self-pity and snake's beard

FaceBook, these days, is chock-full of status updates with exclamation marks. They are all on the same theme:

"Happy days! Four weeks of summer vacation starting now!"
"Last day at work - for the next six weeks, nothing to do except eat strawberries and read novels!"
"An eternal summer holiday ahead!"


A normal Finn gets four weeks of summer holidays, some even more (not to mention my teacher friends, who have something like eight weeks). A normal Finn, having suffered through a freezing winter and a rainy spring, needs every single minute of it, now that glorious, joyful summer has finally arrived.


Choking on rage, I shut down FaceBook and vow to never log in again ( a couple of hours later, I'm back, reading more of the same updates ). Having recently changed jobs, I haven't earned more than one week of holidays, despite having worked as hard as everybody else the entire winter. Even that one week I had to squeeze out of my employer.

And having spent most of that week sniffling from a summer cold and feeling miserable, I feel entitled to more than a little self-pity. I returned to the office this morning, hating everything in sight. Most of my coworkers were on vacation, anyway, so I was free to seethe to my heart's content.

I spent yesterday, the last day of my meagre holiday, dreading the return to work. Went cycling around some back streets near the railroad tracks and found some strange and marvellous things, like a mountain of sand and the place where household appliances come to die.

But my mind finally found rest when I wandered into a garden centre to breathe the scent of flowers and stare at snake's beard and the vivid colours of pygmy paprikas.

I didn't know there existed such things as pygmy paprikas or snake's beard.* So, not an entirely wasted holiday week after all.


* ( Actually, snake's beard doesn't exist, not as a name anyway. Ophiopogon planiscapus nigrescens is called black lilyturf or black mondo grass. But its Swedish and Finnish names both translate as snake's beard and I like it that way. And I get to decide, since I only got one week of holidays. )