Freckles & Doubt

When I went to see my doctor last week in re the exhaustion levels, I subliminally expected her to tell me to buck up, stop whinging and simply get on with my life, taking it slightly easy if at all possible until I'd regenerated some health. (It's easier in Dragon Age). The result of her unexpectedly concerned response is to somehow have given me permission to be ill: "take a week and a half off work" appears to have allowed me to stop pretending I'm not exhausted all the time, as a result of which I'm rather more than semi dead and very, very glad I don't have to drag myself up to campus. The mind is an odd thing. Also, her image choice ("you're starting to live off your capital") is really sticking with me in an extremely cautionary way. Things To Do This Week: rest. Also, wrestle boss in re extended leave.

Since ill health is boring, have some linkery of various degrees of joyous-makingness, depending on your personal proclivities.

• For dance fans, fashion fans and fans of very nifty editing, this ad may hit your buttons with the cheerful octopoid multitudinosity with which it hits mine.
  
  
• For players of Dragon Age II, particularly the girly ones, Fenris cosplay! Amazing costume, and the dude has the necessary level of elven emaciation going, but I have to say, the I Have My Arm Around Felicia Day Effect notwithstanding, he's way too cheerful for strict verisimilitude.
  
  
• For music lovers of approximately the same vintage as me, and/or who cherish a fondness for 80s dance music, Goth or New Wave, She Wants Revenge. I had never heard of She Wants Revenge before matociquala linked it. How did that happen? It's like Bauhaus mated with Sisters of Mercy and had the offspring raised by Depeche Mode. It seem to make it slightly redundant to have actually gone through the 80s.
  
  
  Watch on YouTube
  
  
  In other slightly happy-making news, the problem with Winona seems actually to be the On switch. If I dig my fingernails under it I can persuade the thing to switch on for about five seconds and start to boot up, although it won't stay on. I don't want to fiddle any further because the rapid on/off cycling can't be good for the hard drive, but at least I have a diagnosis, if not a solution.

Reading, the lost art. My last two days have been hideous because nameless individuals scatter-shot emailed the entire student body with instructions on what to do if you're facing academic exclusion, i.e. haven't passed enough courses to be permitted to continue. Buried in the second paragraph of this communication, below the giant red headline about ACADEMIC EXCLUSION!, is an instruction that this applies only to students who find themselves excluded once the results come out. From the number of phone calls, emails and students in my office all panicking needlessly about the email telling them they're excluded, only a tiny fraction of them actually read that far. I can't work out if I'm more narked at the twit who emailed so thoughtlessly, or all the non-reading students.

So, in fact, it's not just reading, the lost art; it's thinking.

I certainly am not thinking at the moment, not so you'd notice. Monday's sinus headache kept me off work on Tuesday, mostly sleeping; yesterday was OK, if a bit spacey, but today the rampagings of Sid have gone from the "Ow" setting on the throb-o-metre all the way across to "Epic sledgehammer." I'm at the stage where the student phone call that occupied my last five minutes caused me to spend most of it wistfully eyeing the Advil I'd popped out of its bubble but hadn't taken owing to the phone interrupting me before I could hunt down a glass of water. Life Skills To Acquire: chugging tablets without water. I can't do it. My throat rebels and there are nasting gagging noises. It's all horribly inefficient. Also, ow.

This is so weird. One of my music-acquisition projects lately has been to gradually acquire copies of all the stuff I used to listen to in undergrad, mostly on evil bootleg tapes which have subsequently lost all relevance, technologically speaking. Today, Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn arrived. Listening to it is a very strange experience, because, while I don't think I've heard this album in, gosh, probably fifteen years, it's still utterly familiar to me - more so than music I listen to regularly at the moment. It's as if I heard it yesterday. Something in the sound is hardwired into immediacy rather than nostalgia.

I'm wondering if this is about simply being in your early twenties: the experiences you have then are particularly vivid, they impress themselves on you extra hard because so many of them are new, taking those first steps into adulthood. It's not as if Piper is particularly significant to me, it's a background sound track to a fairly generalised sense of time and place (Honours year, the Twickenham Rd house). Dark Side of the Moon was much more a personal-totem album, it'll be interesting to see if it feels as immediate, once I've actually persuaded Loot to find me a copy.

Talking about moons and dark sides and things, I had truly bizarre werewolf dreams last night. We gatecrashed, literally, a huge, swanky, eighteenth-century mansion by the simple expedient of driving a limousine straight up the driveway and crashing it in through the front door. The place was full of werewolves, all hairy monster-men in eighteenth-century costume (rather Cocteau feel, in fact, although colour rather than black-and-white - lots of orangey browns). I was with some unspecified quest-partner, male; we were really rather evil, or possibly surrounded by evil and rather desperate. At some point I killed a woman by strangling her, rather inefficiently: I had to do it a couple of times because she kept coming back to life, and eventually we dumped her unconscious form into a giant excavation which was conveniently in the garden, and piled earth on top of her. Later we locked another woman into a sort of giant cage with all the werewolves and waited for them to kill her; it was somehow important that she died in pain. In retrospect, all of the above is probably stuff I shouldn't tell my therapist. Or should tell my therapist. If I had a therapist. Memo to self: don't acquire therapist.