All my life I’ve been waiting to get discovered. It may be because I’m lazy by nature, although I think that since I’d simply like to be discovered for what I’ve done - instead of just playing the lottery - I think I’m not a complete slacker.

I’ve always wanted to get head hunted for a job. I think it'd be nice if some movie director saw me order a caffe latte and asked me to audition for a role in his movie. I would have even auditioned for the part of Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies.

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A friend of mine once told me that he’d heard somewhere that your home will always be wherever you are living when you’re 18. Regardless of the questionable reliability of the source, that’s a claim that’s pretty easy to believe, it kind of makes sense.

Home is where you are when you’re a teenager.

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I bought Wife a watch for Christmas because she didn’t have one but also because I like watches myself. The only problem with buying a watch is probably that once I find one that I really like, I realize that I like my money even better but when I was buying that watch for her, I figured that she was paying half of it anyway.

Just kidding.

Only the best is good enough for her. And I found one that she likes “a lot,” as she just told me in a chat window.

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It finally happened. For weeks now, I’ve been walking around wearing a white shoe on my left foot, and a black one on my right, except on a few days when I’ve had a black shoe on my right foot and a white one on my right, and nobody's said anything.

Today, though, when it happened, I was wearing white on left, black on right, and I had just got scrambled eggs, a sandwich, and the local Tampere specialty mustamakkara, a blood sausage.

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“Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”
– Thomas Alva Edison

Terry, my Canadian (exchange student) brother had a buddy called Sweaty. I’ve never met Sweaty, and in the only photo I’ve ever seen of him, he was asleep - or passed out - and not really sweaty, but I’ve always felt a connection to him.

I’m sure you can figure out why.

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The first time my father came home and told my mother that he’d just witnessed a man die, I was about 11 years old. And - at least as far as I know - my father wasn’t a Mob hitman, so this was not an every day occurrence at the house.

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I’m writing this in the kitchen of the northern-most Swedish family in the world, looking over the world’s northern-most concrete plant, with my back towards the northern-most hospital in the world. I believe that right now, I may just be the northern-most Finnish freelancer in the world, and for sure, this is my northern-most blog entry ever.

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“Now that I’ve just tasted coffee, it tops my list of things that taste bad”
– Son, June 28, 2010

Many of the human treats are truly acquired tastes. Who really likes the taste of beer? Coffee? Wasabi? Any kind of alcohol? Blue cheese? I know I didn’t. On the other hand, some of my early favorites don’t taste that good anymore. Like, milk, and specifically breast milk.

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“The Crown Princess waved at me!”
– Son, outside the Royal Castle in Stockholm, June 19, 2010 at 6 pm

We made the trek from our Stockholm suburbia to downtown Stockholm, the self-proclaimed Capital of Scandinavia, now, thanks to the Royal Wedding also doubling as the love capital of the world. The subway ride was free partly to make sure no idiot - especially a Finnish-born idiot - would decide to drive to the city, and partly because the Princess herself wanted to keep her wedding as environmentally friendly as possible.

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A few days ago, I heard an interesting radio show about an experiment some Washington Post reporters ran, on themselves.

So when eight Post reporters got to talking about their attachment -- no, addiction -- to their BlackBerrys, phones, Twitter and Facebook, it was only natural that someone said, okay, let's go without, if only for a week. No Web, period. If you need to talk to someone, do it in person or by phone.
Everyone got excited: What would our friends and loved ones think if we didn't respond to their texts and e-mails? Would we be able to do our work? Could we make it five whole days?

Some of them did.

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I admit it, I missed the memo on fist bumps. I guess I was still pretty much on the map when the secret handshakes were around, although the one me and Terry had in 1985 wasn’t ever used. It had three different stages, ending in a finger hook. Maybe even a pointing gesture. But it was never used in a real-life situation.

Nobody’s doing the secret handshakes anymore. It’s all fist bumps. I’m not saying that I don’t like it, because I kind of do. I get the bonding, and in some way, I like most hand gestures: the peace sign, the thumbs up, high-five, and the like.

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I went through high school in a city with a population of about 50 000. Not a huge city, in other words, but still a major town in Finland, well-known and all.

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I’ve always spent a lot of time with Dad at work. It was at the backroom of my uncle’s store he made all those hockey masks for me, and it was the same store where I crashed through the glass door. (I was trying to be as cool as Dad and his colleagues who ran up the three stairs inside the store, opened the door, and kept on running.)

When Dad took a job at another store, I followed him there, playing my first games of Pong there, and having endless hours of fun with a typewriter, and a pencil and a fan.

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She came running from behind me, and swooshed by, with a quick step, arms pumping up and down, giving her the beautiful rhythm I think she has. I've said it a hundred times, I'll say it again: Daughter knows how to run!

She stopped, and opened her jacket, then took it off, ignoring Wife's and my protest.

"I'll wear it, I'll wear the hood over my head. Just the hood," she said, then asked me to help her put on the jacket so the hood was over her head.

I did, and then kept on walking. Two seconds later she came running again - oh, so beautifully - yelling that she was a superhero.

I did the same thing when I was a kid as did surely millions of kids around the world. I would wear my yellow bathrobe an jump down from the benches in the sauna dressing room, pretending I was flying. I know I haven't told Daughter about that, so it must be an idea that just occurred to her. And to millions of kids around the world.

We all want to be superheros. We all want to be powerful. We all want to be special. Only the heroes change.

In her head, Daughter was Batman.

Jumping down from that bench in a Helsinki suburb decades earlier, I wanted to be Super-Goofy.

“Ha ha, like your old boss”
– Wife, on Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt sticking his fingers up his nose while watching hockey.

Bosses, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few great ones to mention. I’m probably not an easy employee, and it’s not because I want to be difficult or because I think I’m smarter that the rest – although I understand that even writing that as a possibility probably qualifies me as a jerk – or because I ask tough questions. I sometimes do ask silly questions and I often tried to make everybody laugh at a company meeting, back when I still had bosses.

These days, I have clients.

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When I moved to Sweden over twelve years ago, I told my parents that it wasn’t such a big deal because “Stockholm is closer to Helsinki than Joensuu is”. Helsinki was my hometown then, and Joensuu theirs.

It’s true. The distance between Stockholm and Helsinki is 398 kilometers, while the Joensuu-Helsinki trek is a 440-kilometer one (and I know every inch of it).

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I’ve gone retro. I’ve gone back to using a pencil. Trying to, at least.

Pens have always been my luxury item. I’m not big on rings or bracelets. I’m not a shoe collector, and the odd days I wear a watch, it’s my ten-year-old plastic watch with The Phantom’s face on it, and the text, “The Phantom, the man who never dies”. I like watches, but I’m too cheap to get the really nice ones.

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When I first met Wife and we started dating, she lived not far from where we live now. It’s a ten-minute drive from our house to the cul-de-sac where the other yellow house is. My place across town, on the south side, about a five-minute walk from our first apartment together, was an 18-minute drive from her. But that’s in the middle of the night, with no traffic, and with some speeding.

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“I don’t think driving five hours a day for weeks would be fun. You’re the one who loves to drive.”
– Wife, over dinner, talking about vacation plans

I heard somebody say recently, in the aftermath of the restructuring of the American and Swedish auto industries that he felt that having a domestic auto industry was one of the signs of a nation being a true industrial power. I can’t remember who it was, or the actual phrase he used, but I know I heard it in my car, driving to an interview about an hour from my office.

I also remember thinking that the man had a point.

After all, the Americans had their big old cars, the Cadillacs, Fords, Chevrolets; the Germans had their Audis, Volkswagens, Opels; the Brits the Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Aston Martins, Jaguars; the Italians the Ferraris, the FIATs, Alfa Romeos, Lancias; and, of course, the Swedes Volvos and Saabs.

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The characters in Enid Blyton’s The Five Find-Outers and Dog series (and Blyton’s Famous Five and the Secret Seven series and all the other detective books, like the Three Investigators, or the Girl Detective, all very popular at the Oulunkylä Public School library) always found things. They found something that got them started on a case, and they found stuff during the case.

To find something on the street has always fascinated me. Finding something requires more than just luck. Not a lot more, but a little. You have to be alert enough to see that something, and not too lazy to leave it lying there.

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“The affable Helge Berglund claims there are more than a hundred thousand active players and about seven thousand hockey teams in Sweden. How fitting, he reflects, that the Johanneshov isstadion should be the scene of the world championship competition. “The stadium’s fame as the Mecca of ice hockey,” he continues in his own bouncy style, “is once more sustained.”
– Mordecai Richler on the 1963 hockey world championships in Dispatches from the Sporting Life

Call me crazy, call me weird - just call me - but whenever I travel to a new city, I like to go see the hockey arena there. I used to also buy a hockey hat from each city, but stopped doing that after my trip to Rouen, France when I walked a good five kilometers in rain mixed with snow to find the one store that carried hockey hats. So, these days, I buy the hats only if the store that I happen to go into - and I always go to one - has them.

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Last night, I held a pretty decent speech to Son, about owning up to things. About how it takes more courage to stand up and confess a mistake than it takes to … do something else. I can’t remember what the other stuff was, but it was something very macho, and tough, like to do a jedi jump.

I went on a good ten minutes about the importance of being a great loser, and then of course, told him how, at the Olympics, all the players had to walk through the mixed zone and talk about the loss they had just been delivered.

And for good measure, I threw in Henrik Lundqvist’s name because I know it carries some major weight around here. So, if Henke Lundqvist can come ut and talk to the press right after he’s faced four shots and made just one save in one period in an Olympic quarterfinal, then Son can surely muster up some courage to tell me who it really was that spilled that glass of orange juice onto the carpet.

Right?

Great losers aren’t born. They’re made.

So I went to a place called "Olympics" and the next thing I know, three weeks just flashed by. I hope you had your "risto+pakarinen" Google alerts on, and caught at least some of my stuff on IIHF.com during the games and the Games.

Like this blog entry, about an event of which I wrote here earlier.

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Twenty-five years ago, a friend of mine received a tape in the mail. It was a black, regular tape he had got from a friend from home, including the hottest hits at the time. For my friend, Terry, home was Canada, and that tape had the keys to Canadian Rock Wonderland, namely Bryan Adams’s "Reckless".

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Wake-up call: 5:55 am. Get dressed, walk out the door, meet a colleague at the edge of Stanley Park. Mission: To witness Arnold Schwarzenegger carrying the Olympic torch. Why the Governator would be carrying the Olympic torch in Vancouver on the last day of the relay was a mystery to me.

Sure, “The Austrian Oak” is a six-time Mr. Olympia, but he’s never participated in the Olympics. He’s not Canadian, he's Austrian American with no special connection to Canada as far as I know.

But, run he would, and that had to be seen.

And that’s why I headed out into the darkness, and that’s why I was ordering a tall latte at 6:15 am. I had five minutes to kill - I was supposed to meet Lucas at 6:20 – and, well, Starbucks is never far in this city.

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Greetings from Vancouver, the host city of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. It’s a long way from Stockholm to Vancouver (via London), and my total travel time form door to door was 21 hours. I spent ten of them on the plane from London to Vancouver, sitting next to Victor Droop, a Dutch fellow on his way to the Olympics as well.

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Last weekend, I was in Minsk, Belarus, to see the Russian KHL’s All-Star Game. After the game, I was standing in the mixed zone, listening to former NHLer Ville Peltonen, also a Finnish national hero thanks to his hat trick in a World Championship final against Sweden in 1995, when some fans showed up.

They said, “pleez, pleez” and gave Peltonen some small flags, posters, and a pen. He said, “sure,” and signed a half a dozen autographs, and posed for a few photos.

(Some of my colleagues thought it was such a no-no that the KHL should be fined, but my story’s not going there).

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It’s been twenty years since I last read Peanuts, but I used to be a huge fan. A huge fan. Reading about Charlie Brown taught me a lot about life, I discovered new words - “anxiety”, anyone - but mostly they just made me laugh. I could relate to all of the characters at some point in my life.

What a joy it was for a little pre-teen Finnish hockey guy to find a Zamboni on the pages of Peanuts, let alone strips abut Snoopy playing hockey. “Here’s the world famous hockey player winding up for one of his spectacular slap shots…”

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I can say that I pretty much compete with everyone, with the exception of three people and those three happen to share my street address and my love for the “Make’em laugh” scene in Singing in the Rain. (Although, to be one hundred percent honest, I think I love it the most. And I’d be perfectly happy to say I finish second in that race, but I don’t).

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I like my name. I like my initials. The letter R is a very special one to me. I used to love the blinking R that marked replays on sports broadcasts. I sign my emails with just a single R, and my little hand-written notes to friends and family with a backwards R, like the one in Toys R Us.

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“Who’s going to like a guy who’s just being funny and doesn’t even want to wear socks?”
– Son, a week before Christmas, 2009

Your mother, Son, your mother. And I’m not talking about your mother as your mother, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, let me explain. Your mother, my wife, the smiling little chickity that takes care of business in and around the house, once fell in love with a guy who was just being funny, and never, ever, wore socks in his shoes.

(He did wear shoes).

Yes, that would be me.

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Ten years ago today, I put my hand on J’s knee when we were sitting at a bar just around the corner from the office. The bar, Krokodil, was a gay bar that served cold beer and good food for the people that could fit in the eight tables it had.

We were there, a group of us, and at some point, late that night, I rested my hand on J’s knee, a gesture that - I have been told later - sent shock waves through her body. At the time, I was unaware of this.

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Today, Dec 6, is Finland’s Independence Day. I will spend it on a ferry to Sweden. How appropriate.

I have never been as Finnish as during my first two years living in Sweden. I moved to Sweden in April, and by Christmas, I was an ultrafennomaniac. I read only Finnish classics, I listened to Finnish music, and I basically spent my weekends on those ferries, going back to the old country, to the old hood and the old buddies.

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They say that the more something changes, the more it stays the same. In case you’re wondering who “they” are, the answer is Huey Lewis and the News, who had that line in “I Know What I Want“ on their Fore! album.

I can now tell you that the reverse is also true. The more something stays the same, the more it changes.

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In a couple weeks, a K-1 tournament is going to be held somewhere in Sweden, Stockholm, or the surrounding international waters. Now, the fairly new combat sport has a lot of fans, and it attracts a lot of people, and I guess it’s gaining in popularity.

On the advertising posters that you can see in the Stockholm subway cars, they run a few quotes from papers to add creditibility to the event.

One of them is by an evening paper columnist and it goes like this: “… this is the future.”

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In the last five years, I’ve conducted more interviews than I ever imagined I would. Somehow, while I do (kind of) like people, and am (kind of) curious to learn about new things, and get (kind of) excited (kind of) easily, I’ve never really seen myself as an interviewer - because somewhere deep down, I still (kind of) know that I’m (kind of) shy.

And when you think about it, the interview person is holding all the cards, really, unless you happen to know something that he doesn’t know you know, but that’s never happened to me.

Straightforward postgame interviews can be frustrating and exciting at the same time.

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Here’s the joke of the day.

“What do you get when you throw a mobile phone in a bathtub?
Answer: Speech bubbles."

Pretty good, right? Before you scroll down and start ripping the joke apart - as is the custom on the Internet - let me add this tiny bit of information: The joke was written by my son, six years old.

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A part of hockey’s lure has to be in the equipment. There’s something magical in the ritual of putting on all that gear that looks nothing like anything in the real world. Nothing.

Gloves are so padded that when the players do the now-ubiquitous gloved hand-clap to thank the fans after a game, it looks bizarre, unnatural. Same goes for the helmet, the socks (yeah, right), and the pants.

When I was four years old, following my father to hockey games in Helsinki, I was fascinated by goalies who, to me, looked like freaks of nature. I mean, where did these people live? I had never seen such creatures - with their wide legs, their chubby upper bodies, and their big, blocky hands - out on the streets.

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Doing the post-game interview can be tough, especially after a loss. But, being the professional that I like to think I am, of course I was ready for one … even if the walk upstairs was a long one, made even heavier by the weight of the loss on my shoulders.

The winner was already sitting in the booth when I got there. I saw the door with the sign, “Announcer / head referee”, at the end of the room. When I opened it, I saw her sitting in a special chair, smiling, and chatting with the said announcer, a legend in his field, mind you.

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When a baby is born in Finland, it is customary for the godmother (or father) to buy him (or her) a spoon that has the baby’s vital stats engraved in it. At that point in time, the stats are height and weight at birth as well as the date and time of birth.

And - naturally - the name.

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When I was a small boy living in Finland, my teacher told my class that despite Finnish being a small language with only about five million speakers, there were in fact two words that the rest of the world had adopted from us: sauna, and sisu.

For emphasis, that story was then followed by another one about Finnish UN soldiers in the Middle East, and how the first thing they did at their post was to build a sauna.

(For sisu, and sauna, see here.)

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About nine years and eight months ago, I received an email from a pretty, young lady. The subject of the email was, “I hope you visit this site every day”, with the appropriate link attached to the body of the message.

http://www.thehungersite.com

The link took me to a site which I obviously hadn’t ever visited - the Hunger Site which helps to feed the hungry in Africa - but which I just as obviously visited right then.

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It’s become painfully obvious to everybody that I am no handyman. I’m not somebody whose idea of having a great time is to disappear into the garage and fix stuff. My idea of a good time is to hang around that person and talk and maybe play ball.

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I can think of at least five meetings I’ve been invited to sit in just because I am Finnish. Not that I didn’t enjoy sitting in - I’m pretty fond of the Swedish meeting culture with the coffee and the bullar, the cinnamon buns - and not that I took it as an insult or so, I just thought it was pretty obvious to everybody that I was there just so our company could show the prospective (Finnish) client that we had intimite knowledge of Finland, and Finns. We had one sitting right there in the office. Me.

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I just bought a new bike, and realized, again, how much fun riding a bike is, but then I read Christopher McDougall's "Born to Run," and I think - I think - that even though I have said (many times) in the past that "Running Is The Devil", I may give running one more chance, just because I also like the idea of running barefoot.

After all, I ran barefoot to school and back, ten kilometers, uphill, each way, through the snow, when I was a kid.

Good times.

Official announcement from the office of Risto Pakarinen: I am the new new renaissance man of the 21st century, the kind who can’t do anything. By “do” I mean fix things, plant anything, or make any visible - constructive, literally - changes in my surroundings.

But I can play ball.

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Being the President of Finland still seems to have some pull. Yesterday, H, the boy genius - both self-proclaimed and encouraged by parents - surprised me right in the middle of a nice bike ride to the grocery store.

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Our family is bilingual, and since I write a lot in English, I switch between three languages all the time, every day. Every language is special in its own way, and each of them portray my personality in a slightly different way.

Even my voice is a little different depending on whether I’m speaking Finnish, Swedish, or English, let alone the style of my speech. A good American friend of mine once noted that while he was getting more fluent in Swedish while living in Stockholm, he always counted money in English. I seem to be doing the same, only, I count in Finnish.

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Seems to me that life is a chain of small races, competitions. I’m sure there are people out there who don’t care about competing that much, and who are happy just to participate, but I'm not one of them.

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