“Tricks are a curious thing. I remember when I was a little kid in Joensuu, Finland, I used to play basketball with my father at a nearby schoolyard, and while I’m a man of the streets, I’m the laaaaaaast person…“

*Record Scratch*

*Freeze Frame*

Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation… Well, it all began with reader interaction. In other words, I asked Son if he had read my previous blog entry, and whether he thought it was any good.

“Yeah, it was good. Liked it,” he said.

“But it didn’t have enough of me in it,” he added.

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Last year, I spent a lot of time at the The National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, doing research for an article series I was working on, and almost every time I walked back to the train through the city tunnel comes out to Olof Palme’s Street. And every time I was there, I thought of my high school Swedish teacher because I think I remember her saying that it might be smart to read up on Olof Palme, because it was possible he was going to be an essay topic in our high school finals.

“Now that he got assassinated and all,” she said.

That may be a false memory because I can see on Wikipedia that by the time the Swedish Prime Minister was shot in downtown Stockholm, my and my classmates had already left school for our study period during which we were supposed to cram for the final exams.

Maybe she told us that during one of the visits back to school when we had our “pre-finals”, or maybe she never said it at all. All I know is that I did not brush up my knowledge on Sweden or Palme, and instead, focused on biology and history of Finland.

Sweden, Palme, and the prime suspect, Christer Pettersson of Sollentuna, seemed so far away.

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I was never the captain of my hockey teams when I was a kid, which was fine with me, it was never a big deal for me – as long as I was the first line center. I always thought I wasn’t the captain because in the younger junior teams, the captain was named by the coach, and the coach was my father. I figured that Dad didn’t want to make me the captain to avoid talk of favoritism.

I also assumed that was the reason he expected me to be the hardest working player on the ice and why he though benching me was a good way to signal to the team that they should pick up the pace. (It only happened once, but I remember it well).

Also, I never wanted to be the captain.

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Now that Sweden made all kinds of news – fake and real – I’m sure the Stockholm Syndrome will also hit the headlines shortly. I first heard of the Stockholm Syndrome when I watched Die Hard. Now, the first Die Hard movie came out in 1988 so I probably watched it on video a year later because back then, it took at least a year for Hollywood movies to hit the video stores in Finland.

Also, what really made me pay attention to a weird psychological condition that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have cared about was that in the movie, they mistakenly called it the Helsinki Syndrome, a thing I had never heard of so I had to look into it. And that’s when I learned it was really called the Stockholm Syndrome.

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When I was a kid, and Mom wanted me to behave well with my cousins, she always told me that she counted on my being nice because “you’re their idol”. I’ve never been a troublemaker to begin with, but the flattery worked, too. Whenever dealing with my younger cousins – or young kids in general – I always tried to be on my best behavior.

I wanted to be a good role model.

And I wanted my Mom to be proud. Still do.

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