and so become yourself

They (and that's the doom-laden unspecified-authoritorian "They" that should probably be THEY) have been renovating our building on campus since the beginning of the year. Today I fled the scene, silently screaming, at about 3.15, since my office had become absolutely untenable owing to the three scraping and two bashing-type fellows engaged in doing something nasty, brutal and permanent to the plaster around my windows. The noise was indescribable. I have had a much more productive couple of hours at home, peaceably answering emails while listening to the rain on the roof and the distant, premature mewling of cats. (Supper is at 6pm, and not a moment earlier. They know this. This does not in any way prevent them from daily attempting to speed up time by means of complaint, ankle-level seething and concentrated feline glares).

I have been working quite hard, she says with faint surprise. There are all sorts of interesting things afoot in the faculty with reference to new course structures and teaching/learning initiatives and what have you, and I'm having a lot of input into policy and design. Hideous power, in fact, is mine. It's pleasantly chewy and instrumental work, and contents a deeply authoritarian and structure-ridden portion of my psyche. Slowly, by exercise of will and guile, I am warping this job into something I may actually want to carry on doing.

Since I don't really think the gritty details of faculty policy are madly interesting to the uninitiated observer, I leave you instead with interesting linkery.

• This is a spirited defence of popular fiction, one with which I wholeheartedly agree. No guilt!
  
• This is simply beautiful. The world's ocean currents, as a dreamily-drifting graphic that looks like something by Van Gogh.
  
• And this is simply amusing, and surprisingly heart-warming. Homophobia is slowly eroding, at least in contexts outside the religious right. There's hope.