Column: Fear of sharing

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Risto

“Social anxiety is the fear of interacting with other people, which can bring on intense feelings of self-consciousness. Put another way, social anxiety is the fear of being judged negatively by other people, leading to feelings of inadequacy, embarrassment, humiliation and depression.”

Let’s just face it. Sharing is a little scary. We all know the feeling when the teacher singles you out for talking in class. You do not even realize that she is staring at you. Once you do realize it, and look up, the teacher looks you in the eye and says: “If it is such a great story, would you like to share it with the rest of the class?”

Of course not.

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A funny thing happened

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Risto

Here’s the year 2011 as chronicled in the opening lines of stories published in the New Yorker throughout the year. What a year!

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Picture perfect

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Risto

Last week, just as I was about to make a long-distance Skype to America, my laptop quietly died. Well, before it died, it froze, and went into a coma. I don’t know if it could hear me, but it didn’t react to anything I did. Not mouse movements, not my tapping on the keys, not even Escape.

I had to switch it off and have it examined.

Two days later I got a call. The man had some good news and some bad news. The bad news was that the hard drive had, indeed, died. The good news was that they were able to retrieve the data.

“I’ll put a folder called ‘backup’ on your new disk then,” said the man with the message.

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Löst in tränslätion

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Risto

When I first moved to Sweden, I was more than shy to speak Swedish. For a non-Finn that may have seemed a little strange, since I had seven years of Swedish studies – with good grades – under my belt, and I had translated hockey magazines from Norwegian and Swedish into Finnish. And yes, I could read the papers, watch the late night news on TV, and every now and then, I would even send an email in Swedish to my colleagues.

But every Finn knows how difficult it is for us to speak Swedish. Partly because the Finnish accent always gives us away – and Finns would like nothing better than to blend in – and partly because while that fantastic educational system did teach us Swedish grammar, it didn’t teach us how to speak.

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Catch a rising tsar

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Risto

When I was 17, many moons ago, I lived in a small Finnish town called Joensuu, in the eastern part of the country, about an hour from the Russian border. Except that it wasn’t the Russian border, it was the Soviet border, and it wasn’t such a big of a deal. There’s nothing on the other side of the border, anyway, just forest. There’s nothing else in about a hundred mile radius from the city.

There was no Internet, and therefore no YouTube, but there was rock’n’roll so my friends and I spent a lot of time sitting in each others’ rooms listening to tapes and records, and swapping tapes and records with each other.

And trying to learn those first few chords to Smoke on the Water.

(As it happens, still the only chords I know).

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Keep it real

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Risto

[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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Pay it forward

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Risto

Even before my father had uttered a word, I knew what he was going to say next. I had heard it before, and always in a voice about two octaves lower than his own because that’s the tone he had heard it in the first time, some 30 years ago.

We were at a hockey game, when I mentioned to him that I’d be going to Turku to interview Juuso Wahlsten. As soon as “Wahlsten” had left my lips, I saw the twinkle in Dad’s eyes, the lightbulb over his head, just like I had seen many times before over the years.

“It’s not every day you see a junior team play such good hockey,” Dad said.

Scotty Bowman (left) wanted Juuso as assistant coach in Buffalo. Twice. The man in the background is not my father.

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Back in time

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Risto

First time you feel it, it might make you sad
Next time you feel it it might make you mad
But you’ll be glad baby when you’ve found
That’s the power makes the world go ’round

In the winter of 1985, JVC handed out free tickets to see a movie about a young kid traveling back in time. I had read in the Rolling Stone that Huey Lewis and the News had a couple of songs in the movie, but didn’t know much else. I didn’t even know that JVC handed out free tickets, but when my father asked me if I wanted to go, I said yes.

It was a special afternoon matinee, starting at 4.30, which was perfect, because it meant that I would still be able to make it to the hockey game the same night. The game started at 6.30 so if I ran or walked briskly, there was still a chance to make it to the rink before the opening faceoff.

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Close encounters

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Risto

Last week in Sweden, some 600 000 people stayed up or got up in the middle of the night to watch the World Juniors final between Sweden and Russia on TV. The average was 530 000 and by the time Mika Zibanejad beat Andrei Makarov in the Russian net, 600 000 people had tuned in.

And the way the game ended, it was obviously worth losing some sleep.

After the game, Sweden’s Jeremy Boyce-Rotevall said that Zibanejad had told him before the game that he’d “finish this game off.” A bold prediction coming from a player who had scored just three goals in the tournament, against Latvia and Slovakia – but he backed it up.

“I [repeated it to Boyce-Rotevall] before the overtime too so it was good to get that goal,” Zibanejad said. “You have to decide if you want to win this. In the morning, it was a joke, but obviously it’s not a joke anymore.”

No, it’s no joke. And every time we repeat it, it becomes a little more of a truth until it becomes a true legend.

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The man with the hat

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Risto

Longtime German national team player and national coach Xaver Unsinn passed away on Wednesday, January 4, 2012, in his hometown of Füssen at age 82. With 107 games at World Championships and Olympic Winter Games as a coach he was the coach with the second-most international games behind only legendary Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov.
– IIHF.com

One September morning in 1977, I was in a rush to read the sports pages of the Helsinki morning paper, even more than usual, because the Finnish SM-liiga had kicked off the night before. I turned to the back of the newspaper, and saw a headline about Lauri Mononen scoring a “Canadian hat trick”.

I had never heard of such a thing, but I learned that it was not just a regular hat trick, but a double one. Six goals.

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