intellectual epiphany, and other things that go "bump" in the night

[freckles_and_doubt]

tsukikoneko had a rather good Halloween party on Friday night, complete with people in somewhat excellent costumes, and a cake shaped like a ghost (cute). I copped out of the costume thing, although a random selection of sort-of-Halloweeny items from my wardrobe seems to have kicked me out dressed as myself circa about 1993, i.e. gothy (sans the make-up. I no longer actually possess any make-up, even if I felt like relapsing. Curiously liberating, actually). I was feeling a bit antisocial and thus had to have about three glasses of wine before relaxing enough to enjoy it, which resulted in poor librsa, who'd incautiously asked me a leading question, having his ear enthusiastically bent for about half an hour as I madly compared Sheri Tepper's Grass with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is the substance of a rather tentacular feminist/genre/gothic paper that has been callously refusing to allow me to write it in any coherent sense for about three years now. Fortunately librsa is good at leading questions and wine is good at unlocking my thought processes, with the result that a crucial insight hit me amidships after about ten minutes of babbling, causing me to go "OMG! it's all about failed parenthood resulting in monstrous offspring!", after which I wove drunkenly home to spend about half of the rest of the weekend enthusiastically reshuffling my notes and watching the argument slot neatly into place. Which means I'm no further on Harry Potter. Sorry, wolverine_nun. But it all makes me realise how isolated I am in this university from people who actually understand the genre stuff I do. Also, that possibly I should write more papers while drunk.

It was also rather a felinated evening. Apart from re-acquainting myself with tsukikoneko's Machek, who I helped bottle-feed as an extremely small scrap of kitten and who is fat, unbelievably beautiful (silver-grey tabby, my favourite flavour) and a total slut for affection, one of the guests had dressed as a witch and brought along her "familiar", a sphinx. (That's the weird hairless breed). It was very cute, velvety to the touch, and also bizarrely and completely chilled - I swear she'd drugged it, although she maintained it's simply a calm cat. You try to wrap any of mine in a blanket and drag it into a Halloween party, you end up with your Halloween costume involuntarily being "Survivor" - of a mountain lion attack, or possibly the zombie apocalypse.

Bugger, it must be Monday, it's The Sentences That Ate Cape Town. Sorry. (Also, I'm a bit zoned from waking up randomly at 5am this morning and being unable to get back to sleep, resulting in a 7am arrival in my office and two hours of extremely productive work before the first student disaster knocked on my door. Not to mention the comfortable glow of superiority. I wanted to leave handfuls of small reproachful etched frimpt shells on my boss's desk, but fortunately wiser counsels prevailed. Besides, she's exponentially more efficient than I am, and I rather like her.)

Last Night I Dreamed: a complicated sort of Alias-style dream involving subterranean secret bases accessed from the bottom of a river (tricky for dragging in reluctant prisoners). Said base was controlled by a giant, organic, semi-sentient computer system called ROAR (don't ask me why, it's probably an obscure faculty acronym) which at the central point of the dream was sabotaged by Cary Elwes, who was a double agent (no doubt present because of his dodgy ambiguous agent turn on X-files), by means of evilly substituting a fake replica for the small charcoal pill at the point of the laser which ran the computer. (My subconscious is also not a science grad). I was just too late to stop the substitution, resulting in the whole world being shunted off into an alternate reality in which ROAR was crippled.

Comments

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Not to worry. I'll find one or two other things to keep me busy.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

ooh, the irony burns... I shouldn't take too long to get back to it, actually. It's weighing on me.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

:D
Marking, currently ... grr

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm even missing the marking.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

You need your head read, sir

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I need to be a teacher again.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Let's get these papers out there.
Yay Sheri Tepper and Harry Potter!

Alias

[(Anonymous)]

ROAR generally stands for Right Of Admission Reserved, in my experience, which seems appropriate. :-)

Re: Alias

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I suspect my dreams would be a tad less weird if I actually had "Right of Admission Reserved" up over the door. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any actual way to eject obstreperous subconscious imagery.