New blog, after all.

Time for a short ad:

The Swedish blog I considered starting is now up. It can be found at evajohannas.ratata.fi/blogg/. I will keep both blogs, for now. Go have a look if you feel like it, though I haven't posted that much yet.

That's all for today. Thank you.

Update from the Yellow House

Just realised I completely forgot to update last month. Lots of things going on, most of them relating to my studies. I'm glad to say I've finally got ahead with my thesis again. AND I found an actual interest in it again, so I rarely even have to force myself to work on it anymore. I'm not only working on my masters in Ethology, but at the same time also an essay in Art theory. The later one will, or so are the plans, later be included as a chapter in my masters, and the subject for it was chosen with this in mind - I'm analysing the architectural changes done to a representational building in the town I've already been studying for my Ethnology theses.

Beside the sheer inspiration, one more thing that helps me focus right now is I got myself a key to the so called "Yellow House", a building on campus reserved for students working on their masters theses. I don't really have my own room here - you are supposed to clear your table by the end of each day in case someone else needs it - but a locker for my stuff (so I don't need to carry it back and forth) and a table that's practically become mine.

There are many things I could also mention but I'll keep it short and try to return soon enough.

July. On work and such...

Been a while again.

July has, so far, been a bit more hectic than June. Which is good, in a way - more visitors at the museum is always technically good after all - but also means I am tired most of the time. Today, Monday, I have my weekly day off. Until now, it's been spent at uni, working on things I don't have the time or energy to do on most nights. I used to have this idea that I'd do something fun every Monday but now I never really seem to find the time for that, after all. Or the energy. Time and time again I ask myself whether it really was that smart to use all of my vacation days (six days ) on a one-week trip in August. It does heighten my expectations on that week, to say the least - this year it will have to be good to be worth it... But I bet it will.

Had a short visit by friends from back home this weekend, which was great fun! But lots of catching up and too little time, as so often happens. Will be strange not to go up north for a visit this year, and this is the week I'd normally do that.

I'm quite satisfied with the writing I've done today, but wish I had one more day off (a "Sunday" following this "Saturday") to use for other things, like cleaning my flat...

Before the summer

The weather is still warm and lovely, but I hardly have time to enjoy it. When this week is over, I have only one more week to finish everything  before the summer - as I will be working every five to six days a week, I can't expect to have much time to write during the summer months. What I am writing on right now is the probably least inspiring group of essays I've had to do in years... While the sun is shining outside. Do I even need to mention that the progress is excruciatingly slow?

Sunday is election day for the European Parliament.  I still can't believe the number of people who chose to show their dissatisfaction by not voting - no less considering how common it is to complain about the European Union and the bad decision-making of the parliament... Many voters also seem to gather behind candidates who are simply "against" the European Union, which I find quite naive. How can anyone expect to change things simply by complaining about how little you like them? (Or, in the case of not voting, not even complaining. Choosing to just stay quiet.)

Sunshine is my new drug

It looks like the belated and longed for spring might finally be here after all. I seem to have more energy than I've had in a long time. Yesterday I went for my longest jog yet this year. Even though I waited until the evening, the weather was almost too hot. Still felt great afterwards, though (in spite of a slight dehydration)! I'm not sure whether I've written this before or not, but I've been surprised this spring of how little my allergies have bothered me when exercising! I still have no idea as to why, but so far I have not suffered one single allergy attack while, nor after, running. I have not done anything different that I can think of, I even exercised less last winter than I'd done the past couple of years, and I haven't changed my medicine (I still go for your average anti-histamines) or anything, but for some reason my health has just been better this spring than "ever" before! Which also means that it's so much easier for me to enjoy running - lovely! Strange, but lovely!

(Oh, I see now that I commented on this a couple of posts ago.)

One more thing that's going well at he moment is my artwork. Suddenly, missing pieces just appeared! Now I just wish I had more time to put on it. I still have deadlines to catch at uni, so I don't quite have the courage to really throw myself into my art just yet. I should probably also look into getting some new canvases, rather than just picking around on my old, un- or half finished ones... Not that I wouldn't love to finish them of course, I'm just starting to realise that it might never happen.And it would be interesting to try out some of the new ideas on fresh surfaces, to really start from scratch for once.

Have to go now (dinner at mum's). Will seriously try to keep up here on the blog. The longer it takes, the harder it is to write...

Quotes of the day

Working on my thesis and reading Hewison:

"Whatever the true figures for productivity and employment, this country is gripped by the perception that it is in decline. The heritage industry is an attempt to dispel this climate of decline by exploiting the economic potential of our culture, and it finds a market because the perception of decline includes all sorts of insecurities and doubts that make its products especially attractive and reassuring."

"Instead of manufacturing goods, we are manufacturing heritage, a commodity which nobody seems able to define but which everybody is eager to sell, in particular these cultural institutions that can no longer rely on government funds as they did in the past. Which means every single one, from the universities to the Arts council."

Oh. The sarcasm.

Update on this and that

I can't believe how fast this spring is passing. Around yesterday it was still February, as far as I remember... I do enjoy the warm, sunny spring weather, I just wish there was more left of it.

I don't remember whether I already mentioned this or not, but right now my brother is staying here in Turku until sometime the end of this month. This is the first time in.. I don't even remember how many years that my entire family is gathered all in the same town (not counting the occasional weekend or Christmas holiday). Feels a bit strange, up until now Turku has been "my" town. Still nice to be able to spend time together and catch up, of course. My mother's move is not yet finished - she resides in Turku now, but loads of stuff are packed/still unpacked up in Jakobstad, awaiting the next step. I don't know when that will be. Sometimes I think I wouldn't mind moving myself, but I refuse to do it before all this is over. In a family of three, you really don't need more than two members moving at the same time.

Some progress considering my studies. Not much, but slow. Two more coures to finish this spring, waiting to receive credits for one more finished one, and still work (most of it, to be honest) to do on my masters. I naively plan to write on it this summer, as I'll be working quite short days. We'll see.

I wonder what happened to my blogging. I'm doing lots of interesting things, but never seem to gather the energy/inspiration/motivation/whatever to write about any of them here. And when I do blog, I end up with texts like this one - rarely about anything in partcular. Hmmm...

exciting work-related headline goes here... (No. I'm keeping this one.)

Waiting to hear from two different eventual future workplaces. I've applied for internships for this summer, and so far been interviewed for two of them. Both interviews were surprisingly nice experiences! The interviewers asked only relevant questions, answered my questions, and seemed more focused on letting me learn about the places in general and the tasks and other details linked to my eventual work there. In both cases I left the interview with a more more positive image of the place, than I had had before. So, of course I hope to receive a positive answer from at least one of them. Still have some places left to apply for, though.

 At Uni, things are... well, quite interesting right now, to be honest. Except for just having started on my masters, I'm also currently working on an article... on Death! Or, rather, on writing about death. Still fascinating, though! It's inspiring to work on a subject this new to me, after having stuck to more "relevant" (to e.g. my thesis) subjects for quite a while. And today, by shear coincidence, I found one more article to use! I might or might not use the same (or a similar) theme for an upcoming presentation in English, but haven't quite decided on this yet. Bo Lönnqvist, who is one of the scholars I'm referring to in this work, will be giving a lecture on the subject here at Uni next week, so looking forward to that!

Library closing, have to log out. Happy weekend everyone!

right now

I realise I've hardly written at all this month. I've been lost for words again. It's not like I wouldn't have had anything to say, but... no words.

January has been an interesting month so far. There's always so much more happening this time of the year than in the fall - and I like it. I like juggling many things and not yet knowing which projects will turn out well or, for that sake, even finish. At the same time I'm looking forward and trying to plan at least for the closest future. Why am I even writing this? Guess I'm trying to get started again. Be back in February, by the looks of it.

the jar of awesome revisited - again

A couple of days into the new year it hit me: I had completely forgotten to open the Jar of Awesome! So I did. (Truth to be told, the notes had, by the end of the year, to be stores in two separate jars because there was so many of them...)

I then sat down and read them all, and was in some cases surprised by the things I had written about - I had never guessed that they would be so different, rather expected most of them to be about things like training... I also decided to repeat the project this year.

 Earlier posts about the project can be found here and here.

on writing

It was amazing to have a full weekend off work! I got so much done. It was good to have that little extra time, a chance to catch up and to care for my long-neglected home. I've tidied my flat (which was in a state close to health hazard again), rested, read lots and even got some writing done. When cleaning, I found quite a pile of forgotten notes from last spring, that m now having great use for - both for my thesis and for the essays I'm working on for the moment. The pages of notes came with... maybe you could call it a bonus of kinds. On several of the pages (I had completely forgotten about this!) I had also made my own personal notes in the margins, spontaneous little notes on this and that, on things I had seen or thought of at the moment, absolutely unrelated to what I had been studying. These were very fun to read, made me remember things...I bet I still do them, haven't even thought about it really.

Where does this need to write come from? Sometimes I think I'd be nothing without my words.


I'll soon be off to see the doctor again about my knee. I need to know whether to keep eating the same medicines, and I'm going to ask for one more week of sick leave.

The jar of awesome - revisited

Remember back in January when I wrote about the Jar of awesome project? Well, this week I guess you could say I updated it a bit...

 The plan was not to open the jar before next new year's, but just about six months into the project, the jar was absolutely packed with little notes...

 ...so I emptied it, but saved all the notes in another place for later...

...and made a brand new start with new ones. Now I can watch it grow again. (For more details, go to my previous post on the same project.)

letters and diaries

I have been keeping diaries more or less regularly since I was 7 years old. But for a while back in secondary school, my diaries were not quite that important to me, as I also had pen pals - at most about 40 of them at once! This meant that on most days, there would be at least one letter waiting for me when I got home from school. I would save all my letters in binders or in empty letter set packs. After I left home, and due to the many changes of address that followed, I slowly lost touch even with the most long term of my pen pals. And at the same time I guess that other kinds of communication took over for letter writing. Still, living in my first college dorm,  all of the other girls in my dorm would be jealous because of the amount of mail I'd receive every week.

Today, I'm back to keeping diaries. And my two blogs, of course. This does, to some point, answer to my need of putting things down in words. But still, writing blog posts aimed at whoever might stumble over them is not the same as writing someone a personal letter. Also, it often feels more than a bit one-way... I remember having written before about how much I miss letter writing. I miss writing  my letters by hand, but this is about more than forming words and sentences and getting them on paper  - I also miss waiting for the answer, not knowing when to expect it, and the joy of finally receiving it. Not to mention finding the letters decades later! Plus adding stuff to the actual letter. I particularly remember exchanging cassette tapes somewhere around the mid-90s...*

I wonder if its still possible to find old-fashioned, pen-on-paper penfriends somewhere. I mean, with all of the other brand-new-retro trends around, it wouldn't even surprise me too much. I should probably check this out. But for now, I guess I'll stick to my diaries and social media.

Why do I feel like somebody's grandmother when I write things like this?



*this was actually how I discovered for example the Stone Temple Pilots and RATM, and also how I got familiar with the Finnish bands CMX and Apulanta...

One jar of awesome

I first saw this idea over at facebook, and immediately thought I should try it myself!

So, in short, the idea is: Every time something good happens, big or small, write it on a little note and save it in your jar of awesome! Next New year's eve, open the jar and look at all the good things that have happened to you all through the year!

So I found a big jar I used to store beans in...

...and pimped it up a bit...

Why, yes, that is a cat hair on the lid.

...and chose some nice papers for writing the notes...

...and slowly started adding them to the jar.

This also makes the jar nice to look at. I keep it in my kitchen, as the old bean jar it is. I've already realised the jar might be too small, as this is one of those projects that really helps you notice the small positive things in a day!

letters or text messages

With the obvious risk of sounding old: Sometimes I miss the times of letter-writing. Late night I leafed through the always-full inbox of my mobile, searching for messages to delete, and I realized I still have some very old messages in there, ones I just haven't had the heart to delete. And now I don't know what to do with them.

This was what brought my mind to letter writing - in a way I envy the people of my parents' and grandparents' generations, who still wrote letters. Letters are so easy to save, you can just stack them away somewhere safe to find them twenty or more years later, but what to do with old text messages? I don't feel like copying all of them, because some are just... well, let's just say a bit private.

I am more than a little stressed right now. I am late with every assignment I'm working on. Every. One. I have tried to explain to my professor that however much I like the thought of putting everything else on ice for a couple of weeks to finish my thesis, it is just not possible at the moment. I cannot skip the courses I'm taking right now, as most of them are mandatory - so without passing them I will still not get my degree. Hope we'll find some kind of agreement soon. I do want to finish, it's just not possible to do more than I am doing right now.

Drab November post

November always seems to be a hard time for me. It's more than just the near-constant darkness, all though I'm sure it affects me too. Just as I haven't written here for weeks, I've had a hard time writing anywhere else either. My other blog has not been touched in at least a month (if not longer), I'm running late with my essays again (and it seemed so good for a while!), I rarely feel I have anything I need to say over facebook or twitter and even my old-school paper diary is being neglected. I don't think this is anything too serious, but it bothers me nevertheless. I hate feeling ineffective and it's stressful to watch that heap of unfinished things grow. But this would all bother me much less if it weren't for the troubles writing.

I hope this will pass soon. I feel lost without my words.

Edit: Now that I checked my blogroll, I saw that I've always posted less in November - and last year did not write any November posts at all.  November and May are those months, obviously. But for different reasons.

Twitter, authors and other things linked to writing

I noticed an interesting thing about my using twitter. On facebook I'll follow (or "like") bands or artists, but on twitter I'm already making a habit out of following my favourite authors. A surprising amount of authors have twitter accounts, not only the youngest, and tend to write much more interesting tweets than most of us.

Speaking of such, I just re-read Atwood's Moral Disorder for the n:t time. It is obviously just one of those books I can return to time and time again, finding new aspects with every reading. I also, pathetic as it may sound, found myself missing some of the characters after I had finished it. So I felt like doing another All-time-favourite post.

Today, I've been trying to finish an essay for the Academic English course, on the subject of adoptive rights of (or for) same-sex couples. The essay doesn't need to be long, and the subject has been interesting to work with, but now I'm just stuck. As I mentioned earlier, one downside of the English course is that I now ten to over-focus on how I write, no less knowing that my writing will be marked and graded. This, of course, slows me down even more (than the procrastination is already doing). And the deadline is tomorrow night. I hate when this happens. (It does, most times.)

On blogging and longing for a vacation

At uni again, and actually working (or... umm...  was doing that until now.) I am taking some quite interesting courses right now, which makes it easier for me to put down the effort. One of them (and this might be one of the most interesting courses I've taken in a long time) is Blogriot versus feminism, just started, where we look at many of the phenomenons around blogging - who does it, to whom, self imaging etc. It's been fun to try analyze other peoples blogs, and very inspiring, but at the same time it makes me realise how... well, boring my own blog can be. I know that this blog doesn't follow any kind of theme, for example. But I'm still holding on to the idea of keeping this one as the "free/unbound" blog, where I can just allow things to appear, grow or die without trying to shape it too much. I do plan to post more pictures, though. Just haven't  allowed myself the time. (And no, I dont own an iphone.) I have probably mentioned my other blog over at tumblr? OK, I know I have. It would in a way have more "potential", if I could just get it out and start updating regularly. I still have no clue at all why I don't. I had actually planned to do so tonight, but now that I've got this far I'm already to tired. Basically nodding off in my chair. Will be heading home soon.

 I think my biggest overall problem at the moment is how tired I've been recently. And with that I mean constantly tired. I wonder if a weekend off again would do me good, or if I should focus more on my eating habits..? Been lots of tea and sweets lately.

And it  looks like I might have an extra weekend off very soon. I asked my job for a free weekend as soon as I heard about the upcoming Estonian course, but the chances of me actually attending are very, very slim. Normally it would bother me to know I'm "wasting" a  weekend off (without having a program or other "good" excuse) but I'm growing more and more fond of the thought even as I write this.

Oh, and the beginners course started well! I think there were about ten new people on the first session, and I'm very happy with that. There might also still be some people showing up later. Unfortunately I missed the second session (I was late, no better reason) but will be all the more excited to see what things look like next Tuesday.

Listening to: Bob Dylan

Out of words

I have been out of words for a while. There hasn't been more nor less to write about than before, but definitely fewer words. I wonder why that happens.

I guess one reason has been the conflict between wanting to about things that I then notice feel too personal to blog about (not knowing who end up reading it) and on the other hand cutting too much of the too-personal away only to find it all turned very shallow and empty instead. Or end up putting it up.

I've been quite tired lately, having focused mainly on my bread job and university studies. Looking back, I know it would have done me good to allow myself more time for creativity, because when I don't, it will just eat my motivation and mental energy and this way actually slow me down even more. (Why don't I learn this?) I be I've written about this before.

Anyway, only two days left now and then one more week of vacation! Returned my work keys today, something I always love doing! Tonight will be my last session before Summer school,  and I will be practicing dressed as a beginner (without my gi) as  I own only two gi:s and won't have time to do any more laundry before packing for the trip.

So hyped about the weekend! Will be good to use some of the restlessness practice, I think.

Unfinished

I mised all three of last week's karate practices, and without even being ill... Just very tired and honestly a bit unmotivated. This almost scared me, as I normally never miss practice - the opposite. It's the last thing i miss out on, and generally what I usually feel I need to do when everything else is wrong/ demotivational/just sucks... Maybe I needed the break. I plan to attend again tomorrow, anyway.

I also don't know what happened to my writing blogposts. I've started several posts this past couple of weeks, but never finished any of them. They're still there as drafts, unfinished. Not finishing things is the most hopeless one of all pet peeves I've ever had. I can't remember if I've always had this problem, but I know I do now, at university. I'm always late with my essays and assignments too, if I finish them at all. Starting things has never been a problem - after all you only need some inspiration or a good enough idea for that (or something that "seems like a good idea at the time"). I still hope to learn the magical skill of finishing things one day.