You know, I was thinking…
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The F-word
“It’s obviously more important that Israel survive, you know, than probably some other random set of six million people elsewhere survive.”
– David Plotz, Slate’s “Political Gabfest”, April 20, 2012
Ahem…
Over here? No, not Israel, look a little further north. A little more. Here, in Europe. Just go straight north from Israel and when you hit the Arctic Ocean, look to the west. See? Just another random set of 5,363,624 people.
That’s right. Finland.
In the zone
HELSINKI – Of all the skills that Mikael Granlund has, and of all the gifts he has, the ability to be in the moment, to live in the now, may just be his biggest, and the most important one.
That’s why he was able to hone his stickhandling skills for hours on end as a kid. That’s what’s helped him keep his feet on the ground during the media frenzy around him the last few years, and that’s why it’s easy to believe him when he says that he hasn’t thought about playing in front of his home fans at the World Championship in May.
After all, Mikael Granlund says that when he’s in the zone, he doesn’t even remember his last shift, and doesn’t hear what the crowd’s yelling, or what the other players are saying to him on the ice.
Yellow mellow
The best part of spring – which has definitely sprung here now – is putting the winter clothes away, and brining the summer clothes back into rotation. Not only are there always some nice surprises, jackets you’ve forgot, there’s often the added bonus of finding money in the pockets.
And that, I say, feels like winning the lottery.
He’s a fast talker
“Just take it from the top, read it through to get a feel, and you know, remember that you’re partly thinking about this out loud, but that there’s also an audience out there so you have to make sure you reach them,” said the producer.
I nodded, and pulled the microphone a little closer to my face. I leaned on the desk with both my hands, and stared at my script in front of me.
“Anytime you wanna go, just go,” he said.
Ride the line
My idea of a perfect afternoon is going for a bike ride with the family. We all get on our bikes, and before we take off, one of us raises his or her right hand and yells, “Let’s ride!” You know, like the Three Amigos did in the movie.
And then we ride to the mall or the library – next to the mall – or to a nearby park. The bike rides don’t take an entire afternoon yet, but by the end of the summer, we might even make it all the way to downtown Stockholm. With a couple of stops to eat our sandwiches, of course.
Rockabilly Rebels
Before the weekend hockey trip that turned me into a fan of a Finnish new wave band, and before I started to grow my hair long, accordingly, but after my favorite band was Alvin and the Chipmunks, I got into rockabilly. Of course I wasn’t alone in this, because that was an era when the 1950s came back in style.
Even Elvis was still alive, although, at that point, I was basically still rocking to the sounds of a chipmunk band, and loving it. I caught the trend a couple of years after his death when a friend of mine and I saw Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s movie on Elvis. And we thought Kurt Russell was perfect as Elvis, but then again, we already knew Kurt was cool, because The Quest, a TV show, had been a big hit in Finland.
What would Hulk Hogan do?
Last week, when I saw the YouTube video of Scott Hartnell making his then-famous now-forgotten – nothing personal, Scottie, that’s just the way things go these days – Hulk Hogan impersonation, I thought of a friend of mine who did the same thing 20 years ago.
Only, he wasn’t doing it in front of 15 000 people, or to a guy dressed up as Hulk Hogan. He did it in an ice cold hockey rink 50 kilometers west of Helsinki, Finland, in front of 200 people, and purely out of frustration and to get back at every single one of those 150 people in the stands.
Father and Son, Inc.
Last weekend, Wife and Daughter packed their bags and drove south. Now, because it had been snowing when we got up, instead of driving to the cottage, as planned, they only drove south for ten minutes, parked the car at the In-Laws’, and spent the weekend at their imaginary cottage, giving Son and me the male bonding weekend we had talked about. (And the female bonding weekend to them).
This was to be a weekend of life lessons, something they would make a Hallmark movie about. Son and I would talk and hang out, watch movies, eat hamburgers, and while doing that, I would drop some words of wisdom his way.
Like, “Did you know that they just found the Apollo 11 engines?” or “Did you know that there are actual flying cars these days but they’re now called roadable aircrafts.”
And Son would nod, and take notes like I was going to ask him to. That was the plan. But first, we had to run to the train so we’d make it to the 12.10 showing of the 3D version of “The Phantom Menace”.
True fiction
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.
