hey muzungu

So far I have been on a plane with a broken engine and had to turn back to Schiphol, traveled to Entebbe the next day, spent the evening and night drinking beer in the garden bar of my hosts, went to the local market where a live chicken was selected, butchered and prepared (I played no part!), and tried to get over a culture shock. It seems you can’t really prepare yourself for Africa.

The people are very kind, both my Dutch hosts, their expat friends and the Ugandans I have so far talked to. The country is exceedingly beautiful, and very very poor. The contrast between the cozy expat life here and the lives of Kampala locals just a few streets away is harsh.

I wrote a very long text in my Finnish blog and am now kind of out of words. So you’ll get some hipshots from the nearby market and a promise for more details later.

Long time no see, eh?

Here I am again. What has happened during the summer: I was almost forced to quit the Academy but happily managed to continue. I was in Finland for a few weeks. I went to Russia with my family. I went to Japan again. My husband got a job from Germany and I returned to the Netherlands. Now I’m back to school, or have been for almost two months, and this semester is busy as ever. Which is nice. Also stressful.

A Many-Body Problem

In physics, the many-body problem has to do with quantum mechanics and studying the effects of interaction in complex systems. In science politics, it sometimes refers to the problems scientist couples face when they try to follow their careers in science and at the same time keep their family together. It can be pretty darn difficult to find proper grants or tenures at the same time in the same area.

Our current situation is related to this problem. When we moved to the Netherlands four years ago, we were following my husband’s career in theoretical physics. He got a two-year postdoctoral position at the Technical University of Delft. I was at that time doing pretty well with my own career, which was in systems administration. I applied for a two-year leave, was granted that, and off we went to Delft.

After two years Henri tried to apply for positions back home in Finland but there were none available at the time. So he decided to continue in Delft, where his contract was extended with one year, and I decided to stay with him, at the same time waving bye bye to my own career. I then decided to try to make one of my dreams come true and applied to study photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and to my complete surprise, was accepted.

One year passed and suddenly Henri did not have work in Delft anymore. He got a temporary position as a visiting professor at the university of Lund, Sweden, and went there “just for a little while”. Well, the little while ended up being a year, and during this year we’ve effectively lived separately, with him working in Lund and me following my studies in Delft.

Now the situation gets even more complicated. This month Henri’s job in Sweden will be done. He applied to continue his career in Finland, but that is still not going to happen. At the same time, I have applied to move my studies to universities either in Sweden or in Finland, as the strain of living separately (both emotionally and financially) is getting to be a bit too much. Well, the Swedish photoschool I applied to is not interested, and one of the Finnish ones invited me for the entrance exams, but again – Henri has no work in Finland, at least not in theoretical physics. So this seems to be the situation now:

1. Henri might have work in Sweden but I have no way to continue my studies there.

2. I might have a way to continue my studies in Finland but Henri has no work there.

3. If we stay in the Netherlands I can continue my studies here but Henri has no physics work here and we have no support mechanism as I am not eligible for study financing (being overage).

To make matters even more complicated, I effectively have to decide now, since the entrance exams to the possible Finnish universities take place on our individual evaluation week and our collective evaluation week. Which would mean that attending those entrance exams would screw up my otherwise pretty OK semester at the Royal Academy.

Whee.

Apparently I have a brain

I spent 1.5 weeks in Finland. First attending a funeral, then meeting my folks, then finally getting checked up because I got awfully, awfully sick and needed a doctor. I ended up getting the whole works: blood tests, urine samples, heart scans, brain scans… all kinds of stuff. At the moment the doctors think I may have 1) a thyroid problem 2) burnout. Wheeee….

Anyhow, this kind of self portraits you only get with medical assistance. I definitely will have to use this image for something…

Phasers on stun

I’ve been feeling unsafe lately. Whenever that happens, I tend to revert to my childhood interests; science fiction, computer games, geeky stuff. I picked up an old science fiction book from my own bookcase and started reading and noticed the date on the cover page: seems I bought this book on 9th February 1989. Whee.

My first foreign language at school was French, but I found English more interesting. One day, at the bookstore in the center of Helsinki, I found a huuuuge bookcase full of English-language science fiction books. I bought one and noticed that I was not able to comprehend most of it – so I set out reading more, sometimes with the dictionary, sometimes just guessing by the context. In a couple of years I had built up a vocabulary good enough to read Star Trek. Admittedly, it was a weird vocabulary: I knew “wormhole effect”, for example, but did not know many normal words.

I’ve always been better at reading and writing foreign languages than speaking them. This is very obvious nowadays. I still can’t really speak Dutch except in everyday situations, shopping and such, but am able to follow lessons and read newspapers. I think most of this difficulty in speaking comes from the Finnish mentality – we tend not to open our mouths before we are certain that we do not make mistakes – and Finnish traditions of language education. I remember endless grammar lessons and written tests, but not much discussion.

My grandfather is gone

My cousin Milena took this photo last summer when we celebrated Grandfather’s 80th birthday. I don’t remember why I did not photograph then.

This is the worst and the hardest part of living abroad. You think you still have time to spend time with your loved ones and suddenly…

And then you get the news and you sit in your apartment all alone 1600 km from your family and have no-one to talk to.

Grandfather’s funeral will be on the 24th of February, I will fly to Finland on the 21st.

When I was a kid in 1989 or so, I was – for a time – interested in photography for the first time. My grandfather loaned me his Russian SLR camera, a Petri or somesuch, and I tried to learn to work it on my own. Didn’t really succeed, though.. and then forgot about it. Grandfather himself had a huge collection of slides and photographs, family history.

This reads like a very disjointed blog entry.

Jessica Dimmock

The Ninth Floor project. Hurts to look at, but still..

There’s also a film, a video snippet of which can be viewed here but not embedded..

D’you know what’s fucking scary? The way hard drug addicts start to sound like each other. During the last year of her life, when my friend was calling me, I did not recognize her voice on the phone. She didn’t sound like herself. She sounded like the woman on that video.

We are ugly but we have the music?

I’ve known of Leonard Cohen’s music for 20 years. The first concert I ever attended was his in Helsinki in 1988, and now, exactly 20 years later, I had the chance to see him play again. His music has been important for me in different turning points of my life, and it is again now.

This portrait of his was made by Diana Blok, who will be teaching us Foto Autonoom.

And clenching your fist

For the ones like us

Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty

You fixed yourself

You said well never mind

We are ugly but we have the music…

September

September was a month of getting reacquainted with the Academy after the summer, with the Netherlands after spending two months away, and with life mostly alone after hanging with H and the relatives for most of the time. We began the new work/schoolyear apart, and that is how it will be for the whole year; H’s job is in Sweden, I am in the Netherlands and my friends and family are in Finland.

It will not be easy.

What small things happened in my life: I got new glasses after 10 years, planned a trip to Japan for November, followed the rocky start of the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, followed the American election battles and felt ashamed for Sarah Palin (a quote from someone wise: “…it’s as though there’s this massive blob of embarrassment that someone should be feeling but they’re not, so it attaches to you, the watcher. I could never watch “I Love Lucy” for this reason: Lucy wasn’t embarrassed, so by some sort of Law of Conservation of Shame, I had to be.”), watched the International Space Station pass over me, drank too much beer with the other foreign students and studied.

It was a weird month because I only read two books, The Complete Stories by Isaac Asimov (very good science fiction, but I for some reason never much cared for Asimov’s robotics) and Truth and Consequences by Alison Luria. I’ve noticed that my attention span is getting noticeably shorter; it is now easier for me to relax in front of the TV’s stupid sitcoms than by reading a good book. Worrisome.