I need to make a plan for the next and possibly final thesis chapter. In order to do that, I should sum up what I have already done, and restate the goal of my research.

So the question I am trying to answer is "What did the ancient Greek person experience at a sanctuary of Asklepios? What did they experience in religious healing?" We can break down this question around the following axes:

- what is the built and natural landscape of the sanctuaries of Asklepios in our case studies
- how did people perceive and use them: ie, sensory dimension, theories of perception, practice, experiencing place, movement, landscape
- what is the social landscape of the sanctuaries of Asklepios: ie, who went there, why, what did they do there, what sort of social intercourse took place, how does it relate to other kinds of interactions with healing practices in antiquity
- what is involved in religious healing itself: ie compare modern and ancient material, look for ways to using modern comparative material to illuminate ways ancient people may have used or experienced or understood religious healing in antiquity
- combined with social and perceptional questions as well is the issue of what the ancient Greek person experienced in sickness, and how we should understand sickness and health in the ancient world: the context for religious healing


So I have good material for the first bulletpoint, the theory bulletpoint, and the comparative bulletpoint. And I have inadequate but decent attempted hacks at the idea of sickness and health, which I can fix in draft. So what I really need to focus on is the social world of the sanctuary: in particular the social intercourse and interactions, who was there, why, relationship to professional medicine. So I need to dig up everything on Aelius Aristides, everything on Greek public physicians, everything about how medical doctors interacted with each other and their patients... other things as they occur to me.

Aelius Aristides is our one source from inside a sanctuary. Also need focus on Galen, medical training at Pergamon? Public physicians. Inscriptions. Herodas's 4th mime again. Lucian?

Okay. I think that's an outline of a plan. Time to hit the library catalogue and make lists.

I made a decision to take yesterday off from mental labour - and such is rare for me, since normally the decision is made for me by my thinking parts going STOP NO CANNOT BRAIN.

I did mean to go to bed early like a sane person who intends to fix her sleep patterns, but when I wandered off last night to play videogames, I rather lost track. It turns out that real-time strategy games are the perfect kind of non-threateningly absorbing to occupy the majority of my attention without requiring my emotional investment. I may have mentioned this before. The absence of narrative means it's interesting, like a puzzle, without feeling like work.

But I got distracted by the push-button-get-reward nature of play, and ended up not going to bed until after 0500. I should really put myself on some kind of timer, I suppose...

( Cut for some personal meandering )

Anyway. That's life.

The scene: to my back, a fire with log and turf and flames. To my right, my laptop on the hearthrug. To my left, an armchair, colonised by a sleeping cat. My notebook is open across my cross-legged knees. My current reading is balanced on the armchair, half-shoved under the snoring cat to keep the pages open. A teapot (presently empty) sits on the hearth. The ceiling light is on. My back sweats and my toes are cold.

Every few pages I must pause in my note-taking to settle my anxiety. And so we go on.

(Reading: Saara Lilja, The Treatment of Odours in the Poetry of Antiquity.)

Today I read a novel. Wrote half of a review (500 words) for it. Wrapped up and formatted an interview. Wrote 200 words of my thesis, a process which took over three painful hours. Okayed books to review for Ideo's winter issue. Queried more reviews. Took a painkiller because my head felt fuzzy.

And yet, my brain is convinced I did not do much at all today.

(Yes, that would be why I am blogging my "accomplishments.")

So, gym. Less pathetic than Friday, but still pathetic: 0.6 miles on the treadmill, absent some other faffing around, 10K in 28 minutes on the bike. Some few weights.

Also, I am now 102kg. My ankles and knees do not thank me. So I suppose I will have to do the Boring Constant Exercise programme until I reach a more appropriate fighting weight. Alas.

Now I sit in the library (I'm actually in college, how shocking) and attempt to read the internet before settling down to work. I still have to review Above, and I just keep getting the intro paragraphs all wrong. (I blame leahbobet for writing such an interesting, complex book.) I am at the point of saying, "Screw it," and writing nonsense just to get a start on it. Or giving up and weeping frustrated tears of insufficiency.

At some point I need to consolidate my to-do list and Make A Damn Plan. That can wait for the evening, I think. Or possibly tomorrow.

The creation of writtenkitten has been very helpful for my word-related endeavours.

Well, that, and sitting my arse in my chair and working. Today, for example, I worked through three pots of tea (mint gunpowder green, Margaret's Hope Darjeeling, and finally a rooibos called Mélange du Cap) and approximately ten hours of arse-in-chair time, leaving me with one point five completed reviews (for around about a thousand words) and five hundred (500) new words of thesis. The assistance of Youtube was also invaluable.

The thesis, of course, despite being a miserly amount of words, took by far the bulk of the time.

Lucky for me jujutsu was cancelled and I got to stay home. I wouldn't have managed half this amount of work if I'd gone for a commute.

Er. I think I had something interesting to say? But I've forgotten what it was. So. What's up?

Yes. I'm finally writing it.

Language is a versatile instrument, but often painfully imprecise. Words become charged with the history of their use, so that it is difficult to divorce the concept from the context. We make assumptions without being aware of them, and use blanket terms which fail to elucidate the messy complexities of living, growing organisms: people, societies, religions, culture.

This is the case with "hellenisation". To hellenise, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, means to make or become Greek, to make of Greek character, to study or to imitate Greek culture. Hellenisation, then, is the adoption of Greek manners and culture, or the act of causing a culture to become Greek.

To become Greek. Is it, then, so easy to trade one culture for another, one mode of thought and life for another, as one might shed one set of clothes and don another? We talk of the "hellenisation" of indigenous elites in the new post-Alexandrian kingdoms, and by speaking in terms with an exclusive Greek frame of reference, fail to look more closely at the chances for Greeks to cast off their himatia and run off with the barbarians: to, in short, take advantage of the opportunity to "go native".

Or to bring the native back to Greece. Up until the latter part of the last century, scholars contrasted "orientalising" and "hellenising" tendencies in the Hellenistic world without critically examining their own frames of reference. Civilised, rational, classical Greek culture, with its concern for naturalism in art, the clean symmetry of its temples, its philosophers and democracies, set against the wealth and luxury of the decadent Orient, the more stylised art, Egypt's animal-headed gods, kings and god-kings: a frame of reference itself rooted in the nineteenth-century assumptions that opposed the enlightened West with the opulent East.

The so-called Orient is still today associated with exoticism and the Other, although these underlying assumptions are increasingly challenged by the use of post-structural and post-modernist methodologies. But we still speak broadly of "hellenisation," and in so doing, render the non-Greek experience all but invisible. If considerations of Greekness dominate our semantics, how are we to express with any clarity the experience of identity which does not fit neatly into a discrete binary?

Dreadful, aren't I?

Virtue, it is alleged, is its own reward.

I invite you to guess what I have been doing for the last week. With the exception of Tuesday, where an attack of excessive sleepiness resulted in me going home in the early afternoon and sleeping once I got home (which was, I stress, by that time the early evening, due to how damn long it takes me to get there), I have spent at least three hours (more on the days when I did not have two hours of class) every freaking day in the library. And at least an hour either climbing or in the gym.

I'm still slightly behind in my work. Is this, I ask you, fair or just? Is it right?

(Is it fair that too much of the research material is written in French?)

Also, it will take me days before I can acquire and watch Criminal Minds. That would make a better reward than mere virtue. But insufficient time, I has it.

Bad news: I am working six days this week.

Good news: At least there's overtime.

I may actually like this job.

Quite frankly? I'm relieved beyond words.

#

There's a downside to working eight hour days with the extra two hours for commuting. It seems to be eating my brain. I'm a wuss with no stamina, this is true. Duellist has not increased, and my exercise regimen has declined. Must do better.

Fortunately, I have three days off in a row. Tomorrow is do-everything day, but by Wednesday Duellist might be en route to 15K.

#

Something about tourists, since I've started having to interact with them: partly contradicting the stereotype, the American tourist in Ireland appears to be pleasant and possessed of manners.

(The rest of the stereotype seems to hold true: the American tourist is in the majority white, between the ages of the thirty-five and seventy, and noticeably overweight. Working at a tourist attraction is proving to be a veritable font of useful observations. And so far my misanthropy has been keeping its head down. Marvellous what the promise of a paycheck can do.)

German and Spanish tourists, however? Much less pleasant.