Being Asiala

I realize I haven't bragged about my family in a little while :)

Recently (last weekend, to be exact) my beautiful older cousin got married to my NEW older cousin (in law) in what I believe is safe to say was the BEST PARTY I have ever attended.

Going to this event and seeing my all of my cousins, uncles, aunts, etc. got me thinking about the Finnish heritage that we share, connected by our very un-American sounding last name (which gets butchered by people who don't know us). For the record, it is pronounced exactly how it looks Ah-see-ah-lah (all long aaaahhhh sounds). Every time I register this name on a poster or manuscript for publication I have terrible split second lucid nightmares of future research psychologists referring to me as Ash-i-luh, or worse.

So what makes the Asialas cool??

1) Our Cultural Roots: We are from Finland.

The land of epic poems! (I'll get to that) and Salmon for breakfast.

Above is the beautiful Finnish wilderness that I'm sort of shocked any of my great great's wanted to leave. But that brings us to the number two reason Asiala's are awesome...

2) Our Resilience: we moved to the United States under false pretenses and made the best of it!

Thats right, the individuals that came before us and were responsible for binding us together as a family moved to Kaleva, Michigan as immigrants, uprooting everything they knew to live in a village established by a few other former Finnish citizens like them. The village of Kaleva was established around 1900 (approximately 17 years before Finland claimed independence from Russia).

Where do the false pretenses come in? Well, the land that makes up quite a bit of Northern Michigan, (especially where Kaleva lies) is made of sand, and at the time, clear cut forests. Essentially, those who lived in Kaleva in the early to mid 20th century had to deal with sandy soil, stump land, and acres and acres of flooded plains and swamps. Due, however, to the resiliency of the Finnish/Asiala spirit (but I might be biased), those farms still managed to produced a livelihood the supported the foundations of the family we have today.
And speaking of said family farm...

We still have it! Note: this is NOT the original farmhouse (this is a mansion compared to the original one room log cabin). However, this is the original land -- 100% Asiala roots.

3) We tell a really good story.

Perhaps you're wondering where a name like Kaleva comes from. Like any other culture of the wold, Finland has it's own cultural patrimony that has been handed down in one way or another throughout generations, one of the most important being The Kalevala -- an epic poem comprised of elements of Finnish folklore passed down over many years. It has been noted as one of the most important and significant works of literature in Finnish history (which is high praise coming from a country with a 99% literacy rate). "Kalevala" translates directly to "The Land of Kaleva"and is a work that is noted to be directly related to the development of Finland's national identity and eventual emancipation from the Tzar. Needless to say, it's reasonable to assume that a work like The Kalevala was influential on the people who sought a new life in America in the years leading up to Finland's independence.

The Kalevala is like other important epics. It has a collection of creation mythology, there is an element of magic and mystery, it involves characters who go on quests and endeavors, fall in love, learn skills, etcetera etcetera. And like many written epics, it impacted a nation, and inspired those who chose to plant their seeds in a new place (hoping against hope the sand and grasshopper population would allow them to grow).

And we still let a good story inspire us.

Here is my cousin Olivia, telling us about her sister Celia (the bride) and Jim (the newest member of our family).

And here we are sharing stories about two other very important Asialas

So not to brag...but my family is the coolest family there is.

Apple has all of my love.

It's about that time, and finals are upon us once again. As you can see, that doesn't stop me from updating my blog.

I realize that it's been a while. I've had a ridiculous amount of research-related work to do (and mistakes to fix -- yikes)...and it the moments that I'm not working my little first year butt off, I've been heading back to the mitten to celebrate my cousin's upcoming wedding, and spending some quality time with the family, good friends, and boyfriend.

I have several milestone moments to share with you once finals are over and grades are in, but I have a moment to share one now...so here it goes.

The milestone moment for this post is: My First Tech-Related Full Scale Panic Attack.

When my sister and I were in middle school and high school, my Mom used to walk past the door of our home office and yell "SAVE!" to remind us to save whatever we were working on. While a little annoying after a few years, it DID jump start my obsessive habit of saving every document as soon as I open it. However, all the saving in the world won't help you in the face of a hard drive crash.

When I started grad school, I knew it was going to be important to back up important data somewhere else. Thus, most of my important files are actually saved several places. However, in order for this to be effective, you need to be doing this regularly...and someone got kind of busy, and well...forgot.

So yesterday when my hard drive crashed, I had a small conniption fit. Luckily, the IMPORTANT stuff was saved (to the cloud, to email, to external hard drive, you name it)...but the little things -- my outline for my cognitive psych midterm? My latest picture uploads? Potentially gone. Not to mention all my software and saved personal settings (what the hell was my Skype password again??)

Enter the Mac store.

When I showed up for my genius bar appointment, I found that despite whatever repair needed to happen, I wasn't going to have to pay anything. Which on my stipend was excellent news. The bad news was that the hard drive was done for. Had I really just lost everything not consciously backed up?

Nope. While in the back, the "genius" I was working with found one of my documents that I desperately needed, and transferred it over to the new hard drive for me! On top of that, the screen was cleaned and dust removed from the keyboard. Long story short, I lost a couple of things, but all of the crucial things are back in business and running perfectly.

So..I've learned two lessons this week.

1. Back up everything all the time. ALL THE TIME. And don't get lazy and forget to do it for a week.
2. Buy Apple products because even though they fail sometimes, the people at the Apple store will do everything they can to help solve your problems.

I'm spending some quality time this morning working on backing up my files again, and organizing everything back into better organized folders, and reinstalling all of my software.

BACK UP YOUR FILES.

Netflix

Am I the only one who loves watching T.V in the morning?

My laptop had been my constant companion almost every morning this year as I do my hair, brush my teeth, make coffee, cook breakfast, ect. I dislike excessive silence, so I think this is the perfect solution to my otherwise very quiet solitary mornings.

The things that I watch in the morning while I go about getting ready for the day vary widely; anything from the latest social or economic documentary to the trashiest reality TV show I can find. Hey, say what you want, but my taste is anything but narrow, and I pride myself on the ability to enjoy just about everything.
Furthermore, for those of you who scoff at my reality TV ways, I challenge you to spend the entire day reading scientific publications from a number of journals, or grading a giant stack of APA papers and not want to relax with some mind-numbing trash. Ok, I'm done being indignant.

Anyway, recently I've been on quite the documentary kick, and I'm starting to wonder if I haven't learned more reasonable lessons from those reality shows than some of the messages I'm supposed to be taking away from these documentaries.

This is going to be a short post...it was originally a Facebook status, but it has since grew to the point of being much to large (and fun to write) to make a casual post. So here it is: the list of things I've "learned" from Netflix documentaries.


1) people are overweight and sick because they don't eat organic food exclusively. They also don't exercise enough, so you should force yourself and your family to work out like a fiend or you will die.

2) but people shouldn't worry about being too thin because it leads to eating disorders. Encourage your family to eat what they want without worrying about body image and try to be happy with their personalities instead.

3) don't have babies in the hospital because you will not have as good of a connection with your child as someone with a home birth, and even though we're not saying that people who have hospital births are less good parents...we are.

4) but appreciate the healthcare you have access to, because there are enslaved women dying of diseases in 3rd world countries and being denied basic human rights! And for some reason, sending Meg Ryan and Gabriella Union to interview them is somehow cooler than a non-famous trained social scientist...?


5) the collapse of the world trade centers is not only possibly, but likely a conspiracy of the US government......

I got nothin' for this one, I can't even make fun of this one.

6) schools in the United States are horrible.

7) except that people are going into obscene amounts of debt in order to attend some of the top Universities in the world..which happen to be in the US.

8) the school system will not protect you from bullies, even if you video tape them getting hit repeatedly on a bus.

Things I "learned" from:

 Keeping up with the Kardashians

1) be nice to your friends and siblings and support them when they need it because in the end they will have your back

2) keep the lines of communication open and during a relationship and you might not always be happy, but you will work toward being happy again

3) when you hurt someone, apologize...and tell them their boob is really squishy.

4) sometimes following your dreams is more important than satisfying the people around you

5) put your family first

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo

6) live within your means and spend money on the things you love to do

like hanging out with a pig...

7) find ways to have fun in every situation (even a corn field...thanks Honey Boo Boo)

8) mairnase is not a meat!

9) don't give your kid mountain dew or pure sugar (this was an inadvertent lesson, but a lesson all the
same)

Pretty Wild

10) spend time with people that will influence you positively

11) thank people who give you career boosting opportunities, and then work hard in a professional manner to show them that you appreciate their faith in you

12) call the people you love on the dumb stuff they do -- unless they are writing a blog about reality TV lessons :)

Ok, so maybe I'm a little bias. But sometimes a little dose of reality (haha..see what I did there?) would be nice, social documentary makers! Not everything is so black and white, all or nothing, and do or die. I find it fascinating that not one of these films promotes eating a balanced diet (growth hormones or not), exercise a few times a week, and spending quality time with your kids. Make sure they do their homework, and for God's sake teach them how credit cards work before you send them off to college.

Look, problems fixed, and you didn't even have to make any overly dramatic life altering decisions.

Thanks Entertainment News Network and TLC for keepin it real :)

weird science

My new temporary home is the NIU cognitive lab.

Seriously. I live here.
A week from tomorrow I will be giving my first talk based on my OWN RESEARCH THAT I DID ALMOST ENTIRELY BY MYSELF.
Naturally, I'm really excited :) and this has been months in the making, but I'm finally ready to talk about my graduate advisor's brilliant idea that I took and ran furiously with.

Really...I'm pretty out of breath!

But in order to present research I need actual data. And unlike a chemistry or biology lab, psychological data usually needs to be collected by scheduling individual session in which people come into the lab and do your experiment, and then learn all about why you made them jump through your ridiculous hoops. Seriously, I really envy those whose data comes from a bunch of cell cultures and fruit flies sometimes.

So that's where I am right now... for hours all week I have been greeting participants, explaining the tasks they will be doing, and debriefing them on why I had them do what they did.

I wonder sometimes what participants are thinking when they are completing some of these tasks, because they vary from extremely boring to completely ridiculous! So for your enjoyment, I will explain a couple of methods of cognitive experiments so show you what I mean.

In one experiment in perceptual research, psychologists had participants come into the lab and put on a pair of virtual reality goggles. The goggles were designed either to present the viewer with smooth visual input to simulate moving through space, or simply give them a fixed visual perspective. To make this study even more weird, the researchers had the participants walk on a treadmill for an extended period of time while they were wearing these goggles. Now, the researchers had a perfectly good reason for doing this. They wanted to manipulate the visual input that people were getting as they experienced walking...essentially confusing the perceptual system into either believing the person is putting in the regular amount of effort for walking and moving an equivalent amount of space, or putting in effort for walking and not being able to move anywhere. This has been shown to influence how people perceive distances. But wouldn't this be a weird study to participate in? You want me to do what?

In another study, participants had to watch a feature length movie about a balloon twice in row. This was actually a study I helped collect data on a year ago, and let me tell you -- this movie was not enjoyable the first time around, so you can only imagine how terrible it is after the second time..and the 100th time (seriously, I've seen this film over 100 times now). Anyway, the study had participants watch this film twice in a row and press a button every time they perceive a unit of meaningful activity. What does that even mean? It's totally up to interpretation. Not kidding, the participants essentially don't get any further instruction!

In yet another study, participants had to judge the distance of their body to a very large and threatening spider.
...I can't make this stuff up.

Psychologists are weird.

More Interesting Things from Scientific American.

Something I have really never understood is why people think that watching someone who gets hurt, frightened, or both is funny. America's Funniest home videos featuring drunk relatives falling off of furniture is innocent enough (especially when they stand back up and laugh) but what about people who fall off roofs? You know - the ones that need to be hospitalized? Hilarious. I know, maybe put the camera down and call an ambulance.
Better yet, maybe convince your friend not to do the crazy stunt in the first place.

Immediately you're thinking "wow, this post is totally killing my Tosh.0 induced humor-buzz." But before you get defensive, chill. I did some research, and this is actually really interesting.

Also, you will be impressed to know that this post spans my knowledge of theater history AND psychology.

First of all, physical humor involving violence and injury has been alive in performance arts since the rise in popularity of Commedia dell'arte in Italy during the 16th century (side note, Commedia dell'arte also gave us other elements of modern entertainment such as the 'stock' character and sketch comedy).
In fact, the term slap-stick comes from this early form of professional theater, and is linked directly to the sort of humor I'm referring to. The "slap-stick" is actually a tool called the bataccio. It's comprised of two flat pieces of wood that, when smacked together, sounds like someone getting popped in the face. The slap-stick was used to create this sound effect so that the characters could feign over the top violence and injury without really hurting each other to create the appropriate stage sounds.

So clearly, people have found pretend physical violence and injury funny for a long time.
Why?

Lets turn to some humor research to find out.
According to a short article published in Scientific American, a certain level of incongruity must be established for a joke to work. The punchline is unexpected, and surprises the joke comprehender. The punchline is incongruent to the set of for the joke.
Here's a good one
"Knock Knock" "Whose there?" "cash" "cash who?" "no thanks, but I'll take a peanut!"
During the set up of the joke, the comprehender focuses on the separate words "cash" and "who", and  two separate constructs represented by the words rather than the sound they make together ("cashew"). However the end of the joke is inconsistent with the assumption that "cash" and "who" are separate entities, and that they can have a relationship to one another: "who is this "cash" and what is his first name?" Rather the punchline introduces an entirely different way of thinking about the sounds uttered rather than their meaning, which takes the comprehender by surprise and leads to a giggle. Or maybe an eye roll.

According to Scientific American, physical humor may work the same way. Falling is incongruous to everyday experience. Think about the number of times in a day that you fall -- I don't know about you, but mine is usually 0. So as someone is walking along and suddenly trips and falls, the punchline (represented by the fall) is incongruous with the everyday experience of walking, and thus the onlooker is taken by surprise and laughs.

Another component necessary for a joke is that it must be established in a frame of reference that is relatively consequence-free. With no (or few) consequences, we can suspend the usual empathetic reactions we may be more prone to, and laugh at the person who is now laying on the floor.

So whats the problem? Sounds like laughing at people's pain and humiliation is pretty natural.
Well...no.

To be fair, the slap-stick humor is understandable. Unreasonable levels of violence and injury can be funny in a play, because it is an inherently consequence-free environment. Thus, because we are overtly aware that the proceedings are false, we can laugh at the "joke" freely.
This can be extended even to extreme examples, such as T.V shows like Family Guy and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

I personally have trouble watching it regardless, mostly because I am overly empathetic. I cry easily in dramas, I get very easily scared by horror movies, ect.

However, the featured videos on shows like Tosh.0, Tru TV and the like are NOT slapstick. They appeal to the same type of humor, but they do not occur in a consequence free environment.
Perhaps the setting is misleading. Many of us are accustomed to seeing things on TV and in movies that aren't real. While this is pure speculation based on two paragraphs published in SA; what if this is happening: because the video of the real event is presented in the same format as the event that we know is not real, we don't bother making a distinction between real and not real events where humor is involved.

If that's the case, I think that's a little dangerous. Do we really want to train ourselves to laugh at some of this stuff?
Just food for thought.

And if you're interested in reading the article, it's called "Ask the Brains: Why Do We Laugh When Somebody Falls". Google it!

It's Spring Break

Midterms are finally over.

and all I can think about doing is one thing....

looking for cute pictures of puppies....

And sleeping.

The next few days will still be full of work. But for right now, I'm taking an epic nap before getting to work on all of the research projects that I have been neglecting for the past week.

oh...and my thesis

Two Ladies get Adventurous with an Exacoknife

I found this online a few weeks ago and decided it was the perfect quote to sum up why Liz and I are best friends. 

As many of you know (if you've been reading my blog that is) Liz was my "randomly selected" roommate freshman year, and my current partner in crime for the last four. 

This weekend she came to DeKalb to cure me of my statistics midterm blues (Wednesday was rough this week) and to help me find all of the fun DeKalb stuff to do. 

I'm going to be honest....DeKalb can be a bit of a drag in the winter. Summertime yields nice hiking paths and outdoor shopping downtown, but winter is a different story. Luckily, Liz and I have been finding fun things to do together since we moved into the North C building at the beginning of our GVSU education. 

Both Liz and I had a few things to accomplish in the near future. Liz needed to acquire clothing that was acceptable for wearing in Africa when she joins the Peace Corps. in May, and I needed to find something to do with all of the ticket stubs I had laying around in boxes that my mom delivered from the house when she moved. 

So our first stop was taking some advice from Macklemore and going to Goodwill. 

Goodwill is one of the best places to find light flowing skirts that hang past the knee (because honestly, where else can you even buy those right now? the long peasant skirt is a bit of a dead trend). We found so much more however...while looking through t-shirts to match to the suitable peace corps attire, I found a Free People shirt that looked as though the tags had recently been removed. Sometime you really can find some great treasures in the most unlikely places. 

After Goodwill hunting it was time to tackle the issue of the ticket stubs. As I posted about last time, I have a really hard time parting with items that represented fun things I've done in the past. Although I have all the pictures from Italy, I also have the menu from the restaurant we visited almost every day, the bus tickets we bought, the airline itinerary, and museum tickets. I couldn't just throw them out! What if I want to go back someday and I can't remember the name of the guy that ran the family owned pizza place on Borgo Pio that we went to almost every day? (it's Luigi, by the way). At the same time, they couldn't very well sit around cluttering my living space (which is extremely limited). Thus, it was time to consult pintrest for a useful way to use these paper memoirs. 

Tada!!!!

from the craft kitchen of Lillian Asiala, I give you

ticket stub coasters!

Pretty cool, right? 

And they were relatively easy to make. After taking an exactoknife to our walking tour maps, tickets, and restaurant menus, we collaged the pieces together, sealing the final pattern with Mod Podge over a couple of 11 cent bathroom wall tiles. The "recipe" called for a piece of plastic over the final product, however the plastic sheet wasn't binding with the glue, and the result was a "protective" cover that is very easily peeled off. Googling a fix for this problem directed us to ditching the plastic cover idea and using polyethylene spray which is both expensive and extremely smelly. Thus, for now our coasters aren't entirely safe for use. I'll have to wait until spring, when I can turn this into a back deck project and let them dry in the sun for a little while. They do, however, look very cool. 

The coaster on the right is mine. On the top left corner is the spot on the map where one could find Saint Peter's Basilica (our apartment was only about three blocks from here). Directly next to the map on the top right side is my ticket to the Vatican Museum where we saw the Sistine Chapel. Below is the top of the menu from La Romanella. This was a family owned pizza place on our street that we visited the first night we walked around the city. We came back several times over the course of our trip -- the owner was very nice to us and the pizza was amazing. 

The white block on my coaster is my attempt at collaging my airline itinerary to the tile. Unfortunately you have to look very hard now to see the schedule, but even after mod podge it's still there. Detroit to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Rome (May 15th 2009). Rome to Amsterdam , Amsterdam to Detroit (May 25, 2009). 

Liz's coaster features a map of the colosseum and the surrounding ancient ruins. On the bottom you can see the maroon and black stripes of the Roman bus tickets, the zoo ticket, and our pass to enter the "time elevator" which was an extremely touristy attraction that taught us all about the history of Rome in a 60 minute movie complete with moving seats (think the intro dinosaur DNA ride from the movie Jurassic Park). Thinking about it still makes us laugh. 

For good measure I included an action shot.

I am so excited to make more of these! By the time I'm finished (with Italy, England, and Germany) I should have a whole set! And besides being meaningful relics of past adventures and excellent conversation starters...

They just look awesome.