Sunday, November 30, 2014

dawn will break - next March

Finland is shrouded in eternal darkness.

We crawl into our hide-outs, light fires and candles.
Eat hot food and mulled wine. Amuse ourselves with stories.
Party a little too hard to show we are not afraid.
Sleep and dream of summer and eternal sunshine.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Manchester of Finland

If you dream of living in one of those old industrial buildings that have been converted into fabulous lofts, full of exposed brick, light and air, and overlooking the water, you should probably go to Tampere, Finland.
Its raw charm is irresistible. This is not a town for sissies. It's where Lenin and Stalin met for the first time - in a building which is now one of the few surviving Lenin museums in the world.

Tampere also has an Ikea store and a fabulous Spanish restaurant. What more do you need?

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

freedom's midnight hour

If the most glorious moment of freelance work came that June morning when I sat on the balcony, summer breeze in my hair and sun on my rosy cheeks, barefoot and happy, gloating over all the poor bastards who have to work in offices and factories and shops...

...then the hour of the wolf arrived a pitch-black night in November when I struggled through an endless project at four in the morning, aching with cold and lack of sleep, anxiously doubting myself and knowing that anxiety would still be there in the morning, as it had for weeks.

Monday, November 17, 2014

that funky Jesus music

I was going through my old CDs to decide which ones to keep. Found an old gospel one that I probably hadn't played since the 1990s so I put it on, just to confirm my suspicions that it was good for the 'reject' pile.

To my surprise, I enjoyed it enough to decide to keep it. I was especially moved by a Whitney Houston song, "I Love The Lord" (and Whitney Houston songs have failed to move me since I ran out of teenage hormones).

What's more, it made me long for a good, old gospel concert of the kind I used to go to in the 1990s. The kind I haven't felt any need for since the 1990s. As it happened, such a concert was being arranged in my town that same week (and they are usually very few and far between) so on an impulse I asked a friend to go with me. When the day arrived, I nearly changed my mind - there is a reason you should not revisit your teenage years - but my friend convinced me to go anyway.

The concert was packed with old acquaintances - on the stage as well as in the audience - and was really good. World-class good. All my doubts and fears vanished and I let myself be carried away by the wonderful music.

And then they played "I Love The Lord". If that wasn't a sign, I don't know what is.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

chased by the Pac-Man monster

How to grow up before the internet:

Eighties, in primary school: first encounter ever with a computer when we were offered computer classes. Which meant learning simple programming, like If-Then-Else. Never got much further than that. Pac-Man was fun, though.

A boy in school had a computer at home. A Commodore 64. He was considered the nerdiest of the nerds because of this.

Nineties, starting university: we were offered our own email accounts on the university server. This was something we had never heard about. You weren't supposed to apply for one unless you needed it for your studies but we all applied anyway, out of curiosity. Email became wildly popular for writing silly messages to your friends. Nobody owned a computer yet but you could log in on any of the terminals scattered throughout campus.

Then everything started to happen. Windows came, meaning that using a computer was actually easy and not only something for programming geeks. No longer did we have to know commands by heart or get stuck in WordPerfect when we forgot which function key to use. The mouse was invented and now it was all point-and-click. The internet and the romantically named World Wide Web arrived - there wasn't much on it at first, but information about anything and everything soon started to flood it. We took the few basic computer classes available and learned the rest from friends and through trial and error. More computer labs opened on campus and we were encouraged to use them instead of writing our essays with the help of a pencil or a typewriter.

I was given someone's old computer, then somebody else's slightly newer one and used them to write my essays, but they were slow and prone to crashing and there were always compatibility problems when I saved my work on a floppy disk and brought it to campus to use the printer there. Being online at home wasn't really something to consider - modems were excruciatingly slow and you were billed by the minute. But you could always play Solitaire, Tetris or maybe even Need For Speed.

The 21st century, once we survived the dreaded Y2K bug: by the time we left university we had got ourselves hotmail addresses that we could access anywhere, not just on the campus computers, and knew the basics of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The internet was by now stuffed with both useful and entertaining information. Most businesses were getting computerized and the really cool people had their own laptop or Nokia Communicator.

The rest of us used computer rooms in the public library, or the internet cafés that started popping up everywhere. I could spend hours in them on my days off - emailing, reading fanfiction, looking for jobs. There was great coffee to be had, lots of other cool people around and the wonderful feeling of having the entire world at your fingertips.

Now, with a laptop and a smartphone, I never really get over that feeling of having conquered a world nobody expected me to manage. Neither the slight insecurity nor the triumph. I was on Facebook just a couple of months after it opened to the general public and signed onto a number of other social media - just because I have to prove to myself that I'm still on top of this computer thing.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

nation of sorrow and strength

I'm studying the language, culture and mindset of my own country.

It's not easy growing up in a language minority with its own culture and way of thinking, its own tight-knit community. The longer I live in this country, the more I realise that I hardly know it. The language has always been a struggle to me, the culture has run a closely parallel and only vaguely known course to my own, and my neighbours think a bit differently than I do.

No matter how much I dream of foreign shores - before I go anywhere, I will know this people and understand how they think. No matter how much work it takes to delve into the complicated grammar of this Finnish language, read up on popular culture that should already be familiar to me, and try to understand the mind of a people that is not my own. And yet somehow is.

One of the most beautiful Finnish songs of all time:


- Itkuja varten on ihmisen silmät, vieriköön kyyneleet. 
Tuleehan tuolta se toinen päivä, kun on kepeät askeleet. -

Monday, November 10, 2014

November, the bad boy I always fall for

Even when there is no fog, November in Finland feels like fog.

We trundle along in grey dampness, sometimes on dry streets, sometimes with wet slush under our feet. Always cold. Now we pay the price for our glorious, paradisiacal midnight-sun summers.

November is darkness that infinitesimally brightens to a doubtful twilight in the hours around noon.

The darkness brings a gloom even in the mood of the people. A constant tiredness, sometimes a severe depression.

The miracle occurs when the temperature drops below zero. Although there is the added irritation of icy roads, snow that blocks the way and frozen fingers, the cold often brings out the sun, not seen for weeks, and suddenly people are involuntarily smiling again.

December is technically colder and darker than November. But December usually means snow that stays on the ground, reflecting light and brightening the daylight. And, of course, Christmas decorations and parties, reflecting hope and brightening moods.
On the darkest days of November I have to take up arms against the weariness, the sugar cravings, the urge to stay in bed and dwell on dark matters. I drag myself out on a walk along cold streets in the evening. I look at the lights in all windows. Candles, fairy-lights, the flicker of a flat-screen television, the warm glow of a kitchen lamp.

People are cooking pasta for their kids, walking over-enthusiastic dogs, packing their gym bags. The shop assistant in the grocery store on the corner still has the energy to smile at me. In the pub, someone is pouring a comforting pint. Someone else has lit a fire in the fireplace - I can smell wood smoke.

And the sea and the sky, despite the oppressive grey fog, take on a shade of breathtaking beauty that I never saw in summer.

A glass of wine never tastes as good as when you're dry and warm and happy - in horrible November.

Saturday, November 08, 2014

raw food and a dog tail

The icy clarity of a day with sub-zero temperatures that always, after the choking grey dampness of slightly warmer but more hopeless days, brings relief and almost euphoria.

A raw food café in the trendy part of town, a Chinese friend, and the delicious feeling of whiling away hours on a Saturday over good food.

A stranger's dog that wagged his tail at me as if I was a long-lost friend.

A long walk, slow thoughts.

And when darkness descends, candlelight.

Sunday, November 02, 2014

walking wounded

A terrible need for someone else to take charge for a while. I will survive, as I always do. But what to do with this gaping wound inside?