Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

I recently discovered my first gray hairs. It was truly a sincere sensation. I was minding my own business, brushing my teeth in the bathroom, and suddenly, checking my face in the mirror, there they were. On the temples, on both sides, like sideburns from hell. I looked like Clark Cable. Oh my GOD, I thought, spat out the toothpaste and almost hit my nose on the surface, getting a closer look. Undeniable grays. What? The shattering, harsh reality of aging had finally caught up with me. The fact that I wear my hair short only underlined the horrendous sight in the mirror; I couldn’t even hide the strays underneath my flaming locks of auburn hair, like Jolene. What the hell was going on? Grays? Already? I hadn’t even done anything yet! I had lived my life the way many people born in the late Seventies had: biding my time, daydreaming the years away like the in-betweeners we were, always telling people that one day, when I grew up, I would be a writer. One day. And I had no one ...

A short memoir of the family Kervinen’s mishaps during the holidays. If your family is anything like mine: crazy, busy with the casseroles and making the plum dessert cream and whether the ham is done and ornaments and secret wrapping sessions in the back, behind the mountain of fresh laundry beside the ironing board, father having some sort of last minute crisis at work so that he immediately has to go take care of it in the morning on Christmas Eve, but everyone knows he’s really going for some last minute gift shopping – every year, in my house! – then you’ll know what I’m talking about. A few years ago, my dad drove all the way from my home town to pick me up for the holidays with all my Christmas paraphernalia and hiking gear, and after loading the car we quickly headed back East because daylight was burning. Hitting the motorway, one of us made an idle remark on how they were all over the gas stations now, the seasonal salesmen, selling their trees. We discussed the mat...

I was already seated, my man on my right, my refreshment on my left side cup holder since I’m a leftie, when the group of young men came over and seated themselves next to me. My neighbor almost crushed my cardboard cup with his enormous Canada Goose jacket, so I quickly rescued my drink and told him to watch it with my most customer-servicy, gentle and mean-no-harm voice. The strange young man with his huge red coat was, of course, a right-handed man, and I only realized this as he was settled into his seat and started to instinctively place his own drink on top of mine. Since I had got there first, I exercised my right to choose a side of the two cup holders, but later on, as I had failed to act and replace my cup on the right side holder with his near miss of a cup placement, I wondered during the dreadful trailer of The Great Wall, if I had sometime heard that the cup holding arrangement in theaters was actually made for the right-handed, and therefore I probably had disturbed...

I’m going to risk sounding repetitive here. While I realize Stephen King was sort of one of my themes the last time, I simply cannot write a Christmas piece without including him. So here goes: Ever since I was young and bookish, one of my standing wishes to Santa was the new King novel. It was my parents’ job to get it, and after opening the presents, I proceeded to immerse myself into the new translated title for the rest of my school holiday while gorging on gargantuan portions of chocolate and gingerbread and other official holiday delicacies. This tradition continued well into my twenties, even after I became adept enough to start reading Anglo-American literature in English. While these days I purchase my own original copies of his still unending cornucopia of new books, and bring them with me over to my parents’ when I go home for the holidays, the basic idea of reading King and overeating on the days around Christmas has remained somewhat the same. The first King novel...

When I was in my late teens, Faithless released this humongous dance hit that rocked the clubs for almost a year. Of the song’s eight-and-a-half minute duration, the DJ almost always played the last three or four minutes, “The Radio Edit”. I, among many others, took to imagining these last minutes as the actual duration of the dance track. Had I known that one day I would reach a personal milestone of an entire year of sleeping around forty-five minutes a night, I would have demanded the song to be played in its entirety. In the deep dark hours of the night, there is nothing as horrible as the slow minutes inching by, the “I am going to die, I am ACTUALLY going to die” –thoughts every other half hour that passes, sleepless, the ticking of even the most silent alarm clock on the market loud as a beating drum, the gradual awakening of the surrounding world, knowing that the whirring in my brain just won’t stop, and another day is dawning where I have to get up, go to work, and try t...

If Trump gets elected, I’ll kill myself. If I get my heart broken one more time, I’ll kill myself. If they are out of pesto at the store, I’ll kill myself. If I have to sit through another bad rendition of The Cherry Orchard, I’ll kill myself. I guess I use the sentence a lot. It’s a comic relief. When I first watched Heathers in my early teens, it was laugh-out-loud funny. I mean, who would ACTUALLY want to kill themselves, or blow up the school? As I got around to early adulthood, I got my answer: lots of people. For many years, Heathers ceased to be funny for me. I live in a country, where the long and bleak winter is, indeed, long and bleak, and lots of people off themselves in the course of our shared darkness. Everyone knows someone who ended it, just like they say in stories about the sea how everyone knows someone who never returned. We are, as people, melancholy and slow to warm up to new things, I think, and I guess the darkness isn’t so much shared as it is experien...