Haven’t had the time or the energy to update the blog in a while again. I must admit that it’s mostly because I’ve been lacking the energy – I’ve been at the computer a few times, but have just surfed the web instead of writing. Caught a slight cold and it’s really been making me lethargic. And instead of resting like a good little drone, I’ve been out and about. People to see. Places to go to. Things to do.
It’s the year 2007, around the beginning of March. I’ve just come back home from a short-yet-awesome trip to Sweden, where I was listening to some music. Even if I didn’t really have any time on the trip to do anything besides go to the said gig, I had an awesome time. The trip was damn well worth it.
Granted, I am at the moment sitting in front of my computer, writing a blog entry on the said trip. I have a need to make it sound as cool as humanly possible – the original plan for me was to go there with a friend, and he decided to bail on me at the last moment. Thus I’m making the blog post to rub it in, make sure he won’t make the same mistake twice. Well, to tell the truth, he got ill, so he sort of has an excuse. But nevertheless I did end up in Stockholm all alone, without anyone to share the experience with. So I have to make it sound like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. He’d do the same for me if I couldn’t have made it.
Now, I might want make the blog post sound like that, but the fact is, looking back, that the whole experience was really awesome. The band performed very differently on stage than on disc and I was left with a feeling of “wow, cool” when I was walking out from Berns.
And Berns.
Oh boy, is that venue wonderful or what. It’s really classic. Sort of like our Wanha, except ten times as cool. And at the trip, I had a wonderful opportunity to compare the local party populace with us Finns. And I can comment so much – we lack style. A long way to go for us in this department.
Berns in all the glory.
I keep talking about the year 2007 (or, as I usually tend to refer to it “a couple of years ago”) a lot these days. The reason for that is the fact that I’m living it again. The things that I did and that were a part of my life back then are part of it now. To give a perfect example – Go back to the point where I said “It’s the year 2007″ (before the photo, a couple of paragraphs up. Yeah, there.) and replace that with “It’s the year 2010″. And suddenly you can read the story of last Wednesday. Yeah. Things are happening in amazing replay motions. Again. And I’m left wondering how on earth did that happen.
Sure, the stories are not identical, but still eerily similar… Basically, the previous time I went to Berns to see a gig it was 2007, and the band playing was Nouvelle Vague. Last Wednesday it was La Roux. In 2007, it was Lou who was down with a stomach flu and had to cancel the trip, this year Mitch had some sort of a … thing. Dunno really. Probably just a two-day long hangover. And so on and so forth. But the basic big picture stays the same and a fact remains.
2007 is haunting me.
The work I’m doing these days is disturbingly similar to the stuff I was doing back then in many ways (wish I could discuss it in more detail, but NDAs are damned strict). And of course, like I’ve mentioned, there are suddenly people who I haven’t heard from in three years, who have come back to be a part of my life.
Small things. Synchronicity. The combined effect makes me feel like I’m getting thrown back through time and living an old lifetime of mine.
Now. In my life I’ve been a goth, a raver, a computer geek, an academic, an office worker, an archivist, an artist, a lumberjack, a mathematician, a musician. Okay, not a good musician, but you should hear my rendition of Greensleeves on the classical guitar before making any final call on that. I’ve been left wing, right wing. I’ve been green, red and blue. I’ve been a mystic, a scholar, a scientist, a doer, a thinker. I’ve been this and I’ve been that. And the change can be sort of a sudden from being one thing to being something completely different.
While it’s not really a change that shows on the outside so well, it’s still quite apparent in who I deal with and how I spend my days – When I considered myself a goth, I don’t think I ever wore black clothes, dyed my hair black, or wore makeup. I did however, listen to the music, hung around with people who had an appreciation to the lifestyle, and drank Snakebites. And while I don’t own a flannel shirt or an axe to remind me from the days I was chopping down trees in Pirkanmaa, my life was about being in the nature and discussing the finer details of various chainsaws. I didn’t get myself a pair of trendy black-rimmed glasses when I became a graphic designer, but it doesn’t mean that I am any less a graphic designer – macs, trendy coffee and disdain for those coders, who just don’t understand what I’m talking about, fill my head.
Luckily my closest friends and family have gotten pretty used to this over the years, so they know how to cope. The essentials of me don’t really change, so they stick around, even if the crowd around me tends to keep changing.
Now, I’ve had this feeling of living an old lifetime a few times before. I remember having a similar deja vu some half a dozen years ago when I had somehow ended up back at the Helsinki University of Technology after swearing never to go there again. That was also the time I decided I needed a really big change and went to the forestry route.
But this time the weird thing is that it doesn’t feel bad to be back here. Sure, I get the sensation of ”wait, this again?” every now and then, when going to Sweden again to listen to a gig, or talking with people who I had thought disappeared, but the fact is that I think I’ve missed this life the past few years.
At least it’s fun to write about.
P.S. Mitch. Damn the gig was great. You should have been there. The band was awesome and the people were just the sort you would have enjoyed meeting. And the weather was perfect. Everything was shiny!