Snip-snap

Yesterday, I went to cut my hair at a barber's just around the corner. The owner is a slightly eccentric woman who tends to hover above my hair - very much reminding me of an unusually large insect when she does so - before cutting to the chase. It's always a funny feeling to get up from a barber's chair and find huge amounts of one's hair lying about the floor, ready to be swept away and thrown into the rubbish. It makes one feel so... renewable, in a way. Whatever, but I've decided to visit the same barber from now on because she remembers me and because I seem to always meet interesting people there (yesterday, for example, her previous customer, who seemed to me like a grumpy old woman, suddenly stared at me and simply said "aren't you a pretty boy") - not to mention the price, which is cheaper than other places nearby.

What else have I done: I was at a party yesterday which had a very mysterious quality about it since I was kept almost completely in the dark about the proceedings before I went there. It was in the middle of nowhere and started out just fine, then started bordering on the verge of the bizarre, and just as it was getting boring I got a ride home. No more ritual-invested dinner parties with half-unknown people who tell endless stories about people I've never heard about - at least for some time, please :)

You know - who needs to go out and meet people anywhere when there's the internet. People from all over the world have suddenly started contacting me through Skype. It all started when 32-year old Zaid from Yemen started having a - to put it mildly - flirtatious chat conversation with me. Apparently I'm the love of his life - or at least I was until he found out I'm not female; this was about 20 minutes into the conversation. It's okay, these things happen, I told him, and we agreed to stay friends. I'm afraid he changed his mind, however - last time I checked, he listed his place of residence as Mexico. Maybe he thought he could hide from me better that way. In addition, I just got an interesting phone call from a certain Robis Jega - all the hysterical twittering and giggling made me guess I was being connected somewhere to the Far East, but I couldn't have guessed more wrong - my new friend is from Lithuania. This chat session didn't last as long and was not nearly as romantic as the one with Zaid, however - it ended with Robis giving me the middle finger. The people you meet...

I'm not yet 100% sure what I'm supposed to do with my bonsai tree. I mean, one is supposed to cut it every now and then, right? But what if I don't want to? Is this bad in any other way than harming ancient Japanese spirits? I quite like the way a new little branch seems to spring up all the time, and it just feels cruel to snip it away like some piece of rubbish. If I keep always cutting the tree so it keeps its shape, how is it supposed to grow? I've decided to stick to watering and give the scissors a rest. I'm anyway probably doing the cutting wrong - one should find a suitably young but not frail place to snip, while keeping a good look at the cuticles of the leaves as well as the direction the scissors are pointing once the cut is made - north and south-southwest work best because that's where the mother of all bonsai trees is planted - - this is just too much for my very basic horticultural skills.
On the plus side, I think the tree has already outlived my previous one, which seemed to shrivel up and turn into an ugly brown stump before I even managed to get the water.

With the Hong Count already past its twenties, I need to think of something to replace it once the day arrives. I wonder whether Martin programmed it to start counting backwards? I mean, that wouldn't be so bad - to see exactly how many days and seconds have elapsed SINCE the trip started. Technically not a countdown, though.

I want to figure out how Nana can change the size of her text in her emails - it looks very impressive and frankly I'm uneasy because I don't know how to do it. Talking about crazy grandmothers, an email titled "Shit" arrived today from Ecuador. So beautiful and simple - that's how I like my correspondence subjects. That also brings me to what else is in the air besides spring - its scary what all this wind lifts from the ground almost bang into one's face - thank goodness for glasses. It probably won't get any better with the most chaotic weekend in the Finnish calendar hitting us tomorrow.