Jäässä

"Olen jäässä," is a phrase I seem to catch myself uttering more and more often these days. Those two words are exceedingly strange words, ones you can't translate into English very easily, except for maybe the olen part, which simply means, "I'm". (Minä olen is how you say "I am".) Jäässä is definitely one of the most difficult Finnish words I've ever encountered, as far as means of translation into English go, and even here in Finland, there are only a handful of people who ever actually use the word in their everyday speech. While the word obviously comes directly from the Finnish jää, meaning "ice", as in jäätelö, or "ice cream", the true meanings of jäässä are almost myriad. To make things as uncomplicated as possible, you might just say that jäässä is a state of mind in which the mind for whatever reason has become frozen solid like ice, and therefore is quite incapable of forming even the simplest of words and basic sentences, no matter how strong the will to speak and socialize may be.

I can proudly say that I have been deeply trapped in the jäässä state of mind at least twice today. The first time I experienced the true glory of jäässä was when I woke up very early this morning with a rather bad hangover. A friend of mine, whom I consider to be a colleague in both art and film happened to be sleeping beside me, and he was snoring noisily. This pissed me off, although it shouldn't have, and so I snapped my fingers right in front of his face several times in an attempt to force him awake without freaking him out too badly. But when I realized that Janne was very deeply asleep, and that he had no way of knowing that his snoring wasn't helping my hangover one little bit, my mind became frozen to escape the harshness of reality. I was like a child's robot that was running out of batteries, or a prickly black-faced hedgehog that had been mauled in the wee hours before dawn by a neighborhood cat and was perhaps about to die; I became a very quiet and depressed individual, and in doing so, I became the very essence of the meaning of the word jäässä.

That probably makes absolutely no sense. I promise to write more on jäässä later when my mind finally thaws and I am more able to fully articulate my thoughts.