Here it is, finally, after two long years! My first published article in a conference proceedings volume.

This is following the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics 15, which took place in summer 2008. Apparently this is the first volume, with 14 articles. I have no idea how many volumes there are altogether, but I think it’s nice to be picked among 14 articles covering historical changes in English syntax.

Besides, pink and red is a beautiful combination. Here’s the table of contents:

Mine is the article on prevent. My professor’s is the one on the TIME corpus. The editors wanted us to cross-reference to our articles, but neither of us saw any point to it…

It’s kind of funny now, considering that I’ll probably never take up my postgraduate studies again. Having an article published and some conference presentations under my belt might even be a hindrance in my CV when I apply to jobs elsewhere than in the academic world. So I’m not exactly underlining it, it’s just there. Something I did.

Well, there is a student in England who’s working on prevent and other verbs of prevention. She’s enthusiastic and has been asking me for help a lot, apparently thinking that I’m a lecturer at the University of Tampere. Whatever, it’s not like she’s my competition anymore.

As more time goes by, I feel more certain that it was never meant to be. I simply don’t feel at home in the field of research. There were too many external issues that I couldn’t stand at all, unrelated to the actual work. And I could never convince myself I was doing anything useful. It’s no help if others think it’s useful if I don’t believe in it myself.

I’m not supposed to be a thinker. I’m supposed to make things happen. I’m happy with my life like that, and I think that’s what counts the most. Why pursue something that doesn’t make you happy? I believe we only have one life, so it doesn’t make any sense at all to waste it when you know what makes you happy and what doesn’t. I’m lucky to have found what I enjoy doing.

Last year, I gave lol-slippers to my mum as Christmas present. I also gave Deniselle a pair of her own, a Christmas gift in name, but no sooner than earlier this month! That’s why I couldn’t show them here earlier – I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for her. As for mum’s slippers, obviously she has had them at my childhood home, and I kept forgetting to take photos whenever I visit my parents. But now I finally have photos to show both of them off!

Hmm, maybe we could make it a tradition to exchange xmas presents in March or April, since it’s such a long time until my birthday and next Christmas… Anyway, in exchange for lol-slippers, Deniselle gave me fridge magnet poetry!

It’s a collection of words and punctuation marks in the form of fridge magnets that I can use to compose sentences, poetry in particular, by arranging them around on my fridge. I tried to group them according to word class, but soon discovered that my powers of classifying Finnish are less than perfect.

But let’s move on to the slippers! The pattern is from here, the Ravelry link is here. They are called Peter Pan’s slippers, but since mine always turn out too big, I call them lol-slippers.

Here are Deniselle’s slippers:

Deniselle really, really liked them! I guessed her taste in colors quite well – I don’t like blue much myself, but I don’t have a problem making something for someone else in colors that I don’t like. She thought they look absolutely hilarious with the pointy toes, which fits her endearingly silly personality very well indeed.

And here are mum’s slippers:

Mum commented that the pointy toes seem to want her to keep turning to the left all the time. They twist like that because I wasn’t careful enough with lining up the sides properly when I sewed them together.

Just like my dad’s slippers, these are huge. The cat in the photo is about the size of a real cat! The weird thing is, they are 12 rows and too big for mum, but at the same time the 10-row slipper she crocheted herself turned out too small for a friend of hers who has big feet for a woman. And when I asked Amoena about the size, she recalled she may have made only 8 rows in slippers she gave to a male friend of hers! Strange.

In any case, mum was thrilled with the colors and she decided she wants to try to make her own to give out as presents. She used to crochet, knit and sew her own clothes when she was young, because back then she was too poor to buy her clothes ready-made. She used to have a decent skill at it at least, so no reason why she couldn’t re-learn it.

So I urged her to buy  a crochet hook (her old ones were so short that they felt difficult to use) and some yarn, so I could teach her some basics before I have a 3 week break before my next Irish dance classes. She obeyed and I translated and printed out Finnish instructions for the slippers. As soon as she made her first double crochet, she immediately exclaimed “ooohh this is fun!”. Hooked from the first stitch! I had to draw a detailed series of pictures as a reminder of how to make the first slipknot and the first stitches in a magic ring, but otherwise she got the hang of the different stitches very quickly.

So the next time I’ll show her how to make hexagons (see on the sidebar in my projects – oh dear, I’ve completely neglected to blog about my hexagon blanket that I also gave to mum?!), since the slippers are quite fast to make and can get boring really quick. I can’t wait. It’s fun to spread the joy of handicraft.

One person I know has told me countless times that I’m a perfectionist. But what does that mean exactly?

You want optimal results in everything you do. Whatever you get, you’re not happy with it. Either because there’s no such thing as perfection, or you don’t recognize it even when it slaps you in the face.

I always feel like I could have done much better, whatever it is I’ve done. Sometimes I’m happy and satisfied, but mostly not.

It must be linked to poor self-esteem. There’s always someone who does the same thing better than you in an objective evaluation (though all such are really subjective ones). On the other hand, there’s probably always someone who does it worse than you.

I feel like I’m backstabbing myself when I’m feeling fine and dandy and happy and so forth, then suddenly I get overwhelmed by a huge attack of envy. Why is it so hard for me to acknowledge that someone does something better than I do? Why not just be happy for them? Why should I be just as good, or better? What would I accomplish with that?

It’s like my whole existence is questioned if I don’t do something as well as I’d like to. Like I don’t have the right to exist if I can’t do anything worthwhile or noteworthy.

I think everyone needs to feel that they’re successful in something, whatever it is. Raising reasonably normal kids, keeping a pretty garden, painting, writing, teaching, keeping people safe, selling stocks.

So it’s only normal that I want to have that feeling. It just seems I’m not satisfied with anything small. Is my problem too much ambition? Is ambition a bad thing? Is it a sin to shut down your ambitions?

Ok I don’t know what I’m trying to say, this is just a filler-gap dependency* function of my blogger’s identity.

*In bloggese, that means no posts in a while -> must. post. something. no. matter. what; in grammar, a filler-gap dependency refers to a process whereby a subpart of a phrase is missing and another, complete phrase outside of it fills the missing part. The other phrase is called the filler, and the existence of the gap in the other phrase is licenced by the existence of the filler phrase.