Suomen Soliloquies

I have made it no secret how much I love Turku and Finland. The city started to feel like home only a few days after I arrived. But since coming back after a two month stay in the wonderfully diverse Berkeley, Turku has felt a little different and even more so after the events of Friday. Now, instead of feeling exotically different, I feel like I stick out like a sore thumb. I feel I am unwanted and so I try to avoid attracting attention as much as possible. This leaves little leeway in breaking rules of daily life. I feel I can’t walk in the bike lane, even on accident. I must tread quietly while inside stores or buildings. Doing anything new or different from my usual routine makes me anxious that I will unwittingly do something wrong. The day after the attack, I told my Finnish friend that I felt afraid of other Finns, realizing that this must be much worse for women who wear hijabs or brown men. An Indian friend said that he felt people darkly ...

It turns out that cats really do have distinct personalities. Enough so that people can spend hours analyzing the preferences and quirks of each of them. So when you have four you have quite a lot of content for a lengthy conversation. Or a blog post as the case might be. Among my four furry companions the last Goofball three weeks I was in Berkeley, was Madame Fluffles, who was a true Madame and stayed in her room and demanded that her nightly treat be brought upstairs to her, hissed if the two younger cats came on the bed and insisted on sitting on only things that were white and fluffy. There was Mr. Fluffles, the other older cat who knew to run away from me because I would try to pick him up, wandered through the house as though he was the lord of it and would ram his head repeatedly into my hand and leg while I sat in the kitchen until I pet him. Selma was the only cat who would let me pick her up, would climb into my lap whenever I sat on the floor and lik...

Temptation incarnate I have now told myself that I really need to cut down on my sugar habit at least five times since coming to Berkeley. To be clear, this only counts the times I have said this with the serious will power to try changing my eating habits. There are numerous other times when I have thought I ought to change my eating whilst eating a cookie or buying the fourth ice cream in the past five days. My poor fellow has had to deal with listening to me say on every one of these occasions that this time will be different or listen to me dwell excessively on how the day went in terms of eating sugar for the entire time. He’s been a good sport about it and doesn’t judge me for my inability to stay away. I am about to start on my sixth endeavor. This time, I have set a time frame and I am planning on sticking to it. Even though it makes the hours seem so much longer as I continuously talk myself out of eating the chocolate pudding temptingly sitting in the fridge....