freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with friends keep me sane

Life got a bit complicated recently, what with mad fraudulent incursions on my credit card (my bank is on it) and the discovery of potentially dodgy moles on obscure portions of my anatomy (my dermatologist is on it). I am also, reluctantly and with trepidation, looking for my own place to rent, thus disrupting a working relationship with the Evil Landlord which has lasted for 15 years, but which has become a somewhat different space-sharing prospect with another human being in the mix. I'm feeling a bit ... beleaguered.

I shall thus distract myself randomly with random things. We keep a notepad stuck to one of the kitchen cupboards, with a stub of pencil balanced precariously on top of it (it only falls off frequently rather than continuously), for purposes of a running reminder list for groceries. While this normally reads, with a moderate degree of sense, things like "Trolls" and "Eggses" and "Earl Grey, dammit!", on occasion (usually following a Sunday night in our kitchen with added jo&stv) it blossoms forth into what I can only describe as cryptic graffiti. I have taken to carefully preserving these effusions for posterity, and the other day found a whole stash in a random pile of paper on my desk, which I have scanned, and which I reproduce for your delectation. (I cannot reproduce the one that read, in shaky trailing letters, "SEND HELP...", because I left it incautiously on my printer, which this morning grabbed it and madly overprinted it with four different entries denoting the $1 attempts of TENSO COM TOKYO to fruitlessly charge my credit card. I apologise for this careless trashing of a possibly priceless artwork. For a given value of "artwork").

The ones I can reproduce are more in the order of a free-form, possibly avant-garde, artistic riff on the genre of shopping list. Thusly:

fridge 1

"Honey" was actually a shopping list item and is actually in my handwriting. I should hasten to report that as yet Chez Extemp/EL is not graced with flamethrowers, trebuchets, robots of any size or a small cow, although all of the above would be handy for my current sense of beleaguerment. Also, I could do with a touch more surreal in my weekly grocery quests. (If "Trolls" aren't surreal enough).

Have a lovely weekend!

I am officially Over 11-hour days. You can keep them. I do not want them, they are skraaaatched. I wish to unsubscribe from their newsletter, which is a nasty and exhausting publication offering little inspiration. Other, that is, than grateful ex-confused first years, who are actually both cute and inspiring at times. All puppy-dog. Their ears droop when they're lost and bewildered, and then you solve all their problems with the laser power of your curriculum skill and fearsome missile array of institutional knowledge, and they bounce around with their tails wagging madly. (Thoroughly mixed metaphors brought to you courtesy of too many computer games, and Roxy).

I could also, may I add, have done without the 3-hour readmission appeals meeting this morning, on account of the awful things that happen to students, and the complete lack of tangible feedback even when we are able to find reasons to re-admit and thereby, presumably, make students happy. Apart from the usual (death of parents, poverty, depression, abortions), this morning we had five separate examples of students with unplanned pregnancies whose babies are now being looked after by parents or in-laws at the other end of the country while the student is studying. I don't know how people do that. I mean, I don't have children, I have only observer knowledge of that mother/child bond, but it must be hideously difficult to live apart from your baby like that. Some people have really sucky lives which make me realise mine isn't really that bad even with 11-hour days.

In the insane morass of registration, orientation and seething seas of student angst, I am grateful for the internet, which keeps me sane. (As do jo&stv, who feed me rosé and ice of an evening, and listen to me with commendable patience while I blither on whingesomely). Today's internet sanity moment is Canada's response to all the wretched stupid ugly Russian anti-gay stuff around the Olympics. I have been reading way too much slash recently for this little gem to allow me to do anything other than laugh until actual tears.

My subject line is still Magnetic Fields, who also keep me sane; said song is invoked both in honour of homoerotic Olympic ad campaigns and the probable cause of unplanned pregnancies, but of my new skirt, which is a pleasing shade of brilliant purple but which trial and error (i.e. wearing it to campus this morning) has revealed as being diaphanous to the point of unwonted revelation. I don't think you can quite see my underwear, but I quite definitely have legs. Who knew? Generally I prefer to keep the actual existence of my legs shrouded in a decent veil of mystery, but being as how there is absolutely no other option, I have simply worn the thing all day with a cheerful acceptance of its less professional aspects. It has caused me surprisingly small amounts of self-consciousness or angst. It's really a very cheerful shade of purple.

It being Stv's birthday and all, we went out to Overture for supper last night. I feel that it is important and indicative that, if the Salty Cracker crowd could be said to have a favourite default restaurant at which to hang out and celebrate anything at all, it's bloody upmarket and one of the top ten in the country. The waitstaff know us. Stv got free champagne. At in excess of R600 a head for a four-course meal with a wine pairing, that's an expensive neighbourhood joint. (And a bit distant, too, being half an hour's drive away in Stellenbosch). It was a lovely evening, although slightly negative notes were introduced by the following:

It's faculty exam committee season, which means I'd spent the entire day checking and annotating the 635 student records on a 364-page board schedule which is a fraction under 2.5cm thick. This puts me in a strangely zen state composed of equal parts of numerical trance, Machiavellian structural insight, advisor empathy and seething resentment, and incidentally renders me completely exhausted and glandular to the max. I was only really capable of conversation by the end of the first course and my second glass of wine. Overture was a kindly panacea to the day's ills, but conversely I wasn't really in the best state to enjoy it properly.
We may be overdoing the neighbourhood joint five-star expensive restaurant thing to the point of over-exposure. The food was, as always, excellent, but I didn't think it hit its usual plane of dizzy high. Lovely tomato risotto (they always do great risotto), but slightly arb green bean salad with unidentifiable duck, and bland square chunks of mostly tender pork. Fellow diners' mileage may vary, you are perfectly free to blame my exhausted state rather than any diminution in quality, but I wasn't blown away. Beautiful evening on the terrace, though, exquisite dusk clouds, and as always the best sort of company.
It is possibly fortunate that my tiredness was sufficient for me not to rise to the provocation offered by a fellow guest, who during the course of conversation incautiously offered a statement to the effect that she thinks Stephenie Meyer writes well. Them's fighting words, where I come from. It is my professional opinion that Twilight's stylistic and narrative infelicities are only marginally better than its gender politics in general loathsomeness. In default of the spirited debate and righteous suppression I would normally offer to such provocation, I present, as threatened, the blog which picks Meyer's grammar apart, with maximum snark. Fortuitously, today also gave rise randomly to this Slate article, which does statistical/linguistic analysis comparing three hugely popular texts - Twilight, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. It's a fascinating comparison, and in particular the tables which look at adjectives are extremely telling. Viz:

The thing which immediately strikes me: Collins's characteristic adjectives and adverbs are generally more sophisticated, but they also relate to complex states and actions and very frequently to abstractions. Rowling's are very action-oriented, but you can see her younger audience intentions in their comparative simplicity, with a focus on straightforward emotional states which tend to reflect action. Meyer's are definitely less sophisticated than those used by Collins, but they're also almost entirely emotional, and when they're physical it's physicality which largely reflects or responds to emotion. This echoes the frustration I feel when reading Twilight (and, for the record, I've read the entire series twice and supervised a couple of graduate theses on the books, if I diss them it's from full knowledge and exposure), because really, when you get down to it, nothing much happens in them. You drift passively around in Bella's head while she angsts and reacts and feeeeeeeeeeels. The language is not accomplished at the structural level, frequently obvious and clumsy and weirdly unfocused (my undergrads can do better), but it's the pacing, characterisation and plot which are really problematical, and which are heartily outdone by almost any piece of fan fiction I have read recently. I stick by my assertion. Even without getting me started on the gender politics, Meyer does not write well.

Rantage and random analysis brought to you courtesy of my really rather strong feelings about this, did you notice? And by the sure and horrible knowledge that in about twenty minutes I go to meet my four-hour meeting doom. Doooooom! At least the energy from all that ranting has my blood buzzing enough to mostly compensate for my state of over-fed, mildly hung-over sleep deprivation. Now with extra glands. Sigh.

Subject line is still Arcade Fire, "Wasted Hours", from The Suburbs. It's a ridiculously catchy, lilting, gentle tune which was playing in the car this morning and which has thoroughly colonised my head. It's curiously soothing, particularly after losing a day to board schedule checking. One feels they understand.

I've been on a bit of a quest over the last year or so to update the artwork in my living space, which has hitherto tended towards slightly amateur block-mounting of random posters, some of which date back to undergrad and damned well look their age. This is something of a solitary quest: the EL's indifference to home furnishings of a decorative nature verges on the sublime, and his input stops abruptly at the heraldic shield over the mantlepiece. My own taste is very much towards pop art, often with a fan twist, and I have made merry hay with various internet art sites and the local framer, with results which would probably cause exquisite pain in anyone with actual artistic chops such as I do not in any way possess. However, I am deeply happy with my Ursula Vernon and Martin Leman cats, giant greeny-blue stylised owl, Firefly silhouette collection and those dreamy, alienated superheroes in the atmosphere above Earth. This particular picture is in my bedroom, generously sized and properly framed (the slightly small image is all I could include, because of the artist's completely legitimate protection of her work on her website). Noelle Stevens also produces Nimona, which is possibly my currently favourite web comic; I adore the slightly spiky, faux-naive precision of her images.

I love her art, but I also loved the theme here: happy introversion, with that fascinating colour inversion which puts all the madly partying people in sombre blues and purples, and the girl/cat/tea/book ideal in warm orange and peach. It encapsulates everything that is currently true about my ability to interact with people, particularly at the moment with the merry gang of depression/fatigue/glandular fever/sinusitis having its wicked way with my hapless form. (Not nearly as savagely as a few weeks ago, but there are lingering traces).

See, the weird thing is that I am predisposed to quite like people. My job requires that I engage empathetically with a continual string of distressed students, and after six years of this I still like students and wish to improve their lives to the best of my ability. I'm good at empathy. My therapist, poor lady, spends half of her life hacking through the thickets of what I think other people are feeling in order to get at my own heavily-protected feelings, and we still have that argument about the extent to which it is ok to prioritise other people's needs over your own. (For the record: more often than she thinks it is). I love my friends, and stand firmly by my assertion that I have the loveliest friends in the known universe - and in that I include the bunch of you who hang out here and who I have never actually met in person, or who I see only every few years when we coincide continents. I love dinners with friends, mutual tea-drinking sessions, role-playing games, movie evenings. I have been known to cautiously enjoy parties. But, ye gods, it has to be at carefully spaced intervals, and on my own terms.

Part of the problem is, I think, crowds. Students are probably okay because they come through my door mostly singly or in pairs; they don't overwhelm me with input. I don't deal well with having to force my way through herds of gazelles in those mad fifteen minutes between lectures, and generally try to time any movements out of my office not to collide with them. But even if I have to navigate campus crowds, I know it's temporary - I can psych myself up for it, and pace my endurance knowing that it's finite. That's the other half of it - having, in the immortal idiom of the internet, sufficient spoons. Dealing With People is a finite allocation of energy. At the end of the day it tends to be gone, which is why I don't socialise much during the week. I can do parties, particularly if they're full of people I know, and alcohol helps, but I need to get a good run-up at mental preparation, and I've left a hell of a lot of parties very early over the last couple of years.

So, this giant chunk of introspection brought to you courtesy of the fact that I told my book club last night that I'd be taking a sabbatical from it for a while, because I can't do it any more. Part of the problem is that I'm not reading book club books, which sit in my bookshelf reproachfully and weigh on my conscience, but it's also about energy and groups. It's only six or seven people, but there tends to be lots of wine and chat, multiple streams of discussion and catch-up and laughter, and while I enjoy it in many ways, it also exhausts me. They're lovely ladies, but over the last few months I've missed several sessions, and have increasingly had to exert supreme mental discipline to persuade myself to attend the few I did make. I don't use socialising to recharge; it drains energy rather than bolstering it. It also, regardless of how much I like the people, makes me anxious, often only subliminally, but when I get home after any social evening I always require at least an hour of something solitary and soothing - computer games or reading fanfic the current favourites - before I can actually unwind enough to sleep. This does not work well with either insomnia or fatigue.

So, yes. I love that picture. It shows the happy introvert. Better still, it shows the happy introvert quietly recharging, so that when energy levels permit, I can leap out into the world and engage with all the people I really like. Because introversion is not misanthropy, and there's only so much you can get from cats.

Subject line from early Eurythmics, specifically "Savage", which is what was randomly playing off my MP3 player in the car this morning, but which is one of my favourites of theirs despite its possible slight dodginess. You can play with me there sometimes, if you catch me in the mood.

I have just found three CDs in the side pocket of my Ipad case. They are unmarked, save for a small, cryptic barcode sticker. They do not play when put into a normal drive. I have absolutely no recollection of these - where they came from, who gave them to me, what they're for. I have been reading enough dodgy fanfic that I am half convinced they're a sneaky hacker ploy, and the seven seconds the one spent in my drive making meditative and abortive read noises to itself is in fact the herald of my entire system melting into slag, because unlikely superviruses. This is ridiculous. I know my memory is bad, but this is ridiculous. Who's given me CDs lately? Why? What are they? How long have they been there? What is the meaning of life?

In the Department of Memory, Lack of, Total, there's also Bartholomew's Klip. We had that lovely weekend there over Easter - five-star luxury on a game farm with nothing to do except go on desultory game drives and consume early tea and muffins and biscuits shaped like rabbits, brunch, high tea, sundowners and godlike snacks, dinner, and the shortbread and decanter of sherry in your room when you went to bed. It was bloody marvellous. The group represented that happy confluence of 8 people any one of whom was interesting to talk to in their own right and who were downright hilarious in combination, which is pretty much the definition of a good weekend, although owing to the booze flowly-freeing more or less continually, it was also extremely argumentative. (In a more than somewhat entertaining way, although I do find myself wondering what the hapless staff thought). Jo and I don't agree about feminism, but a bottle of champagne soothes all ideological ills. The food was beyond excellent. Vi pwned me at Scrabble.

I've just remembered that there are a bunch of photos of the place on my camera, and have been since Easter. A full month later, here are some, in a spirit of memorial penitence. (There are a few more on Flickr).

Lovely old farmhouse, lots of garden space, weaver nests in the tree outside the dining room, and if you hang around on the wicker chairs on the patio reading dodgy fanfic on your Ipad for long enough, someone brings you a gin and tonic.

The landscape is also very beautiful, in that sparse, self-contained sort of way I love about the Karoo.

There were inordinate varieties of buck, but my camera skills were not up to capturing them. Also, renosterveld, and heart-warming stories about endangered tortoises and invisible Cape leopards. And my dawn and dusk camera skills have not entirely deserted me.

We slid in on an off-season half-price, and booked out the whole house (five double bedrooms for eight of us), and it was expensive but bloody worth it. A++. Will spend absurd money on again.

I am sternly informed by my fellow New Year celebrants from last night that I am not in fact permitted to consider the burglary the first act of the new year, but the last act of the old one. To which I say, gee, thanks, 2012. Way to exit with an over-dramatic flounce like a complete arsehole.

We had the usual giant multi-course New Year meal for eight of us last night at jo&stv's, which was just getting into gear around Course 3 (those amazing Vietnamese rice-paper spring rolls Jo made after stealing my cookbooks for inspiration) and my third glass of champagne (needle indicates "slightly incoherent but passionate holding forth about fan fiction" on the drunk-o-metre) when a complicated concatenation of events caused Karen to phone Jo to tell her to tell me that the house had been broken into. It appears the bastards kicked down the front door, rushed in while the alarm wailed, stole the television (again) and Winona (my netbook - woe!) and ran away quickly before the armed response arrived, which they apparently did in under three minutes. ADT hauled in the police, but repeated phoning of my cell was bootless as it was in another room and we were making a fair amount of noise. (Phoning the Evil Landlord was absolutely bootless as he's hiking somewhere in the Cedarburg and is likely to be entirely without either reception or the actual phone). So the nice policewoman apparently sat in the house for an hour twiddling her thumbs in between phoning down the entirety of the list of numbers tacked up next to the phone, which is how she reached Karen, who phoned Jo.

It all makes perfect sense, really. For a given value of "sense". Given that this was at about 10.30pm, my apologies to anyone else who was randomly phoned. (Including the Evil Landlord's sister, who came rushing through from Paarl as a result of a garbled voicemail just as everything was over and we were departing to resume our rightful year-end gourmandising). The Nice Next-Door Neighbour is of the opinion that the unfortunate officer was prodded into the above slightly excessive action by Mrs. Cake, who was rampaging around in her usual busybody fashion when I arrived, and it does seem in character.

I am beyond pissed off. New Year's Eve is logical if you're a burglar, everyone is either out or drunk, but it's bloody rude, and we ended up delaying Robbi and Vi's delectable smoked ribs main course by over an hour. I was deeply attached to Winona, and hadn't backed up the last two hours of LARP writing I did on her, which is making me spit. The TV was six months old, we'd just replaced it after the last burglary, and I shudder to think how the insurance premiums are going to skyrocket. The front door is trashed, the security gate is trashed, and I spent the night at Jo&Stv's rather than alone in a house I couldn't lock properly, fretting about the cats and the unspecified hordes doubtless carrying the house contents off into the night. (Fortunately they didn't).

The marvellous handyman sort of person Claire's dad unearthed for me has just left, having hauled himself out to work cheerfully on New Year's day for a complete stranger, and equally cheerfully accepted whatever the hell I wanted to pay him as he didn't think he'd achieved much. (I showered him with everything in my wallet). Since the security gate tends to the cheap and nasty his efforts to repair the lock were fruitless, but he has nailed the security gate to the front door frame, which means I'll have to do all entrance and exits via the back courtyard and the shed for a bit, but am unlikely to be murdered in my bed tonight unless they bring Grond or a tank or something. I feel very maiden-in-tower. Fetch me flowing golden locks and a prince, stat.

There is probably a stern Dutch Uncle talk I shall be giving the Evil Landlord in the near future, once he's staggered back from his four-day hike, which will entail pointed requests for a better security gate on the front door, a serious repair to the door frame, which has now been multiply splintered by callous door-kickers-down, and something baroque involving electric fencing. This morning's breakfast with Jo&Stv featured blueberry pancakes*, on the grounds that there were blueberries left over from last night's dessert, and a spirited debate on the relative merits of moats, bear traps, bears, bears in boats**, alligators, sentry guns, and something more lethal which explodes the heads of any unauthorised personnel over 20kg in weight, suggesting we'd be fine barring incursions of midget ninjas or (Jo's rather rude contribution) Hobbit.

I need to do That Post, all year-end reflective and resolvey, but right now I'm too narked. However - and I say this with something of forced cheer - happy new year.

* New recipe I wanted to try for the hell of it. I approve.
** I have no idea. We did conclude that the bear traps would probably simply sink.

Current Mood: annoyed

My poor little Mermaid finally died. The Mermaid was, lest this sound unduly surreal, the white CitiGolf I've been driving for the last eight years or so, who earned her sobriquet from the mystic and largely inexplicable inscription on her number plate. Perhaps as a result of this she evinced an uncanny attraction to water over the time I drove her, not always with the best results given the traditional workings of the infernal combustion engine. She always had a tendency to run her cooling system dry and overheat, and over the years I've had the radiator replaced entirely, had insane quantities of water removed from the distributor cap after an unusually deep puddle experience, had water poured into my boots via the front panel as a result of rain becoming cached under the bonnet, and had the bodywork reconditioned because of the exuberant leaks which tended to manifest in jolly Cape Town storms. She finally expired a few days ago, completely in character, when the leaky head gasket I've been pussyfooting around all year got to the point where it let water into the system, and she started driving in a jerky, hiccuppy sort of way which definitely Boded. Poor Mermaid. Always yearning for the ocean in a doomed and futile sort of fashion.

So last night the nice man from Ray's magical auto-mechanic place came round, and after confirming my diagnosis ("I really shouldn't be driving her, should I?" "Uh...no.") bought her off me on the turn, pressing oodles of cash into my slightly fluttering hands, detached me from the registration papers and a receipt, and drove her, hiccuping gently, away, bound for a complete re-conditioning and resale at his capable hands. I hadn't expected it so quickly, and had to do an extremely speedy purge of the interior of all the random guff which piles up over time. (The yield: gorilla lock, mermaid charm from rear-view mirror, bottle of sunscreen, bottle of engine oil for babying the leaky head with, eight shopping bags, an exploded map book, my now entirely useless campus parking disk, a coke bottle full of water for babying the leaky cooling system with, a metric buttload of random paper bits those poor sods handout at traffic lights, five nursery plastic sheets for carrying plants on, a flourishing crop of mould in the boot, and that umbrella I thought I'd lost last winter, thus continuing the watery theme).

Watching her toddle off, I felt completely bereft. A car driven over time becomes a personality, both an organism for whose continued well-being one is responsible and a trusted compatriot who bears one's chattels and one's lazy form tirelessly about the show. Her possibly dodgy Dagon-worshipping traits aside, the Mermaid has served me faithfully; she's ported me around the city, up the campus hill daily, over the Neck repeatedly into Hout Bay to visit my father, on tarred roads and dirt, in hail and pelting winter rain and February heatwaves and those amazing Cape Town winds which try to playfully blow you off the freeway. She hasn't done much distance stuff, but has successfully ambled out to Arniston a couple of times. She had a game little heater but no air-con, the world's most terrible gearbox, and a faulty passenger-door interior handle which used to randomly entrap passengers to no discernible pattern, causing amusing levels of panicked scrabbling. (I always chose to interpret it as a sign of affection, a reluctance to relinquish the cherished passenger, but I doubt they felt it). She didn't have the personality of my Biscuit Tin, but I was fond of her, and used mutate "Mermaid" into "Merrymaid" at odd moments, and drive around singing Gilbert and Sullivan.

I feel as though I've carelessly allowed something fragile and complicated with whom I have a relationship of trust to slip out of my control. Did I damage her carelessly? Will she be OK? Will her next owner look after her properly? Shouldn't I have vetted them, like you do for dogs? Do I over-invest in inanimate objects?

So I'm carless again, and slightly tearful. Various confluences of the Cosmic Wossnames have determined that I'm trying to find myself a Toyota Yaris, if only because it narrows the field to manageable levels which stave off panic attack, and in defiance of the fact that it's a silly name. The Jo, with ineffable kindliness and self-sacrifice, has volunteered to haul me around to various auto dealers on Friday, and to pat my hand gently as I try to grapple with the technicalities of test-drives and finance and what have you. There's a sheaf of car ad printouts on my desk and a page of annoyed scrawls which determine, after horrible hold music has caused the ear-wax to melt and dribble out of my ears, that it's not going to be worth going through my bank, as they hedge their loans about with sharp stakes and unpalatable restrictions. As a result of the indefinitely-delayed adulthood occasioned by indefinite grad studenthood, this is the first time I've had to do this. I'm in a state of wibble.

However, this does mean that the state of fatigued uselessness which has dogged me for the last year and a half, may finally be lifting. The things I needed to do by the end of this year included a new car, a driver's licence and a new agent for the French house. I have a learner's, a car plan which will by gum by a car in jig time, and a contract from the new agent in my inbox. Two and a half out of three ain't bad.

Current Mood: verbose, apparently. Sorry.

There's a piece of Harry Potter fanfic I read lo, these many moons ago, about which I can remember nothing except that it featured Draco Malfoy on the run through Muggle England by train. (It may, on mature reflection, have been an A. J. Hall). At some point his train stops in the middle of nowhere, and a soothing voice on the public address system advises passengers that there will be a slight delay because "there is a sheep lodged in the high-tension cables." I always thought this was pure hyperbole. Hah.

Today my otherwise calm and well-planned trek from Golders Green to Kingston was stopped for a total of about half an hour at two stations on the Northern Line, because (a) "they're still having that bit of trouble at Belsize Park" (precisely what kind of trouble history does not relate), (b) "the Fire Brigade are examining Chalk Farm station", and (c) "there's something stuck under the rails in the tunnel." It's a little disconcerting to be told all change, this train has been discontinued, please cross the platform to the other train, oops, sorry, that's also been discontinued, please cross the platform back to the first train, which has now morphed from the desired Charing Cross iteration to one that goes via Bank and is thus perfectly useless for purposes of Waterloo. (And what's with a station called "Bank", anyway? I don't know if it's meant to be taken in the financial or geographical sense, but either way, it's a sad failure of imagination).

It is, I suppose, faintly inevitable that passing through Mornington Crescent repeatedly for several days should cause hallucinatory fragments of the game to circle vaguely and continuously through my skull.

I managed in the end to change at Camden Town without undue trauma, and there was a lovely taxi at Kingston Station who took me and my suitcase (which is, I have to say, doing that inexplicable suitcase thing of becoming heavier and more overfull despite the fact that I'm actually taking stuff out of it rather than adding) to the B&B. It's a slightly downmarket B&B, rooms not en suite, but chintzy and comfy and right on the mighty river Thames, which this evening looked like this, with added swans, sculls and vapour trails:

Achievement Unlocked: Visit All London-Resident Ex-Boyfriends Whose Names Begin with A. (My romantic history has some strangely specific trends, at least in the geo-alphabetical sense). I had lovely lunches with lovely people on Monday and Tuesday, and

egadfly and Iza were princely hosts (the latter allowing me to feel useful by assisting her to cut up and laminate untold oodles of stuff for her class full of teeny titchy kiddies, which is absolutely the closest I care to get to kiddies, teeny-titchy, for the use of, en masse, and was rather fun).

Oh, yes. *speaks urgently into Secret Service wrist-mike, à la Chuck*:

wolverine_nun, I am happy to report that the bok has bumpied. Repeat: the bok has bumpied. *skulks off*.

Current Mood: somewhat travellated
Current Location: United Kingdom, London

Hooray! I am back in the familiar embrace of Winona, with all my logins automatic, instead of having to type the wretched things in manually on my mother's computer. I miss my own virtual space. I am also much in favour of Virgin trains, which are currently trundling me happily towards Euston with a power point and a table for Winona and easily-accessible internets, with no greater drawbacks than occasional fainting fits in the wireless connection, and a slight tendency to double-type when we go over a bump. Ain't the future wonderful.

I had a truly lovely week in Sedbergh with my lovely mother, and have now sadly left her to her pre-term preparations for the 71 teenage girls who descend on Wednesday. My mental image is of her manning the bunkers wearing an army helmet and an expression of grim determination. She does, however, send love to any of you lot who are acquainted with her.

It is also the start of another month, which is (a) terrifying on account of how the year is doing that acceleration thing, (b) means I missed

wolverine_nun's spanky birthday party on Saturday, woe, and (c) obligated me to pay my intellectual debts. Unsuspecting sources from whom my subject lines have ruthlessly nicked euphonious words over the month of August are as follows:

1st August: one of the more crescendo-to-silly bits of the Arithmetic Song from the Doctor Seuss Song Book, a copy of which I joyously possess. It's actually surprisingly atonal and tricky music to play, but the inherent insanity of the lyrics makes me very happy.
6th August: the Obligatory David Bowie quote, here, of course, from "Life on Mars" in rather nicely layered commentary on Curiosity's perfect landing. The ineffable satisfaction with which a quote clicks into place on several levels simultaneously is... well, ineffable.
10th August: Charles Dickens, the opening Chancery bit from Bleak House, in which he is sustainedly and beautifully rude about lawyers.
14th August: you should have spotted this one - pretty much my statement of weather-related creed from "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", which was written for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by one of the world's great song-writing duos, Burt Baccharach and Hal David. Those guys wrote great music, particularly for piano rendition. Hal David, by an unpleasant co-incidence, died a couple of days ago.
19th August: a somewhat prescient reference to The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, since, while I have neither seen nor read the work concerned, I have spent the last week rather dementedly catching up on my YA girly literature from the library in the boarding house. This has involved a slightly gruesome amount of paranormal romance in addition to teen fantasy and a bucketload of Meg Cabot. Meg Cabot is fun - funny, acute and surprisingly well written. As a bonus, scientific experimentation suggests I can whack through a Cabot novel in about an hour and a half, which means that the total number of books I've read in the last week is... *counts on fingers* ... somewhere slightly in excess of fifteen. I feel much more frivolous now.
20th August: a horrible pun mashing up the conference venue with the sort of agony-column state I was in after completely screwing up that first conference paper. My second paper is much shorter and more ruthlessly shaped, and I am poised to watch myself like a hawk for unnecessary elaboration.
23rd August: dear Bilbo, slightly drunkenly at his birthday party, quoted in mitigation of the slightly drunken ability of a select cohort of academics to correctly remember the quote at the after-party.
30th August: William Wordsworth, naturally, from "The Prelude". Sticking a pin randomly into "The Prelude" at almost any point will yield a quote useful for heading posts about sight-seeing in the Lake District.

I'm in London for a couple of days, crashing with

egadfly, and lunching with various peoples who are being very kind about my feeble flutterings at the idea of navigating London with a giant suitcase in tow. I go through to Kingston for the conference on Wednesday, and then head back to CT on Sunday. I feel very globe-trottery.

Current Mood: happily futuristic

So, a strange thing. Several people commented on my post about Zimbabwe and identity to say that they felt national identity didn't really apply to them: either because it's an irrelevant concept, or because South Africa itself has changed so much in the last ten years that it'll never be the home they left. I can obviously understand that, and the extent to which the increasing globalisation of our particular strata of the socio-economic wossname has made nationality in some ways irrelevant. William Gibson would be proud. But it's weird: in a sense, the gradual erosion of the old South Africa into irrelevance for those people has had the opposite effect to that which the sudden, catastrophic erosion of Zimbabwe has had on me.

There's the old saw that "home is where, if you have to go back, they have to take you in". If a new Brit or US or Aussie regime suddenly expelled all you SA expats, you could come back here. It wouldn't be the place you left, but it would hold out at least a vague hope of employment, enough continuity for a pension, an education for your kids. At least as it currently stands you could build a life here, and have a reasonable expectation that it would endure. (

xavierxalfonso hit it when he talked about somewhere to grow old). It may be hopeless idealism or ostrichism on my part to see it in those terms, of course, but I live here: to me, it feels viable.

You can't say that about Zim. Its changes have been sudden and shocking and arbitrary and cruel enough that it no longer offers any sense of continuity, and to be effective, "home" and "nation" have to have that - they can change, and everywhere does, but they need to endure. Somewhere in my head, on some odd level, "nation" is not actually about a community of shared life experience, but equates to "shelter", to "belonging" in a sense which is ultimately protective and continuing. Zimbabwe no longer offers that. South Africa might, but it doesn't belong to me.

Nonetheless, the effect of the dissolution of my "nation" has made me value nationality rather than reject it; I can't have it, but it's still important and desirable. Probably because I can't have it, and I know how aching a loss its absence - on a completely different level from "I left it and it's changed" - has created. On a weird sort of level, I have no right to take for granted the shelter offered by any country, including my own. And now that I think it through, obviously for me "nationality" has a resonance of legitimate expectation, of "take for granted". It's about security above anything else.

Fortunately security can come in all sorts of flavours, and if I can't identify with nation, I certainly identify with people. You lot, for example :> - both in Cape Town and in cyberspace. I'm not sure I agree that nation is no longer relevant, but I certainly agree that community has come to mean a far more diffuse and abstract thing than it ever did in the age of the village. And that, too, has its poignancies and pains, because on some level of community it's really just about someone to give you a hug when you're down. I've just delivered my mother to the airport, and I won't see her again until April next year. I've spent the last couple of hours in tears, because already - and probably particularly because I'm exhausted and post-serious-illness and not quite myself - I miss her like an ache. I'm too bloody old to miss my mum, but dammit, I do. And part of that weepiness is because I watch her struggle off into the distances of the airport with her huge suitcase, and I know that she goes gallantly back to a home, and a life, which is characterised by the same visceral loss and undefined rootlessness as mine. Except worse, because she's older, and Zim took far more away from her than it ever did from me. And it's not fair. Dammit. It's not. Nations should endure.

Current Mood: ridiculously weepy
Current Music: Band of Horses

Things I Have Learned Over the Last Ten Days:

All that stuff they throw at you on aircraft about long-haul flights and deep vein thrombosis? It's not urban legend. Or old wive's tales. Or scaremongering. Or a cunning way to make you look ridiculous while waving your feet in the air.
Deep vein thrombosis really hurts. Your calf builds up quite ridiculous amounts of pressure, and putting foot to floor after having it elevated invokes the Screaming Agony Death Type Three.
Developing the bloody thing on the flight out to Australia is neatly timed to give you a “gosh, sprained calf” pain which increases only in gradual increments, reaching its full apotheosis in Johannesburg airport after the 14-hour return flight, as you hobble at frantic speeds down the approximately six million miles of Oliver Tambo airport to catch, with a 20-minute window, the replacement connection you've been rebooked on after missing your actual Cape Town connection after high winds in Sydney. At this stage, “desperate to get home” is a thundering understatement.
The ultrasound with which they prod your leg to determine the existence of the doomful blood clot lurking behind your knee is quite ridiculously cool, particularly as operated by the little ultrasound goddess on whose slightest pronouncements doctors hang.
Hospitals are not, contrary to vague expectation, designed to be about your comfort. They are designed to be about your treatment. Your actual comfort and reassurance does happen, but it's very clearly secondary on the priority list of all these incredibly busy people whose actual allegiance is to this enormous unwieldy structure full of important rules.
The above notwithstanding, a lot of hospital staff are actually lovely and empathetic and do deal with your comfort. Eventually.
Hospital is mostly about waiting around. After ten days this gets tired.
If you are a generally unfit sort of person prone to bodily ills, and have moreover trotted obliviously around Australia on a deep vein thrombosis for ten days, you will inevitably develop complications. This means that a few nameless bits of the clot have detached themselves from their spawning ground behind the knee, and have wandered vaguely through the heart and into your lungs, where they've stuck. This causes small sections of collapsed lung, chest pain, shortness of breath, your doctor to put his head into his hands helplessly, and a disconcertingly sudden transfer to the ICU with strict instructions not to move.
If you have multiple pulmonary embolisms, the ICU is an incredibly reassuring place to be. It is also bedlam, filled with noise, chatting staff, beeping machines, and the continual entry and exit of patients.
Hospitals are not restful places. Fortunately their drugs are good.
Pain and concern about collapsed lungs are surprisingly distractable by cool machines, particularly the ones which are a cross between alien tech and the X-Files, and where they give you weird side-effect sensations by pumping you full of iodine.
Avoid any illness which requires you to have blood taken through a pulse point. It hurts like hell and damnation.
Friends are absolutely the only way to retain sanity through a ten-day hospital stay. I am blessed with incredible friends, whose dedication to visits in the teeth of my bored and disconsolate growling, has been wonderful and miraculous.
”Medical aid” is a swear word until you're in hospital for ten days.
There is a bizarre comfort knowing that you can tick the "injury on duty" box on your leave form when you eventually get back to work.
Hospital food is inventively awful.
When it comes to the crunch, the Evil Landlord is actually cheerfully matter-of-fact about being asked to go through a lady's underwear drawer in order to bring fresh underwear to hospitalised housemates.
The list of foods you can't eat while on Warfarin is quite bizarre.
Ten days of internet absence, apart from the withdrawal symptoms, generates a ridiculous quantity of livejournal spam, mostly in Russian.
It's really worth moving around a lot on long haul flights.

Current Mood: very tired of hospitals

That was 2010, that was. Now it's old and grey and tottering towards the finish line while 2011 sits in the wings and plots. At the end of last year I said that 2009 had made me sad, and politely requested 2010 to pull its socks up. In a weird sort of way it's sort of complied. Given that my major resolution for 2010 was "survive", I can pretty much say "mission accomplished", but it wasn't much of a mission.

I lost my father this year and, however merciful his release was from his horrible illness, losing a parent is something of a major life event. His death has freed me to start getting my life and finances back on track, but I think I'm still trying to absorb the implications of his absence; it all feels strangely distant and unreal, as though he's actually live and well and pottering around France somewhere. I suppose that's almost inevitable, when the relationship I've had with him for the last ten years has been across distance and with infrequent contact. Loss takes a while to sink in.

The usual scorecard:

Things achieved by me this year: a conference, a published paper, a serious amount of academic validation from complete strangers. Paid-off debts to bank and sister. A house in France, and an actual tenant in it. Survival of giant renovations. A far more vicious stranglehold on this job, it's starting to become routine, and to give me something approaching headspace, making it vaguely possible that I will be able, in the near future, to think of it as a day job and do more interesting things around its edges. A reasonably effective management plan for life with chronic sinusitis/glandular fever, although I'm still working on the "while not whinging about it" part.
Things discovered this year: Star Trek, Smallville, Plants vs. Zombies, Catherynne M. Valente, tempura batter, Death Cab for Cutie, Echo Bazaar, Scott Pilgrim, Transmetropolitan, Fiasco!, netbooks, how to cook fillet, Microfiction.
Things not achieved by me: as usual, fleeing the country, crushing academia beneath my booted heel, enough writing, enough exercise. In addition, I have not seen enough of all my friends; I've retreated into a sort of exhausted hermitage thing where I socialise only if someone actively pulls me out with hook and line. I've missed everyone.
Resolutions for the new year: trample job under my booted heel and find more energy for more interesting things, including headspace in which to write. Do some bloody exercise. See my friends far more actively and often. Travel more.

2010 had extremely horrible moments, but I think its overall arc has been slightly upwards. I am cautiously hopeful about 2011. Tonight a small gang of us see in the New Year in our traditional fashion, which is to cook giant, elaborate meals on the distributed plan while imbibing alcohol freely and allowing the conversation to wander hither and thither at will. I hope that you all have equally pleasant prospects for the evening, and that 2011 will bring you wonderful things.

Current Mood: retrospective

Lovely, gossipy lunch with

wolverine_nun yesterday, in the course of which she revealed that she's just been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Hooray! *random pom-pom routine, with mortarboards*. This is excellent news: the ad-hominem promotion process is legendarily nasty, and it's very, very cool that her faculty has recognised her Excellent Work. However, she also gently suggested that it would be far preferable to impart this sort of news over lunch if I was in any sort of position to be contemplating such a promotion myself, and oh, by the way, when am I resigning from this job? Which is an excellent question.

While I'm actually not completely hating my current job just at the moment, nor is it anywhere I actually want to be in the long term. I want to be a Real Academic, and be able to share my academic ladder-climbing triumphs with

wolverine_nun over the calamari. However my daily little theme song, wandering the corridors of my Cherished Institution, goes something along the lines of "I'm a lonely little fantasist in an African Potato patch". As long as I resolutely stick to my non-Africanist guns in terms of research interests, it's extremely unlikely that I'll acquire a permanent academic post of any sort here. It may be wantonly bloody-minded, but those are my guns, and by gum I'm sticking to them. This recent Glasgow trip has suggested that I'm also not quite as uncompetitive in the international arena as I've always kinda thought I'd be. All of this being the case, why the hell am I still in Cape Town, instead of kicking my heels up in a much more accommodating unicorn-infested field overseas?

Another excellent question, and there has been Brooding about it. Mature reflection has suggested that the following factors may be a consideration:

Trepidation. I'm a cowardy-custard, you may commence the junior playground mockery now. I doubt I'll waltz straight into an academic post of any sort overseas unless I'm actually living there, which will entail some sort of temp work. I lived hand-to-mouth for a long time as a grad student, and I do not contemplate a return to a more precarious existence with anything other than fear and trembling. Also, I am very happy with my home, friends and life here, other than the actual career satisfaction, and the thought of having to start again from scratch fills me with a profound desire to chain myself to my bed and hide under it.
Location. It's a well-known fact that the groovy cosmic rays put off by the Mountain have a measurable effect on brain chemistry, as well as causing long-term inhabitants of the city to put down Psychic Roots. In the immortal words of wolverine_nun, leaving Cape Town is all cool and exciting and great career opportunities etc, except for the part where you shrivel up and die. She was born here, she Gets It. I am too young and cussed to shrivel up and die just yet.
Dislocation. I am Capetonian, body and soul, but I'm also an exiled Zimbabwean. Being Zimbabwean does very odd things to one's sense of identity and belonging. Cape Town has become my home, because the utter disaster that is Zimbabwe precludes thinking of it as home any more: there's no longer anything there for me, and never will be. My family is now dispersed all over the world, which means that the main thing which makes Cape Town "home" to me is my presence in it - I build that rootedness for myself, not because of a family safety net or family home or anything else which grounds it. (Friends do, and my friends are amazing, but you can't take them for granted; they're also dependent on ongoing construction by one's actual presence). If I go elsewhere, out of Cape Town, I have no anchor. I'm adrift. I can't "go back", because "home" has uprooted and moved with me. It's a horribly precarious feeling to contemplate, and I think contributes materially to my reluctance to leave.
Consolation. As I said above, I actually haven't hated this job lately. Bits of it annoy me intensely, particularly boring admin nitty-gritty and not being able to work at home. But at the same time, I'm achieving useful stuff here, both for me and for the organisation. I am advancing, if nothing else, in leaps and bounds in the acquisition of interesting political skills in the areas of self-promotion, committee-wrangling and what have you. If I ever do get back into academia proper, watch out academia. Also, this year I've managed to up the amount of teaching I'm doing quite considerably, with the reassuringly full blessing of my superiors, and have moreover realised the possibility of exciting conference trips courtesy of the Cherished Institution. I thus have just enough access to the things that make me happy to be able to contemplate the continuation of what's effectively a Day Job for at least a little while longer.

All of the above, of course, is sheer rationalisation, and subject to change without warning: if someone against all odds offered me an overseas academic post, I'd probably up sticks tomorrow without a thought. But it's quite a good feeling to think it through and realise that there are Reasons, and it ain't all bad.

Current Mood: Friday! Fridayfridayfriday!
Current Music: Death Cab for Cutie

A topic which allows one to be subtly rude about Twilight's vampires can't be all bad. Conversely, this is a better paper now that I'm being subtly rude rather than writing TWILIGHT VAMPIRES ARE STUPID! across it in letters of fire.
There may still be inherent flaws in this paper if certain paragraphs are still shot through with little pink comments boxes containing Notes To Self such as "This paragraph is FULL OF HOLES, sort it out."
It may become necessary to examine my commitment to the academic project if I still have to bribe my way through writing this bloody thing by eating Nutella straight from the jar with a spoon.
Words I use too often, largely unnecessarily: Intrinsically. Thus. Powerful. Inherent. The last edit of any paper always entails creeping through the thickets of prose with a shotgun and taking them down with merciless precision, along with the flocks of semi-colons. Words I no longer use too often, owing to rigorous training by my immediate social circle: Resonate. Evoke. Shut up, stv.
The Russian formalists are sadly underrated in our postmodern age. They rock.

Current Mood: nose to grindstone
Current Music: Annie Lennox

This conference trip was really enjoyable, and at the same time deeply surprising. I've mostly come to terms with how isolated I am in my academic interests here: there aren't really any other serious fairy-tale theorists in the country, and my other interests - genre, science fiction, the internet, children's lit, fanfic - are likewise not highly regarded. This has conspired to somehow give me the mental sense of being a negligible quality, academically speaking. A dabbler. Not serious. Certainly not theoretically accomplished.

My experience of the conference has revealed this as so much bosh. Distanced as I am from the European and American hubs of fairy-tale theory, I expected my book to vanish into the academic ocean with scarcely a splash or ripple. Instead, it was fairly high-profile in the conference consciousness: included in the conference recommended reading list, directly referenced by several papers, and quite a few people approached me to say they'd read it/liked it/had it and planned to read it/oh gosh let's talk about metafiction no-one else does! I didn't feel that my actual conference paper was particularly well delivered, and I always feel like a bit of a fraud trotting out the jargon, but again it received only positive feedback, engagement, validation. If nothing else my isolation means I do things slightly differently to the mainstream of this discipline, and my peers in the field seem to find that interesting.

Most importantly, though, I found that I actually fitted into this milieu without too much trouble. I deliberately don't socialise much with my academic contemporaries, I think that way madness lies, or at the very least princesses in ivory towers, but the result of this is that I'm very conscious of "not being a pretentious academic" in social settings. Not only do I self-consciously flag long words like marmalade when I'm holding forth, I self-censor like mad, and have apparently conditioned legions of my long-suffering friends into applying the firm hand of righteous mockery when the polysyllables become too polysyllabic. (And mad props to stv, for the suggestion that my next online identity of any sort is as "Polly Syllable".)

So it was a bit odd to find myself, for example, in animated discussion with one of the grad student presenters about Buffy and Supernatural and genre tropes, reflexively holding back on the jargon levels, only to think, "Wait! Hang on!" and crank it up instead. Which is, I have to say, fun. And tends to be met, capped and encouraged. And, somewhat to my own surprise, I pull it off. I actually know what I'm talking about. I know the critics being referenced, I have opinions on theoretical positions, I am swimming at ease in this verbal ocean and doing occasional back-flips in sheer joie de vivre.

As one of the nice professors pointed out after listening sympathetically to my minor rant about my employability in this country, this conference is a space in which no-one once felt the need to mention Africa. You have no idea how refreshing that is. And I am starting to realise, with slight horror, the actual and hideous extent to which this department, this institution, this intellectual climate, has sapped my belief in myself and the validity of what I do. It sucks. It must stop. I must go on more of these jaunts. They're good for the soul.

Current Mood: struck
Current Music: The Cure, Disintegration

I really used to love flying, and I still do enjoy the moment when the plane surges magically into the air in defiance of logic and gravity, but I think I'm getting too old for these larks. The primary experience now is discomfort: twitchy legs, sore butt, the frustration of being unable to stretch my legs, the complete inability to do any more than fitfully doze in the upright position. And the person sitting next to you is inevitably an octopus made of elbows, and lacks all sense of personal space. Also, they can apparently sleep in odd, contorted, unrelaxed positions, and will do so, snoring loudly, just to underline your own lack of slumber as the small hours of the morning tick by. Phooey. I just had a three-hour nap, but I'm a little frayed.

On the upside, I'm in London!

starmadeshadow rescued me from the airport, and Scroob is providing me a haven filled with vital elements such as Earl Grey, beds, baths, internet and an Elfbaby. Tonight I see

bumpycat and

rumint, tomorrow the other hordes. I am suddenly reminded that I got into this whole LJ lark in the first place mostly because of the huge bunch of Cape Towners in exile here, and who I don't see nearly often enough. Maybe all the travel horrors are worth it.

It's also, I have to say, incredibly fun to be typing this on my very own mini-computer, leeching off Scroob's limitless high-speed bandwidth with the wide-eyed awe of a colonial gawper unaccustomed to all this high tech. Winona's keyboard is small and has its little idiosyncracies, but I think we're getting acquainted very nicely. Now all I need to do is find a three-pin SA-to-UK adaptor, and we're in business.

Hooray! London!

Current Mood: dead, but wheee!

smoczek is an enabler: in tandem with her, I spend more money on cool things than I would if left to my own devices. (Although, to be fair, I probably have the same effect on her). We egged each other on buying plants for our respective gardens yesterday (more clivia, herbs and vegetables, things that look cute and grow in shade, and a pot for strawberries), and then further egged each other on buying weirdly random stuff at the Milnerton market this morning. (A sheep! a sort of metal cage sheep with floppy legs and a decorative metal beard and butt-piece, through which you're supposed to grow topiary. She's going to grow catnip through it, and rely on the cats to keep it shorn.) I bought more random bric-a-brac owls, in sharp defiance of my own policy, and plead in mitigation that they were round and cute and I was egged on. Also, a large glass mixing bowl, assorted adaptors, really cheap pecan nuts, and a small blue shiny lizard in brooch form. I love the market, it's so random, and so vastly diverse. The Evil Landlord, for example, bought a wrought iron umbrella stand, for which we have no umbrella.

maxbarners bought an elderly light metre in German, presumably for measuring German light. Oh, and I found a little 40s-style set of miniature cookie cutters packed neatly into a tin -

wolverine_nun, was it you who was looking for little cookie cutters a few months back, for purposes of small children? Because if so, these are for you. There's one shaped like a bone.

Then we went and had lunch at Caveau, and drank rosé, which I will forever associate with summer lunches owing to the French habit, observed on holiday in the Gers, of drinking it by the gallon out of plastic bottles straight from the local vinyards. Then I came home and played Bioshock 2 for four hours straight, after which I went and laboured mightily in the back courtyard, which now has two functional planters out of four, planted with random vegetables in the faint hope of squeezing one crop out before winter hits. This procedure was fraught with interest as the builders, in moving the planters around, have shifted the soil from one to the other, thereby mixing it all up with the drainage stones from the bottom (and, I have to say, all the cat crap the cats have been lovingly depositing on the top). I don't like builders. I may have mentioned this before. But I now have tomatoes and beans and spring onions and lettuce and a few parsley plants for the hell of it, plus all the sorrel in the shady corner with the mint. And dirt under my fingernails.

I am very tired, slightly sun- and wind-burned, faintly cross-eyed from Bioshock and Fringe, grubby, damp and happy. It's been a lovely couple of days. I approve of these long weekend thingies, and contemplate with tolerable equanimity the return to work given that the next three weeks are four days long owing to the sudden descent of Easter. But now I'm going to bed. G'night.

Current Mood: tired, happy

I actually can't face the thought of telling everyone individually, so I'm afraid I'm taking the easy way out (blogs are wonderful things). Most of you will know that my dad's been very ill, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis a couple of years ago - it's a degenerative, inevitably fatal motor neurone disease which attacks muscle control, and he's gradually lost the ability to walk, stand and speak over the last year. Yesterday afternoon he died, very quietly and peacefully, lying on his bed in the frail care facility where he's been living. I'd spent most of the morning with him, taking him to the hospital for a check-up, which I suppose may have been one of the contributing factors to his death as it tired him out.

We weren't really expecting this so soon, but he'd seriously deteriorated in the last month; by the last week or so he couldn't actually write and was thus unable to communicate. He was frustrated and distressed by his condition, and my own sadness is very much alleviated by gratitude that he no longer has to endure his own helplessness.

I have to say how wonderful my friends have been in all this - my dad's year in Cape Town has been materially improved by all you kind people who lent him TVs, found him old computers, provided software, helped to install it, allowed me to appropriate modems, lent him books, helped me lug supplies from the hospital and generally kept me sane with your support and sympathy, both virtual and real. Thank you.

Current Mood: sad
Current Music: David Bowie, Heathen

Jo&stv are Princely Hosts - I think I may have mentioned this once or twice. A day. For a month. They really are keeping me sane in the middle of all the start-of-term crises and the damage to my psyche done by a thoroughly filthy deconstructed house. They are also both in the middle of enormous work projects, so large tracts of the last week have been characterised by the three of us collapsing zombified in front of the TV of an evening in front of junky movies and good food cooked on a strictly rotational basis. This is how I ended up watching Crank, a film I otherwise wouldn't have gone anywhere near with a ten-foot electric cattle prod, a device which by some curious oversight isn't actually in the movie but certainly should be.

Crank is dreadful. It's a completely, mindblowingly, utterly brainless film, so far and firmly in the "action" category that it really constitutes little else. It has a stunningly simple premise, which can loosely be summed up by saying it's Speed with Jason Statham playing the bus. He's been injected with a sinister Oriental poison courtesy of strange organised crime shenanigans, and if his adrenalin levels drop below a certain threshold his heart stops. This weirdly simple plot is encapsulated neatly in the film's title image, which is a completely pixillated and badly-drawn 80s computer image of a heart, pumping, which they flash at you at intervals to remind you of the necessity of shutting down any expectations of complexity. The adrenalin-rush premise is actually pure genius: it's so simplistic, so utterly puerile that it achieves an almost transcendent level of elegance, which neatly underpins car chases, punch-ups, hold-ups, shoot-ups, unbelievably gratuitous public sex episodes, high-speed blow-jobs and the jolly little closing sequence with the helicopter. The underlying retarded elegance is supported by the film's profound lack of interest in set-up, characterisation, nuance, theme, moral or intelligence. Its actors are various shades of wood, from teak (Statham) to freshly-sanded pine (the girlfriend), and some slightly scenery-chewing poison oak from the bad guys, who rock the stereotypes rather rockingly. Bonus decadent doctor, brainless bimbo girlfriend, and a random snatch of Quiet Riot which forced me to confront the horrified realisation that they're a hugely guilty pleasure.

So's this film. I had a complete blast watching it. It's ungodly amounts of fun, probably because its sole saving grace is that it embraces its total lack of quality and absolutely refuses to take itself seriously. It's a violent, meaningless video game, and proud of it. I feel dirty, ashamed, sated, profoundly amused, and fundamentally apologetic to the several thousand of my long-suffering braincells, already weakened by all the curriculum advice, who undoubtedly perished in the endeavour. It was worth it.

We also watched Daywatch, about which I shall say not much except, dayum, those Russian drugs are not our Earth drugs¹. I was severely hampered by having last read/seen Nightwatch several years ago, so I found this fundamentally incomprehensible, although weird and stylish, and very, very whiplashy with all the fast cuts. One of those movies that suffers from plot-shamble and inheres mostly in scattered fragments of profoundly strange urban-magical imagery which stay with you for a long time. Also, I like the main character, he's rather endearing, if occasionally a bit dim.

¹ Bugger, I think I inadvertently nicked this phrase from smoczek. I blame the booze.

Current Mood: Friday! Fridayfridayfriday!
Current Music: Annie Lennox

Grumpy today. Grrrr. Toe throbbing. Arguing with EL about tiles¹. Really, really tired. You know that bit where it's been completely mad for a month and things start calming down, and suddenly you realise you're actually dead and have simply been shuffling around going through zombie motions for the last week or so? That. Warning, Zone of Imminent Collapse, Please Wear Hard Hat At All Times.

I had to go forth and find medicinal linkery in a determined effort to cheer up and not actually bite students, or at least only the ones who really, really deserve it. Fortunately I found this:

Watch on YouTube

Courtesy of Pajiba, whose psychotic assaults on the manifest stupidities of Hollywood keep me sane. As do my friends, so thank you.

¹ Not on aesthetic grounds, since really it's his house, but on practical, since I'm the one who ends up doing as much cleaning as is not done by Margaret, Ace Cleaning Lady, and I'm extremely dubious about excitingly textured faux-stone surfaces and the likelihood that they'll collect greasy kitchen dirt in the same way Pigpen does. (Obligatory Peanuts reference, nothing to see here, move along). Tile people think I'm right! Come on, EL, see the logic! are you German or not?!

Current Mood: grrrrr
Current Music: Postal Service, Give Up

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Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with friends keep me sane

manning the barricades

a pretty boy in his underwear

all those wasted hours we used to know

these are my guns, these are my furs, this is my living room

I'd much rather have a mansion in the hills

bring on your moated grange

You'll know that fish has lately fed on what remains of Ethelred

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song

I'll catch the first train, bag in hand

belonging to be

she took those pills from the pill concoctor...

retrospective

I have just had an incredibly deep and touching spiritual insight, man, which I shall share with you

notes from the coalface of an academic paper

long words like "marmalade"

London derriere

world enough, and time

happened oh so quietly, they say

now I feel dirty

don't wake me, I plan on sleeping

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December 2024

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