2001-2002
ENTER LUKIO! TPM

Pokemon 2000 Power of One made an huge impact to me. I was a winter person even back there, and the way Articuno was featured in the movie didn't change that. Somewhere during class 9 I had invented the name 'Mikachu Yukitatsu', Mikachu the Snow Dragon. I graduated from the Finnish Comprehensive school with good grades, so it was only natural the next step would be Lukio, the school somewhat equal to high school or college, so I had a meeting with Haapaveden Lukio headmaster in June 2001. I said to him I'd like to add French to my studies, but he said I already had German and Advanced Mathematics so there would be too much things to learn so I had to switch from German to French.

I started Lukio full of excitement and it wasn't a disappointment. Those were golden years indeed. Before the first day at a new institution, I saw girls calling me Mikachu. I soon discovered I could use the two computer labs almost unlimitedly so I exchanged messages with an English Final Fantasy fan via E-mail. But then it happened. We had our a class photography taken at 2001/09/11! I had been shaved bald the previous day and wore a kimono-styled outfit made be my mother. On the same day, airplanes hit WTC and Pentagon. I sent a strange E-mail about it to my British friend but she didn't reply. Having to find something else to do in the Internet, I went to TPM, a website I found a year before or so. I stumbled upon the message board. Not knowing what a message board was, I joined. I started thinking about the forums everywhere and sometimes go to school at 7 AM when the cleaning ladies opened the school doors.

I even went to TPM during classes, if they were held in the computer lab. That's right, aside from computing classes (the only lukio courses I officially had to quit) also some physics an mathematics classes were held in the computer lab. I was captivated especially by Pokemon Anime Forum. Those were the days of AKA Pokemon Fan, Murgatroyd and others. It wasn't until my post #144 (the same as Articuno's number in National PokeDex) I started my own thread. It was about the alternate plot for the second Pokemon movie that involved Ash catching Lugia to a Master Ball. Soon afterwards, something strange happened with the Finnish channel where MTV3 Pokemon was being shown.

While they should have shown the final episode of Indigo League, they skipped the entire Orange League and started Johto League!! That was the second theme for a topic I posted at TPM. Nobody had heard about a leap like that ever before.

Days and weeks passed by and as I used TPM during classes, I began to notice studying at lukio required more effort. My mathematics and physics degrees seemed to decline and discussing Pokemon in English started to wear me out. Even Finnish language and literature studies weren't as easy as I expected. I loved the first course, because that's where I could learn to use grammatical terms and declinations, handy tools also when studying languages other than Finnish. Once in a French class our teacher asked what's the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb. I answered that an intransitive verb cannot take an object. My teacher praised me that nobody had known that answer before. I knew the right answer from a certain Japanese study book. But my Finnish language and literature teacher always rated my compostions 8 ½ in order to keep my grade at 9.

Lots of things happened at TPM, it became an EzBoard, and after switching back to UBB my interest in Pokemon faded for a while. For a new anime series entered my life and also a new romance, no matter how one-sided it was again.