Hettie’s Reflections – Blog Posts

Biking In Helsinki

We are actively using the time of year (white nights) to go biking, even though I spend 10 hours a day at the co-working space, including daily workouts and meals.

On Saturday, we biked to Natasha’s place, and it appeared to be faster than taking a bus. On Sunday, we went for a very long bike ride, including a lunch break at IKEA (it started raining twice while we were biking, but we waited for the rain to calm down at the bus stop shelter). There was no biking on Monday, but then I biked to work on Tuesday (Boris escorted me both ways), and then we went for another bike ride after that to cross the new bridge, which is closed to any fossil-fueled traffic 😂.

On the way to Espoo
Lunch at IKEA
Biking to work
On the bridge
No cars allowed

Each time I bike in Helsinki, I feel incredibly jealous of the local cyclists who can bike literally from anywhere to anywhere using the safe biking lanes that are isolated from other traffic. To be clear, biking in the city during the rush hour still makes me uncomfortable, but I know that it’s mostly in my head. Other than that, looking at all the bike lanes, all the arrows, all the crossings … I totally get what Anna is trying to achieve! Even Milwaukee can’t be compared with Helsinki, and I do not even want to start talking about Chicago!

An Organ Concert At The Kallion Church

It was a super-fun concert, and if you look at the program and wonder how some of these pieces could possibly be performed on an organ, you are in your right to wonder! It was quite unexpected, and sometimes funny :).

The dress was bought for the occasion 😀

Traveling

A very short trip to Helsinki. Left lots of loose ends in Chicago, in the office, and otherwise, and trying to take care of at least some of them remotely.

My flight was on Friday evening, and I decided to take the L to the airport, thinking that at least the travel time would be predictable and I could do some work on the train. Didn’t exactly work as planned, since I had a medium-sized luggage which was rolling around all the time, and I had to hold it, and a Blue Line train moved as if it was a race car, but I made it to ORD, and even had a relaxing hour in the LOT lounge (that’s where Finnair is sending their eligible members these days).

It was nice to see the welcoming screen 🙂

I have been in Finland for three days, and I did a lot of biking, met with friends, attended an organ concert, and worked from my favorite coworking space. Some clothes shopping. A lot of time with Boris. Sleeping for 7 hours a night (I will be back to six tonight, most likely, but the first two days are like that).

When we biked to Natasha’s place on Saturday evening, we passed multiple green areas with lots of wild flowers everywhere. All the flowers were the ones I saw in the countryside when I was a child, everywhere I ever spent my summers. If there is anything from my childhood I am nostalgic about, it is nature in the places where it was almost untouched by civilization: meadows, strawberry patches, wild blueberries, and lingonberries; high pines, ferns, and horsetails. And this soft light-green grass, which is surprisingly different from the prairie grass, and I never thought about it until the first time I came back from the prairies to the European North. And that might be the main reason I would always want to come back to Finland 🙂

Pride Celebration

We had a Pride Month celebration in all of my company’s offices last week, and I was disappointed with what we had in the Chicago office. Here are the pictures that all other offices shared:

The Montreal office had a cookie decoration activity:

I assumed that our cookie decorating class would also be Pride-themed, as advertised, but it was not! They didn’t even have the right colors 😦

These are the cookies that I decorated. I could make the rainbow and the heart pride-themed, but they didn’t supply us with the proper color icing!

I feel left out! (Although I learned some decorating techniques, which I will use for my Christmas cookies)

And I missed the Chicago Pride Parade and the whole weekend of North Pride celebration in Rogers Park, and the next year will be even more challenging schedule-wise.

TIME Magazine: People Are Living Better

One more interesting article (I am catching up on my TIME Magazine reading for the past month)

The article addresses common dystopian fears that people are living longer but in worse health, thus straining the health system and taking more money from the rest of society.

And that’s another topic I was thinking about a lot recently. When I read books that describe life in a not-so-far-away past (both fiction and non-fiction, especially diary-based), I am constantly stumbling over descriptions of people of my age and even more of Boris’ age as “old” and “very old”, having trouble performing daily activities. And I find it encouraging that that’s a trend, not us being exceptions.

Full text below.

Continue reading “TIME Magazine: People Are Living Better” →

TIME Magazine: What Is a Democratic Socialist?

Interestingly, as it often happens when I am in Finland, I was thinking along the lines of this Time Magazine article. Each time I am here, I see and experience the outcome of a social system very different from the one we have in the US. I like what I experience, even though I see the cost of all of the things I like.

This article, however, emphasizes that Democratic Socialism is something different.

Full text below.

Continue reading “TIME Magazine: What Is a Democratic Socialist?” →

My Mom And Her Memories

It’s not even that my mom forgets things that happened many years ago, but the fact that she does not have real memories at all, but rather memories of the memories. She often combines several past events in one, or forgets the seqence of event entirely, like for example not remembering whether my children were born in the US or not. A couple of months ago she said that “I never told her anything about my first husband,” and would I tell her something about him, like what was his name, and who he was, and when we got married, and where he is now. I was more than shocked (I believe I blogged about it), but wrote everything down for her. For some reason, she seemed unhappy with what I wrote.

About two weeks ago, when she wanted to talk with me about her diaries, she mentioned that she found one of them, and she didn’t remember that she wrote it. I recognized the notebook when I saw it: that was the one I didn’t ever want to see again. She opened it and ask whether I remember how I yelled at her, and read one paragraph aloud. I told her that I indeed remembered. I didn’t ask here whether she remembered why did I yell at her, because she clearly didn’t. Then she said that she would type all the texts from this notebook on her computer (which was not a bad idea at all; she already did it with some of her diaries). And then she said that she was not going to change anything in her words, although now she thinks that she was wrong regarding “what she wrote about me” because “I am the best daughter ever.” To be honest, that was a tryly remarkable statement, because I would never imagine that she could take her words back, so I really wanted to aknowledge it.

Unfortunately, immediately after she said this, she added “as I mentioned, you never told me anything about your first husband, so I don’t know… it’s not about your Boris, is it?” I told her that it was indeed “about my Boris,” but she didn’t believe me. Now, adding two and two, I am beginning to think that she was reading her diaries, and could not imagine that she wrote all these horrible things about Boris and decidede I was married to someone else. Igor’s dad, apparently, had completely disappeared from her memories.

How I Got Accepted To School Number 30

In my recent historical posts (here and here), I described my situation by the end of the eighth grade: I wanted to transfer to School Number 30, but it was, technically speaking, forbidden because I was already attending another specialized school.

I can’t remember who told me to start attending one more math class at the same school: this one met twice a week and was taught by Mr. Maiselis, the most decorated math teacher in the whole city. He was teaching these classes to prospective students, which allowed him to assess everyone’s skills and pick and choose the best students for his upcoming 9th-grade class. There were always seven 9th-grade classrooms. Two were taught by Mr. Maiselis, two by Mr. Ilyin, two by Ms Kursish, and one by Ms. Klimwitsky.

There was some sort of rivalry between Maiselis’ classes and Ilyin’s classes, and everyone was keeping an eye on the school competition, even more than on citywide olympiads. But I learned about all of this later. At the time I am talking about, I was still fifteen, still attending the eighth grade, and still wanting to transfer. The reason I started to attend Mr. Maiselis’ classes was that I was hoping for his help with facilitating the process.

I think I was not the worst student, and when I got a chance to talk to Mr. Maiselis, he told me that a person in charge of math education on my district school board was a friend of his, and I should get an appointment with him and ask for an exception.

Looking at that situation from today’s perspective, I am unsure why my mom just let me do this. I remember that later she was telling someone that “she told me it’s up to me, and if I want it, I should figure this out.” That’s so out of her character that I can’t imagine why she would do that. Nevertheless, she left me to my own devices, and I went to the district school board, and asked for an appointment, and talked to this gentleman. First, he appeared to be very compassionate, but when he learned that I held several city olympiad diplomas, he exclaimed: why would I let you leave our district! Yes, an additional problem with that transfer was that I wanted to transfer out of my home district. Finally, he told me that he would sign the papers if I could convince my current math teacher and my homeroom teacher to sign a letter of recommendation for me.

I went back to my home school, pleaded with both teachers until they signed all the papers, then went back to the district office, and was finally accepted to School Number 30. I do not recall taking any entrance exams. I believe that Mr. Maiselis’s recommendation would suffice. My homeroom was 9-2. Vadim and Tolya were accepted as well. Vadim was in room 9-4, and his teacher was Mr. Ilyin; Tolya was in room 9-6, and his teacher was Ms Kursish. Can you believe I still remember all of these details?! That’s how important it was for me at that time!

Transferring to School Number 30 was one of the defining moments in my life, one of the events that changed its trajectory. I got an access to likely the best available secondary education, not only it STEM, but also in social studies and literature, even though, looking back, I am astonished seeing how one-sided was this best education. The environment I was immersed into fostered independent thinking (again, to certain extent only, but probably the best I could have at that time). I got to know many people whom I would never get to know otherwise. Most importantly, if not for School Number 30, it would be rather unlikely for me to even think about applying to the Leningrad State University, which means that none of my life would happen. There were very few decisions of life-altering decisions of that magnitude, and transferring to School Number 30 was the first of them.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

Pink Morning

My attempts to capture these subtle minutes of the sun just about to rise, this “here for just one minute” peach-pink…

Water For Elephants

Yesterday, I saw the musical Water for Elephants, and I could hardly wait to tell everyone about it! I liked it so much!!! I love circus. I know these days circus is a controvesial subject, especially when animals are involved. However, I have to admit, that I love circus the same way I loved it as a child, the same romantic love i still there. By the way, my mom never liked circus, and she avoided going to the circus with me, but aunt Kima loved it as enthusiastically as I, and we would often go together.

This was good old previous-turn-of-the-century circus, and the quality of the performance was not compromised for being “just a background for the story.” And the show has a drive (something I, surprisingly, didn’t see that much of a drive at Kinky Boots).

And now I want to read the book!