I’m exploring new ways of socializing. Mornings, an amazing way to start the day, with a friend. Getting up a lot earlier than is customary on a Sunday and taking the tube north. To Lappis, and Roweena’s kitchen.
Preparing a proper English, vegetarian brunch. Eating it and talking about books. Watching the clear March sun rise above the student houses. A tingling, as if we were on an adventure, Roweena and I.
And simply: That a meal can look so aesthetically pleasing.
nostnost
Situated just a couple of blocks from my former high school, the PunktMedis library became one of my safe havens in the chaotic world of a teenager.
And still, I just can’t stay away. This time, I left with a book of contemporary Swedish poetry, an English young adults novel and an American classic. Life is good.
I’ve been watching Masters of Sex, a TV series set in the 1960’s about two researchers and their big study on human sexuality. I don’t really think I like it, or, possibly I just really dislike all the characters.
Still. It has something. One of the few sympathetic characters, the daughter of a doctor colleague of the researcher Dr. Masters, has a series of tough things happen to her. One day, she runs into Dr. Masters, who isn’t at all the kind of person who invites confidences, but something just bursts in her and she says:
”You know how you sometimes just feel so heartsick and everything feels so hopeless, so for just a minute you forget that there are people who love you so much. That you have a family.”
And that is so true. The deceptive nature of unhappiness. The loneliness and despair, making you completely forget that there is this network of people around you, willing to catch you and carry you to shore.
For different reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. About my people. About who they are. Close friends and family. And that it is important to remember them. Take care of them. In this messy life, with dead-lines and meetings and tube rides and parties and broken hearts and worries about the future, it is so easy to forget the people who will come to my rescue in a crisis, no questions asked. Just be there.
I’ve been taking stock. And they’re there. My heroes. But not until the end of time, not without occasional care and attention. So I’m focusing on taking care of my people now. It is me, my thesis and my people who matter this spring. There’ll be time for a lavish social life and adventures later.
I’ve been running late more and more lately. It’s as if time has lost its texture, I can’t hold on to it. The limits that time puts on our lives seem to have become blurry, and I keep on getting lost in my own actions. And that is fine, as long as work is what I need to do. Being completely submerged in calculating a Tasseled Cap Transformation is okay on a day when I only need to remember to eat (which, to be honest, I don’t always manage to do either). But life isn’t only working, locked up in my lonely chamber. There are meetings, both of a professional and social nature, there are events and also the ordinary but necessary activities of buying groceries, going to the gym and doing laundry.
I know I need to do these things. I make lists, plan. And still. I get lost in tasks and time constantly seems to run away from me.
And I wonder: Is this an age thing? Will this only get worse? Am I getting older and more eccentric? Unconventional understandings of time are not unheard of in my family, especially on my mother’s side. Maybe age is just bringing out the dormant Ruohomäki in me. Maybe this is just one of all those pieces of my individuality. Or am I just lazy?
Happiness is eating breakfast at a Kungsholmen cafe together with Hanna, talking about St. Petersburg futures and Mexico dreams.
Happiness is walking among the books at the Stockholm City Library. The physicists talk about parallel universes. For me, every single one of these covers house worlds of their own. It makes my limbs tingle.
(I also had a cappuccino at the cafe, and you all know caffeine behaves like a drug in my system. The tingling might have a combination of causes…)
Happiness is sunshine over Kräftriket, the feeling of spring in the air and having the entire world at my fingertips.
Who said a rainy day isn’t a good day for a photo shoot? Well, not me. And not Jonatan.
In the summer of 2010, I read ”A short history of nearly everything” by Bill Bryson. I really enjoyed his eloquent combination of humor and science, but haven’t read anything else by him since. But, as it happens, I found myself holding a copy of his ”A walk in the woods” in Accra in December, and thought: This I’ve got to read when I get home. Said and done. I got home. I borrowed it from the library. And now I’ve read it.
It is Bryson’s very personal story of how he tried to hike the Appalachian Trail in eastern United States, mixed with anecdotes from the trail’s history and descriptions of the surrounding ecology, the US National Park system and other relevant information. It is funny and informative and very much what I wish I was capable of producing.
And it has filled me with irrational longing to the Appalachians. It doesn’t really make sense, because the way he tells it, the Appalachian Trail is a complete pain. But there is something about the deep forests. A lusciousness, a deep green that they get in temperate rainforests that our cold, Lutheran coniferous forests can’t muster here in Sweden. I got a taste of it on Vancouver Island and the Olympic National Park in 2012, but now I want more, and I just feel like hiking a part of the Appalachian Trail would be the best way to drench this thirst.
I don’t see when it’ll happen, though. Maybe the longing will pass. Or it will internalize, mingle with my other longings. A dream to be fulfilled in an undefined future. A walk in the woods.
Me and Lina were supposed to have a birthday party together, but ended up cancelling it last minute. Neither of us could simply muster up the energy to host.
Instead, I invited my two oldest and closest friends over for dinner. Because cooking, for me, when done with time and purpose, carries no stress. It is like meditation. The more complicated, the better. Making the aubergine sweat, then frying it, while the garlic is roasted and the tomato sauce simmers. Separating the yolks from the whites for the dessert, a meticulousness that calms my nerves.
And the act of cooking for someone you care about. I think it was Lotta Lundgren who said it on the radio once, that preparing a meal for someone is the ultimate act of love. The time and effort I put into the preparations, and then: this is what will become the blood and bones of the person who eats it. Something mundane, everyone has to eat, it’s literaly what we need to survive. But also: something so incredibly intimate, me being part of someone else’s survival.
I like cooking and baking, because I enjoy the activity in itself, of working with my hands, creating textures and smells and tastes. But I also like cooking for people. Of knowing that this is going to become part of their bodies, that hopefully it will give them a little piece of a simple pleasure and a tiny bit more strength on their path through life. That I was allowed to be part of that.
Food. It is basic and it is mundane. But it is also beautiful and at the core of being a human being.
And for the umpteenth time, I got the same frustrating result: an index map that lacked any kind of useful data. Sure, at first glance it looks pretty:
Looks kind of like the blood vessels in a lung – not a very far-fetched analogy, considering that the white and the grey is supposed to show places with potentially higher soil moisture, based on topographical conditions. A topographical wetness index, as it is called. The blood stream of the landscape: rivers and seasonal springs.
But then I look at the actual numbers, and realize that the index calculation has failed for more than half of the pixels in the image.
Everything that is green is No Data. Calculations failed. Something with the input data is wrong. A poor quality digital elevation model, a free of charge global product and I guess you get what you pay for.
Lisa sits next to me in the master’s computer lab, working with amazing LiDAR data. High-resolution elevation data captured with an aircraft-borne laser machine. In it, even single trees can be separated, as well as the tree-tops from the ground. Many Swedish municipalities are acquiring these products now, for better planning and monitoring purposes. Lisa is developing a method for mapping old deciduous tree alleys as corridors for biodiversity protection.
In Burkina Faso, data access is very limited. My job now is to create data from basically nothing. It isn’t going particularly well. Why did I choose this? Why do I make things hard for myself?
In the beginning of February, I watched the series finale of Parenthood. And I cried until my muscles ached and my eyes were raw. Not because the end was particularly sad. Actually, quite the opposite. A satisfactory end – but I couldn’t stop crying.
It’s just, I’ve grown to care for these flawed people and their love for each other. This family that gets too involved in each others business, out of love. And I talked about this with Jonatan, my cousin, once. How we both enjoyed the show to a big part because it reminded us of our big Finnish family. Eccentric aunts and uncles, cousins and in-laws, always someone in a crisis, always someone putting their nose where it doesn’t belong, fights and peace-making and the big family dinners. And at the core of that: all the love. The wholeheartedness that runs in the family. There is a similar mentality, in the Braverman and the Ruohomäki families.
And the way the show manages to portray everyday life as something meaningful and interesting. Framing the ordinary to become extraordinary. Failing a maths test, fighting with a brother, winning a baseball game. How these small things can affect the big ones. I just feel that the writers of this show had an understanding for psychology and family dynamics that is rare, at least in American series. And I will miss it, now that it’s gone.
Katja Malmborg