This is what Finland looks like these days. At least in the countryside.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
recurring dream #4
Trying to pack my bag and I'm in a hurry. But my things are everywhere and I never get anywhere. Stressful and frustrating.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
slow is the new black
The dark fragrance of coffee in a ceramic mug.
Snow like cotton on the balcony railing, melting under a yellow sun - and the sound of dripping.
The warmth of a blanket after a night of deep sleep, a slow awakening.
It's a morning of slow thoughts, soft dreams, amazing grace.
Snow like cotton on the balcony railing, melting under a yellow sun - and the sound of dripping.
The warmth of a blanket after a night of deep sleep, a slow awakening.
It's a morning of slow thoughts, soft dreams, amazing grace.
waiting for the right kind of pilot
It's so predictable it's ridiculous.
My days off are always the same, at least in the winter. I sleep in, have a lazy brunch, then read or hang out online for a while, and life is wonderful.
In the afternoon I go out. Doesn't matter if I drift around town, go for a drive or just walk around the block, makes no difference what the weather is like - when I come home I'm mentally exhausted and severely depressed. When evening comes, I'm usually back on track again.
Too much time with my own thoughts apparently does this to me. At least I have a good reason to go back to work the next day.
What a sad little life.
Monday, January 26, 2015
angry and unusual and free
Angry and unusual women of the world, unite.
Let's not have children, believe what we're told, have a pretty home, smile, cook healthy meals, post our creative achievements on Facebook, get involved in our community, be a picture of health and rosy-cheeked success, talk about all the hours we put in at the gym today, do things out of duty, show righteous indignation over things we know nothing about, be fake.
Let's show our anger and pain, sleep in, do what we love, do the unexpected, eat tuna out of a tin or strawberries with champagne, dress like teenagers or little old ladies even when we're in between, be honest, act out of character, say no, go to parties, party on our own, say "none of your business", cry.
Be free.
Let's not have children, believe what we're told, have a pretty home, smile, cook healthy meals, post our creative achievements on Facebook, get involved in our community, be a picture of health and rosy-cheeked success, talk about all the hours we put in at the gym today, do things out of duty, show righteous indignation over things we know nothing about, be fake.
Let's show our anger and pain, sleep in, do what we love, do the unexpected, eat tuna out of a tin or strawberries with champagne, dress like teenagers or little old ladies even when we're in between, be honest, act out of character, say no, go to parties, party on our own, say "none of your business", cry.
Be free.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
awake at 3:00 am
"The only ones awake at 3:00 am
are the lonely and the loved."
(alive-and-shattered, Tumblr)
are the lonely and the loved."
(alive-and-shattered, Tumblr)
Friday, January 23, 2015
orange juice and companies
Drinking wine to stay up late and maybe go on antibiotics in the morning
Dragging out a spare mattress and buying orange juice for a friend
Preparing to start a company I have no interest in
I just want to feel this moment (but I just worry instead)
Dragging out a spare mattress and buying orange juice for a friend
Preparing to start a company I have no interest in
I just want to feel this moment (but I just worry instead)
Thursday, January 22, 2015
woodsmoke and silence
The sunshine, slanting in across white, flat fields. The landscape, wide and open and dotted with the pretty red cottages and grey barns that are so common here. A sweet smell of woodsmoke in the frigid air.
This country is so beautiful. I had forgotten, again. I spend all my time wandering around my little town and forget that there is all this world outside of it.
Driving in temperatures of minus 12 degrees Celsius feels slightly dangerous but my little car doesn't let me down this time. It even manages to keep the temperature inside acceptably warm. I leave the highway for a smaller road that is treacherously icy but forget to be nervous because the sun is setting and there are picturesque villages along this road and it's all so quaint that it's ridiculous.
After a while, you forget the frustrations of winter driving: icy roads, blizzards with zero visibility, mysterious engine failures because of the cold, and the endless, endless drudgery of scraping ice and snow off your car before you can get going.
I know I will freeze half to death the moment I step out of the car but who can resist sampling the deep, peaceful silence of this world?
(Image from pinsta.me)
This country is so beautiful. I had forgotten, again. I spend all my time wandering around my little town and forget that there is all this world outside of it.
After a while, you forget the frustrations of winter driving: icy roads, blizzards with zero visibility, mysterious engine failures because of the cold, and the endless, endless drudgery of scraping ice and snow off your car before you can get going.
I know I will freeze half to death the moment I step out of the car but who can resist sampling the deep, peaceful silence of this world?
(Image from pinsta.me)
Friday, January 16, 2015
Thursday, January 15, 2015
at least my thigh looks good
New jeans, basically for free.
Something to make me happy in the midst of worrying about health, work, relationships and the meaning of life. You know, the small things.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
dusk hides the body
“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s
evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from
nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.”
(Virginia Woolf: Night and Day)
(Virginia Woolf: Night and Day)
Monday, January 12, 2015
not all those who wander are lost
I didn't get up early this morning to sharpen my elbows and practise my smile.
That's what people do, these days. They figure out what they want and they go and get it.
You can have everything, they say. (You must have everything, they mean.) We celebrate diversity, they say; everyone has the right to their own way of life. (As long as your way of life is not that of a drifter or aimless dreamer, they mean.) Everyone's values must be respected, they say. (As long as those values are not too different from our own, they mean.)
I can't figure out what I really want or am good at (perhaps because it's many things?) so they put me down. My world is too vast and unspecified so they make me feel I'm wrong.
I will not shrink myself to fit their world. I cannot focus on a goal because there is so much in the universe to explore. I cannot join the race for gold because someone has to slow down to think, to create, to love, to shape the future.
(Title from J.R.R. Tolkien: "All that is gold does not glitter")
That's what people do, these days. They figure out what they want and they go and get it.
You can have everything, they say. (You must have everything, they mean.) We celebrate diversity, they say; everyone has the right to their own way of life. (As long as your way of life is not that of a drifter or aimless dreamer, they mean.) Everyone's values must be respected, they say. (As long as those values are not too different from our own, they mean.)
I can't figure out what I really want or am good at (perhaps because it's many things?) so they put me down. My world is too vast and unspecified so they make me feel I'm wrong.
I will not shrink myself to fit their world. I cannot focus on a goal because there is so much in the universe to explore. I cannot join the race for gold because someone has to slow down to think, to create, to love, to shape the future.
(Title from J.R.R. Tolkien: "All that is gold does not glitter")
Sunday, January 11, 2015
buy flowers
if you want to be beautiful
buy flowers and take
them to the cemetery
if you want to be free
write a letter to the person
you hate most then realize
you do not hate them
at all
if you want to be wild
wake up at 6 AM, drink
hot coffee and watch the
sunrise
if you want to be happy
smile at every person
you see even if they aren’t
looking
(via irynka, Tumblr)
Friday, January 09, 2015
today's the day Camus and Väinö Linna meet
I am an anxious soul so here's today's reminder of what I actually have:
Spiced coffee. A cosily messy flat, lit by tiny warm lamps in every corner. A friend who calls to say we have a hall booked for indoors beachvolley tonight.
I get to feel sand between my toes again! "In the midst of winter, I found there was, in the tiny Finnish hamlet of Karkkimala, an invincible summer."
And I'm working on subtitles for a TV show with famous quotes from the classic movie The Unknown Soldier. Tulta munil!
... With apologies to Albert Camus for the mangled quote above. To continue in his own, mostly unmangled - though translated - words; "And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger - something better, pushing right back".)
Spiced coffee. A cosily messy flat, lit by tiny warm lamps in every corner. A friend who calls to say we have a hall booked for indoors beachvolley tonight.
I get to feel sand between my toes again! "In the midst of winter, I found there was, in the tiny Finnish hamlet of Karkkimala, an invincible summer."
And I'm working on subtitles for a TV show with famous quotes from the classic movie The Unknown Soldier. Tulta munil!
... With apologies to Albert Camus for the mangled quote above. To continue in his own, mostly unmangled - though translated - words; "And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger - something better, pushing right back".)
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
commanding attention
Today, my primary job task consisted of writing a command into my computer.
It took 1.5 hours, a Skype conversation in a foreign language and allowing a stranger 300 miles away to poke around my hard drive.
It took 1.5 hours, a Skype conversation in a foreign language and allowing a stranger 300 miles away to poke around my hard drive.
Monday, January 05, 2015
all
I stretched out on my friend's sofa and yawned.
"What's another word for 'mayhem'?" she said.
As I craned my neck to see the crossword she was holding, I realised that this is all I need from today, from friendship, from life.
"What's another word for 'mayhem'?" she said.
As I craned my neck to see the crossword she was holding, I realised that this is all I need from today, from friendship, from life.
Saturday, January 03, 2015
2014: the year of subtitles and smoothies
* New Year with friends in the countryside, fireworks and green tea. I also heard the snarl of Cerberus in the dark behind me.
* Cocktails and an anomaly: a volleyball game on the TV screen in the pub, to the joy of me and a handful of hardcore fans.
* Lost my dearest neighbour,the best widow in the house, the one who first saw me in pyjamas and who could tell me what the view out of the window looked like in the Sixties.
* Endured a few months in a gym with coldhearted people, stuffy changing rooms and excellent dance classes.
* Stocktake: counting ten thousand pieces of clothing plus a few reindeer hides.
* Composed a 10-page quality plan without knowing what a quality plan is. (Brought back memories of every essay I ever wrote at university.) For a company that was went bust a couple of weeks later. (Irony not lost on anyone.)
* Weeks and weeks of compiling business statistics for lack of anything better to do. Never thought I would look at spreadsheets as a source of entertainment.
* Second-hand shopping in Suicide City with an unusual man and a GPS navigator that favoured cow paths. I learned that Toyota apparently does sewing machines too, bright orange ones.
* Lived in suburbia for three weeks during the most desperately depressing phase of winter. Cheered myself up with dog walks, good espresso and lounging in front of a real fire.
* Abrupt end to my new career in the clothing industry when I came back from my lunch break one day and was told to pack my stuff as company was bankrupt.
* Abrupt start of my new career as audiovisual translator when I was headhunted by a tattoo-heavy rock'n'roll biker dude. Visit to a strange little television company where I was crammed with new software skills.
* Return to the Little Shop of Harmony (the job I left a year earlier) for a few days of work among books and people.
* Went to a concert to hear a Nineties pop star (Jenny from Ace of Base). She can still sing.
* Debut as fanfiction writer.
* Visit to Helsinki, star-struck by the city lights. Everything was a delight - the four-hour train ride, the hostel that had birdsong in the bathrooms, the mozzarella sticks, watching football over a beer with the locals and the Japanese tourists - but most of all the urban air. Must have walked five hundred miles just to take it all in.
* Hen party with Finns and Russians - shabam-core-stretching, film discussion in a sauna, too much thai food, a club that wouldn't let us in and one that did. The dancing went on for a very long time.
* Another visit to the nation's capital, this time in a hostel with less birdsong but more exotic people. A glorious evening walk in an odd part of the city and the dubious pleasure of sleeping in a 20-person dorm - rocked to sleep by Russian whispering.
* A three-day wine picnic by the rivers of Germany with a woman who cuts dead people for a living. Highlights included a bowl of carrot soup in a twilit garden, and a bomb scare.
* A wedding. I cried, charmed a whole table of introverted bachelors, tied a ribbon into a stranger's beard and endured forced labour afterwards with the cleaning-up. Will never go to a wedding again.
* Guided tour in a garbage truck factory and a preacher museum. Just another day in the life of a translator.
* Scary and unsafe and yet the best job I've ever had: subtitling TV shows while sitting in the sun on a balcony overlooking the sea, sipping coffee.
* Six cocktails on one summer's evening, served by an unlikely cocktail master who was also an expert on child-rearing and on going naked for extended periods of time.
* Day on a deserted island with a laptop, an excavator and a man.
* Watched the icehockey world championship final with friends. Someone bit me in the knee when Finland lost.
* A summer lunch in the cemetery (with the thought "Maybe I'm sitting on my future grave?") and a National Ballet show in the market square.
* Summer cider evenings with a seaview and a friend, and this year's only cigarette.
* Coldest midsummer ever with gang of friends, almost-midnight-sun and a concert with an American artist who arrived by helicopter.
* Watched the traditional old-school boat race on the Island with friends, my mother, my friends' mothers, my mother's friends...
* Summer of my dreams: five weeks on the beach far from everything with family, books, beachvolley, water games and a hot, hot sun. And no worries about returning to work. Enchanting additions to this summer included shrews, squirrel babies, and locals who let me refill water canisters free of charge.
* Camembert and cannoli at the European food market where vendors greet you with "bonjour" or "buongiorno". Melts a cold Finnish heart every time.
* Became a half-hearted fan of junior football, either roasting or freezing in the bleachers.
* Sampled the best of a summer in the city: giggling among the beautiful people on a summer's evening with crazy friends, watching beachvolley championships barefoot in the bleachers with icecream.
* The Night of Arts, this town's annual carnival day. Personal highlights included an Orthodox church crypt (not at all what you would expect), Shetland ponies, an enchanting tango show in a back room, "Whiskey In The Jar" and overdosing on tea in an artist's studio. The best thing about this annual chaos is always ending up in the weirdest parts of the city.
* An August of electrical storms - like the one that went of for an entire afternoon and almost slaughtered the city while I was trying to keep four kids and one dog calm, or the completely silent ones that brightened the midnight sky.
* The end of summer: cousins and Norwegians, bonfires, country roads in harvest time, the silence of a million stars, bittersweetness.
* Emergency-babysitting two kids, an experience not unlike that of trying to contain a bunch of wasps after giving their nest a good shake.
* Peaceful last coffee break ever in my old workplace, the Little Shop of Harmony, which now closed its doors for good. Nostalgia but a sense of grace.
* Free tickets to the theatre: Edith the crazy poet, me, my intellectual friends, silver shoes.
* A few boisterous Saturday nights in a bilingual Irish pub packed to the rafters with all kinds of humanity. In the company of the girl who reads Camus in French and drinks me under the table, and the stone-sober girl who only reads Fifty Shades of Grey. Or the scruffy guy of rough hands and a kind heart. A good time was had by all and we got through the list of selected beers.
* My first senior citizens' trip, at least 25 years too early, across the pond to Sweden: sunny landscapes, great seafood, a sing-along, hilarious elderly gentlemen.
* Autumn days wrapped in wool, warmed by the laptop on my lap or the fireplace at my side.
* Harvest feast with an abundance of melted chocolate.
* A world-class gospel concert with my teenage crush, a boy I knew in third grade, and a one-time card-game partner - all of them now professional musicians - and familiar faces all around. Suddenly it was 1992 again.
* Lunches in my ex-workplace just to confuse the boss who fired me.
* There is a first time for everything - like editing web pages, digging out ancient Finnish poems, job interviews on Skype.
* Walked like Quasimodo for a few days.
* Work that brought freedom but also hours upon hours of installing software, reading instructions, learning how to use strange databases and convert files. And wondering what would explode first, my laptop or my brain.
* A really weird party in a fancy villa, stone sober, with wasted women, bemused bachelors and a privately guided art tour.
* An international night with input from Honduras, Nigeria and the U.S.A. and the reminder that a dark, dangerous winter lies ahead. The night ended around a bottle of wine with friends as a storm howled outside and the reminder that I have survived Finnish winters before.
* Trendy Saturday brunch on raw food and liquorice balls.
* Computer courses - the same ones I've taken before and forgot all about.
* Weekend in Tampere with the girls: mad laughter, Spanish tapas, Beaujolais Noveau, cozying up in bed watching Bones and Magic Mike, spilling scented candles all over the IKEA parking lot.
* Back to the night shift: debate, exhaustion, bucketloads of vanilla chai.
* Barely made it past Christmas Eve with family before crashing down with the flu. Thank God I have friends with the good sense to give me DVD box sets for Christmas.
* Singles party on New Year's Eve. Singles party! This is SO not me. Fell head over heels in love with life.
* Cocktails and an anomaly: a volleyball game on the TV screen in the pub, to the joy of me and a handful of hardcore fans.
* Lost my dearest neighbour,the best widow in the house, the one who first saw me in pyjamas and who could tell me what the view out of the window looked like in the Sixties.
* Endured a few months in a gym with coldhearted people, stuffy changing rooms and excellent dance classes.
* Stocktake: counting ten thousand pieces of clothing plus a few reindeer hides.
* Composed a 10-page quality plan without knowing what a quality plan is. (Brought back memories of every essay I ever wrote at university.) For a company that was went bust a couple of weeks later. (Irony not lost on anyone.)
* Weeks and weeks of compiling business statistics for lack of anything better to do. Never thought I would look at spreadsheets as a source of entertainment.
* Second-hand shopping in Suicide City with an unusual man and a GPS navigator that favoured cow paths. I learned that Toyota apparently does sewing machines too, bright orange ones.
* Lived in suburbia for three weeks during the most desperately depressing phase of winter. Cheered myself up with dog walks, good espresso and lounging in front of a real fire.
* Abrupt end to my new career in the clothing industry when I came back from my lunch break one day and was told to pack my stuff as company was bankrupt.
* Abrupt start of my new career as audiovisual translator when I was headhunted by a tattoo-heavy rock'n'roll biker dude. Visit to a strange little television company where I was crammed with new software skills.
* Return to the Little Shop of Harmony (the job I left a year earlier) for a few days of work among books and people.
* Went to a concert to hear a Nineties pop star (Jenny from Ace of Base). She can still sing.
* Debut as fanfiction writer.
* Visit to Helsinki, star-struck by the city lights. Everything was a delight - the four-hour train ride, the hostel that had birdsong in the bathrooms, the mozzarella sticks, watching football over a beer with the locals and the Japanese tourists - but most of all the urban air. Must have walked five hundred miles just to take it all in.
* Hen party with Finns and Russians - shabam-core-stretching, film discussion in a sauna, too much thai food, a club that wouldn't let us in and one that did. The dancing went on for a very long time.
* Another visit to the nation's capital, this time in a hostel with less birdsong but more exotic people. A glorious evening walk in an odd part of the city and the dubious pleasure of sleeping in a 20-person dorm - rocked to sleep by Russian whispering.
* A three-day wine picnic by the rivers of Germany with a woman who cuts dead people for a living. Highlights included a bowl of carrot soup in a twilit garden, and a bomb scare.
* A wedding. I cried, charmed a whole table of introverted bachelors, tied a ribbon into a stranger's beard and endured forced labour afterwards with the cleaning-up. Will never go to a wedding again.
* Guided tour in a garbage truck factory and a preacher museum. Just another day in the life of a translator.
* Scary and unsafe and yet the best job I've ever had: subtitling TV shows while sitting in the sun on a balcony overlooking the sea, sipping coffee.
* Day on a deserted island with a laptop, an excavator and a man.
* Watched the icehockey world championship final with friends. Someone bit me in the knee when Finland lost.
* A summer lunch in the cemetery (with the thought "Maybe I'm sitting on my future grave?") and a National Ballet show in the market square.
* Summer cider evenings with a seaview and a friend, and this year's only cigarette.
* Coldest midsummer ever with gang of friends, almost-midnight-sun and a concert with an American artist who arrived by helicopter.
* Watched the traditional old-school boat race on the Island with friends, my mother, my friends' mothers, my mother's friends...
* Summer of my dreams: five weeks on the beach far from everything with family, books, beachvolley, water games and a hot, hot sun. And no worries about returning to work. Enchanting additions to this summer included shrews, squirrel babies, and locals who let me refill water canisters free of charge.
* Camembert and cannoli at the European food market where vendors greet you with "bonjour" or "buongiorno". Melts a cold Finnish heart every time.
* Became a half-hearted fan of junior football, either roasting or freezing in the bleachers.
* Sampled the best of a summer in the city: giggling among the beautiful people on a summer's evening with crazy friends, watching beachvolley championships barefoot in the bleachers with icecream.
* The Night of Arts, this town's annual carnival day. Personal highlights included an Orthodox church crypt (not at all what you would expect), Shetland ponies, an enchanting tango show in a back room, "Whiskey In The Jar" and overdosing on tea in an artist's studio. The best thing about this annual chaos is always ending up in the weirdest parts of the city.
* An August of electrical storms - like the one that went of for an entire afternoon and almost slaughtered the city while I was trying to keep four kids and one dog calm, or the completely silent ones that brightened the midnight sky.
* The end of summer: cousins and Norwegians, bonfires, country roads in harvest time, the silence of a million stars, bittersweetness.
* Emergency-babysitting two kids, an experience not unlike that of trying to contain a bunch of wasps after giving their nest a good shake.
* Peaceful last coffee break ever in my old workplace, the Little Shop of Harmony, which now closed its doors for good. Nostalgia but a sense of grace.
* Free tickets to the theatre: Edith the crazy poet, me, my intellectual friends, silver shoes.
* A few boisterous Saturday nights in a bilingual Irish pub packed to the rafters with all kinds of humanity. In the company of the girl who reads Camus in French and drinks me under the table, and the stone-sober girl who only reads Fifty Shades of Grey. Or the scruffy guy of rough hands and a kind heart. A good time was had by all and we got through the list of selected beers.
* My first senior citizens' trip, at least 25 years too early, across the pond to Sweden: sunny landscapes, great seafood, a sing-along, hilarious elderly gentlemen.
* Autumn days wrapped in wool, warmed by the laptop on my lap or the fireplace at my side.
* Harvest feast with an abundance of melted chocolate.
* A world-class gospel concert with my teenage crush, a boy I knew in third grade, and a one-time card-game partner - all of them now professional musicians - and familiar faces all around. Suddenly it was 1992 again.
* Lunches in my ex-workplace just to confuse the boss who fired me.
* There is a first time for everything - like editing web pages, digging out ancient Finnish poems, job interviews on Skype.
* Walked like Quasimodo for a few days.
* Work that brought freedom but also hours upon hours of installing software, reading instructions, learning how to use strange databases and convert files. And wondering what would explode first, my laptop or my brain.
* A really weird party in a fancy villa, stone sober, with wasted women, bemused bachelors and a privately guided art tour.
* An international night with input from Honduras, Nigeria and the U.S.A. and the reminder that a dark, dangerous winter lies ahead. The night ended around a bottle of wine with friends as a storm howled outside and the reminder that I have survived Finnish winters before.
* Trendy Saturday brunch on raw food and liquorice balls.
* Computer courses - the same ones I've taken before and forgot all about.
* Weekend in Tampere with the girls: mad laughter, Spanish tapas, Beaujolais Noveau, cozying up in bed watching Bones and Magic Mike, spilling scented candles all over the IKEA parking lot.
* Barely made it past Christmas Eve with family before crashing down with the flu. Thank God I have friends with the good sense to give me DVD box sets for Christmas.
* Singles party on New Year's Eve. Singles party! This is SO not me. Fell head over heels in love with life.
Friday, January 02, 2015
social studies, interrupted
A string of blue fairylights throw their light over the bay - they may be too bright and glaring for my neighbours' liking but this dark winter needs all the light it can get - and a storm is brewing.
I pull a blanket over me and wonder what to do about my broken TV.
It's not that I'm at a loss what to do without it. I still have my laptop and I never actually watched much TV anyway.
But so much of what's going on in a nation is condensed into that TV. You turn it on for a few minutes in the evening and have a quick look at what's on - and you have a basic overview of what people are talking about right now, or indirectly thinking about.
I have lived in foreign countries, and in my own country as a foreigner, and I always found that I never really got the hang of society until I got myself a TV - no matter how much I read the papers and hung out with people, I always felt like an outsider.
So I acquired a TV, used it for anthropological and social studies a few minutes every evening, and then went back to my books and favourite DVDs feeling much more at home.
The anti-consumerist in me wonders why I should fork out precious money on a new TV. The minimalist in me says the livingroom looks much better without a large screen in a prominent spot (and the bedroom is definitely no place for it). The ultra-minimalist vagabond in me suggests using the laptop for TV as well as everything else (and getting rid of the flat and living a bohemian life in a camper, but the Finnish winters don't encourage it).
The curious, social creature in me craves a TV.
I pull a blanket over me and wonder what to do about my broken TV.
It's not that I'm at a loss what to do without it. I still have my laptop and I never actually watched much TV anyway.
But so much of what's going on in a nation is condensed into that TV. You turn it on for a few minutes in the evening and have a quick look at what's on - and you have a basic overview of what people are talking about right now, or indirectly thinking about.
I have lived in foreign countries, and in my own country as a foreigner, and I always found that I never really got the hang of society until I got myself a TV - no matter how much I read the papers and hung out with people, I always felt like an outsider.
So I acquired a TV, used it for anthropological and social studies a few minutes every evening, and then went back to my books and favourite DVDs feeling much more at home.
The anti-consumerist in me wonders why I should fork out precious money on a new TV. The minimalist in me says the livingroom looks much better without a large screen in a prominent spot (and the bedroom is definitely no place for it). The ultra-minimalist vagabond in me suggests using the laptop for TV as well as everything else (and getting rid of the flat and living a bohemian life in a camper, but the Finnish winters don't encourage it).
The curious, social creature in me craves a TV.
Thursday, January 01, 2015
breaking in the new year
Fireworks exploding over my head, glass of bubbly in one hand, a sparkler in the other. Laughter with cool new friends.
2015 arrived with a very pleasant cliché indeed.
My heart always skips with joy when I admire fireworks, but this time it wasn't just my heart. Every nerve was shivering with excitement. What a long time it is, I suddenly realised, since I was unreservedly happy like this!
It didn't even take much. Just the rare courage of going to a party where I didn't know anybody, smiling and bravely being me among interesting strangers. The knowledge that I am somewhere unexpected, doing something unexpected, among strangers. And a few glasses of wine.
New Year's Eve was a complete, unexpected success then. New Year's Day, on the other hand, was spent in a haze of tiredness that deteriorated into angry sobs as my car broke down. Spectacularly and yes, also very unexpectedly.
What might this mean for the year to come?
2015 arrived with a very pleasant cliché indeed.
My heart always skips with joy when I admire fireworks, but this time it wasn't just my heart. Every nerve was shivering with excitement. What a long time it is, I suddenly realised, since I was unreservedly happy like this!
It didn't even take much. Just the rare courage of going to a party where I didn't know anybody, smiling and bravely being me among interesting strangers. The knowledge that I am somewhere unexpected, doing something unexpected, among strangers. And a few glasses of wine.
New Year's Eve was a complete, unexpected success then. New Year's Day, on the other hand, was spent in a haze of tiredness that deteriorated into angry sobs as my car broke down. Spectacularly and yes, also very unexpectedly.
What might this mean for the year to come?
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