After finally getting a few days of real relaxation ( mostly thanks to my now immobile left leg), it's finally time to pack up and leave.

Well, leave anyway, since I've packed all of the stuff I'm supposed to carry there myself - and let me tell you, it ain't exactly "just a few leftover bits and pieces". Most of the stuff's been at the apartment since Friday, already, but due to some stuff having needed to "get dunn" before I left, I wasn't able to move out myself, 'til now.

... Actually, I was still waiting for a local dealer to give me a ring concerning a modem I bought, but since I'll be leaving on the next train, I guess I'll just have to live without Internet for a few weeks, since I won't be able to pick it up until I come back home - which should be 'round the time my sister gets married. Oh well, I'm sure Internet can cope without me for a few weeks.

Oh, and I ain't got no TV, either.

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As if today wasn't action-packed in its own right, already, it seems Life's gotten all lovey-dovey over me yet again... Lucky me it's happening on the last few days before I move out and become ( momentarily) out of touch to everyone, because HEY, embarrassment requires an audience!

Even if all my stuff's already at the new apartment ( sans laptop), I'm still living at my parents' house for a few more days, mainly to tie up a few loose ends and such ( and not because of the free food - whatever you may think, sis!). Getting stuff done here that I can't get done in the new apartment - mainly due to distances and the fact that I still don't have an Internet connection ( *gasp*, said the audience).

Since I'll be leaving in a day or two and things have been a bit stressful, I decided to take some time off and go run one last half-marathon as some silly sort of "coming of age/rite of passage"-bullshit where I'd come to terms with myself yet again; frankly, any taoist/golden rule-crap you can come up with is fine - I just needed to go let off some steam, OK?

The distance isn't anything, really, since I've been running the same distance several times a week now for a few months; what happened at the halfway-mark, however, was definitely something.

See, I run the same distance back and forth, and at the halfway-mark ( conveniently at the top of a very tall hill on the first island in the local archipelago) I usually stretch a bit to not have to fear of suddenly going bonk ( I love that term) or developing massive spasms and cramps after jogging.

So here I am, doing my some stretches while trying to look as imposing as possible to the two preteens trying out their first moody angst and dreaming of the day they get their first periods, looking at the sun going down and having achieved as much zen as is possible while listening to Ennio Morricone and Motörhead. Just 10 or so kilometers back and that's it.

Not.

As soon as I start moving, a feisty little pug bites me square in the right butt-cheek, basically preventing me from running off. I look down, and lo and behold, no pug! I realize that what I'm dealing with is a sudden and violent contraction of my left gluteus maximus and that I still have 10 or so kilometers left to go; I'm phrasing it like that because "I got an ass-cramp" just sounds too embarrassing...

SO, standing on top of a hill, watching the sun going down with my butt going off like an alarmbell as soon as I even think about going above walking speed I'm seemingly left with three options: either I suck it up and ask if I could borrow some passerby's cellphone and call a ride, try to stop a car and ask for one, or I walk home.

For those of you who know me, I think most of you have already realized what I did: seeing as I'm on an island at sunset with nobody in sight and I sure as hell ain't gonna hitch a ride "because I got an ass-cramp", and calling someone on the same grounds is just as humiliating, I decide to keep going. Damnit, it was supposed to be my last half-marathon here, and I sure as hell ain't gonna stop now! I'm just too stubborn to not finish it.

What happened during the next 40 or so minutes is something I'd rather not remember, but I'm pretty sure quite a few people who drove past me have it painted in vivid colors.

Since it's past sunset, there was no way I'd be walking back on this leg, mainly since I'm just too short tempered to walk, so I do what every medical expert and athlete would discourage with flaming passion: I do some first aid stretches that'll at least lessen the pain shooting up through my ass and start running.

I swear, if there was anything I'd want on film, it would've been this jog - every last minute of it. Nothing could possibly beat seeing a 6 feet tall, 20 year old man in the prime of his life running by with a face going from utter pain to masochistic rage to uncontrolled laughter, only to have him suddenly falter, stop and start violently massaging one butt-cheek.

I can think of few things that are more embarrassing than seeing the drivers turn their heads while driving by while you're happily playing grab-ass with yourself with an expression of utter relief painted all over your face. The fact that this scene was repeated every km or so for the next 10 km was quite a mindblowing experience; it may be somebody's cup of tea, but it certainly wasn't mine! I can deal with the 'sharp, fiery pitchfork jabbed into raw meat'- experience, but as quite a shy person I find it feels kinda violating to have people oggle me while I try to soothe my pain - even if I'm forced to do it in public!

But what the hell, at least someone probably got off from watching my ass-grabbing performances, so may as well see it as a service to the community..

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Ugh, I just hate these early weekend mornings...

Why can't they just-

Checks the alarm clock; 11:49

... Had to wake up before noon again...

And there isn't even any decent breakfast aro-.. Hey, leftover chocolate!

...

Damnit, having to wake up here; my bathrobe'n'slippers aren't even here anymore, blah.. *sniff* ... Guess I could use a shower 'bout now.

After shower, trying desperately to pull some socks on.

Pants aint that dirty yet and *sniff-sniff* t-shirt's still fine, I guess. Guess nobody'll notice the stains. Must be drool.. Bit small, though.

Eyes t-shirt.

Yupp , 'Small'... Should've thrown this one out a long time ago, I guess. And I hate yellow shirts.

Moments later, in the bathroom, "grooming"

Damn, sure could use a shave 'bout now. No point in that, though; I ain't going anywhere decent today. No use in putting deodorant on, either. Just went to the shower and nobody outside of the family'll be sniffin' 'round me today.

...

... brushin' the teeth is such a pain today... why bother? One morning without brushed teeth ain't gonna bring the whole world on its knees. 'sides, I can do it later. Ain't nobody who'd be coming by this early in the morning - not even if it's my parents' house. Ugh, guess I could at least go read the newspaper.

Our hero shuffles lazily up the stairs.

Huh. Looks like sis's back. With the dress 's well. Looks like Anna's here t-

"Hi, Joni!"

"O_o ... Hi, Annika!"

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It's settled: I simply haven't accumulated enough stuff yet. Moving all of my stuff to the new crib ( in terms of size) went awfully efficiently and, moreover, painlessly.

It's like you've already gotten your mind over the fact that you're going to have to go through that colonoscopy, only to find out that it was actually mildly pleasant. Not exhilarating, pleasant.

Not much to talk about there, really since there's still some stuff missing ( mainly me), but there's definitely something worth mentioning.

Remember this? Well, ladies and gentlemen, you are now looking at the proud owner ( -to-be) of The Sofa, and above all for a price that surprisingly didn't require the sacrifice of three firstborn goats on the winter solstice. Strangely, after a few well chosen words ( and accompanying legal and other threats), they agreed to sell it off pretty close to my asking price - which is saying pretty much, since at one point I think I required them donating me one...

Of course, seeing as I am yet not in actual posession of Teh Sofa, they still pretty much have my nuts in the grinder, and I expect it to arrive somewhere between the second coming of Jesus and the Mayan Apocalypse...

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I have to be honest with you: not having moved out of the house before left me with quite a bit too much "it'll get dunn" attitude and far too little experience to actually back it up.

That being said, I still found it myself being able to pack my "shit" up surprisingly fast - which either means that I actually am hella-fast, or that I simply don't have enough of said "shit" to actually be able to get a burnout from simply packing up.

Anyway,

seeing as tomorrow will mostly be filled with blood, sweat, a few tears, two angry neighbors and a burnout just waiting to happen, I thought I'd give a slight heads up.

God I suck at writing good beginnings for these things...

But shitty openings aside, you wouldn't believe the things you actually find when you're forced to go through every nook and cranny while having to admit that no, you have no idea why you've saved that... thing. So I thought I'd share.

First off - embarassing photos. Tucked in between the pages of the closest thing I have to Wikipedia ( some people cal them encyclopedias) I found a delightfully embarassing picture of myself, taken by myself, aprox. twelve-thirteen years old, wearing the silliest hat I ever did see ( which I found later on), sporting shades, a screaming face and flaring gangsigns which none of us probably know the actual meaning to. Embarassing in its own right, what I found hilarious was the fact that the kid, ie. moi, was short and slightly chubby, absolutely devastating the small amount of credibility that picture had before I'd decided to slap that hat on.

... No, I won't post it on Vox. In fact, I'm not quite sure where I put it. Luckily...

Moving on.

Actually, no. See, I also found a camera; one of those old, "shoot the whole roll full and then have it developed. Scary thing is, the roll of film seemed full, and was ( as some of you may have deduced already) not developed. The whole fact that I have a roll of undeveloped photos with ( quite probably) incriminating evidence of some kind against someone ( now whose room did I find it in, hmh?) , so simply having it developed is starting to seem like an overwhelming task - not that I'm afraid of what might be in there or that developing them is quite expensive; I just can't take having the cashier lady at the photobooth go "BWAHAH!" when I come back to get them...

While rummaging through the cupboard under the sink I found even more interesting things. Among others, a few packs of Wunder-baums, reminders from my 18th birthday, an obviously broken cd... thingy for computers and my old hip flask, complete with unidentifiable, non-fecal ( though probably still lethal) contents. The fact that it most closely resembled crude oil or that it smelled like your average Chinese restaurant didn't really bother me, but when it started making strange sounds I decided to see if it still had any alcohol in it - enter lighter.

Y'know what? It did.

Now, after sanitizing the flask and having had the local priest come and exorcise any leftover malevolence from it, I'm pretty sure it's safe to drink from it - not that I'm gonna be the one to test it!

... So it's a good thing I have a housewarming party coming up.

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What were you afraid of when you were younger that seems silly to you now?*
Submitted by wandie

You can say a lot about Finnish people; we may be drunkards and fierce, angry warriors, but if there is one thing that everyone born after 1980 has been scared shitless about as a kid, it's the Groke.

To us, she's the bogeyman incarnate ( in fact, most Scandinavians seem to have been suffering from sleepless nights thanks to her). Whenever she was on in an episode of the Moomins, every kid would close their eyes, pull their legs into a fetal position and hide under the table. The woods weren't scary during the winter because they were dark - they were scary because the Groke might be somewhere in there! Big, manly grownups still confess to each other how they couldn't sleep at night or how they get the chills while watching her with their own kids.

I personally can say that whenever the sun had set during the winter, you wouldn't find me walking around outside alone. She was that scary. To demonstrate, I'd like to show you a segment in which the Groke ( or Mörkö in Finnish, alternatively Mårran in Swedish - even if you pronounce it moron, she's still scary) makes her first ever appearance. Pardon the fact that it's in Finnish ( and quite long, for that matter), but in case you've never seen this one, imagine being a five-year old. The creepy music does the trick. Forget little girls in wells or zombie splatterfests, if you want true suspense and horror, watch and learn.

And if you'd like to have something in it translated, I'll gladly help.

Muumit - Mörön ensiesiintyminen

Still creeps me out...

*To be completely honest, I shouldn't be answering this one, since I still don't think it's silly. She still gives me the creeps.

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I don't want to admit it, but every now and then I tend to choose my friends.

No, that's not right; I choose my nerdy friends.

Why?

Like most of you, I use a computer for most things: working, playing, socializing, artwork, writing yadayada. And just as many of you, I generally have no idea or interest to learn about the complex inner workings of that little humming box with the crazy and needlessly colorful blinking LEDs. I don't really care about all that Mac vs. PC crap either, since I think it's just penis-fencing; Macs are silvery and way too expensive, period.

Luckily for us techno-hillbillies, there are people who do think that these things are both important and interesting. Everyone need at least one nerdy friend who knows their hard drives, no pun intended.

Me? I have three of them.

... Nerdy friends, that is. I don't really even know what a hard drive looks like.

Why three?

If I ever get a computer-problem, no matter how utterly complex ( or not) it may be, I call up one of these guys. Always sitting by their computer, they're easy to gain access to and they tend to have the instructions to cure most dial up-diseases I may get. And by pitting them against each other, I've been able to weed out the ( up until now) ever-present condescending tone and sarcastic remarks about my limited mad skillz, my non-1337 h4xx0rzz, my n00bness, if you will. Clean, effective and quick. They give me lip and I threaten to go ask the next guy for help. Never had to resort to actually going there.

So geek friend takes a crack at the 'puter, solves it and we go about our business. I get my problems solved in a jiffy and can go home and prepare for a night out on the town, and they're left feeling content in their superiority and can continue playing online roleplaying-games.

... But to be fair, we all know who's gonna be the one ending up with the villa in St. Tropez, the bank account in Zurich and the trophy wife from their country of choice.

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Since most of the local gang's just a few weeks away from moving out of town and all across the country, me and two of my friends decided to throw a bit of a 'going away'-party. Since normal parties just won't do, me and some of my friends ( and friends of my friends) went on a three-day awayfest in the form of a cruise; an evening of partying on the ship, a hangover-day in Stockholm followed by yet another evening of partying on the return ship. A bit of "airing it out" after work, the army, moving out: everything, really.

So who'd have thought I'd start liking a city so much?

Even though it's just on the other side of the gulf, most of my trips to Stockholm have been the starting-off point to places other than the capitol, Stockholm mostly just being a through-fare, so actually getting to spend a day there after who knows how long really felt great. Being the least hung over ( due to the fact that I'm not a binge drinker) in a group of binge drinkers did feel a bit awkward, naturally, but seeing as it was our going away-party, I just kept thinking I wouldn't be seeing them for quite some time after.

( That thought only strengthened when one of the import-drunks decided to try and hit on a nun...)

Luckily, ditching a pack of raving drunks in a metropolis isn't exactly an overwhelming feat, so I was pretty quickly able to go about my own business - that mainly being admiring the buildings, shopping and every so often glancing at the local girls - let's be honest: Swedish girls do, in fact, tend to be awfully cute... And surprisingly well-endowed...

So OK, going shopping and checking out a few museums ( the local Museum of Modern Art and Architecture was nice, though) isn't exactly what you'd expect a guy in his twenties to do when he's suffering from a slight hangover, but then again, you wouldn't expect him to change clothes in the middle of a crowded sidewalk, pants and all, either, huh? ( God, I'm glad I wasn't there to witness that one...)

 And 'sides, I found a great book, even if 'great' never had a more relative meaning, since I don't think most people think of a +500-page tome on structural engineering and architectural construction "fascinating", but to me finding something like that was like realizing your local supermarket got a batch of Manolo Blahniks and have no idea what the fetching price for them should be. I'm all glee. And the local Italian restaurant I hit for dinner was all that as well. And cheap, too.

As it is now, I'm starting to think if there'd be any possibility for me to find some sort of corresponding concentrations that I could use as an excuse to go studying there for a year or two. It was love at first "våfan??".

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• The slowest-moving people always walk in the middle of the sidewalk. There's gotta be some unknown Law of [Whatever] which states that walking past these people in an even slightly agreeable manner without looking like an absolute ass is, and will forever be, impossible. Either live with it, or jump over the curb and get splattered back onto it by an Renault Clio.
• Old ladies have, at some point, lost ( or at least seemingly) their capability to pass by anyone; it's either straight forward or... well. I get it, they're old, they live off the forced empathy of others because of their latest hit of osteoporosis, but Lord help me, if I'm standing in the middle of the fudging square, you wouldn't expect them to nearly walk into you and wait for you to move before actually changing course! ( All the while muttering things about "dem teens" which, frankly, are too profane to be mentioned here. They've lived through some vocabulary...)
• People who ride bikes on the wrong ( left) side of the pavement never turn to look if anyone's coming on the right ( right) side when they turn. No biggy, until you realize that the jerk in front of you decides to make you their sidekick in next week's episode of "Scarred".
• Mother's in their mid 30's with four closely aged pre-school kids are the most dangerous people in traffic. Forget suicidal bikers, anyone gets close to these bit-... ladies is gonna have hell to pay. You dare ring your bell in a humble request to have two of their kindergarten-congregation slightly move to the side and you'll quickly find yourself hitting both a verbal wall and an ( ironically) widening wall of 5-year-olds, making a faceplant due to tripping over a bunch of toddlers taste so much more bittersweet.
• Girls in their late teens/early twenties are the ones that most likely will stare you down, man or woman, regardless of how you fare in traffic. Easiest to mow down, though.
• Big people in Small cars: Stay. The. Fuck. Away from them. They've got an unfulfilled mean streak that'd make most murder-convicts blush.

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It seems acquiring my Übersofa means having to deal with a few bumps on the road, as well. Now that I've finally gotten the dealer to sell me one anywhere in the country, the only issue is the price.

For future reference, I'd like to state that my sister has the very same Sofa, for which she paid around 880€ at the time ( approx. 2 years ago).

This is the deal the local dealer gave me for the same sofa, though in a completely different ( and utterly less über) color, was between 1115€ and 1240€. OK, inflation's bitten me in the ass, but it's still reasonable ( unless you were a sane shopper).

I'd also like to state that the only change to that deal which I wanted so badly, was the color. Nothing else.

Here's what the representative wanted me to fork out for that little aesthetic change.

Are you ready?

1450€.

No. Fuck you. I'd rather shear my 'nads and make a quilt out of my pubes than admit that 880€ to 1450€ is still "reasonable". It's not, and if lil' miss corporate representative thinks otherwise ( or that I'd be so desperate that I'd settle for that), she's pretty God Damn Mistaken!

*sigh*

... I guess we have to use the less reasonable methods now...

For the record, I really wouldn't have wanted to.

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