Cautiously Optimistic

Congratulations to President Obama.

Local council elections / Finland

I noticed that I am not able to vote in the local council elections of my previous dear home city Helsinki. Makes sense, since I’ve already actually voted in Delft (my vote went for GroenLinks, although nowadays, knowing a bit more, I would probably cast it for SP). But anyway.

Plenty of my friends were happy to vote and some were even taking part:

Helsinki

Yuri Akseli Höykinpuro (The Left Alliance)

Eva Isaksson (Greens)

J. Pekka Mäkelä (Greens)

Espoo

Jerri Kämpe (Swedish Party)

Tampere

Anukaisa Alanen (Greens)

Alas, none of them was actually elected. The Helsinki council got a bit weird, with a so-called “multiculturalism critic” gaining a large number of votes. We’ll see how this effects the city itself. I am beginning to feel that I’ve already been away for so long (over 3 years!) that the city has changed. Yeah, I can’t find my way around Kamppi anymore, but also mentally, and not only geographically.

September

September was a month of getting reacquainted with the Academy after the summer, with the Netherlands after spending two months away, and with life mostly alone after hanging with H and the relatives for most of the time. We began the new work/schoolyear apart, and that is how it will be for the whole year; H’s job is in Sweden, I am in the Netherlands and my friends and family are in Finland.

It will not be easy.

What small things happened in my life: I got new glasses after 10 years, planned a trip to Japan for November, followed the rocky start of the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, followed the American election battles and felt ashamed for Sarah Palin (a quote from someone wise: “…it’s as though there’s this massive blob of embarrassment that someone should be feeling but they’re not, so it attaches to you, the watcher. I could never watch “I Love Lucy” for this reason: Lucy wasn’t embarrassed, so by some sort of Law of Conservation of Shame, I had to be.”), watched the International Space Station pass over me, drank too much beer with the other foreign students and studied.

It was a weird month because I only read two books, The Complete Stories by Isaac Asimov (very good science fiction, but I for some reason never much cared for Asimov’s robotics) and Truth and Consequences by Alison Luria. I’ve noticed that my attention span is getting noticeably shorter; it is now easier for me to relax in front of the TV’s stupid sitcoms than by reading a good book. Worrisome.