Outlandish

As I promised changes were imminent and the first such change was to move my blog under its own domain. So, continue to follow me in  Outlandishblog.com

As mentioned in the previous post I am not happy with the new job and thus the life I've lead since the beginning of 2018. This unhappiness and how stress has literally occupied every corner of my mind can be seen also as the loss of all creativity in me, thus the blog has been silent for months. But now, with a new set of goals and a new determination born from the ultimate disappointment that this new job has been, I decided to challenge myself: I found a list of 10 questions worth asking myself. Whether as an employee, a manager or just an individual these 10 questions seemed like interesting points to ponder on so from now on I will ask myself one question each week and see what thoughts come forth. First of all this is a good idea for me because I love writing and I've missed it. But also I hope I will come up with new ideas and perhaps some new realizations about myself and my life that I maybe wasn't aware of before. So, challenge accepted...

Overall I have been quite good at cherishing the moment. It has a lot to do with the ability to appreciate the little things in life; whether it is a sunny day (rarety in Estonia!), a great meal or a cuddle from someone special. But recently I have found myself struggling to cherish any moment. There simply hasn't been any moments worth cherishing. Except the moment when I bury myself in bed and slip away from this world for 10ish hours. I got myself a new job at the beginning of the year and despite it being a large step-down from a Project Manager position I felt hopeful because it was a big company with surely many opportunities to grow professionally and move forwards in my career. How wrong I was... The company culture is everything BUT forward-looking and open. The company, it's values and it's way of operating is a complete opposite of me as a person and as an employee. This together with the fact that it has been one of the most stressful winte...

”You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King I’m not a big consumer of inspirational quotes. I find life itself so inspiring that I don’t need quotes to spew evident facts about life to me. But sometimes even I come across quotes by influential people that hit a spot in my mind. Usually those quotes have a point that might not open up unless you’ve seen more of life than just the never-changing streets and people of your home town. One such quote was the above example from a legend that is the one and only Martin Luther King. In his life he cultivated multiple spot-on and brilliant sentences but this struck a cord with me especially. Why particularly? Because I know exactly (both figuratively and literally) what it feels like standing at a foot of a staircase looking up and not seeing where it ends... If it ever ends.  One such staircase I met in Paris when we started climbing up to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and ...

Listing your highlights from the past year is a common practice for social media users around the globe when the year is nearing its end. I encountered this question as early this year as October and it got me thinking... The years when I have actually achieved a lot (moving abroad; getting a job in a huge, international company; achieving a long-time dream, etc.) I never acknowledged those achievements much. Personally, of course, I was aware of what had happened and been done but I didn’t shout about it publicly. On the other hand, the few years that have truly been the most trying in my life so far I have mentioned. Usually in a form of a prayer or a heart-felt wish that the next year would please be better. So far I have gotten that wish... Most of the time. But honestly, how your next year turns out to be depends a lot on how you embark on it; do you start the year with the Finnish mentality ”it’s gonna be just as shit as the last one, nothing ever changes” or do ...

As a blogger it is vital to keep the posts coming regularly; the more often the better. Search engines and their algorithms raise active blogs in search results higher than those that are rarely updated. But the fact is that nobody can be creative 24/7. Creativeness has a nasty habit of appearing all of a sudden and then you are overwhelmed with ideas of what to write or say, what kind of photographs you should take for each blog post, etc. And then, just as suddenly, follows the period of emptiness when you can’t think of anything to say, no matter how hard you try. Creative people have different ways of dealing with the sudden peaks and lows of creativity; some write notes and make schedules, others just get to work, open a document and start spewing words onto it, or grab their camera and run outside to look for scenes to capture. I find the latter practice to suit me better. When I get an idea I have to materialize it immediately, even if it’s just one sentence. I...

When life kicks you in the stomach repeatedly for months on end it’s good to keep in mind the wise words of the great thinker, Taylor Swift: Shake it off! Different people have different ways of ”shaking off” all the shit that life has seen fit to pile on your shoulders and mine is spending time with friends. How fortunate then that one of my best friends arriving for a long weekend visit coincided with so far the worst week of this Autumn! I received a crushing ”Thank you but no thank you”-message from a job that I was sure was mine (yeah, no sign of Finnish humility here) on the same day that my friend cruised to Tallinn and thank goodness for that! I needed her cheering company more than ever. After a quick visit to my local supermarket we decided to make a little curve on our way to my place. The curve had a  conveniently  situated  sushi restaurant on it. There is nothing in life that sparkling wine, sushi and good company couldn’t fix! Ev...

Listening to music before falling asleep. I put the music away when I have fallen sufficiently close to passing out. I hold a cup of tea or coffee ”wrong”: I take the whole cup in my hand(s) even if there is a handle for picking the cup up. This is a habit that was pointed out to me when I was very little and still, to this day, I haven’t been able to shake it. I have a collection of books, which I read all over and over again. I’m extremely particular with books, I can’t just read any book, it needs to match my requirements precisely... Except even I can’t describe what exactly those requirements are. In my apartment there must always be noise. If I’m home the TV is always on, even if there’s nothing interesting to watch. When I take home office, I actually work. The whole 8 hours. I must always choose and prepare my clothes for the next morning before going to sleep. If I don’t do it there’s no point getting up the next morning. ...

* I tend to demand things, not ask: it's very impolite and quite arrogant /  It's also very effective and I usually get my will across. * I am an extrovert: culturally in my home country this is quite unacceptable behavior, it's not OK to be too loud or too open about differing opinions; it all can be embarrassing for family and friends /  I make friends easily because I am very open-minded and willing to try new things, which all leads to not being judgmental. * I am emotional: culturally (again) quite strange, sometimes I am unable to control myself, especially negative feelings can take over my entire body (head ache, heart attack etc.)  / I come across as genuine, honest and caring person, so people find it easy to trust me, which is the base of any friendship. * I value free time/freedom of choice over money: there’s no risk of me ever becoming rich / I am happier when I spend more time with my friends and family and am able to do things t...

Hand up all you singletons who have become face-to-face with this question at least once this year . How did it make you feel? Degraded, lonely, like there’s something wrong with you, or like the asking party was offering you a compliment the hard way? Of course, the way this question makes you feel depends a lot on how it is asked: in an accusing tone of voice or just out of pure curiosity because the questioner is actually interested in your views on living a life. Regardless of the motives of the people who pop this question at regular basis, I find it a funny question to be asked in Western societies in 2017. Aren’t we far enough culture-wise in the Western world already that each and every single (pun intended) one of us could live exactly the kind of life they want to? Why do you consider it your business to inquire about their love life, when will they have their first child or why they don’t want to have kids? Even if you know the people you want to ask th...

” If all the people who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me too" as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. Please copy/paste.” The above text started popping up all around Social Media this Monday. The whole thing started from the Hollywood producer legend Harvey Weinstein  being accused of having a problem. A problem that he admitted, and which too many men on this planet have; He can’t stop harassing women and he has now sought treatment for this. Some of you might now think ”Oh, well that’s good, right? He’s at least trying to get better.” But no, it’s not good enough, and here’s why: It took until his current age for him to understand that everything he’s done to women his whole life is actually not OK. This is unacceptable in every possible way because we are talking about an issue that SHOULD be clear to every effing human being on planet Earth in 2017: my body is my own and you do not have any right to c...

This year has been particularly bad weather-wise; we moved from Spring straight to Autumn (read: we moved from rain straight to more rain). And now it seems that global warming might ensure that in the future 'Summer' will become a word that can only be used in past tense, because warm waters (and thus weather) will flee from these latitudes. It's little bit hard to try and stay positive when the shelf of clouds on top of us is so  thick and consistent that we live in constant darkness. The difference between day and night becomes more and more obscure every day as the days also get shorter. Oh yeah, and then there's this rain. Like, non-stop rain, which I thought was a physical impossibility... Unless you live in the monsoon area, which I do not. But it turns out that there is an area, the very last corner of Europe where all clouds gather and dump their load throughout the year. And that place is called Estonia and I, an imbecile moron, decided to move here...

”Travel broadens the mind”  is a quote that everybody has probably heard. It has even been translated to almost all known languages. And the reason for this is simple: it’s true. I started my mind-broadening travels already as a teenager when I moved to Brighton, England for one summer to learn English with EF Language Travels. That trip was the starting block for my great love for England, English culture, English language and also for traveling, meeting new people and learning about life from different perspectives. Because each person you meet sees life a little bit differently, even if they come from the same country as you. I have discovered that even though each country has its own culture, and each culture has its own habits and traditions that largely define how we live our lives, in the end we human beings are all similar in so many ways. We all have the basic needs and emotions, even if in some cultures showing those emotions publicly is not considered appr...

Escape Rooms have been really popular all over the world for the past few years. Who ever created this idea, hooray to them! Escape Rooms are exactly what you would expect: you are locked into a space with a varied theme and your job is to find solutions to riddles and find hints in the furniture to be able to get out within an hour. If you are experiencing a stressful time in your life I can gladly recommend an hour's escape room experience! It really sucks you in and for an hour you forget about everything that might be outside that room, it's rather therapeutic really.  There are loads of different kinds of escape rooms to choose from; individual people who have reserved one room from their apartment for this kind of physical puzzles that people are willing to pay for, and actual companies that have rented an entire space to set up this experience in, some of them even have a bar and space to hang out in after the hour's ordeal. I had my first ever Es...