Rememberment

I've kept the weekly updates going for way longer than I thought I could. And it's been a fun ride, but there's a lot going on in my life right now, and I'm finding myself constantly struggling to find the time and energy to write. And so, staying faithful to the theme of the blog (which is to keep these "intermediate" posts somehow related to a theme I've touched previously), I'll now go missing for a while. Thank you for understanding, and as ever, thank you for reading my stuff ❤️ Take care.

Ari and his fiancée, Satu, had moved in together to live in a small apartment right in the town centre. Their place was above the only video rental shop in town, along the route from my school to the bus station. One day I was leaving school and decided to pay them a surprise visit. Ari had told us that they had gotten a pet parrot and I was curious to see it. After climbing the steep and narrow staircase that led to their home, I knocked on the door and was let in by Satu, who was alone at home. The parrot was big and green and its former owner didn't want to keep it any more because of all the noise it made. Satu and I chatted about it for a while, but then she had to leave to run some errands. I asked if it was okay for me to stay with the parrot for a little longer. "Sure, just make sure that the door gets locked when you leave." The birdcage was hanging from the ceiling above one end of their sofa, so I lay down and tried to teach the parrot some words. It seemed to ...

Here are some of my favourite songs adhering to the theme, in the order of their time of release. Please enjoy the music, and have a blessed week ❤️ 1. AC/DC - Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be (1977) During the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s, religious groups pointed to the song's title as proof that AC/DC was leading youth straight to the devil. But just like in their even more famous song " Highway to Hell ", the actual lyrics have little to do with theology: " Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be " is about a man who is in love with a woman who treats him terribly. 2. Pet Shop Boys - It's a Sin (1987) Much more to the point, Neil Tennant wrote the lyrics for this song about his time at St. Cuthbert's High School for Catholic boys. When the single became a hit, said school apparently warned its students that anyone found with a copy of " It's a Sin " would be suspended. It's a song about religious pressure and guilt, and remain...

Elementary school was over, and so was the summer. It was time to join the Big League - secondary school. My parents weren't very happy with my grades from my recent school years; my average had dropped by one full point. It still wasn't terrible, but they had higher expectations. "You need to do better in order to get to the upper secondary school" said Mom, who seemed to take it for granted that that's where I was heading. She wanted me to become a doctor or enter some other prestigious profession. But I had started to not only become more depressed, I also had frequent periods of being angry and frustrated at just about everything. I didn't give two shits about my grades or what my parents wanted me to become. Also, our new school didn't make it any better; it looked more like a prison than a school, and felt like one too. I also hated the school cafeteria (the whole concept of having a hundred people sitting and eating right next to each other is somet...

Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French mathematician, proposed a famous thought experiment in 1814 which has since been called "Laplace's demon". It goes like this: if a super-intelligent entity knew the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe, it could use the laws of physics to both calculate the past and predict the future with absolute certainty. (There's a brilliant show on Disney+ called Devs, which explores this concept. Go watch it if you haven't already.) If such an entity could even theoretically exist, it would throw a massive wrench into the works of many philosophical and religious concepts. If everything has been predetermined since the beginning of time, our cherished free will doesn't really exist, but is merely a construct of our minds. Everything we do, say and think is just an effect of a prior cause, and every decision we believe we make has already been made for us. We just don't feel like it has. Except for us office wor...

Matti's dad Eikka was a short, obese man with thick black eyebrows. His arms were massive from spending a lifetime doing hard manual labour and his strength was the stuff of legends; his party trick was to wrap some strong, braided fishing line around his hands and snap it without any effort. There was also a story that he was once challenged to an arm-wrestling match, and as his opponent was using his leg to support himself, Eikka slammed his arm into the table with such force that the other guy's ankle was broken. A house painter by profession, he was also an avid hunter and fisher. He also kept bees; sometimes when I called Matti to ask if it's ok for me to come over, he warned me that there would be an "air hazard" - that the bees were angry because his dad had just collected their honey. And often I walked there anyway, and sometimes did get stung by a bee or two because of that choice. Eikka was a familiar sight to us. Sometimes he stopped by just to make a ...

Like so many others, I found poker during the great poker boom of the early 2000s. Poker shows (such as the World Poker Tour ) started to become popular, and I was quickly hooked by the combination of skills that it takes to be a successful player. And it is, indeed, a game of skill. While randomness certainly plays a part - often infuriatingly so - it's only important in the short term. The more you play, the more apparent this becomes; if you put your money in as a 60-40 favourite, you may lose 10 times in a row. But if you make that play 100,000 times, you're almost certainly going to show a profit. But while maths is important, it isn't the aspect that I find most fascinating. Sure, you certainly need to acquire some understanding of the maths involved (such as how odds work or what an M-ratio means in a tournament) but that's all just mechanical. To me, the real beauty of the game comes from the fact that it's largely about telling stories . First of all, as th...

I spent some of my most memorable summers at my aunt's countryside home. Often there was a whole bunch of kids; Jari and Juha (my cousins, who used to break my toys at Christmas), Jukka (with whom I had the long road trip), Ilkka and Tiina (cousins of Jari and Juha from their dad's side) and sometimes even Jani, Marko and Mika, my older cousins from Sweden. The summer of '88 was a fun one. Elementary school was over for me, so when my aunt and her husband left us alone for a weekend, my cousins decided it was time to celebrate the occasion in the most Finnish way possible. There was an old junk car in the woods nearby, and my craftly cousins had prepared a bucket full of prison wine in its trunk. And so we went upstairs into their room, put on some Samantha Fox tunes and started to party. I didn't need much to get a nice buzz going (imagine that - I was a scrawny little 12-year old after all) so when my mom suddenly called to check on me, Jari's face turned pale. I ...

I've had the busiest of weeks, not really having the time or energy for a proper update so this entry will be brief. Writing this, it's late Saturday evening. I have just returned from our fifth grade class union. About half of our group made it. Some of them I've met once or twice during all these years, others I had not seen at all since that time 40 years ago. I have to admit, I was a little anxious about the whole thing - I even considered not going at all. But I'm glad I did. It was a bit weird but wonderful at the same time, and hearing everyone's stories about what became of them and how their lives turned out was something special. There were stories of success and happiness, but also those of pain, sickness and loss. There was laughter and there were tears.  Many memories and names I had long forgotten came right back to me. Isn't it strange how your brain can just dig them back up instantly when someone else talks about them, while on your own they wou...

Mom's youngest sister Raija and her husband Reijo had a tradition of visiting Lapland every summer. They usually traveled by themselves while another of my aunts looked after us, but that summer they took their son Jukka and me with them. I guess we were now old enough to endure the long hours of sitting in the car. Jukka was a year younger than me, but seemed more mature. He was a pretty serious boy who had inherited his father's composure; always acting very calm and collected and though he also sometimes teased me a bit, we mostly got along just fine. Our cats were also siblings: Miru and Miiru were their names (Miiru was ours) so other than being cousins, we had that going for us as well to bind us together. The travel plan was pretty ambitious - we wouldn't just visit Lapland, but drive all the way north to Norway along the western border of Finland, and then all the way south along the eastern border before finally heading back home. It seems a bit crazy to think abou...

Ahh, the Devil.  Lucifer, The Prince of Darkness. Satan. Belial. The Father of Lies. Beelzebub. You are probably familiar with the story of Lucifer, the most beautiful and powerful of all of God's angels, who became too proud for his own good and started a rebellion against God - only to end up being thrown down into Hell along with his co-conspirators.  But Satan still wields power in this world as well. As my dad put it, "life is a battle that is fought not only in this world, but between the forces of the spirit realm". The Tempter keeps luring people away from God, and woe is anyone who listens to his lies. The Fallen Angel, as depicted by Gustave Doré for John Milton's Paradise Lost. However, as it often is with biblical lore, that story isn't really found anywhere in the Good Book. Rather, it is pieced together by re-interpreting various texts long after they were written, and then putting those pieces together to form something new. But first, let's hav...

My mom was usually the voice of reason in the household, and the first to point out if someone was spouting nonsense. But she would also sometimes get up in the morning and say "I gave birth in my dreams again, wonder who's going to die this time". And then someone died soon after. Such predictions weren't always too difficult to make. Being the twilight child meant many of my relatives were already old, and old people have a habit of passing away. Of course, it was still sad, such as when Grandma died: seeing my mom cry together with her sisters felt heartbreaking and somehow surreal at the same time. But she wasn't the only one to go within a few years' time, and it wasn't always because of old age or natural causes. Mom's brother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and passed away shortly after. He was my godfather, and although I didn't see him very often because they lived in Sweden, I have only fond memories of him. Mom blamed her sister for his...

My childhood dream was finally realized this May Day, when I was visiting the Natural History Museum in London. Enjoy the pics!

I was more than used to seeing dead animals. All my brothers were hunters, and whenever they brought home some prey, I wanted to see how they were skinned and gutted before Mom made something delicious out of them. And while my brothers wouldn't let me mess with the birds and the rabbits, I knew very well how to gut a fish by myself. I could name most of their innards as well. Matti's dad was also an experienced hunter and trapper, and often when I visited their house I was greeted by some skinned muskrats that were hanging from the top beam of their yard swing (which I don't think was ever used for its original purpose). And of course, Matti and I both kept collecting butterflies and beetles, which also had to be dealt with properly before they could be showcased: that is, putting them in a jar with some ethyl acetate in order to take their lives without damaging their delicate bodies. Having fun with deceased critters didn't end there. I had seen a documentary about t...

I count myself a fan of horror movies, although that doesn't go for every sub-genre there is - for example, I'm not generally a fan of films depicting torture or extremely graphic violence. What I'm mostly drawn to are great stories, and exploring the darker side of human (or  inhuman ) nature can conjure up some pretty fascinating tales. Listing out all my favourite horror movies would be too much, but I'll try and pick a favourite from each decade from the 1940s onward. Feel free to comment on my choices, and maybe even share your own! 1940s: The Picture of Dorian Gray Based on the gothic horror novel by Oscar Wilde about a man who sells his soul for eternal youth, this is the first horror movie I ever watched. The final scene is forever burnt into my memory. Because of this, even though the story has been retold in many later adaptations, the original 1945 film will always be my favourite. I find it has also stood the test of time, in no small part thanks to the haun...

There's just something magical about old, abandoned houses, especially when you're a kid. They are creepy and fascinating, and should you enter one, you will immediately start to wonder what kind of treasures have been left behind by the people who used to live there. We used to have one such house right near our own. It stood between our home and the railroad track, surrounded by a sparse collection of birch trees; a small, wooden house with a roof covered in moss. I don't know if it was ever painted in the traditional Finnish way using red ochre, but if it was, that colour had long since been weathered away. Matti and I often wandered around that house. Beneath the moss-covered yard were many empty bottles of booze, and one of the four walls was riddled with bullet holes, but those were the only interesting things we found. We were strictly prohibited from trying to go inside the house, and we also weren't stupid enough to defy that. Falling into an old potato cellar ...

On the 26th of March, the Finnish Supreme Court handed down a verdict in the case against Päivi Räsänen. For those unfamiliar with the name, Räsänen is a veteran member of the Finnish Parliament, a former Minister of the Interior, and led the Christian Democrats for over a decade. She is also a conservative Christian, known for targeting sexual minorities on numerous occasions. In a narrow 3-2 vote, the court ruled against Räsänen, finding her guilty of incitement against a group of people. It was about a pamphlet she wrote in 2004 (and again made publicly available in 2019 and 2020, which was the reason they prosecuted her) titled  "Male and female he created them: Homosexual relationships challenge the Christian concept of humanity" . Alongside her they also convicted Juhana Pohjola, the Luther Foundation bishop who was responsible for the pamphlet's distribution.  The English version of it can be found  here . The entire legal process took an astonishing seven yea...

  "The eyes of the LORD are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good." (Proverbs 15:3) Looking back to my preteen years, I think it's safe to say that my sex education was a bit off. We watched a film at school. It was titled "How Life Begins" or something like that. Before playing it, our teacher was even more tense and stern than usual, and told us that during the film there would be absolutely no talking. Then he switched the lights off. I can't remember anything specific about the film, only the nervous atmosphere in the class during the time it played. And when it was over, our teacher switched the lights back on and told us that we were dismissed. If anyone had any questions about the film, they sure didn't have the nerve to ask; everybody just buggered off in silence. To be fair, I wasn't entirely clueless about the subject: even without the Internet, there were some sources for information. I had found some interesting comics wh...

Despite being the most natural thing there is, death has been an endless source of inspiration for philosophers, religions, cultures and artists throughout history. It remains an intriguing mystery; not because we don't understand what death is , but because it's something we can't truly experience and report back on. For a species so centered on solving problems, death is the ultimate one. The current vibe of my readers, who came for something uplifting to shed their Monday blues. Reflecting on death is an effective way to understand life. Mortality gives shape to our existence; for an immortal being, concepts such as youth, urgency or a retirement plan would be meaningless. Time, our most precious currency, only has value because it's in limited supply. Death is all around us. Without it, we hardly would have any entertainment either. It's our most powerful tool for creating drama and excitement in films and literature, and you can only win a game if there's a...