we sing to bless the morning

monday links (manifestos, lullabies, strangers, paris)

Another Monday, another set of things that make my pulse speed up.

Roberto Farruggio takes the most beautiful photos. 

Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto After the End of Literature and Manifestos) by Lars Iyer is something everyone inclined to write should take the time to read. ("To say that literature is dead is both empirically false and intuitively true," he writes, and opens your eyes.)

A truly incredible song for any dreary morning.

Is 2011 a year that will change the world?


"Grab hold of the nearest stranger. Don't take the stranger's hand, God knows where that's been, but grasp their arm, firmly. Don't let go until I tell you to." Miranda July on strangers.

a bit of wanderlust

Oh if only all commercials were romantic, wanderlust-inducing short films.

favourite film posters: amélie

 

I love Amélie and this poster is the most beautiful one I've seen. The things I'd do for a room like hers! (The things I'd do for any kind of room in Paris, come to think of it.)

this is an introductory post

I was waiting for my crêpes in Paris and my face was doing something weird.

I've been putting off writing an introductory post for weeks. It's high time I grabbed myself by the neck, as we say here in Finland, and churned it out.

Hello. My name is Iida (pronounced ee-duh), I am eighteen years of age and I live just outside Helsinki. I'm Finnish but I was born in England, and I'm bilingual. I attend a high school focused on the arts.

I write, I read, I take photographs, I sail (tall ships, not yachts). I listen to quite a lot of music, jazz and 60's pop and this thing called indie. Pretty much anything with a bit of banjo and whispery vocals.

I am scared shitless by most things in life. I'm a perfectionist to the most ridiculous degree. I'm also inherently lazy and prone to procrastinate.

I'm chronically awkward and ridiculously self-indulgent. It's my second nature to keep a running record of my thoughts and feelings. Like most of us who write, I feel a desperate need to catalogue and define my existence, to pin down my life for fear of forgetting.

My mother wanted to photograph me in front of La Fontaine Médicis and my face resorted to weirdness again.

I've been seeing my therapist for about a year. I've been having a hard time coping with my (truly terribly low) self-esteem, my perfectionism, my difficulties in social situations, my self-harm. It's nothing you haven't heard of before but I have the misfortune of having to live through it. The good thing is that these days I find it much easier to be hopeful about my future

(And the most important thing about me, the reason I write this blog, what it all boils down to: I'm learning to be honest.)

home again

Paris was everything Paris should rightfully be, and maybe more. It was waking up to see the Panthéon through the window of the hotel room, it was croissants for breakfast. It was forcing myself to speak my fragmented, accented French. 

It was glasses of Champagne in corner street cafés and cigarettes smoked outside galleries. It was thé au menthe and crêpes with chocolate. It was room after cavernous room of pastels by Degas at the Musée d'Orsay. It was my repeated wanderings amid the bookshelves of Shakespeare & Company, all the talks I had with the Tumbleweeds.

Paris was several rolls of film (yet to be developed). It was tiny shops in Le Marais and on Rue Mouffetard. It was Sacré-Coeur in the horizon and the view from the Tour d'Eiffel by night. It was hours upon hours of walking. It was those incredible, ubiquitous, unmistakably Parisian rooftops.

I adored Paris, more than I would have thought. But it's nice to be home again, ensconed in familiarity, is it not?

Basin and Shells by Christine Lafuente

à paris

I'll be back in a few days' time, finally as an eighteen-year-old. And speaking French like a native, naturellement! Bisous.