old age and many, many qualms

You know, despite the whinging about the salary (lack of), politics (ugly) and manifest hazards (jargon, marking and the wayward student way with the apostrophe), I have to conclude that I'm in this business because, sad to relate, I darn well want to be. To the extent where I will voluntarily and with nauseating good cheer spend two and a half hours of my Saturday morning manning (womanning?) the departmental stand at the university Open Day. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to madly market English as a subject to hordes of confused Matrics who are attempting to obtain a pre-emptive stranglehold on this strange First Year business before it sneaks up and bludgeons them to death in Reg Week. Granted, there is a depressing tendency for the little buggers to (a) wander straight past us, drawn instead to the exciting sexiness of Film & Media, or (b) to peer fixedly at the selected departmental rep and ask worriedly what English is actually useful for in terms of a career. A nasty home question, that, to which I have evolved a nifty, punchy and remarkably logical and attractive-sounding response, requiring only that I restrain myself from adding, with a smirk, "and if you bought that, you'll see the most important skill University English teaches, viz. to bullshit coherently and with a straight face." (Says she, with a self-satisfied flashback to the recent film colloqium, where I spent 30 minutes deluding the onlookers that I was presenting a theorically tight and densely layered paper on Tolkien and film adaptation, while in fact I was basically offering an impassioned defense of the total hotness of Elves).

Anyway. The fact remains that I enjoyed giving advice to students on Open Day. I like students. I get all worried about their typical state of hopeless existential confusion and doubt, which is basically what first year does to one; I like having a chance to contribute my mite towards their continued survival, and to see the wild-eyed panic calm down a little. They get so grateful. Plus, of course, I get to proselytise the excitement and nifty skill-base of the English discipline, while dropping little baited hooks into the conversation under the guise of curriculum description ("and I teach options on science fiction and on fairy tale in that course..." *pregnant pause while I scan for a gleam in the eye...*). I caught two Terry Pratchett fans that way yesterday, plus a random Tolkien cultist and an interesting young man who not only reads science fiction (although he's sadly in favour of Terry Goodkind), but is an opera buff and could hold forth intelligently on the differences between Shakespeare's and Verdi's versions of Othello. He should go far, if only because he will have read several orders of magnitude more than the next most intelligent and well-read member of any class he's in. Sigh.

The rest of the department present, who dragged themselves complainingly up to campus under protest, and tended to growl at hapless would-be first-years, clearly think my enjoyment of the above is completely insane. I, on the other hand, have come fully to terms with the fact that this is obviously my well-sublimated maternal instinct coming to the fore. You hear that, O readers who are parents, new and forthcoming? I only guarantee to interact usefully with your interesting offspring when they're teenagers and can hold a conversation. And I can give them books to read. Lots and lots of books... *cackle, scheme*.

In other news this weekend, I lost the ongoing epic struggle with ShadowMagic, which I have forced the Evil Landlord to give back to me, thus demonstrating my demonic lack of will-power and ability to circumnavigate user-defined limits. Spent a pleasant and somewhat vindictive twelve hours or so playing an evil race, for a change, which I can probably attribute to the semi-psychotic PMT. Rapier practice this afternoon has more or less resolved any lingering issues, although I'll suffer for it in the morning. Impromptu dinner with Jo&Stv last night, much hilarity, and Jo at several points entwined with the Shadowing Lemma - she swears she had it in a half-nelson, but it looked a lot kinkier than that to me. And spanking, too!

Shall take these old bones and aching muscles off to bed. I have to be interesting on the topic of vampires and the erotic tomorrow, and lectures on too little sleep lose badly in coherence, although possibly gaining in joie de vivre and hallucinatory insights.