I got home on Friday night and started baking karjalanpiirakoita, a kind of Finnish pastry. I felt for some music, went to my CD shelf and picked out a few that I hadn’t listened to for a while. Not really thinking, I started with “More modern short stories by Hello Saferide” and then went on to listen to “9” by Damien Rice. And it was like being transported in time.

I remember the fall of 2006. My grandmother was dying of cancer in Finland and I got “9” off the internet the day it was released. It was the fall semester of my last year in high school and I felt as if the pressure would choke me. I remember getting home from school, putting on the record, lying down on the kitchen floor and crying. I see myself doing this for weeks, but maybe I remember it wrong. But I know that for days and days, “9” was the only record I listened to. I even dreamed “9”. Later, over Christmas, I went to Finland and helped my mom and aunt take care of my grandmother. I read the Bible to her and sang Christmas songs and for once I was happy for her rigorous faith. When I left to go back home just before New Years, I still felt sad but somehow better, calmer. She would die in her sleep a month later, in her own bed, in the house where she had raised seven children, with my aunt and uncle in the next room. That is what I think of when Damien Rice sings “Is he dark enough, enough to see your light /…/ do you miss my smell?”

And I remember October of 2008, I had a fever and my phone rang. It was the guy I had begun to fall in love with. He said that we wouldn’t work. We hadn’t had time to become anything at all yet, so it wasn’t even a breakup – but still I felt like my world was falling apart. The next day, I took the subway train in to the city, in spite of my fever, and walked through the beautifully red and yellow leaves on the pavement. I went to an old record store and found “More modern short stories by Hello Saferide” on display. It had been released that very same day. I bought it and returned home and already at the first line she had me dangling from her every note, Annika Norlin, “People are like songs, it’s true. /…/ and God only knows and you have this one sad similarity that every time it’s over, I want to press play again but the only difference appears to be I can force it on one of you, and on the other I can’t.” She helped me through my fever and all the other, more unidentifiable pain.

These memories became my Friday night, and even though they were sad, it felt good. Because it is a controlled kind of sadness. I can always choose to stop the music. These songs made me remember parts of why I am me, now, here, today. And I think that in order to know the right direction on the journey ahead, you need to remember the path you’ve put behind. Before I went to sleep, I lay on the floor listening to Damien Rice playing on wine glasses after the last song on the record, and felt achingly whole.

When I was 19, and then again when I was 20, I had this very complicated thing with a guy who I kind of still think of as the perfect kind of guy for me – if circumstances had been different. Maybe it’s just stupid, thinking like that, but I can’t help it. Finding someone with whom it’s easy to talk, who’s both smart, funny and attractive and who even laughs at my jokes isn’t easy. Or then I’m just picky.

But then again, I come to think of that one thing he said to me once, and I feel that maybe he wasn’t that perfect, after all. Not for me, anyway. He said: “You should start drinking and taking drugs, live wild and rough, so that you have something to write about afterwards.” To my knowledge, he didn’t take drugs himself, but he drank quite alot.

It is possible that he found my soberness provoking. Because I don’t drink. I never have. I can honestly say that I’ve never been really drunk. I do sometimes take a glass of wine with dinner, if I’m offered, and I love Amarula, but otherwise I prefer water above anything else. And drugs are out of the question.

But for a while there I thought that maybe he was right. Maybe I needed to experience things like that in order to have anything worth writing about. Everything for the art, right?

I didn’t try anything though. Maybe I didn’t dare. Maybe I didn’t want to do anything that would have reminded me of that guy after things ended. I just know that since then, I have read alot of books written by and about those wild and crazy people, the ones that drink and take drugs and sleep around and I just can understand where the fascination lies. I find “On the road” both badly written and pathetic, “Fear and loathing in Las Vegas” tragic and “Creme fraiche” kind of sad. I don’t want to write about experiences like that, and if that is what is needed in order to write a ‘real’ book, I’d rather not. I guess I’m just boring that way.

I do other crazy things instead. Once I climbed a mountain. Huayna Potosi in Bolivia. 6088 meters above sea level, and all I could think about up there on the top, while the sun was coming up above the cottonlike strato clouds, was how the hell was I supposed to make it all the way down again, kind of regretting letting my friends talk me into this crazy scheme in the first place.

Once I posed for an art film that was to be shown at an art exhibition about Virgin Mary. I was a female Jesus hanging on the cross, totally naked except for a small cloth around my waist. I was offered the part by my friend Kirke, who was producing the film. The director told me to look angry at God, but all I could feel was sweaty. It was a very hot day in July, and the film was shot in an old factory without any air conditioning what so ever. Later that autumn, at the Virgin Mary exhibition at the museum of history in Stockholm, I remember standing in front of the screen showing the film, not at first realizing when the first snapshot of me appeared. I looked so voluptuous.

Or now, when I am going to Canada and western USA all by myself for five months, to volunteer at farms without much experience at all, just to see if I can handle it. That’s the kind of crazy things I do. And I feel that they are worth writing about too.

Okay, so maybe I’m not such an awful driver after all. I had my driving test yesterday and I passed. Except for some trouble with the backing into a parking space, everything went smoothly. Afterwards, my driving instructor even said that the inspector that I had was one of the pickiest. But I made it anyway.

So, I have my licence now. Drivers around the world, beware.

In the middle of January the fall semester ended. I had a huge exam in hydrology and hydrogeology and am still amazed that I really made it through that course. With quite a good grade aswell. I’m not as stupid as I feel sometime.

Since then, I have spent my days doing almost exclusively two things: learning how to drive a car and working in an archive. The first, because I think it might be useful someday, and the second because some extra money can always come in handy in North America. But now, with four weeks gone and a little more than three weeks still to go before I leave, I kind of think I misjudged my own capacities and needs somewhere along the way.

Firstly, we have the driving. I honestly think that I have the totally wrong kind of intelligence to handle a car in traffic. I can focus, no problem, my abilities of concentration and determination are amazing. That’s how I’ve made it through fifteen and a half years of school with discustingly good grades. But when you drive, that kind of concentration is of no use. While driving, you have to be able to take in impressions from all around with your senses, continually sift through them to see which ones are important for this specific situation, and then physically act in accordance with them. There is no time to analyze, concentrating on one thing can be downright dangerous.

I’m sure that this ability to see what’s important is something that you learn with time and practice, but right now it’s making my brain confused and irritated, which leads to my driving being perfectly smooth and careful one day, while I the very next day can’t even park the car correctly. My teacher said that I could book my driving test after one of those very smooth lessons, but already the next lesson, I think he regretted it and now I think he’s almost as nervous as I am. And really, I’m not sure if I would trust myself, all alone in a car, if I managed to do well on my test. Cars are dangerous things. If I could choose, I would use a horse for transportation, any day. It’s a much more sympathetic way to travel.

And then we have the archive. As I’ve written before, it is a job that I don’t hate. In controlled doses, I actually enjoy it. I like sorting papers, putting them in neat piles, coming up with new, more effective routines for the different sorting processes. I’ve been working at the same archive, belonging to a government department, for a year now, and just as my semester ended, some reorganizations in the department meant that the archive had to add a new section to itself and re-sort documents that were sent in from other offices in other parts of the country. The head archivist has seen my abilities of neatness, and so I was offered to be a part of the small team that would take care of this new section in the archive, and help create new routines there. Which actually means that I can work almost as much as I want, and get the feeling that I am part of creating something new, not just sorting papers.

This new feeling of importance is dangerous. I loose the sense of when I should call it a day, and when I finally get out of my archive, days might have passed without me ever seeing the sun. Not even through a window.

The combination of these two, the driving lessons and studying for the theory part of the driving test (which I aced, by the way, as if that ever was in doubt) and the job at the archive, leads to my days being quite lacking of the more social part of human interaction. Sure, I talk cars with my driving teacher and archive stuff with the head archivist and my collegues, but even those conversations are very limited both in subject and time. For me, who am used to university life with seminars and lunches and study groups and all the meetings I used to go to in my capacity as president of the geosection student council, this is like being teleported into the middle of a desert – and not the kind of desert that amazes me.

This became extremely obvious to me the day before yesterday, when I went to the university to meet the president of one of the councils that I used to be part of to discuss a few issues for the next meeting that I won’t be able to attend. What probably could have been finished in half an hour, took two – and mostly it was me having a monologue and he listening. This particular person took it very well, but when he finally had to leave I went on to search for other people to attack – and I found quite a few. And all of them did not have the same kind of patience as the above mentioned president. Once I get going, I loose all self control and might say just about anything. Some might find this funny, in a way not very flattering for me, but that’s okay – while others simply don’t have the time in their busy lives to help me relieve myself of four weeks worth of words. And still, after talking to two of my old teachers, three former classmates and a friend who just happened to call and got a lot more than what he asked for conversationvise, I didn’t feel satisfied.

So, the combination of my two occupations these last four weeks has made me feel inadequate (the driving) leading to an unusually big need for attention and a dam of words that just keeps filling up more and more and more until I meet someone, and then – BAM – the dam breaks and I just can’t stop talking. This is not healthy. I am starving myself. Soon I’ll start talking to my piles of paper.

One summer day a few years ago, I went to the blood bank to donate, and was called into the donor room by a young, beautiful med. student who introduced himself as Magnus. That brief meeting, with him taking my blood and me telling him about my Spanish studies, ended up as the first chapter of a new writing project. The story of Ylvali, an aspiring artist who met the very handsome medical student Magnus at a blood bank, but then left him and everything else six months later to go volunteer working on Zanzibar. Not because she had fallen out of love with him, but because she had a restlessness in her, a feeling that made it impossible for her to settle.

I never finished it. Or, never might be a bit exaggerated – I didn’t really start. I still have half the story in my head, people that Ylvali meets, what became of Magnus after she left. A handful of chapters written, the first two, a few in the middle. I think I’ve always thought that I would take up the story one day when I have the time. I don’t know, maybe I will.

Anyway, somewhere the morale of the story was that Ylvali was running away, just as so many others in her (and my) generation, running, never settling, never feeling quite full and satisfied – and that this tendency actually created more problems for her. She wasn’t capable of finding happiness, because she just ran away from it. This was something that I thought I saw among some of my friends and acquaintances at the time, and I found it sad. The never satisfied generation.

Sometimes I worry. Am I running away? Have I become one of my fictional characters? Not that I have a Magnus to run away from, but I do have a life here, classmates and other people at the university that know me, a job that I actually don’t hate. These are things that I am leaving, and might not be able to get back when I return. My classmates will have graduated and my job will probably be taken by some other ambitious student.

Is this trip something that I really need, or is it just fear? This way, I can drag out my studies longer and won’t have to get out into the real world, being rejected on the job market, for another year. Have I become Ylvali, the girl scared of creating her own future? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I just have to write. Or, it’s more like a need to express, become larger than myself. It’s a need as strong as hunger and thirst. It’s overwhelming.

But the last few years, I haven’t had the time and opportunity to grab on to that feeling. Because the feeling is only the start – the process of writing requires energy and solitude. Things that I haven’t been able to spare from my studies.

So, instead I have had to push down the feeling, deep, resulting in a vague frustration and restlessness.

I hope this journey and this blog will allow me to give this feeling more room, more power, give my restlessness some rest.

How do you choose a name? That’s a tricky one. I have spent a lot of time thinking about names in my life. When I was about 13 or so, I started keeping a list of all the pretty or cool or just good names that I knew or heard of. Mostly because I like doing lists, but also as a reference, for the day when one of my characters might be in need of a name. This was during the time when I was convinced and completely certain that I would become a fiction writer and be the creator of an entire library’s worth of books, all full of characters to name. The list became quite extensive.

I guess I still have the list somewhere, in a folder on an old external harddrive. I haven’t looked at it for years. I haven’t felt the need to name anyone for ages. The few characters that I have written about have kind of come to me already named, with matching personalities.

But that’s just the thing. You can’t just choose a name randomly, because it’s pretty. A name has to have a meaning. A name can be like an extention of a person, the final detail to make a personality complete.

Names are important. They have the potential for an almost magical power over the person carrying the name. Or that is atleast one of the premises in two of my favourite fantasy novels/series: “The girl who circumnavigated fairyland in a ship of her own making” by Catherynne M. Valente and the Earthsea cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin. To reveal your true name to someone is an act of ultimate trust, because in doing so, you also give them the key to your soul. And even if these fantasy stories might take it a bit far, I still think there is something there. The importance of a name. It sets the tone. It is a starting point. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of what to name this blog – the documentation of my five months long inspiration search in North America.

In human geography, researchers often speak of different kinds of geographies. Feminist geographies, time geographies, geographies of inclusion and exclusion. The spatial aspects of different structures and networks in our societies. It is an interesting way of looking at the world, and ever since my first fateful semester of geography studies, I haven’t been able to shake off the need to think in these spatial terms. It’s thrilling, to be able to put some of all the confusing phenomena that I am confronted with every day into a greater context. That’s the way I look upon the world now.

And so. The name of the blog should start with geographies. What of the end? What is it, really, that I’m looking for? What is the point of all this travelling, the searching? The starting point of my decision to go abroad was the restlessness. I’ve written before that I’m looking for inspiration. But, in the end, what I think it all boils down to is belonging. I feel lost, and I am searching for a place in the world where I can feel that I belong. And this is not necessarily an actual place. Actually, I rather think that it is more of an abstract place, something that has to be found among people, in a way of being, in a way of looking at the world and your place in it. And it can look very different, depending on situation and need. And by meeting new people and being confronted with new places and new situations, you are kind of forced to think about and define this place where you belong. Perspective and inspiration.

So. That’s a little of what my trip is about. And there we have it. The name. Geographies of belonging.

One might think: Isn’t it enough that she’s chosen to write a blog in a language that she doesn’t know, all about herself? What the hell is this thing about chapters? But, you see, there is a thought behind that aswell. I rarely do things randomly. In that sense, I guess I’m not a very exciting person. I mostly feel that I have to have a plan. And this I do with the post titles aswell.

First, I want to make it clear that this is a story – if not in the novel kind of sense with a dramaturgical curve, and the probability of no moral in the end is very high, but still it has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is not about the abstract thing that is my life, but the specific occurance that is my journey through western North America. In giving the posts the chapter titles, even the reader that happens upon this blog somewhere between, say, Vancouver and San Francisco, might be inclined to start with the introduction, continue with chapter one and then maybe even read chapter two aswell. I think this might be especially helpful, since I’ve used the same adress for my Swedish blog for two years before changing it into the current Geographies of belonging. With the posts as chapters, it’ll be easy to distinguish between the old blog and the new.

Second, I sometimes see my life as a novel. I know that this is a stupid notion and probably not even that healthy, life does not have a beginning, middle and end, it’s a never ending continuum where death is the ultimate end, but only in a very personal sense. But the thing is, novels are such a big part of my life (I read approximately 70 books a year) and some of the people that I’ve made the strongest connections with in my life have been fictional. There might be a risk that that says more about my social skills than my reading, but my litterary experiences have been incredibly important for me all the same. And I think that that is one reason why I so rigorously write in my diary every day, got a blog when I was 17 and compose short stories and poems closely connected to the things that I experience. I think I imagine that I will be able to read all these texts one day and see through them to the hidden agenda, the meaning behind all this confusion and dead ends that is life. Naïve, I guess, but a girl can always hope.

Anyway, the disposition of this blog, with numbered chapters as titles of all the texts, are both for the benefit of the readers, and to fuel my imagination.

I was born in Sweden to a Finnish mother and a Swedish father. This makes my mothertounge Finnish and my first words were in Finnish. But having grown up in Sweden, my strongest launguage is Swedish. What language I’ll speak when I’m old and overridden with dementia, I don’t know, but either way, English is only my third language. Why I chose to start a blog in English then might look like a really stupid idea – but it’s part of the concept. Or at least I think it is.

In order to get real perspective, I need to get out of my comfort zone. Away from Stockholm, away from the intellectual business of university studies, away from my own language.

And this is something huge for me. You should know that. My Swedish is excellent, I’m better than most, though I say it myself. When other teenagers spent the summer on the beach or maybe football camp, I went on creative writing courses. I was 11 when I started writing my first novel. I didn’t finish it, but still, by the age of 13 I had decided that I would become a writer of fiction. Now I’m not so sure. But still, you could say that Swedish has been my hobby.

But now I’m writing in English and as a person with the skill to express myself well in one language, I kind of automatically expect to do well in my third language too. This is not, and will probably not be, the case.

Expect spelling mistakes, grammatical hicchups, sentences that wind themselves into knots. Hopefully I will get better with time, especially after I’ve landed in Edmonton, but I can’t promise anything.

It is exciting, challenging and scary, writing in a foreign tounge, all at the same time. It’s an adventure with words and I can only hope that I am ready for it.

Here we go…

We’re in the beginning of February. A new year. Maybe the last, ever, or just as long into the future as the Maya indians saw fit to predict. Anyway, 2012. The year that I turn 24. The year I could have gotten my bachellor’s degree in geography from Stockholm university. Or, even, the year that I’d’ve gotten my master’s degree, if I had gone to university right after high school that is.

The year that I will not get my bachellor’s degree in geography, because I’m taking a term off to go travelling. I don’t know if this is a good way to solve the problem with my lack of inspiration, but that is what I came up with. I needed something new. I’m going to western North America.