Grays...

Ah hello, it has been a while. (Warning, this will be long and personal, and possibly rant-like)

I have so many things to say, and then again, nothing really. I could talk about how an old friend of mine became a father this weekend and how I have felt strangely emotional about it. I have been mindlessly happy for him... He used to sometimes walk me home, with his bike, and we'd talk about the girls he was in love with (mostly that one girl), and I'd talk about anything, but never the boy I was in love with (that one boy, him). He made those first years in Finland, as an insecure teenager, much more bearable and I feel indebted to him, somehow, for being a friend when I felt very lonely. And now, he is a father! It's miraculous, to see the boys around us grow up.

I could talk about how another dear old friend got married, to somebody I don't even know... is she happy?, I wonder, because we haven't really talked in ten years... because I've moved away... I suppose, and left her there alone, and never thought to check back on how she was doing, although, in heart, I always was with her.

I could talk about how yet another friend, fellow first-time mother, fellow foreigner (although she has long since moved back to her home country) got a divorce last week. How it's made me sad, for them, for couples everywhere that used to be happy. I don't know any details because I haven't been in touch and it feels hypocritical to ask now.

I could talk about how I have been feeling a little tired lately, and a little blue, too. Everybody offers their help when you have a newborn, but you don't need it, because they sleep all the time and you are full of love and wonder. And then, by five months, when everybody expects you to have adjusted to your new situation with a baby, you start feeling like you stop handling it all that well.

I could talk about how I have been feeling like shutting the door to my soul for a little while. Curling up in my snug home, shutting the blinds to the outside world. You know, that feeling. I could talk about all of this, and yet I don't (really) because I feel a sense of shame over my emotional ups and downs.

Why is it that women are expected to be rational and reasonable (or are they?). I've never been good at being a steady stream of emotions, mine are more like little whirlwinds, and they hit at unannounced times. [I was once in class, the professor saying something about the Gulf War, and whatever it was he said, about military strategy, he said it with such cool rationality that it made me sick to my stomach and I yelled something like this, loud and clear, for everybody in the auditorium to hear: How dare you talk about war like that? People die! People die every day! Afterward a friend patted me on the shoulder and said: Aww, poor you, is it that time of month again? And I nodded and said, yes, yes, it is, finding myself highly embarrassed about my emotional outburst among a class full of serious students of political science. Only that, it wasn't that time of month. I simply felt like crying that day, that minute, for all those people that died that day.]

So, my question is, is it bad? To be emotional? To cry when we feel like it, and laugh when we feel like it? I have never had a depression (I think), but I have noticed that people who do are ashamed of it, and they treat it as an enemy, something foreign to them. And once they come out of it, they say, hey look, it's me, I'm back again! But isn't the blue feeling, the sadness, the grief, also part of who we are? And why do we need to hide that part?

You see, I think it's beautiful to be sad sometimes. To be emotional. To be warm. To be woman. There is beauty in gray. We took a walk by the waterfront on Sörnäisten rantatie yesterday and saw the most stunning double rainbow against a backdrop of the grayest sky. Semicircular arcs, with two golden ends. I think seeing that may be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and the beauty of its sight made me cry...

So, you see. A lot of everythings and nothings. I don't know why I am telling you all this. Oh wait, I do. I felt like it.

(And I will very likely feel embarrassed about this post tomorrow... but oh well).

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Es tut mir leid, ihr Lieben, ich hab jetzt keine Zeit das Gelabere hier zu uebersetzen. Alles ist in Ordnung, bei uns geht's zur Zeit ein bisschen drunter und drueber, ich bin auf einer Achterbahn der Gefuehle und mache hier den Punkt, dass man, als Mensch, als Frau, manchmal emotionsgeladen sein darf (oder etwa nicht!). Es gibt Schoenheit, auch in Traurigkeit. Grau ist manchmal ganz schoen toll.