I'm tired. I'm tired physically, and I'm tired mentally. I'm tired of my life as it is. I should be content: I have a great summer job, I no longer have to worry about my father's alcoholism, I study at a university and soon hopefully also in a polytechnic institute. And yet I caught myself today at work thinking through all the arrangements required to get out. To take all the money I have in the beginning of September, unofficially change my name once I get to my destination (for once my difficult name would prove useful), and take off to another country where my past isn't constantly haunting behind me whether I want it to or not. Just to take a cab and on the way to the airport just stop quickly at the police station to notify that I'm leaving on my own free will and that I wish not to be found until I decide to contact someone myself.
I suppose my mother would try to find me at first; out of habit, I guess, or because that is what is expected of her. But not because she would really miss me, not for real. After a couple of months she would get used to it, having a daughter who's not there. But really, deep down, no-one would really miss me. It would probably take several days until anyone would bother to check up on me, and that person would be my boss wanting to officially tell me never to show my ugly face at work again. And otherwise? I have no friends. No-one would cry after me because they would really want me to be there. Nice going, Me.
I need a break. I want my life to stay the same for.. I don't know, a few days. Nobody dies, nobody's born, nobody moves, nobody tries to kill themselves, nobody insinuates that what they told me about a month ago might actually be a lie, nobody disturbs my daily routines in even a slightest way. Why can't I have that? I've been through enough for quite a while.
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The Meme of the Day:
My sun has set down
I dream to flee
As I suffer "the black" bleed into me
I regret every single day I ever lived in my life
I gave all I had in me
So it's time to say Goodbye
My sun has set down
It has ceased to be
The lightning that once burned in me
I regret every single day I ever lived in my life
I gave all I had in me
So it's time to say Goodbye
'Farewell' by Sentenced.
What if I've given all I have in me?
Splenetic
It is a great feeling when you realise you have the ability to surprise yourself. I discovered this ability in me earlier today. I have a co-worker who speaks Swedish as her first language and isn't very fluent in Finnish, whereas the case is the opposite with me. But despite this we need to communicate. For a while I considered using English as a lingua franca but overcame my fear of making myself sound a total ass (somewhat difficult after yesterday, however...) trying to utter something with my crappy Swedish: I spoke to her in Swedish and was understood! And not once but twice!
After my feeble drawing attempts I moved to a place I knew it would be likely to meet or at least see Her. I spend my time fo a while, and near nine p.m. I decide She's not going to go by. I start walking and what happens: She comes towards me cycling. And what do I do? I act like a fucking child, a teenager, and pretend to begin to wipe my eyeglasses. I pretended to wipe my glasses! For two weeks I hadn't seen Her at all (and I would have actually had something to say to Her) but when I unexpectedly see Her, I pretend to wipe my fucking glasses!!!
After a long contemplation I have decided the picture of the tattoo and the perfect place for it: two nude women kissing each other gently and lovingly to be inked on my left outer calf. The problem is that I can't draw, anything even remotely realistic which is what I'm after. In spite of my non-existing drawing skills I am going to have to come up with some kind of an approximate drawing of the picture I have perfected in my mind so that the tattoo artist I've already worked with before can draw the to-be-tattooed picture on actual paper.
I think I'll go to the park next to the sea, to sit on some bench and try to draw something that resembles my idea. Let us hope for the best.
Last year I discovered Helsinki Pride as an event I should take part in. I was thinking of actually going there and made all the preparations I needed for that one Saturday, but two hours before I should have been on the train to Helsinki, I backed out. This year I had -surprisingly enough- a lot of other things to worry about so I didn't even consider going there this year.
Now you're all here writing about the event, telling what you thought of it since you actually were there. Therefore, I want to make a solemn oath: next June, if I don't have any obligatory events or physical or mental obstacles, I will get my ass on a train and go to the Pride. Remind me of this next spring lest I forget or "forget".
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The Meme of the Day:
To celebrate our Pride in some way I found a test determining the level of the Pride knowledge at http://www.gay.com/content/quiz/?id=3951&navpath=/channels/news/comingout/. I wasn't able to get my results out (I have a reason to believe my computer is about to malfunction) but I suspect I did poorly.
Verity of creation, that
Uniqueness dwelling in the
Loins of a woman, not dormant but
Valiant;
A true survivor in this disrespectful world.
Voyage to the gateway of your existence, give in to the
Utmost beauty of life; the gleaming clam, the
Levelly opening flower, the quietly approaching tide.
Veiled or free, large or small, smooth or frilled ; it is the
Abode of mermaids and oysters.
Vespers of life, long-forgotten,
Unholy to some, yet
Life-embracing, important and eager; all you
Votaries of this cradle of life, stand up unashamed and be silent no more!;
Again rise to celebrate the vulva!
My work consists of doing things with my hands. Therefore, I have plenty of time to dwell in my mind in far too complex contemplations about anything during the day while I'm listening to my favourite music. But by the time I get home in the evenings (such as now) I have no energy to write them down here even though hearing your possible thoughts of the matter(s) would be very interesting.
I'm so lazy.
And now I'll watch that final episode of the Bad Girls (season one, to be exact). You know, I identified myself with Nikki Wade right away. Curiously enough, Simone Lahbib playing Nikki's on-screen lover looks very much like Her. Guess what was going though my mind when they finally gave in and kissed at the end of the ninth episode? ;)
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The Meme of the Day:
I rated my blog at http://mingle2.com/blog-rating. Thanks, Rain! My rating (as seen below) is due to the somewhat extensive use of the following terms:
suicide (17x)
dead (10x)
kill (7x)
death (6x)
fuck (5x)
hell (3x)
I found out a while ago that someone I like was diagnosed with a chronic disease last autumn. I didn't ask the specific name of the illness out of sensitivity and because of my policy of it's-none-of-my-business-she'll-tell-me-if-she-wants-me-to-know. Now it just keeps worrying me. The fear of unknown is worse than knowing all the details, no matter how icky. And I really so care of this woman and it makes me sad not being able to help her in any way. I wish I could at least say something to comfort her, maybe. I wish I knew what is the monster she has to fight for the rest of her life; all I've been able to do has been to go through different medical sites of all the diseases matching her discreption. I wish I knew... I wish I could do something.
I feel so helpless. At this very moment I wish I could be committed to some kind of a religious movement, to have someone(s) to pray for guidance and to have a way to send lots of positive energy (or something similar...) to her. She needs all the strenght I or anyone else can give her. Except for the idiot male who is utterly, throroughly and completely incapable of seeing that she deserves better than him, a guy who made her autumn even worse.
"Kauniit muistot eivät koskaan kuole eivätkä milloinkaan jätä yksin."
- - -
So. That's what funerals are like. The service at the chapel began at noon; most of the us (there were twenty-five of us in all) had arrived about fifteen minutes earlier and we had to sit there in the chapel in silence only broken by occasional sobbing from my grandparents and my aunt, as well as my mother and her mother. It seemed like an hour, though, sitting there in the front row with only the coffin to stare at and waiting for the priest to show up. The coffin was simple, white (they had argued about the coffin a week before the funeral); I couldn't imagine my father in there even though I tried. Instead, a picture of him smiling kept coming back before my eyes. The sermon was pretty much as someone on Monday evening said: relatively short, and the one speech (which, albeit not untrue, was one-sided and superficial, as was the other speech he made in the memorial service) was made by the priest. I understand the usual number of hymns in a funeral is two; in my father's funeral, however, the number had increased to three, quite possibly due to my grandmother. I got the impression that she had planned this funeral a long time ago; how else could she have all the hymns and the food (she wanted to have a food service in the memorial after the burial, my mother didn't but eventually gave in) looked up so quickly? I know it took me a small eternity to even come up with a written list of all the songs I like and then try to narrow to list a humanly understandable proportion, which then could be played in my funeral. It's still not finished; I update it all the time as I encounter more and more good songs. I don't know, maybe I'm just indecisive and she's not.
Anyway, the sermon continued after the hymns with all of the guests taking their bouquets to the coffin. The text cited in the beginning is what was written on the card with our bouquet. Since I was the only one not to cry or even weep (you can probably guess how many glances it made others to silently throw at me during the course of the day) I read it out loud by the coffin as my mother cried, my sister wept and my brother looked like bursting in tears any second. In the end the sermon finished with 'Adagio', and the pallbearers (I wasn't one of them; I seriously believe my grandmother's strictness of the sex roles was the reason since my little brother, still a minor, was allowed to be one of the carriers; I was furious) took the coffin to the hearse which then lead us all to the cemetery farther away from the church.
The burial itself was more like what I had imagined the funeral would be like. We walked to the right place (I didn't know the exact place in the cemetery beforehand). Each of us children was given a white rose by our mother to drop above the coffin after the lowering and before covering the grave. I walked to stand by the grave with my siblings. They stood there for a moment and threw the roses in; I kneeled down, dropped the rose accompanied by a Shakespeare quote: "Fare thee well". For some reason a Sonata Arctica song kept going on in my head during the burial. I no longer remember which one it was, 'It won't fade' or 'The Vice'. Somehow I knew he would be buried there, in that particular cemetery. I've always thought it’s so much more beautiful than the one surrounding the church. This one is older, and you can see it from the different tombstones. Actually, it's nicer to be buried in a cemetery that is surrounded by a forest and has different trees growing amongst the graves, and has a great variety of iron crosses and tombstones (there is actually one with a pentagram that I've found particularly interesting). For a while I thought I would be buried there as well, but now… no, I'll be buried here, this is my real home.
Okay, to prevent this blogging from becoming a report of descriptions in great lengths, I have to share a funny anecdote (at least it's funny in my opinion, so therefore the semantics of 'funny' is disputable…). Once my father's final resting place was settled and paid for, the authority in question told that my mother had a place automatically reserved for her next to him as she was his wife. The day following this "reservation" my mother found out something incredibly hilarious: my grandparents, the ones to blame my mother for my father's suicide, had reserved each a place for their own graves next to my parents' (to-be-)graves. I wish I could have been present to see the look on my mother's face when she found out she's not going to get rid of those two even in death. Well, at least the place is only reserved for her, she’s not obliged to be buried there. Actually, I started thinking the possibility of a stepfather. I would much rather not think about it, but since I'm myself a walking and talking proof that my mother is a sexual being I also have to face the fact that having a stepfather is quite plausible. After all, my mother isn't that old, she's only forty-four. That would also mean it's feasible I may have stepsiblings in the future. Eh… I'm really not that enthusiastic about having to get to know to new people without really wanting to get to know to new people; but I couldn't exactly avoid it, so I guess I'll just have to grin and bear it if it comes to that.
Then the wake… let us state the OALD's definition for the event: "1. An occasion before or after a funeral when people gather to remember the dead person, traditionally held the night before the funeral to watch over the before it is buried." Save the watching over (the doctors wouldn't allow my grandmother to look at her son's body; I gather it was in a pretty bad shape since he had been in the car dead for a day [or at least the pathologist's preliminary report said it's l i k e l y he had died on Sunday] before he was found) the definition is nowhere near the memorial service we had. I thought of it, too, as we ate the lunch my grandmother wanted to offer to the guests. I mean, the name itself says it: it was supposed to be a "memorial" service, and yet it had nothing of the like in it. We should have had my father's favourite food, not the one my grandmother and my mother like. We should have listened to my father's favourite music, not sing the hymns my grandmother selected, ones I very much doubt my father ever even heard of. The only thing to tell it was a memorial service, instead of some random religious occasion, was my father's picture between two white candles on a table in one corner of the room in which the service was held. My grandmother had selected the picture; I cannot understand why she chose one that depicted my father in such a depressive and intimidating way (in the picture he's sitting on a chair on the left side of and in front of the picture, staring at the camera with a look on his face, a look that says that he's now very angry and couldn't care less of being taken pictures of right now). I know there actually were plenty of pictures of him smiling. I think that would have been far better.
So, in short, the funeral was a rather formal one with much more Christian contents than I would like to have. Now the next subject of debate between my grandparents and my mother will be the tombstone: they had already argued about it the Sunday preceding the funeral. I do think it’s my mother's opinion that weights more: she is determined to have an original stone that is taken from a forest and has a metal plate with my father's information fastened on the stone's surface, instead of one of those impersonal boxes you see everywhere, one that my grandparents would prefer. Next, within the next three months, will be the estate evaluation, and after that my father's possessions will be divided as the law degrees. It'll take place during a week day, so I can't be physically present since I'll be at work. I could take off one day but travelling back and forth would take one more day at best, and I already had to do that for the funeral (why, why it had to be held on T h u r s d a y ?).
Näistä kuvista, näistä tunnelmista, sayonara. Now I'll have a movie night since I have a night shift tomorrow. First I'll watch 'Bruce, Almighty' and after that I have to watch 'Populäärimusiikkia Vittulajänkältä' again (it was so good!!!).
Build a map of all countries you have visited. The bad side is that the map also shows, for instance, Alaska as one of the visited places even if you had never set a foot on its soil, only because it is a part of the US. I created a map of all the European countries I have visited; no need to expand it any further just yet. Have fun!
