Now If I Could Only Find Some Elephants

Not the center of the universe.

A few billion years ago, the earth decided it would be a pretty good idea to rotate around its own axis almost exactly 365.25 times during the time it took it to travel a single measly lap around the sun.

The sun didn’t mind at all, since it basically just had to sit there and rotate around its own axis and enjoy being the center of the universe, right up until the early 1800’s when some dufus realized that heliocentrism was so 1754 and proved that the sun was not, in fact, the center of the universe, much to the sun's dismay. 

The moon didn’t mind either, it was too busy spinning on its own axis, while revolving around the earth at a rate of a menstrual cycle, while simultaneously revolving around the sun with the earth, all the while making sure never to let the earth see its behind. It basically had its hands full with all the spinning to really care about what the earth was doing.

The moon, in case it wasn't clear.

Someone who did mind, though, was the poor guy on earth in charge of time. He tried everything to get rid of those 0.25 extra rotations, including the old decimal point trick, making his dog eat his notes and running really fast in one place to see if he could speed up the earth’s rotation by 0.75 rotations per year.

Nothing worked.

And so, he created the leap day.

A day that Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, loved dearly. Saint Patrick also loved women, and felt they should be as free as men. Free to do absolutely anything they wanted, whenever they wanted. And so, he decided that women should be allowed to propose to men just as men can propose to women. Of course, women would only be allowed to do it on one day every four years, and lo and behold, leap day seemed like the perfect choice. 

It took me forever to find a picture of the earth
that showed something other than the Americas.

 In Finland we took the tradition to heart, and now every February 29^th, women walk around popping the question left and right. And as an added bonus, the Finnish version of the tradition dictates that the proposal is to be taken very seriously, and if you by some twisted turn of fate have to turn her down, you owe the poor woman fabric for a skirt.

 As the resourceful entrepreneur I am, I have of course turned this whole leap day thing into a successful business. I’ve spent the entire day proposing to men, and subsequently being rejected. In about 32 years I’ll have enough fabric to make a circus tent, and then I can finally realize my childhood dream!

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Now If I Could Only Find Some Elephants

Changes

The particularly observant reader will notice there have been some changes to this blog.  The "I have cookies" tagline is gone, for one. This is due to the fact that I very rarely actually have cookies anymore. Sometimes I have coffee cake, or cupcakes, or PMS, but rarely cookies.

Also, Ziva went Facebook. You now have the very questionable privilege of being able to like Ziva's Inferno on Facebook (please see pretty button in the column to the right of this very text,) not to mention befriend your very own Ziva Moon (yes, that's my real last name. Totally.) Find me. Like me. You'll stay with me ‘til the bitter end, won't you?

Oh, and last, but certainly not least, the entire blog has a new look! (I blame the PMS.) I was sick and tired of the pink and fluffy and decided to switch over to the dark side. I realize of course that some of my aging readers are not only a little hard of hearing, but also have trouble reading the white text against the dark background. I tried to remedy the problem by using a large, friendly font, but it looked like I needed to introduce a new tagline "Ziva's Inferno - Now in Large-Print and Simple English!" So, and I do apologize for this, the size of the font will stay the same. However, I did change it from eye-hurting white to a much friendlier grey. Do you like it? Be honest. No, don't be. Yes, be. Honesty is good. But only if you have something nice to say. Fine, you can criticize if you want to. You guys are so mean.

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Changes

A Tale of Two Sharks

 

In my last post I mentioned something extraordinary, something so fantastic that you can’t even being to fathom the depth of awesomeness of this product; the one and only Salmiakkikossu.

It was Friday, late fall. Zelma and I were once again bored out of our minds, but this time, I was prepared. I had bought an entire bottle of vodka, good cheap Finnish Koskenkorva vodka. And I had also bought the devil’s candy, flavored with ammonium chloride and pepper, Turkisk Peppar is sometimes called salty liquorice by Americans. They couldn’t be more wrong. Salty liquorice implies a soft friendly taste, whereas there is nothing soft about Turkisk Peppar, except maybe the black color. I’d crushed the devil’s candy and mixed it with the vodka. The result is a sweet black liquid with the consistency of molten lava and a taste of about the same. Black gold, we call it.

I clutched the bottle to my chest as I followed Zelma into the deep recesses of the empty cave. In a mining town like Pargas, the cave had been used for everything from public flea markets to headquarters of the tiny local TV station. In fact, it was the very same cave where I participated in, and won, a game show for kids when I was twelve. The cave was huge, the ceiling ridiculously high, and the sound of our heels clicking against the lime stone floor echoed throughout the space. When we entered the smaller passages the sound diminished, and so did the light. We both breathed a sigh a relief when we entered the little space where the local TV was broadcasted from. It was Zelma’s new project, volunteering for the TV station, and to both of our delight, she’d been entrusted with the keys to the cave.

Ziva and Zelma.

We drank straight from the bottle, big swigs that burned going down. We talked about people we knew and fiddled with the controls in the room, briefly screwing up the automated news coverage going out to people’s TV’s at that time of night. While we were laughing and talking, for some strange reason that neither of us would ever remember again, we decided we were sharks, and this would be our first sharks’ night out. We painted the town red that night, and unbeknownst to us, it would set the tone for many more sharks’ nights out in our future. By the time we headed home again, it was late night/early morning, the bottle was long gone as so was our judgement.

We told the cab driver to drop us off about a mile from Zelma’s house. It was too expensive, and since Zelma lived in the middle of the forest it wasn’t as if anything bad could happen. The cab merrily drove away and as the taillights disappeared from view we realized we’d wildly overestimated our night vision. Fall in Finland is a dark affair. It was an overcast night, no stars, no moon. We could not even see our hand in front of our face.

This is how dark it was.

We started to walk in the general direction of Zelma’s house, laughing, giggling and screaming in terror every time we ended up in the ditch. After a couple hundred meters we realized there was no way we would make it to her house. So we sat down on the ground, determined to wait out the moon, or the sun, whichever came first.

We talked, then sang, then rated each other’s singing. We both gave each other a big fat F, then sang some more to see if it got any better if we practiced. It didn’t. Still, we couldn’t help ourselves and called up my then boyfriend who was happily asleep in Spain. We treated him to a serenade the likes of which he’d never heard before. He hung up on us, and we laughed so hard we cried.

By morning we made it to Zelma’s house, safe and sound, tired in body and mind from all the drinking and the laughing. We slept the day away, and woke up to a much deserved hangover, determined to do it all over again soon. And so, the sharks’ night out was born.

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A Tale of Two Sharks

Sometimes A Pizza Is Just Not Enough

Some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps in the morning. This was one of those days when you should have just stayed in bed, warm and comfortable, because waking up was the absolute highlight of the day.

Reason enough to talk to anyone.

See, Zelma and I were bored. Terribly bored. So bored that we in our desperation went to the library. Big mistake. While there, we came across a friend of ours. Frank. Frank was a rail thin, socialist vegan who refused to carry arms in the military. He believed in women’s rights, shared wealth and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was frankly the only reason why I talked to him at all. He was a very nice fellow, though, despite his appalling habit of not eating things that had given their lives to be lunch. Frank also occupied rotten old buildings, entertaining some strange delusion of the buildings actually having some kind of historical or cultural value. When he wasn’t being arrested for free-thinking, he staged protests and demonstrations and workshops for lost souls in search of meaning in their existence. Or, as it would turn out, bored souls in search of adventure and pizza.

 

I bet you can guess what happened next. That’s right, Zelma and I were in fact in possession of two extremely bored souls, and in search of pizza, so when Frank, bless his long-haired emo-heart, asked us to participate in a workshop for women, we agreed to do so for the very reasonable price of a pizza. A workshop for women, he said. He didn’t have enough participants, and we were gullible and easily bribed.

Reason enough to do anything.

We entered the room, apprehensive and, frankly, still quite bored. In the middle of the room there was a table, and around the table a few women, couldn’t have been more than five. They all seemed a little lost. All, except for one. She exuded confidence and quirkiness, two things our teenage selves found off-putting and strange. But, thinking about that pizza, we sat down and decided to play along. A few silly get-to-know-each-other games later, our boredom level had spiked to never before seen heights and we were only getting started.

Filling with dread, we watched as the quirky hippie leader brought out magazines, scissors and glue. Lots of glue. No wonder she was so strange. She told us she wanted us to access our inner feminist. We were supposed to flip through the magazines and cut out pictures that represented the feminist inside of us, past experiences and future hopes. She wanted us to express in pictures why we decided to attend this feminist gathering and why it meant so much to us.

Silently I cursed Frank and tried to find a picture of a pizza. There was no pizza in any of the magazines. I cut out a picture of piano keys. Then a black shoe. Then a pretty white flower. And a picture of some liquorice. Zelma and I worked in silence with the other girls. They all seemed completely engrossed in the task and Zelma and I did everything we could not to accidentally look at each other. I knew if we did, we would burst out laughing at the absurdity of the situation. Zelma and I are definitely not mood board people. We don’t cut out pictures from magazines and glue them to a piece of paper. In fact, we’re the kind of people who paint our nails purple and laugh at people who make mood boards, while drinking copious amounts of my own home made salmiakkikossu and listening to The Dark Side of the Moon.

Mood board, most definitely not made by me.

 And then, our eyes locked. I pulled a muscle in my side trying to keep from laughing out loud, and I can only assume the other women thought Zelma had a weird habit of snorting every now and then, just because she could. I have no idea how we made it through that meeting. I made up some kind of bullshit story about liquorice representing female liberation, and tried to explain the fact that my mood board was mostly black whereas the other women had cut out pictures of sunflowers and bright hats. Zelma just pretended she had laryngitis and couldn’t say anything.

The pizza?

So not worth it.

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Sometimes A Pizza Is Just Not Enough

Women, Can't Live With Them, I Recommend You Live Without Them

M and I have lived in sin for about two years now, and I think the arrangement has generally been a great success. But today M did something that he’s never done before. He offered to vacuum without me nagging on him first. And as realization hit me, I was horrified. M is living with a woman, and it has broken him.

See, the thing is, I’ve lived with a woman. I know what it’s like. And I don’t recommend it. First, there’s the constant fighting over who cleans what. Women suffer from the ridiculous illusion that a house needs cleaning at least once a week, whether it’s dirty or not.

And when you’re living with a woman, slowly but surely every single surface in the house begins to fill with useless crap. In every damn corner there’s a plant in a cute teddy bear pot, and thousands of useless items meant solely for decoration, “I just had to buy this porcelain frog; it goes so well with the curtains.” And the curtains, carpets, bedding and towels all change once a week into a new and improved pastel color.

Kiss me!

The bathroom cabinets are so full with products it’s a miracle if you can find your toothbrush; there’s hairsprays, lotions, weird soaps you’re not allowed to wash your hands with, and every person needs their own towel to dry their hands with. And if by some miracle you can find your toothbrush, you sure as hell can’t find anything else, because nothing ever stays in the same place for longer than a week. You’re supposed to leave your keys in the tiny pink key cabinet, but of course you won’t be able to do that, because even Barbie couldn’t fit her keys in that cabinet, so you’re really keeping your keys in a smelly old tin (got it at the flea market) with a lid that’s impossible to open. And the tin is kept on a dresser in the hallway, but even the dresser won’t stay in the same place for very long. “Hmm, let’s try it over there in the corner... no it doesn’t go with the cat statue, how about over there? No, the feng shui isn’t quite right..”

Smelly old tins.

You can never watch hockey, because oh my god, Sex and the City is on! And on the tv there’s scented candles. Actually, there’s scented candles on every horizontal surface, but whatever you do, do not light them because then they won’t look pretty anymore.

You can never have friends over without first baking and cleaning so people won’t think your apartment is a mess. And when you have people over, you have to drink your coffee or tee from tiny little pretty cups and asking for more is rude, and so is saying no thank you when actually offered a refill. And the coffee isn’t kept in its original packaging, no. It’s in a separate jar, as is everything else. Sugar, flour, salt and rice, everything has its own little jar that is incredibly unpractical and “so pretty!” And those jars keep moving around in the kitchen until you’re just choosing a jar at random and hoping for the best. Even the content of the jars change once a week.

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan will be your new best friends, because every movie you’ll see is a romantic comedy, and because it’s completely impossible to watch a movie without doing your nails, washing your hair or writing a blog post at the same time, you’re continuously answering questions like “Who’s that?” “What’s he doing now and why can’t that guy in Seattle just take a sleeping pill?” And while you’re watching your romantic comedy you’ll hear all about what her friends did this weekend, and why their boyfriends didn’t like it.

In short, living with a woman sucks.

And now M’s living with a woman. Poor guy.

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Women, Can't Live With Them, I Recommend You Live Without Them

Perhaps Awesome Was A Bit Of A Stretch

This New Year M and I decided we needed to travel, and it so happens that my very good internet friend from exotic India was in Germany as an exchange student. We got together in a dark coffee shop at the corner of the internet and hashed out the plans. We’ve both always wanted to see Prague, and this was the perfect opportunity. However, M and I were in a bit of a hurry to get back to work, and Eesha would be leaving Germany for India just a couple days after New Year’s Eve. This, of course, made things a little bit complicated. But after hours of deep contemplation, 27 virtual lattes and 14 not-so-virtual doughnuts, we had it all figured out.

Eesha, the lucky bitch, would arrive in Prague on the 29^th. M and I would try to get off work early on Friday the 30^th, hop on a plane to Stockholm, take another plane from Stockholm to Copenhagen and catch a connecting flight from Copenhagen to Prague, arriving late in the evening. Arranging this wasn’t easy, I’m telling you, especially since I needed a double seat on every flight on account of having 14 doughnuts in one session.

Thursday night, Eesha checked in with us, letting us know the hotel was perfect, and the city even better. I had all my bags packed, and on Friday I woke up at 6 am to go to work with a smile on my face. After work we left for the airport and set out to travel all across Europe on the death-machines called airplanes, before we could finally arrive in Prague.

The flight from Copenhagen to Prague was perfect. It was on time, and since there were so few passengers everyone got to ride in first class. The flight attendants asked everyone what they wanted to eat and cooked different meals for everyone. Alcohol flowed and the captain made jokes over the intercom, including a very good imitation of Pablo Francisco. The weather was perfect, and because of a decent tailwind, the flight arrived an hour early. In the middle of the flight, Elvis (I’ll have you know that the rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated) stood up and treated everyone to a fantastic concert and signed everyone’s plane tickets. After the performance, all the passengers decided to play the lottery, and miraculously won 72 million dollars. Each.

At least that’s what I assume happened. I wouldn’t really know, we never made that flight. Nope, we were stuck in Stockholm. Norwegian airlines apologized for the delay, gave us a hotel room, fed us and put us on a flight from Stockholm to Prague at a time when not even breakfast was awake yet. It was an extraordinarily ordinary flight; two minutes late, bland food and indifferent flight attendants. But it got us to Prague.

We arrived in Prague 12 hours later than we had planned, but luckily Eesha hadn’t run off and left us with the hotel bill. We spent about 10 minutes making sure we didn’t spontaneously hate each other, and then set out to conquer Prague together. We saw everything we could possibly see in one day, and even if I tried I could never, ever pronounce, spell or remember any of the names of the things and places we saw. But we saw a nice square with a nice statue for the late Vaclav Havel, we saw extremely deep subways and ate very good local delicacies. We went in search of a castle on a hill, found it, and nearly died from the climb up the hill. We witnessed the spectacle that is the Astronomical Clock and climbed the tower. We saw the Powder Tower and the Charles Bridge, where we together with ten thousand other people also became the very mangled audience of the most spectacular fireworks ever while sipping a miniature bottle of absinthe. We also saw a lot of furry hats and museums of torture. The Czech clearly have a thing for furry torture.

A Finn, taking a picture of an Indian, taking a picture of a building.

Searching for the castle, finding only empty streets.

We found the castle! Too bad it's too big to fit in the picture.

Around the castle a great wall ran, and beyond, the city of Prague.

Next stop, Hell.

"Don't mind me, just holding up a building here."

View from the tower at the Astronomical Clock.

Have I mentioned I hate heights?

This charming little fellow rang the bell every hour at the Astronomical Clock.

New Year's Eve at Charles Bridge, where someone standing behind me either has a banana in his pocket, or just sexually assaulted me.

The next day we woke up early and rode trains all day long. Unfortunately, so did a lot of other people, and the first hour or so was spent trying to ignore an extremely loud family of two mommies and two kids. When they weren’t screaming and crying (even the moms), they were playing loud videogames on little portable devices from hell.

Luckily we soon crossed into the country that boasts not only Oktoberfest, sauerkraut and bratwurst, but also 5 million skeletons in their closet. At the same time the Czech announcements on the train stopped and a very well-organized lady started doing the announcements in German instead. And that’s pretty much how the rest of our trip was, extremely organised thanks to the Germans and their obsession with neat and orderly. We jumped onto another train in Dresden, and yet a new one in Leipzig. We arrived in Magdeburg in the evening, and didn’t have time do to much more than take a walk and have dinner. Oh, and share quarters with a dozen ghosts or so. We spent the night in an old University dormitory that was clearly haunted. It looked haunted, felt haunted and sounded haunted. The bathroom was at the end of the hallway, and I’ll bet you anything that the clanking sound in the pipes wasn’t made by rats. And it wasn’t Casper the Friendly Ghost clanking either, no, this was The Shining, dubbed to German. Luckily we only had to stay there one night, and then it was off to Berlin.

Berlin was lovely, and just as well-organized as the rest of Germany. We had 24 hours in Berlin, and we used the time well. We saw the Bundestag, Brandenburger Tor, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (quite the fetching name for a memorial, don’t you think?), what is left of the Berlin Wall, the hugely phallic TV-tower and Checkpoint Charlie. We had some currywurst and were ridiculously happy when we didn’t have to pay extra for Wi-Fi at the hotel. We rode the subway and the trains and marvelled at the railway stations, built high above the city. And even I who have only taken basic German, ages ago, understood almost everything said. A lovely place, it was.

I looked up "haunted house" on Wikipedia, then hit "Deutsch", only to learn that there is no such listing in German. Germans are clearly too sensible for ghosts.

 

Not actual wall.

The square at Brandenburger Tor.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

The one thing that really truly stayed with me, though, was the very aptly named memorial. Huge slabs of concrete, lined up perfectly over an entire block. On the outside it looked perfectly even, all blocks the same size. And then you started walking between the blocks, and the ground sank into the earth, you found yourself walking down a slope, the concrete blocks on either side of you growing taller and taller. What started as innocent blocks at knee-level grew into 15-foot tall monsters, blocking out the light, towering over you in a perfect metaphor for the deep dark secrets of Berlin. I could have walked around in it all night, but alas, we had things to do, places to sightsee.

We left Berlin the next day, and I got that familiar angsty feeling when I heard Finnish spoken on the airport. After another death-defying flight home, the bus driver’s laconic welcome made me feel perfectly at home again. We arrived in Turku at 10 at night, crawled into bed and got up at 6 am the next day to go to work. 

And just like that, the adventure was over.

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Perhaps Awesome Was A Bit Of A Stretch