indi: the amanaman of kasmu
On the internet, as usual, one thing leads to another. Somewhere in the vicinity of two in the morning (locally known as Oh Dark Hundred and/or Stupid O'Clock) I found myself on a website where I had been collected and indexed like some kind of trading card or exotic bug.
What I found is a website dedicated to Everyone, Ever, Who Is Connected To Kasmu In Any Way. I'm there, and my mom and grandma, and her cousins and wacky world-travelling talking to herself Laine and Hans with the boats and the being shipwrecked repeatedly, and old Antonia whose sewing machine my mail gets left on where it sits quietly until I find it a week later. We're all there. All these people that I know, and tell crazy stories about.
The stories aren't there, though. That makes it all feel weird, and sort of sterile, because that's how we keep track of each other. Potholders, herring, boats, clarinets, the basement at Macy's, embroidery, Lucky Strike, cameo pins, potatoes, Hummels, the devil's rock, sunburn, embassies, shortwave radios, carpentry. It's like Trachimbrod in Everything is Illuminated, the stories and clutter (mental, physical) are what we use to remember.
The stories I know are mostly on this side of the Atlantic. What I know about Kasmu isn't much. I know that's where everyone came from, and that they built a lot of boats. I know that you went to the sauna (which has a gnome in it) and then jumped into the lake in the middle of winter, because .. ok, I never found out why the hell they did that. I know there were cows and fish. Lots of lucky herring. Vodka. I got the idea that Kasmu could be translated from Estonian as: "small bump on the coast where you build boats and go sailing because there is fuck-all else to do except get drunk in the sauna and tip the cows over." I've looked at it on Google Maps and it has something like four intersections.
The website is run by this guy who's either an Estonian in Sweden, or a Swede whose parents hauled ass the same time my people did, when the Soviet thing started up. He's been meticulously cataloguing the Everybody of Kasmu thing for a very long time. It turns out there is an imperial shedload of us. I'm not sure what the proper collective noun is for Estonians but I am going to take the initiative here and call it a confusion of them, because that seems fairly accurate. It offers itself up in two languages for my convenience, but being that one is Swedish and the other is Estonian it doesn't do much good. Fortunately, google translate picks up the slack well enough.
About half past oh dark hundred, I shot the guy an email, including a mess of names, because I figured that if the English didn't work then the namedropping would. I just got back an email in perfectly cromulent English and very excited, filled with questions I can't answer and references to people I've never heard of. Thus proving that my tendency to spaz out and infodump is either inherited or taught. IT'S AN ESTONIAN THING. I've also been invited to register myself at the website, because once I do that I'll get access to The Database of Kasmu, which includes pictures. I hope there are good stories there. I mean, there have to be good stories, but I hope they've been put on the site. As for the questions, I'll quiz my mom, who probably knows this stuff, and shoot him an email back. It'll be difficult to leave out the potholders and the pierogyas but I'll try. Maybe he'll know what the fuck is with herring.
The whole point of this, other than me possibly being helpful and informative, is that I feel connected to all this stuff. It was very important to my grandmother, so it wound up important to me, and being the black sheep means I don't really get invited to all the parties. Or, as it turns out, any of them. Which is okay, because that would be pretty awkward. Y'see...
THEY: "Ophelia got accepted to law school! To celebrate, we're going to take the yacht to one of those places in New England that Martha Stewart recommends, you know, it's where some of the Kennedys like to stay in the summer. We'll be there for a week, eating lobster. While we're there we're going to take in a performance by the philharmonic! I hear there's a place about fifty miles inland that's great for antiquing, I'm so excited. What about you?"
ME: "I taught my dog how to sing along to Ukranian punk rock! I don't know about boats, but one of the proudest moments of my life is when I managed to drive a Toyota through some river flood during a thunderstorm without killing the engine. I made the six o'clock news*. My mom just got out of the hospital, again. To celebrate that I made What's In The Cupboard Noodles. Oh, and I went to a hockey game, there was a line brawl, it was awesome."
... yeah. Awkward.
*I don't know if I was, but I know they were filming it, and "I made the six o'clock news cutting floor" really isn't as impressive.
So: the whole point to this is that I find it hilarious I've been collected and indexed by some stranger halfway across the world. I feel like an action figure. One of the really random and useless ones, like the thing that was only in two scenes in Jabba's palace, that I spotted, begged for, and got at a toy store when I was maybe three. How I still have that, I don't know. Or why my mother got it for me. Why I wanted it is easier: if given the choice between a fuzzy Ewok and a weird-looking lizard bug flatworm thing, I go with the lizard bug flatworm thing.
Wonder what kinds of interesting lizards and bugs and worm things I could find in Kasmu....
What I found is a website dedicated to Everyone, Ever, Who Is Connected To Kasmu In Any Way. I'm there, and my mom and grandma, and her cousins and wacky world-travelling talking to herself Laine and Hans with the boats and the being shipwrecked repeatedly, and old Antonia whose sewing machine my mail gets left on where it sits quietly until I find it a week later. We're all there. All these people that I know, and tell crazy stories about.
The stories aren't there, though. That makes it all feel weird, and sort of sterile, because that's how we keep track of each other. Potholders, herring, boats, clarinets, the basement at Macy's, embroidery, Lucky Strike, cameo pins, potatoes, Hummels, the devil's rock, sunburn, embassies, shortwave radios, carpentry. It's like Trachimbrod in Everything is Illuminated, the stories and clutter (mental, physical) are what we use to remember.
The stories I know are mostly on this side of the Atlantic. What I know about Kasmu isn't much. I know that's where everyone came from, and that they built a lot of boats. I know that you went to the sauna (which has a gnome in it) and then jumped into the lake in the middle of winter, because .. ok, I never found out why the hell they did that. I know there were cows and fish. Lots of lucky herring. Vodka. I got the idea that Kasmu could be translated from Estonian as: "small bump on the coast where you build boats and go sailing because there is fuck-all else to do except get drunk in the sauna and tip the cows over." I've looked at it on Google Maps and it has something like four intersections.
The website is run by this guy who's either an Estonian in Sweden, or a Swede whose parents hauled ass the same time my people did, when the Soviet thing started up. He's been meticulously cataloguing the Everybody of Kasmu thing for a very long time. It turns out there is an imperial shedload of us. I'm not sure what the proper collective noun is for Estonians but I am going to take the initiative here and call it a confusion of them, because that seems fairly accurate. It offers itself up in two languages for my convenience, but being that one is Swedish and the other is Estonian it doesn't do much good. Fortunately, google translate picks up the slack well enough.
About half past oh dark hundred, I shot the guy an email, including a mess of names, because I figured that if the English didn't work then the namedropping would. I just got back an email in perfectly cromulent English and very excited, filled with questions I can't answer and references to people I've never heard of. Thus proving that my tendency to spaz out and infodump is either inherited or taught. IT'S AN ESTONIAN THING. I've also been invited to register myself at the website, because once I do that I'll get access to The Database of Kasmu, which includes pictures. I hope there are good stories there. I mean, there have to be good stories, but I hope they've been put on the site. As for the questions, I'll quiz my mom, who probably knows this stuff, and shoot him an email back. It'll be difficult to leave out the potholders and the pierogyas but I'll try. Maybe he'll know what the fuck is with herring.
The whole point of this, other than me possibly being helpful and informative, is that I feel connected to all this stuff. It was very important to my grandmother, so it wound up important to me, and being the black sheep means I don't really get invited to all the parties. Or, as it turns out, any of them. Which is okay, because that would be pretty awkward. Y'see...
THEY: "Ophelia got accepted to law school! To celebrate, we're going to take the yacht to one of those places in New England that Martha Stewart recommends, you know, it's where some of the Kennedys like to stay in the summer. We'll be there for a week, eating lobster. While we're there we're going to take in a performance by the philharmonic! I hear there's a place about fifty miles inland that's great for antiquing, I'm so excited. What about you?"
ME: "I taught my dog how to sing along to Ukranian punk rock! I don't know about boats, but one of the proudest moments of my life is when I managed to drive a Toyota through some river flood during a thunderstorm without killing the engine. I made the six o'clock news*. My mom just got out of the hospital, again. To celebrate that I made What's In The Cupboard Noodles. Oh, and I went to a hockey game, there was a line brawl, it was awesome."
... yeah. Awkward.
*I don't know if I was, but I know they were filming it, and "I made the six o'clock news cutting floor" really isn't as impressive.
So: the whole point to this is that I find it hilarious I've been collected and indexed by some stranger halfway across the world. I feel like an action figure. One of the really random and useless ones, like the thing that was only in two scenes in Jabba's palace, that I spotted, begged for, and got at a toy store when I was maybe three. How I still have that, I don't know. Or why my mother got it for me. Why I wanted it is easier: if given the choice between a fuzzy Ewok and a weird-looking lizard bug flatworm thing, I go with the lizard bug flatworm thing.
Wonder what kinds of interesting lizards and bugs and worm things I could find in Kasmu....