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And this is what happens when joik and jazz meet. (Hmm… Joik and Jazz. The new Rock and Roll? Well, no, the former is pronounced yoik, so it doesn’t quite work, but still…)

I suppose one good reason for getting to know new people is to open ourselves up to things we might not otherwise discover. Marrying a Finnish woman has certainly exposed me to a whole new world I never knew existed, and much of that has been a rich vein for a writer to mine. But when you marry a person you also marry their family, which opens up even more possibilities.

My wife, for example, has very different musical tastes from her sister. In fact I’ve probably learned more about popular Finnish music from my sister-in-law than from my wife. It was my sister-in-law that introduced me to Elonkerjuu, a Finnish folk-rock group (formerly Lauri Tähkä ja Elonkerjuu, but we don’t like to talk about Lauri…).

More recently my sister-in-law introduced me to Nightwish, a Finnish metal band. I have to admit I’m not a fan of metal music, and so I didn’t have high expectations going in. But Nightwish has their own take on metal, often including orchestral elements to the music, and often unifying entire albums around a concept. The album my sister-in-law sent us is such an album. As I understand it, Imaginaerum was created not just as an album, but as a movie as well–almost an extended music video tying it all together.

I’ve not seen the movie, but the album design and the music itself are evocative, reminding me a little of “The Night Circus“, by Erin Morgenstern. Certainly Gothic in feel, all but the first song are in English, and full of imagery and designed to inspire emotions. It’s a window into a different world, a different perspective, and while it’s not one I necessarily enjoy, it expands my own perspective that much more. It’s a view of a state of mind that is unfamiliar to me. It’s not one I would want for myself, but knowing that other people have that perspective is in itself a source of inspiration for me.

It’s not a perspective I would have found on my own. Even though Nightwish has a following here in the United States I would never have picked up any of their music. But here I have an opportunity to experience it anyway. I can’t say that Nightwish is going to end up on my playlists, but there may be times, when writing certain moods or characters, I may need to pull out Imaginaerum for inspiration.

There are people out there voluntarily going through experiments on what it would be like to endure the stress of long missions in enclosed environments preparatory to one day going beyond our own terra-system. Jocelyn Dunn is one of them, and PopSci has an interview:

Were there any particularly challenging moments?

Somewhere in the second half of the mission we had a power-system failure. There hadn’t been any sun for a week so our solar-energy setup wasn’t helping, the hydrogen backup was running low, and the gas generator wouldn’t charge the batteries we needed to run the critical systems. In a real Mars mission, that would mean your life support is failing. We needed power to run our labs, not provide our oxygen. We felt stressed, but imagine how magnified that stress would be if you lost power on Mars.

I have to wonder how I would fare in such a situation. I watch movies like Apollo 13 and see how confined their space was and I have to wonder if I wouldn’t eventually just completely wig out. This is probably why I explore other worlds through writing. It’s safer for everyone involved.

I do miss singing in an acapella vocal group, and especially the tight harmonies of Barbershop. Our ward choir has begun working on a song recently that just cries out for the Barbershop treatment on several of its progressions. But I refrain (ha! get it? I refrain?!).

So I was more than pleased to run across this gem this morning. The sound quality is great for video, and you can get all those spine-tingling harmonics that goes with barbershop sung well. And of course, there’s a twist:

Because I’ve crossed over to the Dark Side, and desire everyone to be miserable like myself, I’m sharing this (Of course you should be able to see what it is and NOT watch it, so I can’t be entirely held responsible if you choose to watch):

Seriously, though, am I the only one who saw the first image of the goggled-and-wrapped head and thought “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle!”? Yeah, I thought so. After all, I’m warped and twisted enough to share this vid.

Okay, if you’ll forgive me, I give you this:

Much has been made recently of an editorial by Jennifer Lawrence and an article by Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post that claim that women are forced into different speech patterns during business meetings. I find this interesting, because Hollywood and the Washington Post are not well-known as bastions of conservatism. Granted, Hollywood is in the business of serving up human flesh for our entertainment and oggling, so I suspect much of their liberal pontifications are mere cover-fire. But I do really have to marvel at what the business meetings at the Washington Post must be like. Really?!

I’ve never experienced a meeting where women had to hem and haw and cower in order to be taken seriously. (I’m evidently not alone, either.) And I’ve lived most of my professional life in supposed patriarchal cess-pools like Idaho and Utah. From my experience, if anyone is discounted or not taken seriously it’s an individual personality thing, not a gender thing. In the majority of departments and workgroups I’ve been in, those who are naturally inclined to be assertive and speak out tend to dominate the discussion, male and female.

In the first place I worked we had a female QA lead who could (and frequently would) put the alpha male developers in their place. She didn’t have to tread carefully, and to my knowledge no one thought she was overly aggressive. She was passionate about her job, and we respected that. And, more often than not, she was right. I worked for her for a while, and I enjoyed it. And as a rule, she only got passionate and aggressive when necessary to counter the passionate aggression of the other strong personalities in the group.

You know who was the mealy-mouthed weakling in that group? Me. I’ve never been very good at handling conflict, even when I’m only an observer and not the target. I tend toward the passive-aggressive, and I struggle continually with whether or not it’s my place to speak up. Clearly I was missing something in my “Male Privilege Package”. I’m getting better, but I suspect if you were to hand an anonymized transcript of team meetings in which I’m a part to Ms. Petri she’d tag me as the female in the group, and the majority of the women in the group as male.

So yes, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take a bold stand and tell Ms. Lawrence and Ms. Petri that my anecdotal experience is just as valid as theirs and wonder aloud at the institutionalized biases in their liberal organizations that favor hiring mealy-mouthed women. I’ve never worked at one of those. My experience is that there are strong-willed men and there are strong-willed women. And there are reserved men and women. And there are “class clown” men and women. And there are wise, silent men and women who speak little in meetings, but tend to end all debate when they do. And there are overbearing men and women.

It’s not a gender thing. It’s a personality thing. There is no “female” personality any more than there is a “male” personality. Everyone handles things their own way, for better or for worse. If certain organizations aren’t able to grasp that concept, or if certain organizations tend to collect certain types of people, that’s a problem of those organizations and are not necessarily indicative of the entire scope of society. Otherwise I would find it immensely amusing and ironic that the “enlightened” east coast/west coast are the bastions of sexism, while out here in backward, fly-over country we’re actually practicing what the coasts only preach.