An Eternity of Lost Moments

Another day at work, another mundane mission to buy kitty litter at the shopping centre. I took this shot down platform 1 as I was waiting for the train home.

I think taikataika put it very aptly when she said ‘it's like memories and hopes/dreams all rolled into one. And I'm not even sure why.’

Can a sunset be inherently sad? This is a beauty that makes me so, but maybe that just stems from the essence of my memories, dreams and hopes.

The sunset was perfect when I took this picture. An enchantment had transported Leppävaara into another world, blocking out everything except this little cocoon of dying warmth. Five minutes later, as I boarded the train, the richness of the golden light had weakened to plain yellow. It no longer struck the tracks just so. The real Leppävaara was back: work and shopping centres and kitty litter.

There are things that can make Leppävaara beautiful, even if only fleetingly. This feels like a moment I had, but lost; and as taikataika said, I’m not even sure why. One of an eternity of lost moments.

I Didn’t Survive the Third Crevasse

Another season of Poetry & Jazz successfully behind us!

As Poetry and Jazz enters its sixth year, it seems to be going from strength to strength. I remember when we had an audience of four people for the second performance of, if I remember correctly, the 2004 spring season. (Although it was the night of a mighty blizzard in the heart of February, which may go some way to explaining things!) This time, we once again performed to three full houses – two of them with people standing at the back.

Although Poetry and Jazz has always featured scribblings by Players’ members, they were in the minority for many years. Apart from Rhys’ excellent pieces, which are always guaranteed to raise a hearty chuckle, the last three seasons of Poetry and Jazz have consisted entirely of our own material.

I recall a few people being sceptical and saying no one would show up any more. I am delighted to say that they have been proved wrong, as we’ve had some of our best audiences since the switch. Yay us!

Pictured are myself, Matti and Bruce posing as Rhys Hughes’ Three Friends. Note the interesting and unintentional effect: I’m the ghost and I’m slightly out of focus…

Phantom Goolies

And so it continues – from blues to screech metal. Click here to hear His Lordship’s latest masterpiece: Phantom Goolies.

Review: A return to form for His Lordship, who displays far more of his extended vocal range. The innovative inclusion of a little ‘falling object’ percussion at the end gives a real ‘bad boy’ feel to this track.
★★★✩✩

Anna comments that she recognises this sound and the lad ‘wants a girlfriend, and then he wants his nads back’.

At about the time I was writing yesterday’s post, His Lordship was backing up the likelihood of this being true by displaying more tomcat behaviour - pissing outside of his litter box. Luckily only next to his litter box in the bathroom. For the moment.

Kitty, this is WAR!

His Lordship Releases Blues Single

Once again, I was kept awake until 4 AM by His Lordship’s ode to edelweiss. If I spend too much time at the computer, kitty will yodel. When I turn all the lights off and go to bed, kitty will yodel. And scratch the front door. And throw objects off tables onto the floor – increasingly larger objects.

Research into the matter indicates that he is hypervocalising, and is simply bored and/or attention seeking because the stupid owner has to work, or doesn’t want to play or take him walkies in the middle of the night. Advice I have received: a) ignore him for long enough and he’ll stop, b) get another cat to keep him company when you can’t give him attention.

Option a) is all well and good in theory, but I live in a block of flats. I’m just waiting for that little note from paskatäti to go up on the hallway notice board.

After trying to ignore him for about an hour last night, it sounded as if he was going to succeed in ripping the inner panel off the door. So at 3:30 AM, I resorted to fetching him and holding him down on the bed for about five minutes every time he howled. After three or so attempts at this he quit.

Option b) is one I’m slowly being forced to consider. If a kitty friend won’t keep him amused, at least I’ll have my music in stereo…

Here is the miscreant this morning, lounging nonchalantly in the sun while I had to drink vast amounts of coffee in order to be able to work – how dare he attempt to look as tired and dejected as this!

Click here for a snippet of this afternoon’s music. Turn up the volume and get melancholy!

Review: His Lordship’s latest single – The Workday Blues - exhibits more pathos than usual and lacks that demanding quality we’ve grown to expect from this artist's night music. Neither does it contain as much vocal diversity as much of his previous nocturnal work. ★★✩✩✩

Tagged For Five

I’ve been tagged. Bah.

I’ve been slow to respond, resulting in Anna stealing most of the people I could have tagged in return. But seeing as the two options I have open to me at the moment are a) write this, b) learn my ‘how very extraordinary’ lines, it seems I must finally get around to listing five things most people don't know about me.

1. I don’t watch telly

Not only do I not watch telly, I don’t even have a set plugged in. It’s been a number of years now, and I find it increasingly difficult to sit down and watch telly even if there’s something on DVD I might want to see. To even contemplate the idea requires a really bad hangover day or a gathering with friends.

If I want to relax, I’ll choose to write or read. Telly sucks the, well, everything out of me.

2. I once got over 100% in a maths exam

Kani already stole the being good at sport, so I’m left with being a swot. I used to be top of the class at everything, and top of the year in maths. In one maths exam, the teacher made a mistake when setting one of the questions, so it was discounted from the overall 'out of' mark. However, I spotted the mistake, corrected it and answered that question and the rest of the exam perfectly, thereby getting over a hundred per cent in – of all things – a maths exam.

What's happened since, you’re asking. I wish I knew! I used to be the one with the pieces of paper and prospects. Now, every other person I know has or almost has a PhD, or a Masters at the very least, and I’m one of the least educated people in my circle.

3. I once showed my knickers to the whole school

I must have been eight when I made my first appearance in a non-nativity play. I forget the plot and the title, but I remember it was written by one of the English teachers. I played one of Santa’s reindeer, who – for some inexplicable English teacher reason – was putting on scarlet lipstick while waiting for the big guy himself to show up.

We made little cardboard antlers on headbands and our parents were instructed to provide us with brown T-shirts and tights. Most mothers would think opaque, not 10 denier. I happened to have bright green knickers on the day we performed in front of the whole school. Older kids pointed me out afterwards in the corridor as the tarty reindeer with green knickers…

4. Transport makes me nervous

I like to travel, that is visit new places, but I don’t like the actual travelling part. All methods of transport make me nervous to varying degrees. I hate planes and cars the most, trains the least. At one (very low) point in my life, I couldn’t get on any form of transport whatsoever without being drowned in an inner flood of panic and horrible visions of death and disaster.

There’s probably something in the fixed-path solidity of trains that makes me feel more comfortable on them. I use trains most every day now, but occasionally I’ll still be struck by mild feelings of panic.

5. March 14th

Beware the Ides of March? Not quite – it’s March 14th I have to watch out for. The three most life-changing incidents in my life all occurred on March 14th (of different years): the death of my father, my first period and the day I first arrived in Finland, which turned out to be the day I left the country I was born in.

Most years it passes completely uneventfully, but – although I’m generally not at all superstitious – I always get jittery when it comes around.

As I said at the start, I can't come up with five people I'd feel comfortable about foisting this on, since even Matt was tagged recently and said that it was the last time ever ever ever that he was going to answer something like this. But if anybody reading this wants to tag themselves, sign up in the comments and I'll pop over to look!

Tyger Tyger Burning White in the Forests of the NIGHT

That’s where I was going wrong!

Spring has returned after a brief lapse and so I took the beast out for his third afternoon excursion – which was again characterised by fear and an overwhelming desire to return indoors.

He began to wail and howl and scratch at the front door after we’d been in for a few hours. When I couldn’t take it any longer I decided to punish him by taking him out again. That’ll teach him to shut up!

It was already dark and getting a bit chilly, so thought we’d just hang out in the hallway. But he stared out of the glazed front door with such interest that I thought I’d open it and see. Out he went - like a shot. In under a minute he was up a tree! Luckily still in the harness.

He bounded around in any direction but home, investigating everything he saw, and I eventually had to pick him up and carry him to get him back inside. It seems he’s only afraid during the day and is in his element after dark. I should have continued my last post’s quote!

When we got back to the flat he howled to go out again. I had a rather difficult to hear phone call to my mum, punctuated by her three dogs barking and growling over a toy at her end and the cat howling at mine!

I must say His Lordship is vocally impressive for a non-Siamese. His range of sounds now goes above and beyond your basic meow. He has words that start with w and r and incorporate i’s, a’s and u’s – his favourite of tonight being RAOUUU-IIIARUUUW!!!

Where on earth did an Estonian cat learn to yodel, and more importantly how do you make one STOP?

Power Catages

I've been suffering from power catages today.

My laptop can no longer detect its battery and His Lordship keeps insisting on sleeping by the power connecter, which results in sudden black screens of death as he rolls over onto it and pulls it out of the socket.

The battery is in working order, but not even resetting the PMU seems to solve the problem any more. So I have resorted to the pictured low-tech fix to maintain power through catnaps.

The miscreant is also pictured, as he couldn’t resist going for the printer cable when I unplugged it to get a better shot of my stack of yellow cardboard squares under the power connecter.

Keywords

A selection of search terms that have led people to my blog recently:

numerous – and often highly disturbing – permutations of ‘blood, love & xxx’

scraghole
largest dust bunny ever
my cat chews on metal

love p word
hundred boobs
i love my tightie whities
fortune telling blood
love pussy
animal love
bed

Many of these people will have been sorely disappointed. I only have but one question: what’s the p word and why’s it so great?

Tyger Tyger Hiding Under the Bed

Spring has been with us for a few days and temperatures have reached almost ten degrees at midday! I have therefore been taking His Lordship out for afternoon walks in an attempt to provide diversion for him and save both my sanity and office supplies.

See the brave, majestic animal sitting alert in his jewel-encrusted harness! Twenty seconds after this photo was taken, I was trying to decide whether to save my camera from hitting the floor or stop Sir from escaping his leash.

I settled on stuffing the camera precariously into my pocket with one hand and using the other to grab the cat, who had succeeded in pulling himself out of only one of the harness’s two loops. I never was convinced about the reliability of that contraption, although the way he wriggled out of it wasn’t how I imagined it would fail.

Obviously he was trying to make a run for it to explore the Great Outdoors! Wrong – the wimp was making a desperate beeline for the front door. When his harness was back in place, he dragged me there and started clawing at the door and leaping at the handle in a vain bid to get inside. I decided to try and get him calmly used to being outside on the relative safety of the doorstep.

He was, however, dangling precariously off the handle, mewing loudly, when a neighbour came along. So I had to pick up the beast and have polite conversation about how the cat wasn’t destroying any of the shareholders’ property and no, he wasn’t really bounding around playfully enjoying the spring air at all, he was panicking because the door was shut and he’s complete indoor pussy.

As he'd managed to scrabble through some damp soil on the way to the door, I had to a) wash my coat and b) wash his feet (by dumping him in the tub). Although he only got his paws and tail wet, for the next two hours he hid under the bed every time I even looked in his general direction.

Ah well. That was only attempt two. I shall persevere a while yet. If the paths around the house weren’t lined with dog shit, we might have a nice walk one day. Today, there seemed to be a fresh pile every thirty centimetres :@

Dreams & Travel

is the theme of this season’s Poetry and Jazz programme. After the vast workload of recent months, I was rather more uncertain of my lines than usual, but the programme went without any major hitches for all concerned.

And Kani finally lost his p&j virginity in style! I mention this in revenge for having been urged to make lists :)

We had a large audience – including at least one person who had to stand – and the Finn-Brit Players’ 25th anniversary book A Finite Number of Monkeys sold well too. So, an all round success.

There are still two more chances to see the show on Wednesday March 21st & 28th at Café Engel.

Hoover Balls

My hoover was always getting hairballs. Now there are two of us shed machines. This means a hoover ball practically every time. Suction is suddenly lost and I have to shut down and pull out one of the creatures pictured. I wouldn't call this a dust bunny as such, but I do keep expecting it to make a lunge for my face.

Take a look on Flickr, to see our relative contributions, and then under ‘original’ in different sizes for an extreme gross up.

Oh Dear What Can the Matter Be?

I ate my dinner in a pub loo on Friday.

Normally we have the snug booked for our committee meetings, allowing me to gobble a quick snack in secret. But someone got their first this month and we ended up at a table in full view of the bar. Being pretty certain that I wasn’t allowed to consume my own food on the premises, I snuck off to eat my sandwich and doughnut in a cubicle.

This is what my world has come to.

I also note that I have already labelled four blog entries with ‘toilet’ this year. More success for the Housewife’s tarot!

Stupid Things I Did #2

Tried to designate places where the cat is not allowed to go.

You’ll even find him in the places he can’t get to.

Don’t Count Your Eggs

I used to be the kind of person who counted their eggs before they even had a chicken. Now I’m the kind who doesn’t even look to see how many eggs they have before they’ve hatched.

I used to find it practically impossible to deal with failure or criticism of any kind. I started out on a combined arts degree – fine art, creative writing, theatre, etc. In my second year, I gave up entirely on my art degree and switched my minor (philosophy) to my major. One of the main reasons behind this was a falling out I had with my fine arts tutor. Looking back, I think a large part of my decision was simply due to me not being able to hack the group crit sessions.

Although the tutor could have handled things a lot better, if I had been the me I am now, I would just have gotten over that incident and carried right on – fuck you, bitch! But no, it was the end of everything. In your teens, life is just one huge game of Jenga: one tiny block fells the whole sodding lot.

That choice was the beginning of the end. Until then, I’d been on some kind of track to be some kind of designer. No definite choices made, but I would have had a piece of paper that would have got me interviews for the kinds of thing I might have liked doing. Instead I began the Drift. Taking whatever hateful jobs I had to in order to survive.

Somewhere down the line, I started to stop myself from caring about things I wanted. Because if you really don’t care – and I mean really, not just saying that to fool yourself, but really believing that things are not going to work out and that’s completely okay – then everything that doesn’t work out is mundane and expected and everything that does is a wonderful surprise.

No wonder my list of Things that I still want to do before it's too late is what it is.

I recently submitted a proposal to stage one of my own plays as the Finn-Brit Players' autumn production. I am on the committee, so I was at the accept/reject meeting yesterday. When someone asked if I would rather be present during the discussion or not, I realised that I could sit there and listen to anything – good, bad or indifferent – and although I did want to do the play, if it was rejected I could have gone home and not felt more than mildly down for a few hours.

I have come a long way in ten years. It’s a great improvement, but I start to wonder – have I come too far?

Finnish Year of the Toilet

The Chinese Year of the Pig is well underway, as is another pink and squeaky year in Finland – the Year of the Toilet. For me, at least.

Back in January, I had my fortune read with the Housewife’s Tarot. The card symbolising my year as a whole was a pink toilet being cleaned with a toothbrush. As much as I hate to admit fortune telling being ‘right’, even from coincidence, this image couldn’t have been more true.

A deluge of sickness – both mine and others’ – combined with a tidal wave of seven-day-a-week work got my year off to a miserable start full of nothing but endless toil. Having no free time was almost a blessing, as I was also completely broke.

As I was leaving the post-rehearsal pub session early the other Sunday evening to go home and work, Kani asked me when I was going to see the fruits of my labours. The depressing answer is, I won’t. I’ll amass enough to clear the debts of a bad 2006 and put away the money to survive my unpaid summer holiday (probably spent at home), but I'll not see any ‘fun’ money whatsoever. It’s a weight off my shoulders to be sure, but small comfort for the two months of Hell.

At least now it looks like the end may finally be in sight. A number of my friends have decided that this is going to be their year – full stop. They’re not going to even consider the possibility of any bad luck, let alone accept it. Do I dare do the same – and will it make the slightest bit of difference?

Stupid Things I Did #1

Tried to buy hummus in the one of the largest supermarkets – a so-called 'gourmet' one at that – in the second largest city in Finland.

Assistant: "Er ... that'll be the household plants section, won't it?"

Dreams are

Kanikoski has been making lists, including one entitled ‘Things that I still want to do before it's too late’. This kind of depressive activity has got me thinking; and not only that, but when I actually had an evening all to myself – blessedly devoid of work and all other commitments – for the first time in weeks. Damn you Kani!

I wish I wanted to be a managing director. If I’d wanted to be a managing director, I’d have been one by now. Not of a huge corporation or anything, but of a smaller company: sure. I’d have taken the right course at university, picked the right company and then would have just worked my butt into that hot seat.

You may think that sounds rather egotistical, but I know if I wanted something like that I could achieve it. Or at least could have, if I’d started early enough. Maybe still could if I put my mind to it.

But the problem is, I don’t and never have wanted to put my mind to such a thing. Anything I might put on my list is either somehow nebulous, or relies not on brute determination and hard work, but more on a combination of innate talents and luck I don’t seem to possess. Maybe that’s up for interpretation, and I’m sure such comments would lead to heated debate were I to post said list!

And so somehow I have been discouraged from really putting my mind to even those more definite list items – evidence enough that I had to come up with the list and didn’t already have it compiled as a section in my Five Year Plan. But I have never had a five year plan. I’ve drifted from place to place, thing to thing, with the sole – although largely unconscious – philosophy of the next thing being at least a slight improvement on the former.

‘Discouraged’ sounds like an excuse. Yet my life hasn’t been a complete ping pong match. I have achieved a number of things that I’ve set out to do for one reason or another – just paradoxically not the ones I really want.

No knobs in Helsinki

Another gratuitous title to get more random perv hits – and yet perfectly true. Knobs are out of fashion.

I have been scouring the shops to no avail after becoming truly fed up with my DIY attempts at kitty proofing (some carried out in the early hours after His Lordship suddenly got a hankering to e.g. eat a midnight feast of paperclips in the study). The supreme cunning of ‘let’s turn the handles round so he can’t leap at them’ was short lived, because the pins holding the handles on fell out about ten times a day after inversion.

Although the current turn and tape system works, it’s not ideal. Why are there no doorknobs to be found in Helsinki? Does no one else have a clever cat?

Plan Loo From Outer Space

In order to avoid the dust of normal kitty litter, His Lordship has been using a freaky German product made of some space-age transparent material. Its liquid sucking and trapping properties mean that the only cleaning required is changing it completely once a month (removal of solids far more frequently of course).

I love the occasional blue crystal attempt at a hygienic touch.

If only I spoke better German, I might understand more. Isn’t there some law about product info having to appear in the official language of a country where it’s sold?

One thing I did understand – there was a choice of either ‘balls’ or ‘granules’. Uncomfortable in my seventeen layers of winter clothing, I was in a hurry to leave the hideously overheated shopping centre. Therefore for my first purchase, I just went one two buckle my shoe ‘balls’.

Wrong.

Although I was sceptical, the litter lived up to expectations. It only has one real drawback: it’s incredibly lightweight. This is marvellous for carrying the stuff home, but not so marvellous when Sir gets it stuck to his paws. The little balls bounce along the floor in myriad directions with kitty skittering after them. Who needs toys, when you can play with your toilet? The litter-jabbing-into-foot-hazard zone’s normal radius of about 30 centimetres expanded to the entire flat. It was kitty’s low-budget lavatorial revenge!

This time, I have bought granules.