Hunks
Speaking of tv, I was flipping through the four channels that I have, when suddenly there he was! My heart stopped for a second and then I rushed to the video to start it up, although I had already missed half hour of the movie. I feel like such a silly teenager when it comes to Colin Firth, but somehow he just embodies the perfect man for me. I would pay to see him just read the phonebook.

I'm strange though, I guess, in the sense that I've never wanted to have sex with celebrities (ooh I can just imagine what sorts of google searches those last three words will produce in the future). While I find Mr. Firth to be very sexy, I am thrilled that he is so happily married and hope he remains so till the end of his life. Even when I really was a teenager and my walls were filled with pictures of various teen idols, I never once thought I'd one day meet and marry one of them. If I read that they had gotten girlfriends, I was just happy for them while continuing to worship them for their good looks. I've never had any sexual dreams about anybody famous. If somebody occasionally visits my dreams they end up being my brother, friend, tourist that I show around Helsinki and things like that. That's my fantasy - that one day while walking in Helsinki I'll just bump into somebody famous, they'll ask me for directions to such and such a sight, I'll offer to take them instead and we'll become friends. Right.
Posted 23:44

Pros & Cons
Here's a few (certainly not all) observations from the recent trip - Finland vs. USA. I hope I won't offend anybody...

Better in USA:

• Variety with food. The largest supermarket I've ever seen in Finland must still be only half the size of a normal store in America. There's so much to choose from. Rows and rows of just cereal, for instance. I could have spent one day just at a supermarket marvelling at the choices.
• TV. Everybody always says things like '99 channels and nothing on', which is true to an extent, but you don't know what 'nothing on tv' really means until you only have 4 channels to choose from and most of the day they only show a test picture. In USA, there's one channel just to show the weather, one just for comedy, one for sci-fi, one channel to show what is showing on all the other channels etc. When you flip through the channels, it tells you what is currently playing there. I heard of something called Tivo, which sounded really cool. All in all, the whole television culture is much better developed.
• Roads. I don't mean the condition of the roads, but that there are freeways practically everywhere, 2-4 lanes in both directions. We have a very few freeways around here. Most of the time if you want to do long distance travel (1+ hour trips anywhere out of Helsinki) you'll be forced to take a single lane road, which means most of the time you end up going slowly in a line very frustrated, because there's always somebody driving way too slow. I can see how to Americans a 3 hour drive is really nothing at all.

Worse in USA:

• Toilet&shower. The toilets are... horrible, simply put. They're designed strangely, which makes it so that you're forced to stare at your "leftovers" and they barely flush at all. Needing to flush 2-3 times was very common. And the showers... almost all of them still have a separate faucet for cold and hot water, which is very annoying.
• Petshops. I made the mistake of checking out a petshop at a shopping mall and I just about left the place in tears. In very small cages they had puppies! Poor, poor baby dogs forced to spend their days in a tiny cage where they can barely take two steps in one direction! Barbaric!
• Fake friendliness. I got so tired of the 'hi how are you?' greeting wherever we went. It was always said in one continuous chant, with the greeter having actually no wish to hear anything at all about how I was doing. We Finns are a speak-no-nonsense people.

Posted 19:10

Nemesis
The new trailer for Star Trek: Nemesis is looking good!
Posted 01:35

Zombie
I feel like I am sleepwalking through the days. I continue to sleep at odd hours and am constantly tired. Don't want to do anything at all. At the same time my guilty conscience keeps bothering me, because there were so many things I didn't do before, because "I'll do them when I get back from the trip". Now that excuse is gone, but so is my energy. Hrrmh. *whine* *moan*
Posted 19:04

Stand by your beliefs
Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground. -Henry David Thoreau
Posted 00:34

Brutal honesties at 3am
The pills didn't work for me. Sure they made me sleepy, but they also made me sleep way too much. In the past 4 days (96 hours) I have slept for a total of 50 hours. I am the most rested person I know! Well, haven't had to think too much about how to spend my days, since I've only been awake less than 50% of my time, so in a way that's good, but I'd still like a normal life rather. So here I am, 3 am and not sleepy one bit. I could play more computer games I suppose, but my butt's starting to hurt from all this sitting.

I have a nagging suspicion that I got attacked by louse/tick/something-similar on my trip. My arms are filled with these suspicious looking itchy red bumps. No, not like mosquito bites. This wouldn't be the first time. Back in my first ever trip to USA I bought a pair of socks that then proceeded to infect my feet, got me to see a doctor, use a salve for weeks and disinfect all my clothes and bed linens. I'm going to be SO pissed off if that is the case now as well. Lesson of the day - wash clothes first before wearing! *scratchscratch*

Wonder if I'll be able to skip sleep altogether tonight... Nah, with my luck I'll hang in there until 7am, crash and wake up at 4pm instead... *rambleramble*
Posted 03:18

Get fuzzy
I've become totally addicted to another comic, Get fuzzy. I love the way the cat Bucky is drawn. I found both the available comic books in a store and just had to buy them. Well worth the money.


Posted 19:41

We have no American outposts in Finland
I accidentally stumbled onto this comic and found this one, which I thought was quite funny.
Posted 13:37

Go Helsinki!
The World-wide quality of life survey found Helsinki to be the third cleanest city in the world, after Calgary and Honolulu. For general quality of life, Helsinki scored sixth. That's my city! :)
Posted 00:23

Jetlags
What I really hate about coming back from the USA is how screwed up my sleeping pattern goes. Going to USA is no problem - I got there, stayed awake for a while, went to sleep and woke up in the morning feeling like I had always lived there. Now however my body insists that "night" begins at 5am and it is perfectly normal to sleep until 1pm. I took a pain killer&sleeping aid pill last night, just to make myself get sleepy sooner thinking it'd help. Well I did fall asleep around midnight, but instead of waking up at 9am like my alarm clock insisted, I just couldn't, slammed it shut and woke up at 1pm instead... having slept for 13 hours again. Guess if I'll be sleepy at all tonight?

I don't want to get sucked into a weird sleeping schedule once again. I've done the whole sleep days&stay awake at nights pattern for months and in the long run it really sucks. Life happens during the day - shops, people, friends etc are around during days. At night it's just you and the internet/tv and that's no way to live ones life. Guess I'll go the way of the pills tonight as well... If only I could get enough willpower to actually get myself out of bed when the alarm goes off...
Posted 13:55

Mistreated animals
I happened to turn the tv on to find the British Animal hospital on. Disregarding the overly enthusiastic host Rolf Harris it's actually a fairly interesting show. What caught my attention this time were the twelve chinchillas that were found somewhere (I missed the beginning of it). They had just been left in these horrible small cages amidst their own pee and manure, males and females all mixed so they kept on breeding amongst themselves. Seeing the horrible shape those chinchillas were in, I started to cry. I have three healthy chinchillas, so I can really tell the difference between a bad looking one and a healthy one and the shape of these found ones was just so appalling. I'm still teary eyed just thinking about it.

I've always had very firm rules about my chinchillas. They are small rodents. I could kill one with just one squeeze of my one hand. They live in a cage, where they cannot get out unless I let them. In other words, these poor animals are completely at my mercy, so it is my responsibility to make their life as comfortable and happy as possible. They have the right, as much possible, to a life that chinchillas want to live. For example, they want to chew things, a lot. I make sure they cannot get at wires and other lethal things, but otherwise I let them at it. I bought a kitchen table and chairs that were made out of unhandled wood just so they could eat them freely and boy have they! They're little poop machines. Whenever they run around it's plop plop plop and soon there's little poop pellets everywhere. It happens. No matter how much I sweep, I'm used to finding poop all over the house because it carries around on my socks. Thank god their poop is rock hard and won't ever smudge even if you step on it. Am I grossing all of you out yet?

Of course the hypocritical voice in my head says that if I like my animals so much and want them to have a happy life, why do I keep them in a cage in the first place? Is it actually right to keep pets at all? Do we get some weird sense of fulfillment from dominating these poor creatures? I just don't know. I'm being selfish, I know. I want to have pets, because I don't want to live alone and since no human male wants me, I'll settle for little furballs. However if I could let them free in the Andies (where the species is from) and know that they'd die of old age instead of being eaten by some hawk, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I don't think my chinchillas are very unhappy though. They are very domesticated and consider the cage their real home. Often when the doors are open, they still sit in there rather than run around constantly. I still wish I could do more for them, so it completely eludes me how anybody could mistreat let alone be intentionally cruel to animals.
Posted 21:29

Teaser
A "new" teaser trailer for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is now online. It's a modified version of the same clips that were shown in the theaters at the end of the first movie.
Posted 16:49

Movies
I went to see five movies during my trip. What surprised me was how expensive movie tickets are and also how small individual theaters were - usually for around 200 people max, while over here our theater has seats for 700 people. I also wonder about the moviegoer habits in USA - people talk during the movies, there's constant traffic in and out, people take even babies to theaters and a lot of people leave before the movie is even over. I don't mean leaving during the credits or leaving in the middle of the movie, but like three minutes before the ending, because I suppose they figure they already know how it's going to end anyhow and somehow it'd be a waste to see it all. Say like in Star Wars leave after the Death Star blows up and skip the whole award ceremony. Doesn't quite make sense to me.

About a boy: This was my absolute favorite among the five. A very funny and touching movie. With the new haircut, Hugh Grant actually looked quite good. I really want to read the book now.

The importance of being Earnest: I've never seen or read the play, so the movie was a new experience and I liked it a lot. My friend who's seen the play though said the movie wasn't nearly as good. I'm a bit biased anyhow, because I'll love anything at all with Colin Firth (*droolpantdrool*) in it.

Spiderman: It was a fairly good movie. Judging from all the crazed fan reactions I was expecting something out of this world, so in that respect it was a bit of a disappointment. What bothered me also was how Spiderman and Peter Parker spoke in exactly the same kind of voice, that strange unique kind that Tobey Maguire possesses, and nobody would guess the two are the same person? It's like all those Superman movies where everybody is just blind not to see how Superman and Clark Kent look exactly alike.

Minority report: Tom Cruise looked very hot in this one. A fascinating concept in the whole movie, one that makes you think of a lot of 'what if's. The movie was surprisingly non-violent too. Sure it has some parts, but overall it's more like a detective story. At one point I had to close my eyes completely though and wait for some scenes to pass... Slightly too long, but it has its surprising twists and turns.

Bourne identity: I've seen the 1988 TV version, but I didn't connect the movie name with that tv series (just knew its finnish name), but the moment the opening scenes rolled in I realized what the movie was about. So knowing the whole plot in advance kind of ruined the movie for me, although it's been changed quite a bit. Having never read the book I don't know actually whether the series or the film is closer to the original, but I liked the plot in the series better. The movie was made a lot simpler. Still, it was fairly ok all in all.

The only movie that was left to see was the Sum of all fears, although I really don't like Ben Affleck that much.
Posted 16:21

I'm back
Back in the good old Finland. I'm happy, but it's also very strange. It really feels like I was gone ages and now having troubles adjusting to life back here. It was something like 90F (32C) in NYC the day we left, when the plane landed here it was 55F (13C) and rainy. Gack. I fell asleep almost immediatelly and slept for 13 hours, feeling very disoriented when I finally woke up.

New Jersey:
Far better than I expected. My prior experiences of NJ have been around the Newark airport and it's so damn ugly around there, but there's a lot more to NJ than that. The southern parts, especially by the coast, are very beautiful. Got to see Seaside and Cape May and was taken very good care of by my friends living in NJ. I wish I could have stayed there longer.

New York (part 1):
Exciting, but exhausting. It was very hot and we walked a TON. The hostel was a very interesting experience. The rooms were set in something like an old warehouse area, where they set up cubicle-type "rooms". The walls didn't go all the way up to the ceiling or floor even, just fixed on poles, forming very tiny spaces fit just for two narrow, short beds. We walked every day from around 10am to 8pm and were glad to just fall asleep exhausted after that. I've been to NYC several times before, so there really was no sight that I really had to see. My friend on the other hand wanted to see them all, so I just tagged along from one famous building to another. We walked by the WTC site and it brought tears to my eyes. We didn't wait in line to really see the hole in the ground, but it was all the photos, flags, writings, memorabilia etc that people had left around the site that were so touching.

For all the horror stories, I found NYC once again to be a very pleasant and safe-feeling city. I know there are places you really shouldn't go to, especially when it's dark, but I mean the general parts. Judging from all the stories you'd expect to get robbed gunpoint in the middle of the street in broad daylight, but it's not so. With all the logically numbered streets and avenues it's really impossible to ever get lost and using the subway was very easy. The downsides were all the foreign immigrants and the hectic lifestyle. We couldn't understand a word anybody said and they couldn't understand what we were saying. At the same time you are expected to constantly know exactly what you want. People had absolutely no patience for anything.

Boston:
None of our prior plans worked out in Boston. The person we were staying with ended up having to work on a few days plus the weather got a lot worse, so we never ended up going to Cape Cod. A lot of the time was spent doing shopping. Clothes, clothes and still more clothes, oh and don't forget shoes too... Not by me, but by the other two maniacs. I think I did more standing around in clothing stores than I've done in the last five years put together. Finally I'd go to the movie theater at the mall instead while the other two kept on the mad shopping spree. Then lots more walking around Boston, seeing all the usual tourist sights. Towards the end of the week more friends arrived and along with the person my friend hooked up with, our group grew to seven people.

All of us went out and eventually ended up in a gay club, which was a funny experience. I saw about five real women during the whole night, otherwise the place was packed with drag queens and very scantily clad males. Some were dancing around in their very tight underwear, rubbing against each other and groping each other. Lots and lots of bare chests and firm muscles wherever you looked. Saw my first ever drag show as well. The place had two bathrooms, but both used by men though. I went into the one most inhabited by drag queens, since it seemed to be more for "girls". As I walked in I heard two guys say behind me That was an actual woman, not a guy. Hah.

New York (part 2):
We got a car ride back to NYC, thanks to the person who fell for my friend. It was rather nice, except we had already bought and payed for bustickets as well, so it was a waste. For the last two days of the trip I ended up being the third wheel and just opted to go alone most of the time. By far the worst part of the whole trip was the last night when I first had to listen to the two of them "having fun" in the other bed and then staying up the rest of the night, because of the worst ever snoring I have ever heard. Good thing there were no knives at present, because I was so ready to kill that person. I threw a pillow, I shook the snorer, I tried to make noise... nothing worked, while my friend slept on blissfully with earplugs on.

The flight back was very long. The plane didn't leave until 11pm, so we were already very tired from the day. I cannot sleep in airplanes, at all. I was so exhausted and sleepy, but sleep just wouldn't come so I sat there getting very pissed off. Then we had over 4 hours layover in Paris, before taking the final flight back home. I'm sorry for all the French readers (if I have any), but never ever fly Air France or through Paris! The announcements in "english" were impossible to understand. The stewardesses were very rude to everybody except the French - no hellos, no 'here you go's, no 'what would you like's, nothing. Just a grim, silent stare all the way through. The airport in Paris is a big mess, very hard to navigate through. People also smoke cigarettes everywhere. On top of that our luggage got left behind in Paris on the way back. Not just ours, but of half the plane. In the four hour wait that we had they still couldn't manage to get our luggage from one plane to another in time. The airport personel in Helsinki said it happens all the time.

All in all it was a fairly good trip. There were some very enjoyable moments, but equally things I could have lived without. I am glad to be back, if only the weather would start to resemble summer soon here too. What I found out, once and for all, is that my touristy days really are over. I could care less about sightseeing these days. It doesn't mean that I don't want to travel anymore. I love travelling, but not just to see famous things. I'm happy just walking down the street, eating in a restaurant or even just watching the tv when it's in another country. I'm interested in plain living, getting new experiences that way. I have walked on a street before, but there's a difference whether it's in Helsinki or in NYC. I want to absorb the different culture and lifestyle and attempt to become a part of it. Not just to rush to a building, stare at it, take a photo and then run to see another building. The only structure I could get crazy about anymore these days would be seeing the pyramids in Egypt, which I hope to do one day.

Today I'm determined not to do anything at all. Wait for my luggage, catch up on the internet stuff perhaps and watch a lot of tv, there's my grand plans for today :)
Posted 13:24

NYC
Greetings from an internet cafe in NYC. The trip is almost over, fly back tomorrow night and arrive Sunday evening. It has certainly been very interesting all in all. It's currently 8pm here and I'm wandering on the town by myself for a while. My friend hooked up with somebody in Boston, who then came with us today to NYC and they're probably making out in the hotel room as I write this... Hmmm. This is my first time on a computer since I left. Feel like it's been ages and I have trouble typing. Heh. Thank you all for all the cool comments :) I'm oh so ready to go home.
Posted 03:11

And it's off I go!
Time to go. It'll be New Jersey - New York - Boston - Cape Cod - Boston - New York in some 16 days. Wish me luck and that I'll return safely, which'll be on the 23rd. No updates until then. Hi ho hi ho it's off to America I go!
Posted 09:10

New things for women
Last Vappu, after once again waiting for ages in the bathroom line (just what do women do in there to take so long? I have no idea), I complained out loud that somebody should develop some kind of a system enabling women to also pee standing up. What do you know, now somebody has. It's made out of cardboard, one time use only (surprise, surprise) and looks like a cone. Hmm. The news feature had three women test it out and two of them really liked it and called it awesome. Interesting... I can't see myself eagerly using one (the whole concept is just too weird still), but maybe in the case of a real emergency...
Posted 20:55

Good grief
A university is going to offer classes in how to blog. Unbelievable.
Posted 14:38

More news
I bought Ilta Sanomat yesterday, one of them afternoon daily newspapers and among others it had these news in it:
* Amputating parts of your body is the next craze among the body piercers and tattooists in the world. It gives as the most common examples cutting away parts of fingers, toes, genital areas or splitting the tongue. Completely sick if you ask me.
* They found bones and skulls underneath the Senate square while doing some repairs. Apparently there used to be a cemetery on part of the square around 1640-1812. Ack. All this time I've been walking over people's graves...
* A woman got drugged and raped by her employer. One of the lawyers wanted the charges dropped, because the woman had been living an unusual lifestyle (she had been engaged twice in a short period of time) and had gotten rid of evidence (her own vomit the next day). Luckily the judge didn't quite buy those stupid excuses and the rapist was sentenced to jail.
* Two page report of the Queen's Jubilee in England. It goes on to say that if anything similar would happen in Finland, the jails would be overcrowded with drunken people.
Posted 08:59

News
Headlines before going to bed: The Swedish government decided to allow registered homosexual couples the right to adopt children, 198-38.
Posted 00:44

Busy
Very, very busy day with lots of running around from place to place. Tomorrow will be the same as I still have some errands to run and then packing. I'm so tired right now. I can't decide whether to go nap for an hour (seems ludicrious to nap at 9pm) or just try to tough it out for a few more hours before bedtime.
Posted 21:23

Football
I've been following the FIFA World Cup a bit. Get the most out of it now, because soon I won't have any idea what is going on anymore. I'm rooting for the European and African teams the most, but I hope France won't win again. The only way Finland is ever going to get into the Cup is if we host the games ourselves.
Posted 08:56

Poem
The Tomb Raider DVD was finally on sale, so I bought and watched the movie again. I liked the William Blake poem in it:

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
Posted 17:42

Preparing
I constantly feel like I should be doing and buying things to get ready for the trip. I leave on Friday, but I can't really think of anything I ought to be doing to prepare myself. I got a haircut today, I guess it counts. I'm going to pack already on Wednesday so then that'll still leave me Thursday to get all the things I'll realize I need to take along. I just checked out the weather forecasts in NYC and Boston and things are looking quite good on that front. I'm starting to get anxious and fidgety, but it's not the good kind of excitement. Not because of any fears, but just general reluctance to go on a trip right now. If my money situation were better, it wouldn't matter so much, but I'll really be broke when I get back. Hrrmm. I'm starting to have problems sleeping at night and keep waking up earlier and earlier, when I wanted to do the opposite so I could get used to the timezone before the trip. Weather's been so nice here lately. I just want to enjoy the summer, rather than drag myself back and forth along the US east coast. Expect me to ramble more and more nonsense the closer the trip gets...
Posted 12:18

Immortality
Now that I am an elf, I want the immortality that goes with it. Not unable to die completely, but immortal in the sense that I could determine myself when I wanted to die, whether it be 20 years or 2000 years from now. I think human life, as it is now, is far too short.

Most people who have said they object to immortality say their reason is that they wouldn't want to live their current life forever. They look at what life is like for them now, with its stresses, griefs, boring work etc and imagine being forced to live the same way for the next thousand years. But of course it wouldn't be that way. Living much longer would mean that we would get more freedom in what we want to do. We could spend 30 years working as a doctor and then the next 30 years shepharding llamas in Nepal, then study to be an architect and do that for 10 years, before becoming a cook on a cargo ship etc. You would have many lifetimes, so to speak, to see and experience all kinds of things.

Life is too short now. There's never really any stage where we can just be as we are. Instead we're constantly aging, constantly changing. People in their 30s aren't as agile and energetic than they were in their 20s. When I was younger I could easily stay up all night and never get any hangover either. These days I feel half dead the next day. And so on. We're continuously being hit with all kinds of deadlines, do X and Y before such and such a day or else it's too late. Sure in my 30s, or even in my 50s, I could enroll into a medical school and try to become a doctor, but with the ten years it takes to study I wouldn't get much of a career out of it anymore. Soon I am going to be too old to become a mother. I don't care if medical science advances and I could get a baby in my 50s - the child deserves a parent who isn't too feeble to play with it and who wouldn't die of old age before the child hits 30.

It would be very interesting to see what kind of a society we would have if everybody did live to be thousand years old. If it happened now, all of a sudden, we'd get hit with massive overpopulation very quickly before some kinds of solutions were made, but what if we had always lived that long? What kind of a world would we now be living in?
Posted 09:54

Gamers vs. Mundanes
I am Shandra the sexy super she-cat...
Posted 08:53

Ha ha
A bunch of us are sitting around the table, finishing off a meal and chatting. The discussion turns into children sleeping in their parents' beds, so naturally my mother needs to tell everybody what I was like as a child. She tells them I always just wanted to sleep in my own bed, that I was rather possessive of it up to the point that I wouldn't let anybody else even sit on my bed and that my bed was just off limits to others. So of course her husband quips in jokily that These days she doesn't mind, if only anybody would want to go there anymore. *laugh* He probably had no idea how correct he was though...
Posted 19:53

Cathy
In my search of more websites to waste my time with, I read a lot of Cathy comics. Her life is in some aspects frighteningly like mine, especially in this and that one.
Posted 10:42

Acting drunk
Actors in tv shows and movies never act being drunk correctly. It bothers me. They get the staggering right, eyes rolling about, saying nonsense and all that, but every single "drunk" person can still talk normally. When really drunk people "talk", you can't make any sense of their words, it's all slurred gibberish. But I suppose actors can't do that, because even drunks are given meaningful dialogue.
Posted 22:45

Huh?
It's June, it's summer and some people are still playing ice hockey?!?!? Who in their right mind would want to watch a winter sport in the summer time? It's just plain ridiculous.
Posted 21:02

Invisibility
I'm used to being the outsider at parties and other gatherings, but today I managed to become completely invisible. I was at a picnic and this new guy came to our group. Never seen him before. I'm standing there in the middle of two others, just about with our shoulders touching. The guy walks up to the person left of me, shakes their hand as names are exchanged, then he starts to turn towards me, I extend out my hand ready to shake his and instead he just glides right past me and greets the person to the right of me. *blinkblink* I'm really not cut out for these social things...
Posted 18:04

Waiting
I hate waiting. It's so much easier if you can just wake up in the morning and get going wherever you need to go, but it's a whole other matter if you need to wait a few hours before departing. So I spend the time doing this and that, wandering over to watch football for lack of anything better, sit at the computer trying to find yet another webpage to browse at, look for more things to eat in the kitchen - all the while constantly staring at the clock to see if it's time to go yet. Even though there's hours to spare initially, it feels like it's not worth it to do anything important, because just when you got started you'd have to go anyhow. Which is hardly true though. I could have easily gone grocery shopping for the weekend earlier, but of course now it really is too late.
Posted 11:53