💾 Archived View for spiritualinstinct.site › log › 2024-01-18.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:14:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-03-21)
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Left work early today. Shouldn't have had those craft beers last night. I thought I'd start feeling better after a good breakfast and a cup of tea, but I threw everything up two hours later. I wonder if I should cancel that piercing appointment I have in the evening.
Being sick really sucks when you're not used to it. What was I supposed to do for the rest of the day, lie in bed? I started feeling a little better after eating some fruit, so I looked around the living room for something to do. My eye fell on my old laptop, a Lenovo Ideapad I used for college. It sort of became the living room computer/TV media box after I graduated. And I usually don't spend much time in the living room.
I discovered Gemini on one of the rare evenings I did spend in my living room, on that very laptop. I set up my own capsule a month or so later, just to see if I could do it. On an old Android phone, because that's totally permacomputing, right? I added an index page, a page with some recipes that are easy to make (I've never been a great cook), a page for links that didn't have any links yet, with a little storytelling around it to make up for the lack of content.
So I decided to simply start browsing the geminiverse for things to put on the links page. My starting point was the SmolZINE, a zine that highlights some interesting capsules around the 'verse. I like clicking on links and seeing how far the rabbit hole goes. Especially while knowing the traffic I generate isn't used for advertising purposes.
What I noticed is that many capsules contain posts about the maintainer's own experiences, thoughts, and musings. While I was reading through the fiftieth gemlog of that day, something that happened to me popped up in my head.
It was the 3rd of January, 2021. I had just arrived in Finland, to spend a semester at a local university. The weather was typical for a scandinavian winter: it was cold (-10 C I believe?), and there was snow everywhere. After a four-hour train ride, I finally reached Kuopio, the city I'd be staying for the next five months. The first thing I had to do was pick up the key to my apartment from some office of the student housing organisation in the city center. Google Maps had told me it would be a 15-minute walk from the train station, unfortunately, Google Maps hadn't warned me about the white blanket that covered all roads and sidewalks in the city, or about the steep slope I had to drag my 20 kg suitcase and almost 10 kg backpack up.
When I was roughly halfway my journey to the office, I had given up on trying to look normal, and instead had started to move my backpack and my suitcase separately from each other. I'd first drag my suitcase through the snow for a few meters, then go back to pick up my backpack, take it to the same spot as my suitcase, rinse and repeat.
I must've looked like a total not-Finnish-person dragging around my suitcase like that, because a man with a beard and an orange hat started talking to me. In Finnish of course. This was all very scary, growing up as a girl meant being constantly reminded of the dangers of walking through a city, alone, at night. one such danger is that a stranger might try to steal your wallet, or worse. Nowadays I usually try to tell myself that not all strangers are wallet-stealers-or-worse, but simply people making their way to their destination. Maybe they think I'm scary, too. But in this moment, I wasn't sure what to do.
"I don't speak Finnish", I said in English.
"Are you smuggling gold or something?" he said.
I started laughing. "I wish", I said.
He asked me if I needed any help and where I needed to go. I explained to him that I was a student, and that I needed to pick up the key to my apartment at an office. he offered to walk me there, and carried my suitcase for me. We talked a bit on the way there, about where I came from and about the city. I explained to him that I came from the Netherlands, and, not really to my suprise, he immediately started talking about weed.
When we arrived at the office, he talked a bit with the maintenance man who had been awaiting my arrival. We parted ways after that. I dragged my suitcase and backpack back to the main square, which was luckily not far away from the office. Tired of figuring things out, I called for a taxi, and finally went to my apartment (thankfully completely furnished with a decent bed).