Teeth, Love, and Growing Up

     I’ve spent my whole life on a quest for control—of my circumstances, my emotions, others’ perceptions of me. In college, with the obnoxiousness only a twenty-year-old could have, I thought I’d cracked the code: avoid uncertainty, act logically, and make others as happy as I could while tempering their expectations of me.  An ex once quoted the line from Persuasion , “I am half agony, half hope” to explain the depth of her feelings for me. I hadn’t, and still haven’t, read the novel. I didn’t understand how she could feel that way after only knowing me for a few months. Moreover, we’d agreed to only date short-term, exclusive but casual, just enjoying our few months together until we graduated college. What could she possibly be agonizing over? What was she hoping for? It feels horrible to admit my ignorance now, because it’s a concession I didn’t feel as deeply for her as she did for me. When she accused me of just that after we broke up, I took offense. In th...

The rest of March flew by in a whirlwind of exams, presentations, and projects. A brief spring break trip to Athens, a reprieve of architecture, history, and cats, then I came back to Finland and was once again in the thick of it. Writing my masters project proposal (MP2 for short), putting together my masters project proposal presentation (MP3, if you will), accumulating hours upon hours in the library. Redbulls sprout on desks near hands of students, ripe for plucking, the air tense with concentration, hundreds of hands typing, pencils scribbling, track pads clicking. Boredom feels to me as far away as the heat of summer, this northern country, these days in late April, trees just beginning to bud. Temperatures just on this side of freezing, I leave the house with mittens but leave my hat at home. Drooping piles of snow desperately clinging to solidity in shadowed building corners, ice on the lakes completely gone. Spring came early this year I’m told, a quick snowmelt, weeks o...