Well shucks, it's been a while, hasn't it? Female Author (both blog and writer) have been occupied with a number of pressing matters which have seriously hindered all sorts of writing activity recently. The most time-consuming of these has been work, which has been nothing short of breakneck hectic for the past weeks. Another hindering, not to mention grievous factor, was the bitter end my macbook came to some weeks ago. This end, direly lacking in the shock and drama department, was a simple refusal to turn on one day. All my beloved computer would give me was a foreboding whirr and the occasional faint beeping sound.
The first thing the mac fixer-upper man said to me, as i ran to a service shop in a state of panic was, 'i'm sure you've got all of this backed up, right?'. Rhetorical question fail. 'Yessiree, every last bit of it; actually, my horoscope warned me i should anticipate all kinds of technological breakdowns and bitter ends to long-term relationships, so just last night i made sure i got every last friggin' document, picture and piece of porn (just kidding) transferred to my external hard drive. Phew, what foresight and smarts i possess.' Or not.
So some weeks later, a considerably emptier macbook was returned to me. Functioning, but void of everything it had previously housed. Which, in this day and age, i'm not shy to admit, was most of my life. Be that as it may, while i'm sad to have lost a lot of cool stuff (a shiteload of poems and stories), as well as some really humdrum stuff (like letters concerning electricity bills to my janitor in Paris), there's something quite liberating about starting afresh, even if it means having to download all apps again and building up a whole new, intricately organized bookmark library. It's the exhilaration of a new start and the seemingly endless possibilities offered by a blank slate.
And via this finely crafted tangent, i can digress from my excuses for lack of blogging to the actual subject i wanted to write about.
Which is spring (see how that hardly cliched, new start/spring tangent worked beautifully?). After what feels like seventeen months of winter, three months of darkness and rain, and a good helping of hail on sunny days, i feel like we might be getting somewhere with the whole spring thing. Which makes me happy. Somewhere in my psyche a primal urge awakes, encouraging all kinds of errant and eccentric behavior, no doubt brought about by the sudden increase in sunlight and the masses of people coming out from a dark, booze-laden mental state of winter. Rather than running around naked looking for a mate and some sticks to make a nest with, i've embraced this urge and swapped boots for all stars, winter coats for leather jackets, and trams for my rickety bike. i've braved the cold, not to mention the prolific mountains of dog shit, by opening the picnic season for this summer a week or so ago on a windy evening in Koffari. I plan on taking this a step further in a week's time by throwing myself headfirst into the lairy, reckless madness that is Vappu in Helsinki.
So here's to blank slates, fresh starts, new awakenings and all other spring-associated cliches that we love to hate, yet find ourselves embracing wholeheartedly the minute we first venture out on to the terrace, pint in hand, to sit in the sunshine and take in the promise of summer. Hell, i'll drink to that.
