conceptually elsewhere.

so i went to a christening today: friends of mine have recently become parents, and they've settled on a name for their child [1]. as is custom for finns and other peoples, this warrants a celebration with family and friends.

that said, i have found finns to be incredibly welcoming. in comparison, i often feel uncouth and ill-mannered.

having lacked any good sense, i forgot to ask someone whether it is common to bring a gift for the newborn .. and while walking to the destination, i wondered what a 4-month old would want ..

..if (s)he, for that matter, would want anything other than mother's milk and warmth and love: things that i can clearly not offer.

confused and utterly uncertain, i stopped walking and thought for a moment. then it came to me and i walked to the nearest store.

---

[a few minutes later ..]

my friend: "ah, my dear grey_ghost, glad you could come!.. but what do you have there?"
me: "oh, i figured that the baby would receive many gifts, so i thought i'd bring something for her poor parents .."

[i hand my friend a box.]

friend: "ah, these are very good chocolates .."
me: ".. but as adults, we mustn't set a bad example and eat too much refined sugar! so i brought these, too."

[i hand my friend a grocery bag.]
[the friend smiles, confused.]

friend: "clementines ..?"
me: "they're full of vitamins!"

[nearby guests start laughing]

friend: "well, very thoughtful as usual .."

---

sometimes i really like the manner of mathematicians and other academics. it's liberating to be allowed our eccentricities. (-:



[1] heretofore the christening celebration, it's quite common in finland for the baby to be without a name. in the case of my friends, their baby was "the baby" for 4 ¹/₂ months.

it's 1am on an april evening and it's snowing outside. i guess winter doesn't end so easily in helsinki. it's not cold, though, not as cold as the days in february when, every day, i looked up the temperatures and wondered how many sweaters to wear.

things have slowed down, as i expected. i've had essentially two full weeks from traveling and without having to worry about traveling. i'm struggling with a new problem (to me, anyway) that i don't expect any progress, because others must have thought about it, too .. to no avail.

i want to spend april entirely in finland .. which is not to say that i won't travel around easter, see what turku is like. for a little while i thought about visiting copenhagen or stockholm or even åland .. say, for one day, stay overnight if time is a factor. without my currently-misplaced camera, though, the fun of a solitary holiday cuts by half.

tickets have become expensive, as well.

i don't know how to take a holiday, really. most of the time i've just followed along other people: my family, friends with more vision than me, and girlfriends at the time with more pointed wants than me.

so it's been 3 months, a little more, since my last update. somehow acknowledging that fact seems damning, in some way ..

either that this platform is on its way out, for me,
or that i'm on my way out, nothing new in my life to write about.

that isn't quite true, though.

i'm moving to new york;
i'll write more about it, soon enough.

---

my mind feels quiet, most of the time.
i don't think i'm as fearless or inventive as i used to be.

maybe mathematics has really sunked its claws in me, leaving no more mindspace for anything else. like any good obsession, it has this way of breeding new question after old, even in the rare chance that you've sprung upon an answer.

---

i'm still uncertain about the smiling girl, my climbing partner and drinking buddy (of sorts). i think the window of opportunity has passed, and we're fated to be just friends.

that's fine, i guess.

i don't want to sound resigned, but i don't know what i want out of this. if that's the case .. that i really don't know what i want .. then i have no business starting anything. often that only ends in disaster. the few times i've thrown caution to the wind and kissed the girl ..

.. eventually, those didn't end well.

then again, nothing ever seems to end well, when it comes to love and romance. by necessity it has to deviate from the joy and bliss of young passion, right? put simply, either the relationship breaks up or one person dies of old age.

as time runs to infinity, the odds of a happy ending vanish to nil.

i'm talking in abstractions. these vague, self-referential musings must be hard for you, the reader, to follow.

call it rust, i guess. i can write about maths, i can update my status to complain or attempt something amusing .. but as the years go by, i find it harder to talk about my life. maybe it's because it's fading away into a routine.

---

i guess this is some news:

my ex came to visit, last weekend .. not visiting me, of course. (she has colleagues at the university, so she's visiting from her postdoc in sweden.) it surprised me that she called me to go bouldering; the last time we spoke, i thought she never wanted to see me again.

i guess everything in life is subject to change, after all.

i guess i also realised how little i actually talk when in person, these days. maybe it's because i'm out of practice, that the street language is finnish and it's odd to interrupt it with english. maybe i'm developing the finnish sense of quiet.

spending most of a single day together, it was a little uncomfortable, hearing her talk so much .. about everything. anything was up for discussion, important or trivial. for most of that time i was hard-pressed to think of anything to say.

it even feels strange to mention it.
maybe i take too much stock in saying only what seems to be interesting.

so recently i met a girl, but now i'm a bit mixed up.

the best way to describe it is a kind of infatuation which, according to ze google, means:

Be inspired with an intense but short-lived passion or admiration for.

as for the other online dictionaries, most of the entries qualify this as an "unreasoned" passion .. which sounds about how i would typically use the word.

granted, i don't know if reason and love are particularly well-correlated, or more generally, logic and emotion. to bring things further down to earth, i have known few, if any, persons who have convinced themselves logically to pursue a romantic relationship. [1]

as long as i'm dissecting my thoughts anyway ..

.. there are several factors that obscure the situation. one is the novelty of the situation: i just met her. another is taste: i genuinely think she's a really cool and adorable person.

however, we humans aren't always spot on with figuring out why we feel the way we feel. in one psychological experiment, depending on how sturdy and high a bridge is, men are more likely to ask a woman out.

that said, i mightn't know until later whether i really like this girl or not. [2]

---

still, i think she's really cool. the best way to describe it is that she delights me.

up to cultural differences, some people are easily likable. she's generous with smiles and laughs, easy with making funny faces. i can't help but want to make her laugh.

i think she's pretty, and i know she looks amazing in a dress. having thought about this for longer than i'd care to admit,

she's more cute than hot, which is fine by me.

i admire hot, attractive women, but maybe i'm too much of a fanboy, watched too much pop-scifi. to me, there is some connection between "hot" and the theme of violence. hot, dolled up women are like warships on the high seas: they will shoot you down and it's only known to them where they will dock for the night.

like a few others i've met, she has this adorable cuteness that is mellow but overpowering. if those hot femme fatales are like warships, then she is like the waves, the oceans. you notice the ships, perhaps become interested or wary at them, but in the end the sea fixates you, the rise and rhythmic crashing of waves happily soothing and hypnotic.

---

i'm not giving you much of a mental picture of this girl, but that's not the point:

the point is that i feel something,
it seems creepy to me,
but i want to say it anyway.

i've met many women and girls who have struck me strongly, all in different ways. a few of them still do, despite the months and years. sometimes i feel like i fall in love (or into infatuations) over and over again and in varying degrees of fixation.

despite being sufficiently well-adjusted, i can't convince myself that i'm a particularly good addition in someone's life. there's a recurring pattern in all of my past relationships that i can't seem to shake off:

after a while, after the glow of infatuation dims in brightness, i become colder. i become grey again.

i used to think that it was about work .. and to some extent, it still is.

more precisely, it's about not being able to be alone or be willingly lost for a spell of days, while i wander at length through my thoughts. sometimes i think my introversion goes to extremes.

it's also about not being fully understood.

maybe it's a habit ingrained in me from years as a mathematical researcher, but i find so many things hard to say because of scale, nuance, and prerequisite. it sounds like i'm being stuck up and believe myself brilliant, but i only mean that some things deserve to be said fully and appropriately.

in the beginning, when you meet a girl and would happily stay up all night talking and sharing things that matter, she willingly listens to my prattle and minutiae .. but eventually this patience saps away. regular life comes in the way, with errands and schedules and will this take long?

i can't convince myself that it's worth forcing someone to sit for a minute and pay firm attention to me [3]. my ideas mean something to me, but they aren't that worthwhile. then again, i'm not happy otherwise.

it's a sorry thing when you realise that you are in the way of your own happiness. more precisely, the tragedy is having two incompatible but equally dear ingredients to your happiness, and you must choose between them.

---

that said, back to the girl:

i still think she's adorable, i can't tell if she likes me, and i don't know if i'm leaving helsinki in 8 months (and that this is meant to end in crisis).

all i know is that i want to keep rock climbing with her, have a beer together, maybe occasionally go dancing with her and the loose group of expatriates that are our mutual acquaintances.

if something happens, then it's a happy chaos in my life.
if not .. then that's hardly surprising, isn't it?


[1] in fact, my last breakup came about because (at the time) i didn't see a future for her and me. despite feeling perfectly logical, it was the worst i ever felt about anything for a while.

[2] the older i get, the more of a cold-hearted S.O.B. i become. i blame this on getting better at being alone, which tends to petrify idiosyncrasy (or so i suspect, anyway) ..

[3] this is somewhat long, for a blog post. if you've read this thing to the end and not thought me stuffy, boring, or crazy, then thanks:

i appreciate your appreication.

at the moment i find it too troublesome to write about helsinki, simply because i don't know where to begin. instead i thought i'd write about something mundane in my life.

if i have one gift, it's how to discuss the obvious.


i like classical music. it's not that i know very much about it, but i find it soothing. this will probably offend true fans of the genre, but i like it because i can ignore some of it, choose my level of involvement ..

.. most of the time i listen to it absently at home, letting it play in the background. the notes rise and fall, collide together in decisive patterns of varying scales. i enjoy what broad strokes and few subtleties that my ear catches.

it's not at all like human conversation.

when people are talking to you, then ideally you are supposed to listen and to remember quickly. it's good manners, at any rate.

just like i was once able to remember new names easily, i used to have no problem keeping track of what's been said in a conversation and who said it.

in the last few years, though, it's become harder. maybe my mind more easily wanders. maybe i'm meeting more people than usual, causing a greater neural load on my poor memory. maybe i'm just imagining things.

regardless of cause, i've lately been more apt to ask others to repeat themselves. it's bad manners, but i think most people forgive me when i listen earnestly and more carefully the second time.

snippets of conversation can annoy me, just like everyone else. if you believe recent studies, perhaps it's because they are hard to predict.

melodies, by comparison, have a conceptually simpler flow to me.

a few missing words in a conversation: that's all it takes to throw me into confusion. like a driver who's missed a green light and has to suffer the cross-traffic, i stall impatiently and wait again for the topic to make sense, for something i can follow.

on the other hand, musical patterns have no a priori meaning to me, so a loss of information matters less. in that sense, classical music is not so much cars in traffic as a single kayak in a river's stream: losing one current, i can still catch another melody quickly, go along my merry way.


the academic life of a research is changing me, i think. the solitude is getting to me.

it's just past 3pm and i cannot see much daylight outside. the sun is setting. it looks bleak, almost hopeless .. not that i feel hopeless about my life, but ..

it's much like the silence you might experience if you've spent any significant amount of time alone, not talking to anyone. the first time you notice, it's not a big deal. then you "hear" it again, and again a little later. the logical side of you knows that silence is the default setting, so you shouldn't be surprised that it's there ..

.. but this happenstance, the void of silence, just grows bigger and bigger, until it becomes a kind of entity that refuses to leave you alone. it doesn't mean you harm, but it won't leave, either.

it's strange to say, since ideas like darkness and cold and silence and infinity are literally defined as the negations of certain quantities. if i've learned anything so far, this winter, it's that the darkness is a thing.

so it's been 3 months in finland, close to 3 weeks since i've found my own flat and arranged things to .. close enough to livable.

---

before moving here, i thought i'd be posting every day about my new experiences and tribulations and about the new sights that i'd witness, with my "foreign" eyes. i thought that you'd all be sick of hearing from me.

for reasons hard to tell, i guess the opposite's happened.

life hasn't been that busy,
but it has the tendency to throw obstacles in the way.

---

well, some reasons are easy to say. this is my fifth trip to finland, but by far the longest. during graduate school and my first postdoc, i had many friends and colleagues from finland or who had lived there.

so coming here wasn't full of surprises. i received (and still receive) a lot of good advice about day-to-day life, changed some of my habits, yet still learning how it all works.

put simply, the big recurring question in my mind has been:

is it me, or is it finland?

---

i don't read or speak any of the finnish language, so every little trip out of doors and into the street feels like an excursion into jabberwocky. on the tram ride to work, often i catch myself mouthing the words on signs and billboards, wondering how exactly the pronunciation goes .. but not being curious enough to ask anyone.

oddly enough, on some buses, when i press the button for the next stop, a sign flashes at the front, labeled "stop." it took me a while before i realised it was out of place: why would the sign be in english? my best guess is either that the transit department is willing to facilitate the experience of foreigners, or that the buses were pre-manufactured in an english-speaking country, and it didn't seem like a big deal.

it's not just wishful thinking on my part. for instance, it must be recorded in my debit card that i cannot communicate in finnish or in swedish. every time i swipe it, it takes a few seconds before the display translates to english and asks me to "insert my PIN and press ok."

quite accommodating, that!

suffice it to say that i've been lazy,
been up to my usual ways.

this just goes to show you that nothing is foolproof. for example .. it's 4:24 on finnish time. in any circumstance i should not be writing any kind of blog post .. still, i seems that i remembered my password and could steady my fingers well enough to start typing in this text box that will become a blog post.

i blame nico, that fvcking silver-tongued devil of an italian. when i think about it i should have stayed home, read stephenson's the .. cryptonomicon, which i hear has a large part about alan turing. [1]

no matter. nico is not a liar, but heäs quite self-assured. on the way to the pub he told me about numerology, in the sense that some combinations of girls are impossible and that no man can have a word in edgewise, while in some combinations, there is .. up to personality, a winning strategy to bed a girl.

i took this as italian bravado, the sort of boasting that occurs either before or after a drunken revelry in smoky pubs.

---

real life is not quite like poker, but some parts are.

while at the second pub, nursing my third beer, i saw people swaying, finnish men tilting their chins to talk to shorter finnish women. the biological imperative ..

.. and suddenly i think i have a "meta" moment. i'm thining about the moment, while children-now-turned-adults are dancing to songs that i remember on the radio, swaying, batting eyelashes, giving cold shoulders, ordering drinks in relatively silent defeat.

i feel detached, somewhat inhuman. it's probably for that reason why i can tell you what i see.

my suspicion is that the best gamblers know the odds but that they do not compute. there is a human element, the part that can trick other minds that they know something more than what anyone can compute .. something irrational and illogical that cannot so easily be modeled, yet exists in a very real way ..

.. like watching a woman, with her girlfriends, yet deciding that now is precisely the right time to cut in, sway as she sways, and suddenly you and she are dancing ..

.. well, that's what i see anyway. nico's dancing with a lithe creature of a woman, someone who is dancing for others to watch and apparently it's working.

that's him. as for me, i warily eye the taps, and sigh. finnish beer, eh? and so i order something that i regret least, see if nico's luck will keep .. or run out.


[1] this just goes to show you either how shιtty programming is, or how capable is the human mind. by rights i should never have been able to access my lj account and posted this message ..

.. or there could be a third option: that perhaps, in my deepest part of the soul, i will always have a partly sound mind .. sufficiently sound, at any rate, to be coherent and for you, my readers, to follow this uneasy narrative that is one night of my life.

my habits are changing, even after just one week in finland.

* * *

i'm eating out less. restaurants are more expensive here. since i got off the plane, 8 days ago, i can count the number of times i've eaten out with one hand ..

.. which is still a lot, but not bad for someone who's staying in a hotel-like environment. (i also don't count the university cafeteria as eating out, otherwise i'm probably eating out all the time.)

once was because i was tired from the flight from iceland,

once was seeing old friends and i could not turn down authentic, home-cooked russian food.

once was the evening after a series of talks, at the department, and we were showing the speakers hospitality,

and tonight was because a film was showing at the cinema at 7, and i didn't feel like rushing back and forth from home to make something. (besides, i'm low on groceries already.) that said, it was a really good film, but a less-than-mediocre kebab.

there's hardly the same bar culture here as in pittsburgh. sometimes i would just have a beer at a bar, and then get around to something to eat, like a sandwich or a small pizza. it seems here that finns tend just to drink at bars, not eat ..

.. which makes sense, for reasons of health. pub food tends to be greasy, high-calorie stuff (though indulgently good) and it's probably best to test the temptation at the roadside grilli, after the bars are closed and you're stumbling home.



so i'm cooking more often. meat is more expensive here -- not that i bought much, when i was on my own in pittsburgh -- even ground beef. (i suppose that it's costly to raise animals in this country, especially with the climate.) it's even more incentive for me to continue my home vegetarian ways.

that said, it's quite fun.

good, affordable produce is easier to obtain, though, and i could swear that the variety is greater. even vegetable stands in the subway station offer a lot: piles of cranberries and blueberries and lingonberries. chanterelle mushrooms and fresh peas (in their pods) must be in season, as well. i've seen them all over the place.

on a related note: sauteed brussel sprouts are particularly good, especially with garlic and a little white wine vinegar. i recommend parboiling them though, for a few minutes, because it'd otherwise be difficult to cook them through in a pan.

i still intend to write about california, but lately i've been busy (again) with packing. maybe i'll write about it on the flight to helsinki.

speaking of packing: for a while yesterday i was completely fixated on t-shirts.

---

despite the length of the stay, packing for finland felt much like packing for a long workshop.

the odd thing is that my mathematical materials are easy:
just bring "everything."

the folders full of notes regarding problems that i'm working on,
the printouts of drafts with comments on them, so that i can edit the new version,

the books that i use the most and will cite in papers.

so that's the easy part. clothes are actually harder, to me, because it's tricky to predict which ones i'll need. for example, i caved and packed a dark blue suit jacket and slacks, in case i'll attend a hooding party or a wedding ..

.. which is not out of the question: i was invited to a wedding in helsinki, last summer, but the timing was off.

all in all, though, it's good to be a mathematician. we attend conferences in jeans and t-shirts, maybe bring a button-up shirt for the specific day of our talk and for the banquet (if it's fancy).

so i'm bringing jeans, khakis, and slacks, but no shorts. (it's already a high of 65'F in Helsinki, and won't get much warmer.)

i'm taking with me an acceptable host of button up shirts, a few warm sweaters, my running clothes, my climbing gear ..

.. so the last thing to deliberate are t-shirts.

---

the trouble with t-shirts is the very thing that makes them useful:
they are very versatile.

a t-shirt can be a fashion statement or an undershirt, so it's good to have a supply of both kinds;

it's good to have a reasonable spectrum of color, too; a few years ago i essentially wore only grey t-shirts, and people started asking if i were depressed [1].

lastly, it's good to mix solid colors and logos, in order to make poignant those days when you're in a mood and you want your t-shirt to address it [2]. i used to own this bright red tie-dye shirt, for instance, and would wear it if it had been several days of gloomy-grey, rainy days.

so i set aside 25 t-shirts, with hopes of narrowing down the total number. in the end i think i made it down to 18 -- which isn't counting those worn-out t-shirts i wear, while running.

on a slightly related note: rolling up t-shirts in cylinders saves a nontrivial amount of luggage space, as opposed to folding them in parcels. by my rough estimation, 5 rolled t-shirts take the same volume as 3 folded ones.




[1] i wonder what people would have said if i wore only black shirts? would i look angry? in mourning? bitter?

[2] i used to own a black t-shirt that said: "i do what the voices in my head tell me to do." few would ask about it, but to those that did, i'd say negative answers like 'well, they're not telling me not to answer you.'