<$BlogRSDURL$>
Swamp

Confessions of an Academic Pseudo-Giraffe
25.6.05  

Tailing the Baby
21.6.05  
Students in uniform
This morning, when I came to my office, there was a group of male students killing time by the main entrance. There were at least six or seven of them, and every single one was wearing pants that reach well below the knee but nowhere near the ankle. Too long to be shorts, too short for full-length trousers; I forget what they're called. Every single one. It really struck me as odd and somehow eerie.

The weather's easily warm enough for shorts - I'm wearing a pair myself - so this puzzling phenomenon must be a fashion-related collective statement. What the heck is this? Have I missed something? Where does this kind of sudden consensus come from? Has some big guy turned a switch somewhere?
19.6.05  

European Champion Janne Holmén in Forssa (picture nicked from the race website). I'm glad some men with no hair still run fast.
Summer night pleasure
I feel like an old man. It took some time to get out of bed this morning, what with all the concrete and lead residing in my legs. The feeling is very familiar to me, but after a long break the severity of it always comes as a surprise. Apart from the muscle ache, it feels roughly the same as your common hangover.

I ran the half-marathon yesterday at the Suvi-Ilta (Summer Night) event in Forssa. I completely blew it as far as my plan and goal is concerned. The plan was to start slow at about 4 min 10 s per km, monitor the pace carefully, accelerate slightly in the second half if possible, and finish with something like 1.26 or 1.27 on the clock. Well, it turned out I knew my condition very well but was unable to execute the plan. This is something I knew would be difficult. I suppose a part of me just found it impossible to ignore the number on my chest and the other runners trotting alongside. Somehow the setting gave me the mistaken notion that I'm still a competitive runner.

So I started out at 3.50/km with a good pack of runners around me. Lots of familiar faces too. When I realised my pace at the 3 km post, it was already too late to slow down in a controlled manner to save the race. I simply decided to see what's coming - miracles have been known to happen before. At 8 km, my legs felt like they should have felt at 15 km. And then we had to push the second half against the wind. By the 15 km mark, my method of movement had been reduced to "walking the tightrope" - the state where one just tries to survive to the finish. Mere jogging, really, so slow that I didn't even breath heavily, with a clear awareness that any change of pace might cause a cramp somewhere. Middle-aged ladies (well-trained ones, though) passed me while waving at the crowd. A few guys I know did the same, and we exchanged the usual comments with grins. I guess the basic experience of "hitting the wall" is the richest source of running-related humour and slang. At 18 km, an old friend came from behind and told me to wake up or my brother might catch up with me too. Let him, I said, I'll give him my watch. He may still have need for it.

I finished at 1.30,24, then avoided sitting down for the next 15 minutes because I thought I might not get up very easily. Well, at least I got a t-shirt, food, and the knowledge that some sense in pacing would have easily improved my time by several minutes. The conditions weren't good either - way too warm (23 C) and windy. Now I'm already considering training a bit more systematically for the next two months. Could get close to 1.20 in August.
14.6.05  
Sell us a disease, please.
There's an interesting new ad on one of the streetside billboards near the university. The main heading reads "Ask your doctor about better erection", and the bottom part refers to the website www.erektiovarmuus.fi (i.e. erection security). It's hard not to be amused by the sincere do-good attitude the ad conveys and the fact that the location makes it practically the last thing people see before they arrive at the university main building. I wonder if a corporate board somewhere has decided to target the university community with this campaign, with the intuitive knowledge that academics, if anyone, feel impotent in contemporary society. Or then the logic might be less metaphoric. Everyone knows students ride their bikes a lot, which could cause a lot of pressure on their private parts. Hmm, not very convincing. Perhaps the real reason -assuming these ads are not omnipresent in town - is that big business expects the university to produce citizens with maksukyky ('paying ability', a revolting Finnish euphemism for 'a lot of money'). Citizens, in other words, who can afford to medicalize every single little inconvenience they have and purchase treatment for these "diseases". I'm pretty sure that in twenty years drug companies will be selling medication for things like loneliness, pale/dark skin, boredom, bad cooking skills, and low intelligence. And there will always be buyers.

(Just checked one source, which said loneliness is already being treated with drugs. There is also an operation they use to fix shyness - that horrible plague, the least acceptable of all diseases - by somehow manipulating certain nerves. Seems I'm behind the times. There's something I would like to try, though. I wonder if anyone has developed a pill that would make me look good on the dance floor. All it would have to do is reset my muscle memory, erasing a few hundred hours of track style coordination training.)

So I visited this website (OUT OF PURE CURIOSITY, people) and examined the contents. Crème de la crème: "300,000 Men Think They Are Alone" [within Finland]; "Test Your Erection"; "Easy to Spot [really?], Easy to Cure". The enclosed statistic shows, for example, that two thirds of seventy-year-old men suffer from erection disorder. Boy, the grandpas must really suffer. I guess the remaining third are running around producing children. Maybe there's a reason for some things being easier for twenty-year-olds than for old men. A link placed separately from the main tabs reveals who is behind the site: Pfizer, the biggest drug corporation in the world, which "facilitates health and well-being around the globe".

The title of the pages alone - "erection security" - implies a specific philosophy I'm not happy with. Apparently, one should be guaranteed a good time all the time, for ever. If we take this out of the immediate context, it is neither realistic nor desirable. In general, I feel the ups and downs of life (the sexual context nicely literalizes this figure of speech) are highly necessary. My former coach had a very succinct way of putting it after a bad training session or race: "Ei se aina kulje". It doesn't always go smoothly. I still take that as an absolute truth. Medicalization aims at eliminating that thruth from people's daily lives, but I doubt that the results are as positive as the pharmaceutical monsters want us to think. Probably more often, as some therapist said about Viagra, we just turn the masses of unhappy men into masses of unhappy men with an erection. And that's a more difficult situation to handle.
13.6.05  
A window
That self-portrait on the right keeps evolving. It just performed a profound functional transformation and became an entryway into the open spaces where free and independent giraffes roam.
YEAH!
Today I watched my cousin (well, she's actually my cousin's daughter but a lot closer to my age than her mother) set a new national women's high jump record by clearing 1.92m. That's 21 cm - over eight inches - above her own height. I watched her jump on TV a week ago and quite honestly saw this coming. I believe I went as far as predict aloud to a couple of people that she's going to break the 22-year-old record tonight. It's just so conspicuous when an athlete reaches the state where everything works smoothly. Congratulations, Hanna, and the best of luck for the World Championships!

I see most of my recent posts have dealt with sport. But what can you do when things like this happen. Another young woman I know is on the brink of breaking the Finnish 1,500m record. And yesterday the women's national football team beat Denmark in the European Championships and made it to the semifinals against all odds. Good luck to them too.

As a matter of fact, good luck to anyone who needs it in the near future.
9.6.05  

The match tonight was so sad... but the Olympic Stadium was packed, the sun kept shining until eleven p.m., and on the pitch the Dutch had their own choreography (from left to right: Ruud van Nistelrooy, Dirk Kuijt, Giovanni van Bronckhorst, Arjen Robben, Philip Cocu, and...I'm not sure).
6.6.05  

Kääpiö. Hölmö. Leijona. Karvanaama.
4.6.05  
Facelift
I decided to change that picture in the top corner. This one is a genuine self-portrait, whereas the former shot was snapped by someone else.
3.6.05  
A note on the beauty of defeat
Yesterday I witnessed how the national football team gave away a match against Denmark two minutes before the finishing whistle. This particular match was meaningless, but it followed an age-old pattern. Last-minute shocks resulting in defeat have become part of the national cultural heritage. In the last decade, it is the football team that has really come to symbolize this tendency in international sport (although it was originally established and is still occasionally well preserved by the ice hockey team, catastrophes against Sweden in the world championships of 1986, 1991, and 2003 being the best examples).

Finland has played some fantastic matches in recent years, beating e.g. both finalists of the last European championships clearly, Greece 5-1 in 2001 and Portugal 4-1 in an away game in 2002. I was enthusiastically congratulated for the latter achievement in a Manhattan deli a few months after the game. Many of us still tremble with delight while thinking of a night in Istanbul in 1998. Nevertheless, the last minute disasters have a more enduring power in the domestic collective mind. Living abroad, I had no opportunity to watch the crucial Hungary match in 1997 or the by now infamous Czech match this spring, but I've heard enough. The former I've also seen on video, and it had all the elements of an epic tragedy (a looming victory, a referee's error in overtime, and a simply unbelievable series of chain reactions leading to the equalizing own goal).

But the tragic figures are the greatest, aren't they? We know Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello well. Who remembers even the names of Shakespeare's comic heroes?

Matti Nykänen and Juha Mieto are two Finnish heroes of individual sports who have acquired something like mythical status in the last few decades. Four-time Olympic champion Nykänen didn't lose very often during his active ski jumping career; now he is remembered mainly because of his spectacular fall from grace afterwards (that site is hilarious, unfortunately only summarised in English). Presently the man is in prison. Mieto won a lot in cross country skiing, but nothing really big individually. While his enormous physical size and personality (I've spent a few hours in the same room, and both really are huge) and eccentric stunts (e.g. skiing straight into the sauna from the finishing line after a bad race, with all the equipment on) may explain part of the reputation, the main reason is the fact that he suffered the most incomprehensibly narrow defeat in Olympic history. He lost the bronze by .06 seconds in Sapporo in 1972 - good preparation for 1980, when Thomas Wassberg beat him for gold by one hundredth of a second. In a 42-minute race during which they had no contact whatsoever with each other.

There's something so grand, so sublime, in that kind of loss that it simply fills one with awe. To win such a race is almost nothing in comparison (though some Swedes might disagree). The heroic and tragic qualities of a larger-than-life figure were amplified through the defeat, especially since he took it so gracefully. He cried a bit, took a moment in solitude, and then congratulated the winner, subsequently refusing all tentative offers on sharing the gold. The true and brave tragic hero has a strong sense of fate. He understands the aesthetic side of agony. He may scream at the windmills when alone but shows little desperation or self-pity in public. He finds strength in melancholy. He sees the beauty of not winning, of dying, of not being able to prevent the last-minute goal, of not getting the girl. He embraces loss in all its sublimity. He turns it into an inner poetry.

Old Ones
helmikuuta 2004
maaliskuuta 2004
huhtikuuta 2004
toukokuuta 2004
kesäkuuta 2004
heinäkuuta 2004
elokuuta 2004
syyskuuta 2004
lokakuuta 2004
marraskuuta 2004
joulukuuta 2004
tammikuuta 2005
helmikuuta 2005
maaliskuuta 2005
huhtikuuta 2005
toukokuuta 2005
kesäkuuta 2005
heinäkuuta 2005
elokuuta 2005
syyskuuta 2005
lokakuuta 2005
marraskuuta 2005
joulukuuta 2005
tammikuuta 2006
helmikuuta 2006
maaliskuuta 2006
huhtikuuta 2006
toukokuuta 2006
kesäkuuta 2006
elokuuta 2006
syyskuuta 2006
lokakuuta 2006
joulukuuta 2006
tammikuuta 2007
helmikuuta 2007
huhtikuuta 2007
elokuuta 2007

Powered by Blogger Weblog Commenting by HaloScan.com