Suomen Soliloquies

I knew Loth was a hippie house (more precisely, student coop) before I laid eyes on it. It was clear from the emails about whether pizza boxes are compostable, complete with attached email responses from a professor in ecology. I knew it from an email pleading for the return of a plant that “was not up for grabs” or an angrier one with the subject line “Dear gelato thief…”. The mushroom mailbox I also knew from the countless emails I received the week before I arrived warning about an upcoming habitability inspection done by Central Office to make sure the house was, well, habitable. The sheer amount of emails pleading for people to do certain tasks so the house would pass the inspection was telling of the house’s current state even though I was over 5000 miles away. Especially telling was the email sent after, chastising the residents for not pulling up their breeches and cleaning the house in time for the inspection. And if there was any doubt in my ...

I’ve been eating a lot of ice cream while here at Berkeley. I justify it by saying that I don’t eat that much so I need the calories but it’s getting to a point where even I feel I need to stop. And when I start to feel I need to take a break from ice cream then I know there’s a problem. Barring my ice cream misadventures, two important holidays went by in the past week and a half, one in my birth country and one in my adopted country. So I like to think that I celebrated both over this weekend when I went camping for the first time (one of those days was one of my few no-ice-cream days for the past two weeks). In some ways, camping combined Finnishness and Americanness into one wonderful experience: being out in nature as the Finns do in Midsummer and eating a lot of puppy chow and banana muffins for the American side. Though you can’t compare the two, camping had a different kind of uplifting effect than staying in a summer cottage. Something about makin...