Bittersweet acceptance

I received a letter of acceptance to a conference in Paris. I am at the same time flattered and a bit bitter. Maybe rejectance would have been easier this time. The conference takes place in June, and it would have been such an excellent opportunity to meet other people working in Jordan. It might be possible to have my paper read in absentia, if I manage to produce one. It is not quite the same, though. Not nearly the same. I thought I had already become calmly accepting but now I can't help feeling that this bloody illness is ruining what might have become my career.

Postponing again

Most of you who read my blog know me IRL and know what I'm currently facing. But I'd swear my dissertation has got a curse on it. At first I picked a subject that just didn't work out, then suffered of loss of motivation and uncertainty about what to do with my thesis, and now when I was motivated and it seemed possible to finish it, I was diagnosed with something that is going to ruin my timetable once again. The doctor emphatically said the treatments are going to leave me exhausted and I should not try too much. Of course he is right and the top priority is now to get me back to shape, but although not normally tending towards fatalism, I cannot help thinking that I am not destined to get that PhD.

Needless to say, I also had to cancel the congress trip to London. It was not strictly forbidden, it would just be potentially very unwise. So far I need not give up teaching though, and I'm still hopeful that I will be able to do even the fieldwork part of the course in archaeological survey in May. 

Oh, well. This is just momentary self-pity, you understand. I'll try to keep working on the dissertation as much as I can, not to lose the touch again. And it will do me good to have something else to think than sickness and treatments. I am not going to turn this blog into a medical journal though, so I won't be writing a lot about that here. Let's just say I am in good hands and hope to be almost as good as new after all this is over.

I did it!

I did it, I managed to leave the chapters in time. Go me!

Now various matters not related to the dissertation have turned up to complicate things, and it has been somehat difficult to continue with the next chapter, but I solemnly promise to finish at least one chapter by mid-February.

The date is set

And it is the 24th of May 2010. I know, that's next year. But let's not dwell upon that. I should hand in the first finished chapters after Epiphany. Now I'm trying to decide which ones would be even remotely possible - they are all in various stages of "unfinished", so preferably I should choose two which require the least amount of work to metamorphose into "finished".

Scientia victrix

I know I've been ranting about this subject before, but the recent news regarding universities, both in media and in the internal communications of my precious alma mater, give no reason to optimism.

The raising of private funds required by the new university legislation lags behind the timetable, the government is effectively cutting the income of University of Helsinki by millions of euros by revoking University Pharmacy's exemption from taxes and the financial situation at the departments is so dire that for example the Department of Classics has cancel to all the tuition given by other than permanent personnel for the spring semester.

In this situation it is tragicomic (although I confess finding it hard to see the comic side) that at the same time there is official worry about the state of research* and the duration of studies. As usual, the goverment is about to handle the last problem by applying the stick to the undergraduates, rather than trying the carrot.

Equal opportunities and investment in higher education rapidly changed Finland from an agrarian developing country into a rich, northern welfare state after the second world war. Some argue that the welfare state is already gone, and it seems to me that the importance of education and research for the nation is only a dead phrase, that nobody remembers the true meaning of.

*The Academy of Finland has in a recent survey found out that the standard of research done in Finland has dropped. As one of the major reasons for this the Academy pinpointed the lack of funding for basic research.

Progress report II

I have started a number of posts on topical issues but not found the time to finish them in time, i.e. whatever I've been intending to comment on is long past before I'd manage to finish the post.

Nothing new. It seems the more work I do with the dissertation, the more there is still to be done. Lately I've been so stressed out that I don't sleep at night because of thinking of various things I should get done, including the big D of course. A somewhat useless state of affairs, since as a result I am too tired to do any thinking during the day.

Conjunctions

or "The first Finns were Mongols, after all?"

Amazing things can surface when one is innocently googling for pictures to illustrate lectures. I came across this Neolithic comb-pattern pottery jar held in the National Museum of Korea:

Note the similarity with our own comb-ceramic pottery: