Monthly Archives: December 2012

Two miserable bachelors

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About 15 years ago, I spent New Year’s Eve with my best friend at my place. It was a nice place, in a Helsinki suburb, a ten-minute train ride from downtown Helsinki. We made some food, we called up another buddy to come over – he did, briefly – and we danced to the Doors.

“You know what my mother said when I told her about us hanging out at New Year’s?” my buddy asked me.

I had no idea.

“She said that she felt bad for us, ‘two miserable bachelors, alone at New Year’s’,” he added, and we laughed.

Happy new year!

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Listen to this

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Listen to this: the good people at podcastomatic.com have built a cool robot. It’s got red eyes, and a long face, but the best part is that it’s got a manly voice, and they have trained it to read these blog entries out loud. (Maybe yours, too.)

So, click below to open the feed in iTunes, or, this link if you use another RSS reader to get the audio files.

Get the RPodcast

Enjoy.

– Webmaster

Season’s greetings

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I’m sorry, but there will be no Top 10 New Year’s countdown this year because Mr. Pakarinen says he’s been too busy to write up a list, let alone go through the archives. Frankly, I think the reason there’s no Top 10 list is that he just couldn’t find ten good stories.

Sure, there was this. And this was OK, but you know what I mean?

So, rather than have you go through some old crap, he’s going to hide under the covers and say he’s been “busy”. With what, you ask, and I don’t have an answer.

Anyway. He’s also told all us interns that we can take a long break over the holidays, which tells me there won’t be major updates here, if any. There’d better not be if he first tells us that we can take some time off. Like, suppose he, against all odds, should get a half-baked idea for a story, am I then expected to come in and type the story and post it for him? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Unless there’s a bonus in it for me. I mean, I do things for money. Don’t you?

Merry Christmas to you all.

– Webmaster

Skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets

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The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways. Except that it’s not a screen door, and there’s no Mary around. Instead, it’s the door of our microwave oven. I put a Finnish meat pie in there and sit at our kitchen table with a comic book. It’s cold and dark outside because it’s winter in Joensuu, Finland, a provincial city in eastern Finland, just 102 kilometers from the border between Finland and the Soviet Union.

I could go to the outside skating rink just outside our house but it’s difficult to find the motivation once I’ve got home from school. The thermometer on the roof of the bank at the market square said it was minus-30 degrees today, just like yesterday. I had wrapped my scarf around my face but it only helped for a short while, until my breath made it wet so it froze. Every time I inhaled, my nostrils seemed to freeze up as well.

No, I’ll just eat my pie, read my comics, and then put on some Springsteen. Born To Run.

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Age against the machine

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My parents were in their early twenties when I was born, even if I didn’t know it then, and to be honest, I didn’t much think about it even as I grew up to understand it. In fact, when my best friend asked the seven-year-old me how old my parents were, I said I didn’t know.

“My mother’s 35,” he announced.

“Huh. I think mine’s 35, too,” I said, and then we continued our football match.

My mother was 28 at the time.

Higher, and higher.

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Names and numbers

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Last week, I was back at the Joensuu rink that was my home rink for four years in my teens. It’s been 25 years since I moved from that town to go to college in Helsinki, and most of my old friends have moved somewhere else, too, but if there’s one place I can see familiar faces, it’s at the rink.

Also, the rink pulls me back. I’ve walked around it hundreds of times, I’ve run around it as many times. I’ve jumped up the stairs, I may have eaten hundreds of sausages and chocolate bars there, and I’ve spent countless hours in the cafeteria – that is no longer a cafeteria.

I walked around the rink and climbed up to Dad’s old seats, way up in the stands, at the red line. I sat there for a while, watching the game, and noticed some familiar names on the backs of the sweaters, the names of my former teammates, now on the backs of their sons’ sweaters.

Then I looked for number 17, because I always do that.

17.

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