• Tomorrow is our family’s yearly open house party. Up to 70 people will pass through our apartment during the evening, many who will be attending for their eighth or ninth time. Last year the doorbell broke and people gradually amassed behind the door, waiting for someone to hear their knocking over the thrum of conversation. The doorbell’s been fixed. Welcome all!
• My brother Joel’s having a house leaving party tonight. He’s moving back “home” to our parents’. Unlike me, however, his stay will last only December. After that he’s moving to Turku to live with his girlfriend.
• Elexa called today. She’s moving out of our apartment and into a caravan. This means I have no place to live if or when I go back to Copenhagen. It seems she will be borrowing 500 euros from me for the three months’ rent advance on the caravan.
• The ADSL line went out this evening. While on the phone to Elisa’s customer service, it was discovered that Joel had accidentally pulled out the phone jack while vacuuming. Oops.
• There is at least one other word in English besides “vacuum” that has two U’s one after the other. Do you know what it is?
• Last night I finished reading Nabokov’s Mary. It’s scary to admit how much of myself I saw in the main character.
• There is an email that arrived on Tuesday that I still haven’t opened. To the sender, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry, I’ve been waiting for some time to both read and answer it.

I bought a beer and approached their table.

“Still not many people here,” I said, referring to an earlier encounter with them.

“Nope,” the guy said. Read more

I miss Sundays. Without a week behind you and a new week ahead, there’s no magic in them. I live in a perpetual state of summer holiday.

So yesterday Helsinki opened its Christmas Street. I happened to be walking by, and I couldn’t resist the pull of the crowd. I didn’t stay long, though. I was hungover, and the crowd and the music of the military band were too much for me to stand.

Is this beginning of waiting for Christmas? December, in Finnish, is joulukuu which literally means “Christmas month.” But it’s not December yet, so there’s not even any calendar windows to open. I think Christmas calendars are what got me through December as a kid. That, and advent Sundays, which I remember best for the Hoosianna song we used to sing at school.

Tuntuu aika uskomattomalta, että Suodatin pitää sijaa 165 Suomi-blogien Top-listalla. Tämä saitilta, jota ei ole päivitetty yli vuoteen. Itse asiassa koko Top-lista on syntynyt vasta Suodattimen “kuoleman” jälkeen.

Itse en muuten missään vaiheessa uskonut Suodattimen kuolemaan (“ei kulta, se vain nukkuu”). Kai se on kuitenkin uskottava, että tuonpuoleisesta ei ole nousemista.

I compiled this short list for my friend Marika’s documentary on young people living abroad. Read more

This morning, as I got off the bus, it was snowing. Tiny little flakes that would melt before they ever hit the ground. The first snow I’ve seen this year.

An hour later, while out on the balcony, I watched a huge flake, inches from my face, floating by, impossibly slow. It just hung there, and I saw it was grey. It was raining ashes. The neighbors from two stories up were sweeping their balcony.

Maybe because I’m not a photographer myself, the moblogs I’ve seen haven’t interested me much. But when it’s a friend’s moblog, and you know the people in the pictures, it’s a whole new story.

I don’t think it’s so easy to meet someone in real life that you only know through blogging. If there’s time and opportunity, you may become acquainted, maybe even friends. But it still takes time.

I’ve had people walk up to me and know who I am through a weblog. Hanging out with them always feels like a first date. There’s the attraction and the shared interests, but there’s also, of course, the awkwardness.

However, meeting someone familiar through a weblog is—hopefully—not the same as meeting an author of a book you’ve read. (The other day I was reading stuff on J.D. Salinger, an author famous for the way his readers felt like he was their friend.)

Last year, at some lecture, Ville and I were talking about blogs and web journals. We had noticed that if you see a friend many times a week, it’s better not to read their blog or web journal. Otherwise they’ll constantly be telling you things you’ve already read.

This was a positive discovery: it shows that what you write is what you’d share with your friends anyway. And that, I think, is a nice thing about blogs and public journals.

Postscript
Since Janne answered this entry (which was an answer to his) on the same day as his original post, and his weblog has only daily permalinks, I’ll just tack my reply here. It gets confusing, I know.

Janne’s friends have wondered about the varying “intrestingness” of the stuff he posts. Janne says it’s because he needs the space to write whatever he feels like. Otherwise writing becomes affected, constrained; a chore.

I couldn’t agree more. I think Janne got it head-on.

These are weblogs. We don’t have editors. We’re not being paid to write. Not everything’s going to be great, or super-interesting everyone, all the time. That’s what you get with weblogs. And that, I would say again, is a good thing about weblogs.

I haven’t been here a week and I already want to go back. Read more

If it were rumored that President Bush had a less than healthy, manly libido, his press aids would for sure arrange a photo op featuring a certain well-placed bulge.

This thought helps me deal with the anger.

So I guess I’ve arrived safely in Helsinki. The trip was mostly tiring, though interesting too, as long as it’s a one-time experience. I was traveling alone, carrying a huge duffel-bag, and already worn out from a week of intense living with four other people in a small apartment. Read more

Sitting on the bus about to leave for Stockholm.

Waiting for the bus, the night is dark and the sudden bright lights make me think winter mornings. It is the darkness and the waiting and the feeling of having just woken. My stomach know I am about to leave. There is a cold breeze. I can feel it in the holes in my shoes. Read more

Markku and Karkki left this morning. They’re waiting at the airport now; their plane will take off in an hour or so. Elexa just left for school. Marika’s still sleeping in Elexa’s room. She’ll be returning to Germany sometime this week. I’m leaving for Helsinki tonight. Read more

Oh, and about cliques. The best thing about being “a smoker” is that it’s a very honest grouping. People are mellow, there’s no need to talk. Just inhale, exhale. Smoking doesn’t really define smokers (at least after they’re over 18), so there’s not much assumed identity to grapple with. There is no posturing or striving for coolness. There’s just the acknowledgement of having a regrettably nasty but thankfully shared habit.

This acknowledgement does have funny aspects to it, though. Try telling a fellow smoker that you’re planning on quitting. It freaks ’em out. You either get the disparaging “good luck with that,” or then you get a more prickly reaction in which the smoker is annoyed—usually without even noticing it—and starts acting kind of mean.

Things that might happen if you moved to Copenhagen. Read more

My computer is very ill. It is afflicted with abrupt seizures of restarting itself. There is no apparent cause for these fits. All of the sudden, with no warning at, the screen flashes black and then flickers as the BIOS goes to work counting up the RAM. Read more