Sunday, January 31, 2016

dizzily on ice

In the coldest days of January, before the miserable wetness of global warming hit us again, there was a skating track prepared on the ice on the bay.
I dug out my skates (bought for me by my father in my sixteenth year), laced them up and dizzily headed out on the track. I veered crazily from side to side, gritted my teeth against the pain in my ankles (not used to this) and listened to the silence of the frozen sea.

Saturday, January 30, 2016

the comfort of jackdaws

The wind is cold and the night is dark, but on my wrist are bangles so pretty (I know because the metal chills my skin) and a clattering of jackdaws is circling the black sky above.

I need everything pretty with colours, stained glass and glittering metal in the dark greyness of winter.

I need birds and their chattering and twittering in the cold silence of winter.

Friday, January 29, 2016

sober slams the door

There is an anxious knot deep inside me that hasn't been untied for months, or years.

Something tightly wound that aches to be unwound.

Sometimes, when I'm a little tipsy, or maybe a little bit more than that, I feel God's love swirl around me and a sweet relief settle inside. But why that love is unreachable in a sober state is beyond me. One would think God prefers sober.

Perhaps in the sober state, my mind is slamming the door in love's face. Thus far, but no further.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

in bed with Bukowski

"I decided to stay in bed until noon. Maybe by then half the world would be dead and it would only be half as hard to take."

(Charles Bukowski)

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

bikers and a mother's love

Awakening to the sound of raindrops,
a mild wind after weeks of ice cold winter,
and I feel like crying a little (winter rain is the worst rain).

But I won't.
I go the the market hall,
borrow the newspaper from a couple of aging bikers
who nod politely at me.
Eat hot salmon on brown bread, and drink comforting dark coffee.
Walk through the city looking at people
and wonder, as usual, what their lives are like.

Feel odd, as usual. Not of this world.

A couple of hours with my mother,
welcoming and warm and hard to relate to.
(Well, mothers and daughters, they say. You do your best.)

I go home and wonder,
since there is love all around me,
how come I don't feel it?

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

even our prison is pretty

Prison walls look pretty in snowy weather.

Monday, January 25, 2016

not up for this game

A man (trying to flirt) sends me a text message with only the heart symbol.

Me: Is that an ace of spades?
Sarcastic reply: Queen of hearts!
Me: Quit playing poker.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

while collecting empty wine glasses

Candles burned down,
soft buzz in your blood stream,
"it really doesn't matter if we never sleep",

The time of night when every song has a soul,
"some die young, but you'd better hold on",
a friend's gentle words warm inside,

Hope seems infinite,
"screaming out for love",
tomorrow will be cruelly bleak but tonight is clear,


It's going to be okay,
Someone's watching over you,
"speaking through the silence",

Be still and know that I am here
Be still and know I am

Saturday, January 16, 2016

do this today

Learn to play the piano,
go out and find love,
ask yourself what is the darkness in you.
And above all, stay and watch the rising moon.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

tortilla dinners in the Arctic

I mention winter a lot, in the winter. My least favourite season.

But a season that fascinates me, at least when we have the proper freeze-to-death-or-be-killed-by-falling-icicles kind, not the too-mild, drown-in-grey-slush-or-expire-from-the-sheer-ugliness-of-it kind. It is so exotic, in my slightly foreign eyes. The thick snow, the stabbing cold, the everlasting darkness. The danger, in this otherwise safe and quiet country.

And the unbelieveable beauty of ice crystals and forests buried in snow. 
And the way life still moves on when arctic conditions hit hard - how people dig their cars out of immense snow drifts and drive to work, negotiating lethally icy roads with a shrug, how children go skating in minus twenty degrees Celsius. How we shut out the cold, have parties and Friday night tortilla dinners and post pictures on Facebook and argue about politics, and think nothing of the fact that if we go outside without proper gear we might die within a few minutes.

I'm reading a beautiful thriller, Rosamund Lupton's The Quality of Silence. An English mother and her deaf little daughter somehow end up in northern Alaska, driving a truck on ice roads on a desperate mission. It's so far-fetched that I'm enthralled. And parts of it are familiar in my exotic homeland. Driving in complete darkness, without even the hope of a dawn, stopping to scrape ice off your vehicle in the murderous cold. The immense loneliness of it - knowing that if something happens, you're completely on your own.

I put the book down at last, with a relieved sigh. Darkness and cold may be surrounding me too, but I also have a warm bed, hot peppermint tea and an ongoing Messenger chat with friends.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

drawing the same heart

We sit in a parked car, I and the friend who knew me best in the thousand-year-old city where we chased life all over town. She is breastfeeding her baby while a blizzard is piling snow over the car on a dark winter night.

She absent-mindedly draws a heart in the condensation on the window, the same kind of heart that I do when I doodle even though I don't really believe in love much. The temperature outside is minus twelve degrees Celsius, and despite thick wool coats and thermal mittens we feel the cold assaulting us when the car's heater is no longer blasting hot air. I watch the whirling snow outside while we talk about a man we knew who froze to death recently, not far from his house.  This winter could kill us.  But I can see my house from here, and windows are lit up in warm welcome. The baby, wrapped in a fleece, is making contented noises.

Many years ago, in that ancient city, my friend and I were guests at a wedding and knew every nuance of each other's faces. Now, my friend's face is almost strange to me as we talk about the painful divorce of that wedding couple. Her arms are used to the weight of a baby. My legs are used to running in high heels to silence fire alarms.

Today, we have screamed with laughter about a golden skirt and discovered that we share a recurring and very, very odd dream that we don't like to talk about. Our friendship is no longer what it used to be. It is now warming hearts in a blizzard, exploring newer cities, reuniting women that have carried babies and run in high heels a thousand miles apart.

Monday, January 11, 2016

a bottle back and forth

"Sometimes, you just want to hand a bottle back and forth with someone, with the lights low, feet brushing against each other, as you sit on the floor. You want to read paragraphs aloud from philosophy books, and smile. You want to kiss their neck, just behind their ear. Their cheek just southwest of their eye. You want to whisper french terms of endearment. You want to tell them about the last time you cut yourself, or accidentally looked down to find blood from a scratch on your knuckle.

You want to play the music a little too loud. You want to whisper the lyrics. You want to lose sleep. You want to cry a bit, from laughing so hard. You want to not touch at all except for fingertips. You want to dance, throwing your arms around, your hair a mess. Collapse with joy etched on your face.

You want to lift the bottle up to your mouth and notice them watching your lips. You want them to want. You want to want. You want to mourn the 30 degree drop in temperature, and the week ahead. You want to tell them what you fear the most.
But most of all, you want to get drunk off the taste of them. Lips on lips. Drunk off the night, and the whiskey. The secrets, the laughter. Drunk off the idea that you didn’t have to be anything other than yourself."

(thatkindofwoman, Tumblr)

Friday, January 08, 2016

the games that play us

* Volleyball. Forever and ever the love of my life. Started in fifth or sixth grade thanks to a wise teacher called Runar, in a small and dark gym. Throughout the rest of my school years volleyball was my only extra-curricular activity - when I could be bothered to go. We had two coaches: one who put us through murderous hours of practising technique, one who didn't know much technique but let us play around and have fun. Not until one of my last school years did we actually get to play against any other teams. With the exception of my Irish years, I've played since then. Always just for fun.

* The main sports of PE classes: ice skating and skiing in winter, pesäpallo (Finnish version of baseball) in spring and autumn. The ice skating was sometimes combined with playing bandy, which was fun. The skiing was the cross-country kind where we were basically let loose on the skiing tracks in nearby forests without supervision. This always turned into a competition and I always finished among the last, so no good memories there (having to lug the heavy skiing equipment to and from school didn't help). I wasn't very good at pesäpallo either and was always one of the last to be picked for a team, but it was kind of fun.

* Badminton, during one or two quiet winters in the Irish mountains. My childhood game turned out to be a good way to kill time and get to know the Irish.

* Dance, during a few years at university, and zumba, which I bravely threw myself into much later (when it became a thing).

* Swimming: exercise on hot summer days.

* Running, cycling and weight-lifting: necessary evils that I avoid until I can't.

* Horse riding and tap dancing: hobbies I wish I had. One is too expensive, the other nobody seems to be doing anymore. Why?

Thursday, January 07, 2016

if, full of care

This whirlpool of information and stimuli everywhere!

My mind is becoming scattered. My attention is fluttering in a hundred different directions. I can't even write a short blog entry on a single subject - even if I manage to stay on the web page long enough without moving on to a dozen others.

I can no longer sink into a good novel for hours as before. I find it difficult to sit through an entire two-hour film. I feel immediately anxious if I have nothing to do. And yet, I am mentally exhausted and don't want to go out or see anyone apart from my laptop in the evenings.

More and more often, I have to force myself to fix my eyes on a still object and breathe evenly for a while, just to relax my over-stimulated mind.

This cannot be healthy. I'm afraid that with a few more years of this, I will no longer be capable of thinking with concentration on a single subject.

While writing this blog entry, apart from moving over to other websites every now and then, I actually started two other blog entries on other topics.



WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

( W.H.Davies: "Leisure" )

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

my most incomprehensible blog entries: a compilation

"My busy work day was paused..."
"Ten years and a thousand entries. I'm not sure how to celebrate."
"The dark but colourful décor, the sangria."
"Accidentally set fire to my hair (three times)."

"I'm faced with an infinity of strange streets or unknown doors that offer adventures beyond my wildest dreams."
"... a woman with wild, brown hair, with storms and bitterness beneath her outward calm."
"Sweet, homemade mead with tippa-leipä, traditional fare on May Day and the day before, Walpurgis night and the mad spring party."

"I minored in history, back at university. Probably because of the house."
" ...stared across the bay at a fairytale castle, dreamed of coffee shops with wooden tables, walked on quiet back streets, made..."
"I felt the deep helplessness of the spoiled urbanite as I was trying to feel my way up four flights of stairs with only the feeble light from my phone to guide me to the right door."

"Vaasa may not be the prettiest of little cities but when you approach it from the harbour it shows off an enchanting skyline."
"Something's awake."
"In a town of cotton-snow I spent a few hours in a favourite place."
"Wonder if I will ever look back on this time with nostalgia. Ah, that winter with those Thursday nights..."

"Why is it that grown-up women like me still tend to get stuck on what our mothers say?"
"The place to come to if you want to meet lorries transporting 50 meter long wind turbine blades."
"My own retirement age is hopefully still decades away but it's never too early to start with these things, right?"
"I parked myself in the pub for the afternoon. Ordered the garlic mushrooms, with a Bailey's Coffee for dessert."
"I'm sure Le Havre is a very nice city."

"Some days begin with me waking up in pure, yellow silk."
"I sing while I walk."
"My eyes hurt, my food cravings won't go away and nothing works."
"Tied a bow into the beard of one of the men. Said, "You know, when Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings..." and watched the eyes light up on four of them. Took a picture of one in a little green hat."

Tuesday, January 05, 2016

things to do in Ostrobothnia when you're dead serious

These are some of my activities:


* Sit down too much, burning my retinas staring at a screen.
* Excitedly buy shoes online and send them back when they arrive.
* Fret over the broadband upgrade I was talked into getting and didn't really want.
* Buy strawberry cider and impatiently wait for warmer weather when I can get gloriously tipsy on balconies and in beer gardens with my cider man.
* Worry, for no apparent reason, that my laptop will break down.
* Wonder what I'm supposed to do with my life.
* Get desperately unhappy and relentlessly happy.
* Light candles, no matter if it's midnight sun season or no daylight at all season.
* Sulk over my ugly sofa.
* Have entirely too many "girls' night in" Saturdays, with entirely too many girls sleeping over in my tiny flat, and enjoy it entirely too much.
* Go running, very reluctantly.
* Suffer from tendinitis in every shoulder I own.
* Use the fact that it gets dark at 4 pm in the winter as an excuse for seven-hour-long TV marathons.

Monday, January 04, 2016

a midwinter night's dream

Snow is falling, the last of this Christmas's traditional glögg-drink is simmering on the stove and I'm planning to go out and buy the thickest candle I can find.

One night just before Christmas, I had to venture out in the dark streets in the middle of the night because of a borrowed poodle with a tummy ache. While the poodle was chewing on frosty grass, as dogs with tummy aches do, I shivered, yawned and studied the apartment buildings of the neighbourhood. Most windows were dark, a few were lit by Christmas decorations that had been left on overnight. Electric candelabras, stars and strings of light.

Outside of one dark window hung a simple wooden lantern with the only non-electric light I could see, a thick candle flickering in the wind. The next days I looked for it every time I walked past and it was still lit, day and night. The window belonged to a small flat in the most run-down building around, probably inhabited by a student. I imagined a young woman living alone but not lonely, romantic, full of dreams for the future. Planning a life in beautiful places far from this cold, dark back street in the North. Making the most of her life here, decorating her home with this romantic, thick candle left to burn day and night over Christmas to symbolize the poetry of life.

After a while, I realised that my sleep-addled brain was confusing her with me. And that the student in the flat probably was a loser, judging by the constant blueish flicker of a TV or computer game in his/her window that I saw at more humane times of the day. (Which could, on the other hand, also be confused with me - I watch quite a lot of TV in the winter.) I am not so young, fast approaching the midpoint of life, but I live alone and plan and prepare for a wonderful future in places far from this dark street. Meanwhile, I light candles and make the most of life here.

When the time for Christmas lights is over but darkness still lingers here in the Nordic winter, I will hang a lantern on my balcony with a thick candle left to burn day and night, flickering in the wind. To symbolize the poetry of life and light my way.

Sunday, January 03, 2016

2015: the year of greyness, white paint and one red motorcycle

* Began the year with that rare feeling of true happiness. Fireworks in the sky above me, exciting new friends around me (new as in made that evening), sparklers in one hand, champagne in the other, no need to worry about a thing.
* New Year's Day, and already my car had to be towed to the repair shop.
* Saw my armpit on an ultrasound.
* Published prison fire pictures and subtitled the President's speech.
* Founded a sports club that can make balls stick to a ceiling.
* Enterprising thoughts all year.
* Debut as a TV translator. Also added Danish and Tamil to my list of work languages.
* Ice-skating in my summer paradise.
* Discussed God among beautiful Irish Cobs while getting drenched in winter rain.
* Birthday party with pavlova and hot whiskey.
* Nightly road trip with someone else's three sleepy toddlers.
* Straight perm of afro hair, which involved me, my sister, latex gloves and an instagramming teenager.

* Professional photo shoot (as model) and world championship volleyball game (as enthusiastic supporter) on the same day.
* Cold and quiet summer and two months of holiday with white paint and strawberry liqueur. Painted everything white.
* Midsummer with the Midsummer People and more kids than I knew existed.
* Walked through mud to study 75 000 ultra-conservative Christians. I was the only one wearing ear-rings.
* Gave my Mum a haircut while inebriated.
* Weirdest date ever planned by me: a visit to a cat shelter, followed by an afternoon at an American football game. Hot sun and cold Pepsi.
* Encounter of the third kind with a mouse and a weasel early one morning.
* Drove a Porsche wild with a scandalous man.
* Weekend in the forgotten city of Jyväskylä with friends, sun and beachvolley.
* Metal detector search for wedding bands and my uncle's pacemaker.
* Returned to the clothing industry and spent three days a week between a butcher's block and a Buddha of baby hippo size.
* Loveliest day of the year started with sibling breakfast and culminated in sunny hours on a deserted island.
* Too much TV.
* Internal conflict between my shoulders and knees.
* Joined the third book club of my life.
* Trip on a red Ducati to have pastry with a priest.
* Looked for an exorcist and had pizza with a suicidal wife-beater.
* Theatre with a doctor and a curious incident of a dog.
* Tried one of those cars that parallel park themselves.
* November picnic with mother's peach pie.
* Escorted a heavy Turkish lorry and led it astray.
* Girls' weekend on the sinful streets (and canals) of Amsterdam. Sex, drugs and wild parrots, all viewed from a safe distance.
* Turned down a job I dreamed about two years ago, in favour of freedom.
* New Year's Eve with good friends, whom I then dumped to go and drink beer and watch fireworks with a man.

* What paid my bills all year: subtitling a talkshow, the President's speech and obscure 80's song lyrics. Monday became the new Saturday.
* Wine evenings with the nastiest girls in town, falling asleep to each other's snores.
* The year of refugees everywhere and a feeling of insecurity.
* New phone, new laptop, new TV service - too little time to think.
* A life made up of a billion small tasks.

Saturday, January 02, 2016

going Dutch

The streets of Amsterdam are packed with tourists despite the persistent rain. I pull my hood up and wonder if my white coat glows in the December darkness, just like the scant underwear of the lady of the night in the window next to me. I'm almost pressed up against her window, illuminated by a soft red light, by a rowdy stag party making flirty gestures at her but I seem to be invisible. The Red Light District, with its faint scent of weed in the air, has a strange effect on everyone.
We take one of the last canal boat tours of the evening and the cheerful guide is clearly longing to go home. I sit with my friends in the back of the boat, watching thousands of illuminated townhouse windows - without curtains, a Dutch thing - reflected in the black canal water. We laugh at a heron staring at us from his perch, make jokes with an Australian tourist and dream of the strawberry mojitos we are going to have when we step off the boat.

In the morning, we dawdle in the hotel courtyard, marvelling at the wild parrots shrieking at us from the trees. We also take our time in the breakfast room, stuffing ourselves with dark bread, yogurt, and croissants with Nutella underneath a large reproduction of Rembrandt's The Night Watch.
And we walk, walk and walk. Along pretty canals, in mild greyness, through crowded afternoon markets. Almost get run over by bicycles, many times. We attend a church service, talk to a cat and giggle with a wine shop owner who wants us to take him home.

Watching a gay couple try out leather harnesses in one of the sex shops or choosing among cannabis icecream cones doesn't even seem weird anymore after a day in Amsterdam.

Friday, January 01, 2016

dealing with it

On New Year's Eve, I offered my cannabis sweets from Amsterdam to the chairman of the national anti-cannabis network. He declined, politely. I suppose I could get arrested for this.