• How can common sense be taught (and understood) in a society where there is no term to describe “common sense” in the local language(s)?
• What methodologies can be taken from online social networks to distribute ideas and knowledge in remote environments where access to technology is incredibly limited and literacy skills are still rudimentary?
• In the “real world” what do you consider to be important when becoming someone’s friend? (This is in opposition to Facebook, MySpace etc when you can just “add” friends quite randomly.)
• Lee! Give me the goss on Sheffield!

I’m no economist. I’m not a business person either. I’m just a modern day hippie who consumes and thinks about how she consumes. So, here are some thoughts about current responses to managing climate change:

Thought One:
Moving to more efficient and less polluting energy sources, adding in carbon dioxide emission taxes / trading etc will increase energy costs. I understand that increased energy costs will affect prices of everything leading to inflation and unemployment. But quite frankly, wouldn’t slightly increased energy costs help reduce energy use?

I don’t want to be harsh, but in general, people don’t seem to recognise how climate change will affect their future, they primarily care about how they will finance their futures. If mindlessly using electricity and gasoline has no immediate financial burden, consumers are unlikely to change their behaviour. Whereas, if energy were more expensive, wouldn’t consumers (both industrial and individual) be forced to use it more efficiently?

Thought Two:
Why on earth is the government not leading the momentum on increased standards for efficiency and reuse in design and manufacturing? For example, if there are requirements that by 2015 all white goods (fridges, washing machines, airconditioners etc) sold in Australia have to meet stringent efficiency requirements, won’t manufacturers produce such products leaving the consumers with no alternative but to just buy the device they prefer? And shouldn’t such standards require demonstration of closed loop recycling at the end of the product life time?

Thought Three:
Is it possible to blanket broadcast An Inconvenient Truth on all networks at once? Either people will watch the best demonstration of how f*&^%d we all are or they’ll switch off their TVs and spend time doing something else.

Time is flying, so surely that means I’ve been having fun?

What started as a survival technique 6 months ago (stop somewhere, recover, think, get a job for the summer) is now just everyday life.

I have: furniture; books; clothes; things I should be getting done; some ideas of what I might do with my life; the barest minimum of Finnish language skills; a few incredibly good friends who I would lay down my life for; a reputation (amongst some of my regular customers) as the best barmaid in Helsinki; an addiction to The Wire and a desire to go more places.

Lately a lot of my new music has been discovered via Library 10, mp3 blogs and mix CDs received from near and far. I’ve also started a regular regime of listening to the 13.3GB of undiscovered songs lurking in my ITunes collection from marathon downloading sessions and the 300 CDs I ripped before leaving Australia. As a result, I can highly recommend Dumas, Smoosh, Bishop Allen, The Doves, Rachel’s, Johnny Cash, Feist, Regina Spektor, Lovage, Sufjan Stevens, Peter Bjorn & John, Emiliana Torrini, Against Me!, Mason Jennings, Whiskey Smile, Le Man Avec Les Lunettes, Magyar Posse, Willy Mason, and Chikinki.

But I also spend most of my waking time at the bar which, as I don’t have a working MP3 player, usually limits my music listening to the never changing songs on the work computer. And it means that artists I’ve previously written off as “too commercial” or “too daggy” have been given careful, repeated listenings and I’ve grown to love them.

Songs by bands like Coldplay, Jet, Gnarls Barkley, The Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crowded House, Men At Work, The Cardigans, Tom Jones, Jack Johnson, Icehouse, Kubb and Powderfinger had to be my breakup songs. Over the summer, those were the songs I listened to again and again, alongside the tracks by Jens Lekman, Fiona Apple and Spoon, which were stuck on my phone’s memory card for 3 months straight.

As a teenager I had a desire to “pre-know” things before they were cool. I wanted the songs I liked to be all mine and for them to fit a certain indie credibility. While I loved, loved, loved the songs for the music and words that they were, I did edit what I chose to listen to, based on what I felt to be appropriate for a weird kid such as myself.

Of course, if I was resistant to shaping a public identity using genre and popularity based musical signs, I wouldn’t be writing this post, displaying a Last.fm playlist or blogging a music meme.

Now though, more than ever, I am far more relaxed now about what music I let myself listen and relate to. I’m open to listening for the connection between any song and the moment that I’m experiencing.

Some of the connections and the meanings that can be drawn are just plain obvious and heartbreaking.

Today I let myself look at Dan’s blog for the first time since September. Following the recent loss of his camera, inevitable discussions about items left in storage at my parents’ houses had to be taken care of. That little bit of email contact meant that I felt relaxed and brave enough to have a peek, just enough to know where in the world he happened to be.

The track that shuffled into sound while I was reading? The Special Two by Missy Higgins, a song guaranteed to break my heart every time I listen to it.

:::…

[There's this moment in Neil Finn's She Will Have Her Way just before he sings "Still No End In Sight...". Those moments are in the final chords of Bad Girls Of The Bible's 88 Keys, in Soul Coughing's True Dreams Of Wichita and it's there as Buck 65 intones "'cause when it comes to rockin' something fierce, mmm do i" in 463. Those moments of tension are why I listen to music].

• The Sun
• New friends who make up for the fact that old friends aren’t here too.
• Helsinki’s not Adelaide
• Helsinki is more like Melbourne
• Almost everyone wears bikinis no matter what their body shape, so I had no excuse to not buy one.
• Most people speak English.
• Finnish sounds cool even though I can’t say anything useful yet.
• When the berry season is here you can go into the forest and pick and eat as many raspberries, lingonberries, strawberries, blueberries and blackcurrants as you can find and eat with out getting sick.
• Green plants everywhere
• The drying cupboards which hang over the kitchen sink.
• Recycling.
• Moomins
• Bicycles