Somewhere Near Helsinki

June 27, 1:02 am, land of the midnight sun

It’s hard to beat the feeling of going outside for a pee at 1 am and seeing clear across the 50 kilometre lake; it’s that clear and bright. I’ve yet to see real darkness here. Dusk sets in around midnight but it never seems to get really dark. By the time I wake up it’s blistering out, well, more than 20 degrees C anyway.

1:56 pm – global movement

Reading ‘Human Traffic: Sex, Slaves & Immigration’. Quite interesting, though badly written. But the concept is good, and it’s fascinating how he ties together the movement of people and things like drugs and guns. Reading about one Kurdish couple who fled Germany for Afghanistan, believe it or not, and they were afforded passage on a ship as long as they didn’t mind accompanying guns. For some reason this offended me more than the stories about human bodies becoming live cargo space for cross-border drugs. I guess I believe that guns do more damage than drugs. But then I think back to Copenhagen’s small redlight district, where I witnessed, for the first time, a man injecting himself with heroine. He was in broad daylight in the middle of the sidewalk and made no effort to hide it. If anything it made me realized how sheltered my life has been despite all my ‘big adventures.’ This book is teaching me the same thing in a more theoretical vein, pun intended.

2:31 pm – the humans are alright

I ended my rant on hierarchy by saying that my faith in humanity itself remains, but I didn’t say why. My faith in humanity remains because hierarchy itself is what corrupts us, hierarchy and other flawed systems we create. And then we get stuck on them, as if they are the only option because that’s how we have done it for so long now. So we get trapped in games of unfair competition by our own desire to be as good as we can. Ambition is not such a bad thing, but it’s misguided toward material success and maximizing status within the hierarchy. This kind of ambition depletes our resources and too great a rate to collectively sustain ourselves. Then we get to blaming others because no one wants to believe oneself responsible for evil or wrongdoing. But it is our culture of insane competition and status seeking that puts us in this mess, and pulls us away from our real values, the things that matter most to us, i.e. our family, our community, our fellow human. That’s my theory, what’s yours?

June 28, 1:34 am – it’s a beautiful day

This was the day I longed for in Toronto and never had. Activities included chopping wood, swimming, cooking, eating, reading, writing, watching football, sleeping.

2:23 am – not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Not exactly dark outside, but about as dark as it gets in summer I think. It’s spooky actually, just black trees over a grey sky. Hitchcockian.

July 2, 12:07 pm, Miia’s birthday

We watched sunrise the other night at around 2:30 am, a few minutes after sunset. Magical. “Over there at the horizon,” I told her, “is Dr. Suess land. Cotton candy skies and multi-coloured madness, critters eating fritters and 3-footed sneeds, and whatnot.” And in the foreground shadows under the sun, birch tree shaped shadows.

Now I’m reading ‘This Earth of Mankind’ by Pram Toer, part I of the Buru Quartet, written in Suharto’s Buru Island prison camp. And I’m thinking back to an argument with my friend Cribbsy, who has always given me the most interesting arguments, I’ve got to admit that. He argued that fiction may teach you good morals about living your life, but only non-fiction gives you true knowledge about the world, or something to that effect. And here I am reading this novel set in East Java in 1898 and I’m learning about historical Indonesia, Netherlands, Japan, China, the cultures and geography of these places and the culture of their people, and I’m realizing that fiction, when done well, in fact provides more truth that non-fiction because instead of giving you some scholar’s theories and explanations and selected information to prove his point, you get someone trying to tell a rich story and providing a solid context, so you get a broader perspective that way. That Cribbsy, one day he’ll win ;-)

July 7, 2006 – Bit of a Set-back

A few days ago we loaded up the Citroen and headed south to meet Miia’s brother Mika and his girlfriend Sian, who are here for 3 weeks of their teacher’s summer vacation. We visited with Uncle Reijo and Aunt Liisa for a night and played a long and tortuous, outright tylsa (boringass) game of Phase 10, old-school rules, which takes about 3 times as long as watching Germany fail to win the world cup on their home turf.

The next morning we visited Reijo & Liisa’s daughter Kaisa and her kids Antti and Heli. We took one look at the big lawn and started looking for balls to play with, and our eyes nearly popped on sight of the on-sight trampoline ay carumba! But first there were some issues to work out what with the thunderous multilingual cacophony from the backseat riders and a general sense of frustration at too much happening too fast in too many directions and most importantly in too many languages. I must admit I suffered a little bit of a breakdown, which was assuaged previous to my physical break, or sprain to be less whiny, and was the fault of a lack of reasonable-sized balls, that is to say all we found to play with was a giant beach-ball and a Frisbee, so we opted for the latter and on my first leaping catch I landed sideways and was further propelled by my jet fuel sandals, which are in fact designed to guarantee injury for any jackass fool-hearted enough to attempt any sort of athleticism while bound in their cross patterned leather. I’m not sure if the surrounding Finns, particularly the young ones, understood the stream of profanity I uttered but it was obvious that the game was over.

Today Miia’s other cousin Eeva, a nurse, took a look and told me it was not too bad and should heal in a few weeks time if I keep off it. This limits the wood-chopping madness that was serving as an excellent breather from the midnight writing. So it goes, it could be worse, and whatnot. I can walk on it, but slowly, and it hasn’t stopped me from sweating with these Finns nor swimming laps of the lake.