24

Happy Birthday to me. :)

I'll be at the Maailm pub on Friday night if any Tartu readers want to come along and say hi.

One Year Anniversary

Exactly one year ago today I moved into my new apartment. :)

Long day. Productive. Most of the results imminent on Baltlantis.

Best swag at Tallinn Motorshow: Nissan's USB memory keychains; Citroen's press pack CDs in cool ejector jewel cases that I'll be using for my own disks.

Most impressive part about Tallinn Motorshow: an Icelandic bloke from the support team that got Jeremy Clarkson to the North Pole in a Toyota Hilux. Complete with the actual car.

Memories of a Postsoviet Childhood

Chiquita. Not the bananas themselves - the stickers. You couldn't really get bananas in the Soviet Union (a fact made all the more ironic by their cheap ubiquity today), so when you got a hold of one, you treasured it. Eat it slowly, and completely, chewing the tasteless flesh off the inside of the skin, and then peel off the Chiquita sticker and put it on your desk or some other prominent piece of bedroom furniture, to remind yourself and others that you are a happening frood with access to bananas.

At about the same time, a bit later maybe, empty drink cans were all the rage. It was ages until you could get soft drinks in cans in Estonia, in the first years of independence the only thing that came in cans was beer - and then it was expensive imported beer. I don't think my parents have ever been beer drinkers anyway, but even for other kids my age, colorful cans were an awesome thing to possess.

It must have been '88 or '89, when my dad went to Sweden, and brought back a whole bunch of bananas. They were still green, and were left to ripen in the kitchen cupboard. Dad's return really was better than Christmas. A pencil sharpener in the shape of a cartoon car for me, a remarkably tiny electronic calculator for my sister, and - gasp! - a twin-deck Siemens stereo cassette player. Its recording capacity, built-in microphone, and the ability to copy tapes directly was truly remarkable.

I'm only 23, but the world around me has changed unbelievably.

---
Postsoviet - because Estonia in the late 80s was not entirely Soviet any more.

Bear with me.

I haven't written anything in a few weeks now (been busy with a side-project - I'll plug it here once done, and you'll be able to judge me on my technical writing skills). I have a good idea for an article, but I promised Baltlantis first crack at it. My guilt over procrastination is alleviated somewhat by the fact that they aren't actually paying me anything.

Anyway, an article in Wired Magazine talks about an event I was marginally involved in; records of that event are hosted on AnTyx. I am extremely impressed with my web host for handling the rush of traffic you see in the graph above; still, it's not completely impossible that I will actually run out of bandwidth this month. I am supposed to have an amount of bandwidth far in excess of my needs, and the pages in question are almost completely plaintext, but who knows.

Stay tuned...

Thursday nights in Tartu...

Plugging a mate's band - but hey, I'll be there myself. ;) Still, scary memories of Thursday night drinking. Last time I did that seriously, it was the week before Summer Solstice. A British friend had some of his friends over for the celebrations. One of them had apparently just had a streak of very good luck with his business, and appeased the gods by going to the ATM, punching a random button and insisting that he would spend all the money the machine gave him on vodka & Red Bull for everyone that night. Silly limey got 5000 EEK (£200 and change). After a long pub crawl involving Kissing Students, Rasputin (which refused to serve us any food except gherkins, so we just had more vodka), the Atlantis nightclub ("...but you don't understand - men like cheap sluts!" - a fine justification to present to one's girlfriend) and invariably Zavood, I got home around 4am, woke up at 8 and made a brave attempt to walk to work. I made it as far as the petrol station next to my house, where I proceeded to imbibe a large quantity of Nestea green tea and wait for a cab. Normally I take pride in being able to maintain some level of functionality with a hangover, but this was too much for me. I crashed onto the couch in the office and slept until 3pm. I respectfully posit to you, sir, that it was not the drinking that did me in, but the lack of a full night's rest.

Mind you, the last Helena Nova gig in Tartu started with half a liter of vodka's worth of Screwdrivers and ended in Krooks. But that wasn't a Thursday.

The Last of the Soviets

For all my European posturing (for I am neither convincingly Estonian, convincingly Russian, nor convincingly Jewish) - there is that part of me, the part established in the first seven years of my life in the Evil Empire's Switzerland and the confusing, irrational mess of a society it turned into in the early 90s, that will remain Soviet. Hell, I even got to wear a school uniform for a few months in 1st grade!

And the reason I'm saying it is, I've been eating mandarins. English-speakers will know them as tangerines, but for the purpose of this discussion, they're mandarins. And I've been thinking that the Soviet legacy will finally die with the last person on Earth who subconsciously, inevitably equates the taste of mandarins with New Year's Eve.

It's an aspect of the economy of the Soviet Union: citrus, like most other fruits you couldn't grow locally on your allotment, was a rarity. Oranges were even more rare than mandarins, because there were more places in the SU where mandarins could be grown industrially. You couldn't go to a shop at any time of the year and buy some citrus. Such things were sold only occasionally, in batches.

People could get rarities through their jobs, though. The big corporations tried to instill loyalty in their workers by sending out raiding parties, scouring the warehouses and various shady connections for deliciousness. On major holidays, you would get a package from work, with things for your kids.*

And mandarins were one of those things: you'd get them in the packages, and you'd get them in the shops, just before New Year - the technically secular form of the pagan Winter Solstice and imperialist Christmas. Something exotic, and very un-wintery, to put on the celebratory table. Then you'd sit there, watch the Blue Flame show on TV (baby blue was the predominant color of Soviet New Year, for some reason) and wait for the coming of the Näärivana (or Father Frost, if you'd like) - a theatrical school student hired by the trade union that your parents belonged to.** You had to recite a poem for him before he'd give you your present.

The scarcity of the Soviet time, the deficit - which I never really felt in its worst form, because in the late 80s Estonia was a much better place to be than the rest of the Soviet Union - served to curb the consumeristic impulses, to an extent. Western tradition of Christmas involves a pile of stuff under the tree, lots and lots of presents. But for me, it's always been one gift; that one thing, which was usually not so much expensive as unattainable, that I could wait for and finally get, just past midnight. Then I'd go out with my father, and we'd set off the fireworks; actually fireworks are a much later thing, in the Soviet days it was bangers - cardboard tubes with a rope that you'd pull, and it would set off a small powder charge inside, spraying confetti all over, and maybe even a little present that you'd have to search for in the snow.

That said, at least there were a lot of holidays to get one present for. New Year's was the main one, but there were also two Christmases. The Catholic Christmas (as it was always referred to in Russian, despite Estonia being a Lutheran country - for what it's worth) was celebrated along with the rest of the country. This was the true pagan holiday, the Winter Solstice, a time of quiet joy with the family, irrespective of your religious affiliation. Then there was the Russian Christmas; the Orthodox church still used the Julian calendar, where everything was offset by two weeks compared to the official Gregorian one, so Christmas fell on January 7th. And then there was the final triumph of holiday spirit over reason and logic: Old New Year, celebrated on January 14th. All these were worth a present, though not all of the presents were equal. But it's the very fact of a present that counts.

All these holidays were so draining on the population, that they were referred to as simply "the New Year holidays". It was common knowledge that any business transactions, any negotiations or requests, had to be delayed until the end of January. During the New Year holidays, the Soviet Union just stopped.

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*This is one of those improbably strong Soviet traditions that is still going on, in Nordic, Western Estonia after nearly two decades. My employer - big enough to actually be a faceless corporation - still distributes gift bags of Kalev candy to employees' children at Christmas time. Along with the informal celebration of March 8th as International Women's Day, and the fact that the Latvian border guards in Valga will still address you in Russian and not English, it's proof positive that the regular people are deep down both willing and able to let go of the insults and injuries of the past, and keep the positive bits.

**It was a lucrative, sought-after job. My former boss told me about his exploits as a Jõuluvana, doing some door-to-door promotions, long after the SU had burned in flames. It was the duty of nearly every head of family to offer him a shot of vodka, and he had no moral right to refuse.

300th Post!

W00t!

I sincerely hope there's nobody anal enough to count them, because Blogger's dashboard might actually also count the ones that are still in draft stage, in which case this is not the 300th post published on AnTyx. But let's just pretend it is, anyway.

Days like today is why I own a car in Tartu. I live alone, and I'm within half an hour's walking distance of my downtown office, which is doable even in the freezing winter months. I'm now much more conveniently serviced by public transport than at my previous rental apartment. It would definitely be cheaper to take the bus than drive around, usually alone, in my relatively enormous '93 Mazda 626 liftback, which consumes about 15l/100km in Tartu urban driving, because I only do about 70km on my tiny commute, in traffic, and it always runs cold. I now need to buy winter tires for it, then find out what I need to fix up for the MoT coming in December, and insurance runs out in early January (when I'll have owned the same car for a full year - OMG!). It's a really expensive proposition.

But on days like today, when it's snowing with a cold wind, and it's dark, and slippery, and generally unpleasant - it is an indescribable pleasure to scrape the ice off your windshield (takes longer than the actual drive home), get inside, put the heater on full, turn on the stereo, and carefully inch along the treacherous streets to the wail of the over-revving engine and the cricket staccato of the ABS brakes, driving past the poor, miserable bastards waiting for the bus.

Worth every penny.

Ice? Really?

October 11th - first day this fall when I had to scrape my car clean of ice in the morning.

I need to steal Mutton's winter tires.

No politics today - generally disgusted with human stupidity. It'll pass.

Good Morning Sunshine

As I came out of my sleeping quarter this morning and gazed at the living room, adorned with remnants of a pitched battle between man and mosquito, the grand truth of the previous evening dawned on me:

Half a dozen 20-something IT yuppies really will drink anything. Including Giustino's vile blackcurrant vodka that got separated into blackcurrant and vodka fractions over 24 hours in the freezer.

Still, the rolling housewarming party seems to be going well. (I can only accomodate about 5-6 people at a time, so I'm doing this in stages.)

Sunday afternoon

Yesterday's post was once again brought to you courtesy of the Chinese pub, which has closed its non-smoking floor in favor of the summer terrace (which has no power outlets for my laptop); although the smoking floor was full of people not smoking, so that worked out fine.

Today I'm at a bakery, which has a weaker signal and less outlets, but makes up for it in having Nerva paintings on the walls. I still don't have a network connection at home, so on weekends I go to cafes and pretend I'm in Paris. Although I suspect most cafes in Paris don't actually have free WiFi.

I've been exploring the area around my apartment, and tried a new supermarket. Whereas the one I normally use is posh and opened a few days before I moved in, this one is a bit cheaper, but it's in a run-down building and caters mostly to residents of Tartu's own Soviet tower block ghetto. For some reason, I found it viscerally depressing. I've always been a bit of a snob.

I like to go into grocery stores when I travel - it's one of those places that is by definition not touristy, isn't putting on a show. It's all business. Stockholm on a summer day will be a clean, pretty, impressive place, but go into the groceries section of Ahlens City and you're exposed to the inner workings of it, the things tourists don't see.

I'm bored. Need more things to do and people to do them with. *yawn*

Temple

For Jens, by special request. :)

Giustino reports snarkily on the opening of a synagogue in Tallinn - Shimon Perez was there for the ceremony, and the President of Israel had come earlier to lay down the cornerstone. (Construction is quick in Estonia today.)

At a Tartu blogger love-in a few weeks back, I was asked about my background; when I replied that I was (half) Yiddish, the others were surprised. Yiddish is a term for Eastern European Jews; I use it because it is a more specific definition. It is difficult to explain to foreigners the uniqueness of a post-Soviet Jewish identity, because it does not necessarily have anything to do with the two widely-known pillars of judaica: religion and Zionism.

All the mythology and conspiracy theories aside, Zionism comes down to a single imperative: Jews must live in Israel. It is partially because of dogma - the return of all displaced Jews to the Holy Land is supposed to be a prerequisite for the coming of the Messiah - but I guess mostly it's because Jews want a homeland, a place where they would not be persecuted. The Zionist movement dates from the 19th century, far predating the Holocaust, but then Jews had been persecuted in Europe before.

As I explained to my fellow Esto-themed bloggers, the Holocaust has given rise to a specific sentiment among people with at least some Jewish self-identification: the 'never again' which refers not to the evil of others, but to the complacency of ourselves. The most disappointing thing is not that so many people died - it's that so many people didn't resist. This cannot be allowed to happen in the future, and so I unquestionably support the existence of Israel, as a Jewish state and as a significant military force; I am sorry for all the suffering Arabs, but Israel acting like a psycho nutter bastard is my own personal guarantee that if a new Hitler emerges, he will get a late-night visit from Mr Craig long before he ever gets to any sort of threatening position.

And yet I have no intention or desire to move to Israel. It was an interesting country to visit, if I get a chance to go back I'll probably take it; but it's not somewhere I would want to live. My home is elsewhere.

The other thing, religion - I'm a militant atheist. Under equal circumstances I'd prefer Judaism to other mainstream religions, because it's mostly based on interpretation by rabbis - authoritative, but fallible; and because unlike others, it includes a loophole for outsiders. The Noahide Laws, which essentially come down to "don't be a dick", will guarantee a non-Jew passage into Heaven. Dogma influences mentality, so having a rule like this buys a religion a lot of credit in my book.

So I'm quite sure I won't be attending the new Temple in Tallinn; I might stop by for a look when I'm in town, but that's about it. Still, I'm very happy it's there.

Estonica: Still Standing

I'm still around. I haven't been stabbed by rioters, arrested by the police, or even deported to Russia. :)

What I have been doing is dealing with the fallout of something I did on Saturday. With no network connection at the new apartment, I was having suffering from serious information deprivation. Getting online via a Chinese pub's WiFi and reading the news, and particularly the comments on LiveJournal, I became so incredibly angry that I sat down, and wrote a long text about The Truth.

This is a text that spells out the reality of Russians' position in Estonia, all the things that nobody ever really wanted to say out loud. The problem is that this is the time of reckoning, the time to choose a side. And I've chosen. I've been criticized because of the text, called a fascist, a nazi and a kike; I've lost friends over it, because some people could not comprehend the things I wrote about, or accept them. But I've also found support. Before the text spread through word of mouth, when it was only visible to locals, I received dozens of comments supporting me, saying that what I wrote was right.

Below is the translation of that text.

---

My name is Andrei. I was born and raised in Estonia. My ancestors on both sides of the family lived in the first Estonian Republic. Even though I am a citizen of Estonia by birth, I have no Estonian blood in me. Biologically I am half Russian and half Jewish. When I am asked about my nationality, I reply: I am an Estlander.

And I support the relocation of the Bronze Soldier.

A few days ago, if you were to ask my private opinion about the monument, you would have gotten a different answer. I would have said that moving memorials is wrong in principle; that a healthy society must develop the capability to look at the figure of a solider in a Red Army uniform, with a stone halo in the shape of the Order of the Patriotic War, and see foremost a part of that society's history. I thought that the memorial should stay in place, and schools must explain to children what it is about. Because the tragedy of Estonia in World War II and the consequent decades of Soviet rule are a part of the country's history. And while the Bronze Soldier is standing on Tõnismägi, Estonians and Estlanders will remember what happened.

At the same time, I knew that there is something much more important than the fate of the monument. This is the right of Estonia's population to decide the fate for themselves. For a small country that only recently escaped from the rule of a gigantic neighbor - and a neighbor with a fundamentally different worldview at that - the sense of independence is primary. Estonians are a careful, restrained nation, capable of doing business even with a partner that they personally dislike; but if Estonians are slow to take offense, they are not quick to forget it. No business interests, no threats of sanctions can make Estonians admit the right of Russia to meddle in their internal affairs.

So let us forget philosophical deliberations of the insult of relocating soldiers' remains from a concrete slab to a military cemetary, and the idiotic myths of Estonian fascists. Let us talk about the sort of things that are not usually said out loud.

Despite the presense of many peoples on its territory, Estonia is a nation state, made by Estonians, of Estonians and for Estonians. This is exactly what is not understood by those local Russian-speakers who predict Ansip's resignation after the events in Tallinn on the night of April 26th, and call the riots a victory. They honestly think that the government will back down now; that they were simply not heard, or not taken seriously.

However, they base their opinion on the mistaken assumption that in a democratic Estonia, living according to Paragraph Twelve of its constitution, rioters shouting "Rossija! Rossija!" and throwing stones at policemen have the same right to the state as Estonians themselves. My parents, who have lived most of their lives in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, explained to me in my early childhood the fundamental principle of democracy: your freedom ends a millimeter from the tip of my nose. Freedom is not anarchy, and democracy does not intend to satisfy each and every member of society. Estonian democracy serves first and foremost the interests of Estonians.

Russians live in Estonia only because Estonians allow them to.

And local Russians understand this. Which is why most Russian-speaking Estlanders have considered all the pros and cons, and decided to stay here. In return for the right to use the conveniences of life in Estonia, they follow the rules that Estonians have established for themselves. This includes knowledge of Estonian, and behavioral norms...

Whatever Moscow media and anonymous russian Delfi commentators say, after 1991 Estonians did well by Soviet immigrants. Getting citizenship requires only minimal knowledge of the language and an elementary test on the Constitution; I have not had need to do the exams, but many of my friends have gotten citizenship through naturalization, and not one considered the demands to be daunting. At the same time, Estonian national exams (recognized for citizenship applications) are done by all those who graduate from a Russian-language high school. In the democratic, free, civilized countries of old Europe - like France - public schools in a non-state language are unthinkable.

The only thing Estonians have asked of the foreigners forced upon them by Soviet rule was respect for the local custom; an understanding that however long these people live in Estonia, they remain guests. This is why a citizen of Estonia by birth and one by choice is only distinguished in one aspect. The former cannot be stripped of citizenship under any circumstances. The latter can. Because when a family member is behaving badly, he is calmed down. When an uninvited guest does the same, he is thrown out.

The events in Tallinn are the fault of Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, whose actions against the memorial were overly harsh and obvious, and also Russia's authorities, who used the Russian media to spin the hysteria surrounding the monument to the stage where the relocation of the Bronze Soldier was inevitable. Ahead of the parliamentary elections, the Reform leader needed a political platform, as his party had the image of a team of managers, not statesmen. In the battle of Estonia's two large political parties, the local ally of "United Russia" Edgar Savisaar unambiguously came out in favor of keeping the memorial, and so Ansip came out against. The President's veto did not allow the fate of the memorial to be decided before the elections, and they effectively turned into a referendum; people who voted Reform may not have wanted Alyosha's relocation, but they did not particularly care either. Winning the elections with an unpredicted majority, and setting the record for votes cast for a single candidate, Ansip was forced to continue the relocation process. Backing down at that point would have firstly shown him incapable of delivering his own political projects, and secondly would have destroyed the electorate's trust in the party, which already suffered from "vote Reform, get Savisaar" jokes because of the previous coalition. In the context of Estonian politics, this is terminal.

Under no circumstances could Ansip yield to the Kremlin. At the same time, the pressure from Estonian residents came from non-citizens, or citizens that did not vote; therefore their opinion was predictably ignored. The Estlanders that agreed to play by the rules voted for Savisaar - and lost; the democratic majority voted vor the relocation of the memorial, or at least not against it.

When the police, unprepared for the invasion of the agressive mob, gave downtown Tallinn over to be looted by drunk Russian youths (a third of the looters were Estonians! some scream; and who were the other two thirds? After the relocation of the monument to the German soldier in Lihula, Estonians did not smash shop windows), it was not a victory for Russia, and it was definitely not a victory for the local protectors of the monument. Among my Estonian friends, the disapproval of Ansip's behavior does not lead to demands for resignation, and the only call to hang someone that I've heard on April 27th referred to Edgar Savisaar, who ran to Russian TV to apologize. Two thousand drunk youths in Tallinn and Jõhvi will not scare a million Estonians; conversations overheard in a crowd of Tartu students came down to local Russians mostly being decent guys, and the riots being not a national confrontations, but rather the work of fuckups of all kinds. No matter how much the kids riled up by Night Watch and Delfi riot, the right of Estonians to move the Soldier as they see fit cannot be taken away any more.

At the same time, the authorities' failure to prepare for the riot, senseless and merciless to street kiosks, and the lack of a crowd of Estonian antiprotectors on Tallinn streets, does not indicate readiness to take more disturbances. As the famous Tallinn writer Mihhail Weller wrote, Estonians are not short of steam - they just have a bad whistle. A little more, and detained non-citizen marauders may start to be taken out past the Narva border crossing and left there. In my eyes, as a half-Russian, half-Jewish grandson of people who fought in the Second World War on the side of the USSR, they have already earned the suitcase-train station-Russia treatment.

Home Stretch

So, eight short months later, and my apartment is ready. I'm moving in on Monday, which means that I'm having to think long and hard about what to do with it.

In the spirit of doing things that are slightly out of my nature, I've decided to take the absolute minimum of stuff with me when I move. The new apartment is a bit smaller than my current rental, but the use of space is a lot more efficient; however, it has a lot less storage space. Here I have a balcony and a couple of wall closets where I can simply dump stuff for later reference; there, I will not have the luxury. It is a brand new, modern building, a break with the incompetence and limitations of Soviet architecture. It's even got an unorthodox color scheme, contrived by an artist/interior designer. The point was that the foundation would be grayscale, onto which background I can then add wild and lively colors as I see fit. It came out great - very warm, unoffensive, classical rather than retro. I said it's unorthodox because most of these new apartments - as indeed most deep renovations these days - either end up with either a bland shade of beige, or lose all self-control when faced with a Pantone book. There's an apartment in another building, same floorplan as mine, that is painted a magic marker sort of neon-green. Boggles the mind, really.

But now, I need to figure out the rest of the stuff in the flat. The problem is that such sense of style that I myself possess is calibrated negatively. I mostly get the sensations of "hell no, definitely not that". The upshot is that I rarely end up with things I really like - rather, by process of elimination, I end up with things I can tolerate. I'm not non-conformist for the sake of rebellion itself, not in this case at least, because this is where I'm going to be living, so I need it to be comfortable and practical; at the same time, I despise both the prevalent conservative style and the prevalent modern style in furniture. The former is decadent enough to be offensive, the latter is impractical enough to be preposterous.

I've got two days to trawl Tartu's shops and come up with something acceptable. Wish me luck.

Ring The Alarm!

Well, here's a good man
And a pretty young girl
Trying to play together somehow...

The Sad Bastard Christmas tree is now dead. It's a Saturday in February, and I am swearing to myself that I will never - ever - take vacation time around the winter holidays ever again.

A year ago (or close enough, anyway) I was on a ferry, with a girl who I met online - in fact she'd read AnTyx, and was quite impressed. We started talking online, and eventually she asked me to go to Stockholm with her on a day cruise. First time we met in real life, and we were stuck together for two days and two nights. She'd also asked me to take her to the theater, to a play I'd seen and highly recommended. This girl had the sort of life that had no room for theater, or for pleasure travelling - even though she'd been to some very awesome places.

On the first night, we never went to sleep. We just lied there, in our beds, in a pitch-black cabin, talking. She told me about her life, I told her about mine; about my crap experiences, my heartbreak, the girl who thought I'd kill myself over her. She got the not at all unfounded thought that I did not get into a relationship lightly.

We had an awesome day in Stockholm; we had fun together. Back on the ship, I was both exhilarated and exhausted. The excitement of being in a city that I love, with this awesome girl, and the tiredness from walking around all afternoon, put me in an altered state of mind, where I could pretend I was a purer version of myself - with none of the stupid, annoying psycho shit that I cannot escape when I'm in my normal routine. I don't think it would be fair to say I worked up the nerve - it was a form of dutch courage, really - but I did ask if she'd mind if I kissed her.

It could've gone over better; then again, it could've gone over a lot worse.

What she said, was that I should not fall in love with her. That she had a massively busy life, and it was a very important year for her, she had the project of her life coming up in the summer, and she really could not afford to get involved. The most important point she made was that I really did not want it; that it would mess me up.

That night, in the pitch-black cabin - I won't be specific, but I can say that it was very probably the most emotionally extatic night of my life. Morning after, we parted with a hug at the bus station, she going off home down one major highway, and me down another. That night, on IM, she talking about what she thought all day; asking herself why she didn't kiss me.

Fast forward a few weeks, theater, a play she really liked.

Fast forward to the summer, the rocky seaside at a place that a lot of born&bred Tallinners don't know exists; when we fell off a slippery rock, drenching our shoes, and her phone in the process. (It never really recovered.) Sitting on a boulder with her arms folded on my shoulder, the sun shining on her face - that's my mental snapshot of her, at that moment.

Fast forward, when I came back from Israel and she came back from her great project; literally the day of my return (the flight came in at 2am) we drove down to Haapsalu to see Lordi at the ruins of the old bishop's castle. Unbelievably, the show was sold out; so we drove through the night, to Tartu.

The ferry, the boulder, and that was strike three. But things went downhill from there, and by the time the fall came, I felt alone again. She took more and more time replying to my SMSes, and was almost never online. And then I did something stupid.

I took two weeks' vacation over the year-end holidays. Last week of December and first week of January. And if I've said before that I would never be so miserable as to kill myself, then during those two weeks I at least began to see why some people did it. If you've ever remarked upon the destructive power of thinking about your life at night, in your bed, before you fall asleep, you'll know how much you can fuck yourself up when you're left alone with your own consciousness.

Now imagine two weeks of that.

I know it's foolish to somehow rate the success of my year on where I am come New Year's Eve, but somehow I can't help it. That's why early on, I asked her if she wanted to make an agreement - that barring any major events, we'd spend the next December 31st together; and she seemed to get it. Unfortunately, she ended up with some coworkers at the lakeshore instead. And as the last day of the year started, I was a bigger mess than I had been since high school. It got so bad that I could do nothing, except stand in the bathroom, propped up against the sink, look in the mirror and cry for myself.

In the end I didn't have to spend NYE alone. I went to a pretty cool party, held by the German acquaintance of the girlfriend of one of the Gay Vikings. But even before that, I spent a couple hours at a friend's house - a girl I knew from university, who I've spoken very little to before that. When I had no plans for the night, nowhere to go and nothing to do, she invited me over; she was a friend to me when I needed one more than any other time in recent memory. For that, I will always be grateful to her.

I survived the remainder of that week, spending my time at the movie theater watching crap like Eragon. I went back to work. I bought a car. I drank a lot of alcohol with friends in Tartu and in Tallinn, and I decided that I could not go through with such a torturous vacation again, so I allocated my spare eight days and a massive amount of money on a trip to Iceland (in early April; watch this space). And then I had a moment of clarity.

The girl kept telling me, throughout, that I should not fall in love with her, that she couldn't allow herself to fall in love with anyone, and that she definitely did not love me. But I never, ever said the word. Not in those good, early days, and not afterwards. Her presense, her closeness was euphoric; and not having that was horrible. I'd always been good at being alone - yes, I was easily annoyed by people bailing on me, and yes, on a conceptual level I felt like I needed a girl to share my life with. But I was comfortable with spending a lot of time by myself. Being with her changed that: I enjoyed it too much.

After the suicide girl, I was properly heartbroken. After this girl, I am suffering from a black, soul-devouring loneliness.

There are ways of driving it back, and I spend more time socializing now than I have ever done previously. I've not really talked much to the suicide girl - didn't feel like I had anything to say to her. I won't do the same with the loneliness girl, because if there's one thing this New Year's Eve told me, it's that a friend is far too precious a thing to discard. I won't spend a lot of time speculating on her motives. If I want to make myself feel better, I'll say that she's confused and making the horrible mistake of expecting a Prince Charming, denying the possibility of enjoying herself in the meantime. If I'm feeling cynical, I will say that it's the hypocrisy of all womankind, who may talk of personality being more important than looks; but I'm not the Brad Pitt type, so her fascination with my writing, my intelligence and my self-reliance fizzled out.

Lordi is playing in Tallinn on February 24th. I'm going alone.

So don't come here and tell me things that you don't understand
When it's all about the honesty and time for you to learn
Come back, you're always a friend - is that the message I'd like to send?

I want you to feel no more loneliness...
So ring the alarm!
You opened my mind, now I talk to the sign
You cleared up the sights, now I'm up for the night.

P.S. And a Happy Valentine's Day to you, too.