I don’t know if we were friends anymore, although I’m pretty sure we were. I know we weren’t enemies, which is natural since we were teenagers, and at least for me, there were just buddies and other people. When I look back now, I think we had been pretty good friends because we went to the same school, but I also know that we only went to the same school for about a year and a half, two years maybe, and I had lost track of him a little bit.

Maybe I liked him because he seemed to be always smiling, or because he was nice to me, a new kid in town, or maybe because he shared a name with my father, which made his name unusual for somebody his age.

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In Finland, there are thousands of jokes about the Swedes. Entire books have been dedicated to the art form, and one of my all-time favorite jokes actually comes from one of those books. I read it when I was about 12, and I’m not really sure why I still think it’s sort of funny. It’s almost not even a joke.

“A Swede shot an arrow to the sky. He missed”.

Anyway, Finns like to tell jokes about Swedes, and often it’s the Swedish man who’s the butt of the joke. In the jokes, the Swedish men are slow, thick, and often, if not homosexual, then at least soft and feminine. They discuss things.

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[Professor Hood’s] researchers convince the pre-school-age subjects that their special item will be put into a machine that can produce a copy of the object which is identical in every way. The infants, who are offered the choice of having the original or the “perfect” copy returned to them, strongly prefer the original. – BBC, 2004

Every once in a while, when I’m writing longer pieces, my fingers seem to swell, and I take off my wedding ring. It’s something of a pause to collect my thoughts as well, and a minute or so later, I slip the ring back on because I’m worried that I might lose it.

Before Wife and I got engaged, we were fake engaged for a while. Or, I know that I was. We’d only been together for about a year when we moved in together. She had sold her apartment wanted us to take a really nice, long trip somewhere with the money she had made so we took a trip to Mexico. For a week, we traveled around the Yucatan peninsula in an air-conditioned bus with an active group of mostly retired people.

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I’m a simple man, with simple needs and simple pleasures. Like food. I like food, but because I’m a simple man, I don’t need a gourmet dinner to be happy. After all, I grew up on Finnish lihapiirakka, a deep-fried pie with ground meat and rice inside. (Add ketchup and mustard).

When our family moved from Helsinki to Joensuu, a rural university town in Eastern Finland, one of my biggest fears was that there wouldn’t be a good burger joint in Joensuu. It may sound weird now, but back then, there were no McDonald’s restaurants in Helsinki, and there was just one “real American” burger place in town.

It was a Carrols. And we went there on Sundays.

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I was exactly where I wanted to be. I repeat: exactly where I wanted to be. I wasn’t in front of everybody because if you’re in front, it’s easy to start looking back. When there’s nowhere to focus on in front of you, you tend to take off too fast, and use too much energy in the beginning.

Some people prefer to run in the middle of the pack, because they feel the power of the crowd carrying them on, and I suppose they feel safe in the middle, when the masses begin to stampede.

I don’t.

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I might as well start by confessing that I’m one of those people who, back in 2000, walked around saying that having a camera in a mobile phone was idiotic.

Today, I’m one of the idiots that make the rest of the family wait for me, while I take a snap shot of a beautiful building – or a pile of dog poop that I think looks like Darth Vader.

And I love it.

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Sometimes life really imitates art. My life real art. The other day, visiting Dad, Son and I walked to the car to get his flashlight, so that he could sleep in a little playhouse in the backyard. On our way back, I thought it’d be smarter to walk around the house and go straight to the backyard through the back door.

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I didn’t even notice the first note myself. My buddy did. We were running late to our next class so I just shoved my jacket into my locker and grabbed my biology book, then locked my locker, when he picked it up from the floor.

“Hey, you dropped this,” he said, and handed me a piece of paper that had been carefully folded over a couple of times, just enough to conceal its message, but keeping it thin enough to fit through the small opening under the locker door.

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It’s been such a long time since I went to school – any school – that I don’t even get the urge to go back to school anymore. I always liked school, almost as much as Son who burst into tears the other day when Grandma tried to high-five him, saying, “no school tomorrow!”

I liked school, I liked most of my teachers, and I’d like to think that I learned something during all those years. Well, I know I learned a lot but I also know that I’ve probably forgot most of it. It’s like going back to the gym after a break. I always put the same weights as always, “because I could benchpress that much last time.”

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Vincent: Yeah, baby, you’d dig it the most. But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?
Jules: What?
Vincent: It’s the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that we got here, but it’s just… it’s just there it’s a little different.
– Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction

Last night, as we were driving home from Legoland in Denmark, Daughter started to draft a list of all the countries she’s visited in her five-year long life.

“Finland, right? Italy … Sweden … Norway … the US, what else?” she yelled from the back seat.

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