Updates On Life, The Future

Its been a while since my last post so I thought I’d summarize what’s been going on in my life and what I’m planning for the future. School has been awesome and I was really satisfied with how my courses ended last semester. This semester I’m taking three courses: Graphic Design Projects (a 200 level GD course), Intro to Interactive Design (for the most part web design), and Art Since 1970, an art history course. I’m enjoying all of these but my GD Projects class has been particularly great as we’ve been working in a real-world studio atmosphere on projects based around real client scenarios.

As far as school goes in general, I’m now pretty certain that I’ll be majoring in what Clark University calls “Communications and Culture”, which is a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree encompassing studies of many forms of communication, primarily visual and written. I’ve actually already taken 3 courses that qualify for the major, which is really nice, so if I don’t end up majoring in COMM I’ll probably just go for Visual Arts, since the degrees share a lot of qualifying classes.

Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot since starting college is time. Here it feels like time goes by soooo much faster here than it did in high school or at any other point in my life. Because of this I’ve been thinking in the long term a lot and really, defining what the long term means to me. A few weeks ago I got my new US passport, which expires in 2020, and it was honestly pretty scary thinking about the fact that I’ll turn 20 in a matter of month and in 10 years I’ll be 30, yet the year 2020 doesn’t sound too far off.

Among other things I’ve been thinking about what I’ll do after college, and although I have plenty of details to work out, I’m certain that I’ll be moving to Finland. My mother never sold her condo in Helsinki and has been renting it out all these years after having moved to the USA, so she could give the tenants reasonable notice and I could move in any time! I’ve thought about applying to Aalto University’s School of Art and Design for a masters degree in graphic design after moving to Helsinki, and I may do that but I also might not, as there’s a big design culture there and coming from a background of two cultures and markets I don’t think I’d have any trouble getting a GD job.

I’m not fundamentally anti-American, but I can’t imagine living in this country, having experienced life in Finland. I used to ignore a lot of things about this country that I didn’t like, but now they frustrate me. Primarily, its people’s ignorance. Most American’s that I interact with, even most here at my University, are so isolated in thought, so oblivious to the way things work outside the USA, that it blows my mind. It frustrates me when I walk down the streets of Boston’s Longwood district – an area with many of the country’s best hospitals – and see homeless people on the streets, American citizens themselves, many suffering from curable diseases and struggling to stay alive in a society that gives nothing to its weakest. It frustrates me when I take the 1940‘s era smoke-spewing commuter train from Worcester to Boston and have to literally risk my life jumping between rail wagons if I want to use the bathroom. And to think that I’m actually quite fortunate as an American to have any form of intercity rail available to me. I can’t help comparing everything I see in urban America to what I see in urban Finland. I can’t help seeing how terrible the quality of life is here and how people simply accept it as normal and live out there lives in ways which would often be considered inhuman in Finland. I’ve explained to people so many times that there are in fact places in the world where healthcare and education are free, poverty and homelessness are nonexistent, and the government’s purpose is to ensure the well-being of its citizens. Most people will stare at me in disbelief when I tell them things like this, asking me how such a scenario could possibly work and how people could live with high taxes that contribute to the public good. Most Americans that I’ve talked to simply can’t get past the idea of public good, that everyone should contribute to the well-being of everyone else.

In the same way that after learning about typography I can no longer look at signs without thinking about the typefaces they use, I can no longer live in this country without being in perpetual state of utter disgust with what’s around me after having experienced life in Finland for so many years as well.

So, Besides life after college, I’ve been thinking about this coming summer. I’ll be spending the majority of the summer in Finland as I have for the past 18 years, but this summer I’ll be there for exactly three months, the longest I’ve ever been thanks to my college schedule! I think this will be the beginning of a new era of summers for me, and I’m planning some trips around Finland that I’ve been wanting to take for years. First, I’ll be going to the Turku Archipelago, a constellation of over 20,000 islands, all composed of solid granite, carved by the glaciers near the end of the last ice age. Its an ecological anomaly in the world and I’m really excited to do some photography there. Second, I’ll head north on a car-train to Kolari, and then drive through Lapland and the many fell scattered national parks up to Kilpisjärvi, where Finland’s highest peaks and greatest views are to be found. In addition to my out of the ordinary plans, I’m planning to do more serious photography in and around Loimaa, the town that my grandma lives in and where I’ve always spent a large part of my summers at. Loimaa is at the heart of agricultural southern Finland and despite hosting an endless selection of beautiful landscapes, I’ve never really done any landscape photography there, only close ups, so this summer I plan to thoroughly explore and photograph the countryside.

So yeah, my life is going pretty well. Next week I have my one and only midterm this semester and on Friday my one week (9 days including weekends) spring break begins. Over break I’ll be working on listing a few eBay auctions, since the time frame is perfect for one round of auctions, with my primary goal being to sell one of my lenses in order to reconfigure my camera kit in preparation for all the photography I’ll be doing over the summer.