It’s late 2009. I’ve been single now for a couple of months, and I don’t really like it. I’d managed to get used to being in a relationship and it’s been quite hard for me to come back from that. I am quite lost, to be honest. I’m spending too much time thinking about the good things that were, the places we’d gone to, the way things were, and not focusing on what’s going on in my life right now. I’m trapped in the past.

Now, in your mind’s eye, add to this picture, of a man torn by a break-up, the ever darkening Finnish nights and some other really depressing things .. Just something, whatever helps you get into the proper mood – your mother going into surgery, your cat dying, chronic illness. I admit that the things that were bringing me down weren’t really that bad, but when you’re down, everything feels so much worse. So humor me and let your imagination run wild.

Anyhow. It’s a Tuesday, I’m working on some dead-end project that will never, ever get finished. A friend lets me know some more bad news on an IM and after spending a day of fixing other peoples’ problems, I decide I need a break from it all.

I check my bank account. Not much, but enough to get the hell away from Finland for a weekend. I can worry about other things, like living, later.

I surf to a weather service website and start looking at places in the Southern Europe.

Lisbon. Nice, but rains on Saturday.

Rome. Not really nice, in fact it’s a damn storm there all weekend.

Athens. +20°C. Sunny. 4 hours more sunlight per day than Finland. I can live with that.

Next thing I know, it’s Friday and I’m sitting on a plane. Thinking of where I used to fly half a year earlier and how nice that was. Yeah, trapped in the past.

I check in the hostel, drop my bags there and head out into the night. This is the thing I do when in a new city. Walk. Let the city soak in. I come back to the hostel some 5 hours later, but feeling oddly distant to it all. Feels like something’s blocking my senses. I shrug and go to sleep.

Saturday comes and it’s time to go be a tourist, go sightseeing.

The city is a tourist trap. People are selling “THIS IS SPARTA!” t-shirts everywhere. That pretty much sums Athens up.

I am bothered by that sense of “I’m numb” that was there already on the previous night and that still lingers. To fight it I decide to head to the harbor. There’s something about watching big ships always eases my mind, so should be perfect.

I can’t get all the way to the harbor using the Metro since there is some track repair being done, so I continue my trip by walking alongside the tracks. It’s a beautiful day, but the lights and sounds are still strangely muted.

An hour or so later, I decide I should probably take a break. The harbor is further away than I would have thought.

A rustic park bench near an old café is a perfect spot to refreshen myself with some mineral water from a plastic bottle. My eyes wander on the view. The building across the street looks really pretty and I think ”You look so much like that one café corner in Norway, where we…”

And it hits me like a jolt of electricity.

A momentary clarity, a crack in the caul that’s surrounding my senses. Light pouring through into the gray.

It’s not a building in Norway. It doesn’t look anything like that corner in Norway.

I gulp down the water in my mouth, audibly gasp, start panting.

The world is spinning. I notice the tears flowing on my cheeks as I struggle to grasp a hold of the moment.

One memory peels away from clouding my senses after the other.

The palm tree doesn’t remind me of the flowers on that one window sill. The picture of that cat is not like the cat we saw when walking down that street.

I don’t know how long I sit there. I know I’ve been crying. And when I manage to focus again, the world looks different.

I look at the corner across the street. It’s no longer the street corner in Norway and the air doesn’t smell like Latvian summer, and my mind isn’t lost in what has been. The corner is a corner in Athens. I breathing Athens air. I am in Athens.

I jog back to the city. To the first mall I can find. Buy myself a notebook and a pen, and park myself at a café. Here I order giant cups of caramel flavored cafe latte and start writing while I feel like I can still grasp a hold of the moment.

When the place closes, I’ve written 22 pages. Of what has been, what is, who I am, what I want. A complete account of the relationship and my personal thoughts on what it was, thoughts that I’ll never share with anyone. I wobble back to the hostel, send a text message to the ex explaining some things and fall asleep.

The clarity of mind remains even the next morning.

I’m awake, I’m in Athens.

It’s Sunday. It’s winter. It’s 2009.

Besides ripping the caul from around my psyche that had stopped me from enjoying the moment, I have made a strange realization when writing down things. I have recognized the situations where I have been happy in my life.

I spend my last day in Athens walking the same sights I’ve seen the previous days, but this time it feels like I’m seeing them for the first time. I am no longer suffocating.

Monday comes, I hop on a plane, head home. There is a 4 hour stop at Zürich. I am coming home. What do I want to do next?

When I said I realized when I have been happy in my life, I am talking about two situations. When I’ve been at a good relationship, or when I’ve been working in a day job I’ve been good at. I know I need to quit being a Freelancer if I want to sort out my life. I need steady income, and I like the simplicity that comes with working for someone.

I run out of Euro coins surfing on the internet terminal. Buy a sandwich with the last credit on my credit card. Sit back down to read the book. My phone rings.

“Hi, this is <the big boss> from <the company>. You used to work for us a few years ago and you’ve at some point left us a job application. Would you still be interested in coming back to work for us? Want to come over to the office and talk about it today?”

“Well, actually, I’m in Zürich just now, but how about tomorrow?”

On Wednesday, I’m at work.

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!

I’ve had it easy.

Too easy, I feel sometimes.

Especially after listening to people who’ve had trouble in their lives or who have had to endure hardships to get where they are now. Not me. I come from an upper middle-class family. Neither of my parents have an academic background or come from old money families. They worked their way through life to get to a comfortable life. Sailed the high seas, enduring the harsh storms, the risk of being killed by pirates and worst of all, the constant drunken banter their fellow sailors. All this so that, as my mother put it, “I could have a better life than they’ve had.”

So, I grew up in the suburbs of Helsinki, surrounded by other upper middle class families. A very monocultural environment, to be honest. Well-off people, houses with backyards, well-educated folk who had decided to start building a family. I lived in a neighborhood that never really had any problems with crime, or anything else, come think of it. When I was younger, one could pretty much leave your front door open during the days and wouldn’t have to worry about someone breaking in (except for us kids, who could come in and steal your cookies).

A sheltered environment to say the least. My early childhood was very easy.

First 9 grades, I went to the local school, which was filled with us upper middle class kids. The teachers were patient and brilliant, and I was a quiet nerd. The type that was more interested in getting good grades than getting into trouble. Not that there were many kids who were trouble there. The school bully (who later went to business school) would have gotten his butt kicked if he had ventured a couple of neighborhoods east and tried to tease someone there. And not by the bullies there trying to protect their turf. But the losers, who were probably tougher than he was. So, there we were, the young nerds, surrounded by people who weren’t a danger to anyone, studying hard. Shining in things like Mathematics and Physics. And in the evenings, we went to soccer practice and attended boy scout meetings as we were expected to.

From there, I went into a gymnasium (the next step in the academic route of Finnish school system) that was just one step below the “elite” schools here. Quite close to home and again, very safe environment to be in – made good friends, had very high quality teachers, participated in raising the school spirit. And stayed out of trouble. The wonderful thing about being in a good school that’s not an elite one is, that the social norm wasn’t academic overachieving – you could actually have a good time while you were studying. Good time meaning something else than debating about chess or which was the best Star Trek episode ever. In case you didn’t already guess, I started to get out of my “I am an antisocial nerd” cocoon at this point. And even if I there wasn’t too much pressure to succeed, I still got away with a nice grade average.

After gymnasium, it was University.

In Finland, you apply to a University, go take an entrance exam, and if you pass, you’re in. No need to prove your worth year after year. Just once. Once you’re in, you can study for 10 years if you want. This means that for the popular places, you need to really shine to get in. Not uncommon for people to apply for a few places, and if they don’t get where they want, they start studying somewhere else (maybe somewhere that’s that’s a bit like what they wanted to) and then try again to get in the next year. Not unheard of for people to try for five or more years to get to the local Law or Medical Schools.

I got in Helsinki University of Technology on the first try. Computer Science, which was one of the harder ones there. Since that entrance exam, I have applied and gotten in to some other places as well. Metropolia, Åbo Akademi and University of Helsinki. I’ll hopefully get to tell the stories of these transitions at some point in the future as well, but they’re a bit beside the point just now. The only school where I have applied to and haven’t gotten in is the local Art/Design school. So, I’ve been able to study what I’ve been interested in, where-ever I’ve been living. Without extra hassle.

My studies at the Helsinki University of Technology got interrupted when a friend needed a hand with a work thing he was doing and I promised to go help him out for a while. Didn’t have to raise a finger and got a nice job to do while studying. That’s the way it’s been ever since. I know people who know people who need professionals like me. I haven’t been to a job interview where I didn’t already have a foot in the door somehow.

I’ve had it easy. I still have it easy.

You can hate me now if you want to.

And you can bet your ass that it’s not as simple as I just made it sound. I’ll just write about the bad stuff later.

Now I’m off to pack, as my flight to Dubai leaves in about 16 hours.