Freckles & Doubt

So, it's not enough that Sid has been capering round my frontal lobe in hobnailed boots since yesterday afternoon: oh, no. The cosmic wossnames have to contribute to the whole situation by waking me up this morning at 6.30 am - which is, may I point out, an hour which officially doesn't even exist on a Sunday - still with the headache, and also with the pounding footfalls and cheery, energetic shouts of mutual encouragement of a medium-sized road race coming past my bedroom at a distance of about 4m from my head. Take it from me, this is not a happy awakening experience. Right in the middle of a John Crichton dream, too.

I did manage to fall fitfully back asleep for a couple of hours, and dreams thereafter got, even for me, a bit weird. First there was the extended balletic performance I was giving across the stairs and plazas of a huge, deserted, modern city. Then there were the couscous zombies. As the daughter of the mayor of a small town, I co-ordinated a defense against some lurking, cataclysmic threat which turned out to be zombies, and which entailed holing up in the town hall. This subsequently became (a) the hotel room in which I was captured by the police for a crime I was framed for by my valet, and then (b) starmadeshadow's old flat, which I have to say is horribly designed for zombie defense - no actual doors anywhere. It transpired that eating couscous turned the attacker - I think it might have been Scroobius - into something resembling the more manic cinematic flights of Bellatrix Lestrange, causing her to lunge through the service hatch at us as we cowered in the kitchen. The dream ended on a terribly ominous note with the giant pots of couscous on the stove behind us bubbling and seething as something emerged from the depths, and I woke up thinking "Couscous golem? It'll never work!" But it's bizarre how much doom-laden spin one's subconscious can give to a glimpse of a simple granulated wheat product.

Have become v. enamoured of Naomi Novik's mad Napoleonic dragon series: review to follow when (a) my head doesn't hurt so much, and (b) I've finished the day's CV-burnishing for purposes of admin job application. Because, as you all point out, always apply. I can angst about whether to take the job or not if they actually offer it to me. Yay angst.

The upsy-downsy continues. Annoying day, score as follows:

• Number of post offices visited: 4
• Number of post offices declining to offer service I need: 4
• Number of extra miles walked to circumnavigate building operations in Claremont: approximately 5 millyun.
• New handbags bought: 1
• New Pratchetts bought: 1 (officially a consolation for the failure of job offer)
• Henna sachets applied to hair: 4
• Number of pages completed in new tax returns: 2 (which is all of them. The new tax returns are ridiculously simple and possibly represent a fiendish ploy on the part of the government to attract high-earning immigrants).
• Number of frantic phone calls fielded from third-year students suffering hand-in angst: 3
• Number of honours dissertations marked: 0
• Sinus headaches endured: 1, but the bastard has been going all day.
• Number of grains of rice donated on Free Rice: 950. The opinions of institutions of higher learning in this peninsula notwithstanding, my score wibbles around between 48 and 50. I feel smug. Also, more vocabulary-rich.

While on the subject of irritation, I have to have a little rant here. Indulge me. Typing "Stephanie Meyer" into Google will produce any number of pages on which bookstores, reviewers and readers rave in maddened approbation of her recent young adult vampire fantasy series, which starts with Twilight. The friend who lent me the first two books likewise makes approving noises. I spent the weekend reading aforementioned novels. In my fairly unhumble opinion, they're dreadful. The reviewers throw around words like "exquisite", but I find the writing style flat, dead and weighed down with extraneous detail. The plot is hackneyed, a sort of teen vampire school romance thing; the vampires themselves have moments of interest, but are basically a concatenation of clichés - graceful, deadly, sexy, tormented. The human characters aren't. Human, that is: they're cardboard. The basic idea has some possibilities, which led me to madly read through both books in the desperate hope she might, at some point, actually do justice to the idea, but I can't see it.

What am I missing? Am I that embittered an old academic? I had to go and re-read McKinley's Sunshine just to get the taste out of my mouth, which had its inevitable effect of giving me a serious baking yen, so the jo&stv got malva pudding on Sunday night. Which reminds me, the remnants are still in the 'fridge. If I go and eat them now, I can feed an anti-inflammatory to Sid the Sinus Headache, which may shut him up for a while. Plan.

Last Night I Dreamed: a crumbling country estate at which I was staying, in an outside room with a door which wouldn't close properly. I was amazed to discover that an ex-fling of mine was doing woodwork for a weird experimental movie with Elijah Wood: unfortunately the strange experimental format (lots of writing on bits of wood assembled into three-dimensional constructions) meant that the film was abandoned before it was finished. (I briefly met Elijah Wood - he had a really limp handshake). Travelling away from the estate, it became apparent that someone or something had been going through the countryside killing people, including the owner of another estate, who had become a giant ghost jellyfish. Then the director of the weird experimental movie suddenly wanted me to take part in another film, in which I had to wear a long red dress.

I solemnly swear I am not on drugs.

Bleah. Have had headache for two days. I thought my wretched bod had stopped doing that to me, but no, it has to feature in flashing lights on the marquee of my skull the RETURN OF THE MINI-GREMLIN! with the DRILL! returning for ONE LAST PERFORMANCE! to his abode behind my right eyebrow. Little sod. On the upside, the painkillers gave me extra-trippy dreams last night, variously featuring a long motorcycle road-trip with my mother (at night, in black leather, through weird cityscapes), and a slighly lecherous Terry Pratchett.

The pounding head is causing me to play the Cure, who are depressive and curiously soothing, with the possible exception of "Lovecats", which is one of my Top Five Happy-Making Songs Ever. You know the effect? a sort of happy inevitable resonance with a particular song which means it infallibly makes you (a) feel better about life regardless of the circumstances, and (b) jiggle around rhythmically, regardless of what you're doing (which in my case is probably a bit disconcerting to the beholder if I happen to be giving curriculum advice at the time).

To celebrate Easter and distract me from the headache, herewith my Top 5 Happy Songs, in no particular order:

Belle and Sebastian, "Another Sunny Day."
The Cure, "Lovecats."
Dandy Warhols, "Bohemian Like You."
The Manic Street Preachers cover of "Out of Time." (A toss-up with "You Stole the Song from my Heart", actually, but I think "Out of Time" has it, marginally).
Talking Heads, "Road to Nowhere."

I have a sneaking suspicion Crowded House should be in there somewhere, but I can't decide which one. Possibly "Italian Plastic." Or "There Goes God."

One can never have too many happy songs. What are yours?

Bunny Threat Level: rising slowly and painfully, since Disney criticism is not helping the headache.

Or, at least, two nights of insufficient sleep and a day of the Army of Reconstruction doing their worst certainly gives me a pounding headache approximately equivalent to the pounding of pickaxes as they dig up the floor. Or, in fact, the pounding my cherished feline (she of the Golux persuasion) almost got when she bounced cheerfully through the window and onto my head at 3am on Saturday night for the fourth time in an hour. She appears to enjoy the possibilities afforded by my new sleeping arrangements (the bed is just beneath the window, which absolutely must remain open on the grounds that I'm quite attached to this breathing business). I, on the other hand, do not.

Interesting experience with an Amazon parcel recently: the local post office has a veritable genius for sticking post into the wrong box, most commonly a mixup between 443 and 433. This resulted earlier this week in an apologetic phone call from a total stranger somewhat abashed at having absent-mindedly collected my Amazon parcel after finding the slip in his box: he didn't notice it wasn't addressed to him until he'd taken it home. Either he's a scrupulously honest type or he really isn't into Babylon 5, because he dug out my phone number on the internet and arranged to drop off the parcel in return for the monies he'd disbursed to get it out of hock. The Evil Landlord is consequently able to rejoice in the possession of two more seasons of said Babylon 5, which nicely takes care of our evenings for the forseeable future.

I should hasten to add that, headaches and heat notwithstanding, I finished updating another chapter yesterday, and am embarked, somewhat painfully, on a third. News at 11.

There's something about the process of choosing books for book club which leaves me floundering and slightly shattered. This morning's particular experience may have been partially due to the dual effects of the curiously disorienting and space-warping navigational challenges of the Waterfront mall (memo to self: stick to the familiar entrance in future, even if it's twelve miles and a seething sea of schoolkids away from the end you want to visit), and this morning's thundering headache. Whatever it is, put me in front of a general fiction shelf and ask me to choose ten books for an eclectic audience of 6 other women, some of whom I don't know all that well, and my brain seizes solid while I whimper gently and attract concerned glances from even the psychotic misanthropes who staff Exclusive. Drool may also be involved.

Part of the problem is that I actually don't read that widely outside sf/fantasy, which is Bad and Wicked, if not downright Evil, in a self-respecting English academic (not that I currently am, actually); in a spirit of self-broadening I ration myself to one sf and one fantasy, plus one crime novel. The other seven choices are wide open. A weird sort of effect kicks in where I know that I should be all Serious and Academic, but know I'm not really, but expect the other book club members to expect me to be anyway, so I try to ratchet the Literary quotient up and down simultaneously, ending up in a sort of mental self-arm-lock, and drool.

Choosing books is actually horribly personal, and makes me feel very exposed, and my so-called academic identity really only makes it worse. I console myself with the thought that today, at any rate, at least some of the choices were essentially random, on account of how the headache was preventing me from seeing straight, and I probably chose a couple of things that were two to the left of where I was actually aiming.

Scored Banks's Algebraist, though, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, so it can't be all bad.

Today went steadily downhill after 5am, which is the point at which a small gremlin with a large drill started trying to bore its way out of my skull via the right eyebrow. It's been one of those irrepressible headaches, full of personality and joie de vivre, which is mostly suppressed by drug intake, but lurks evilly in hiding for the moment when they wear off. I have a vague recollection of pushing phone buttons at about 9.30 in order to tell the departmental secretary, in what I hope were actual sentences, that I wasn't going to be there for my 10am tut, but the rest of the day is a bit of a blur.

On the upside, my sister and Cute Niece visited, allowing a brief period of lucidity in which said Niece spent a happy twenty minutes playing with my pale green plush Great Cthulhu. The combination of tentacles, wings and other interesting shapes found favour with the small spawn, who gummed them enthusiastically. The concept of wantonly imprinting the young with HP Lovecraft at an impressionable age found favour with her aunt.

Although not much better, given that it's stinking hot. How much do I love Cape Town's February heatwaves? Not at all, is how. The weather report insists the maximum today is 33 degrees, but I feel much more in tune with their 40 degree discomfort index. Meteorologists. You never realised how much they cared about the poor suffering sods who actually experience the weather they so blithely delineate. My personal discomfort index includes a lurking headache, which I am ignoring in the hopes it'll slink off somewhere and stop bothering me. Bloody summer.

I am this week doing my very best imitation of a Good Little Academic, which entails tottering around campus between patches of shade, drinking water almost continuously, and getting stuck into The Joy That Is Registration Week. Today my Beloved Institution provided what I can only feel is a highly characteristic moment, viz. a curriculum advice briefing session in which the air con wasn't working and the overhead projector kept switching off at random intervals, although admittedly that wasn't too much of an issue since the controls for the ceiling lights were malfunctioning and the light was too bright to read the overheads, anyway. The training session entailed mostly wall-to-wall politically correct jargon from a variety of guest speakers. At about the point where they actually got to the nitty-gritty of curriculum advice, I had to leave in order to introduce the English department's courses to about 150 first-years, since the faculty had incautiously scheduled the two activities, in defiance of topological probability, on top of each other.

It may just be the weather, which is reaching the epic proportions of those becalmed-in-the-tropics, mad-from-scurvy-and-overheating horror stories, but with regard to the aforementioned Beloved Institution I'm beginning to feel the first, faint stirrings of the rat who has suddenly realised the significance of all that water pouring through the holes in the planking. Bit slow on the uptake, me.

All that being said, the half-hour of mad enthused proselytising was rather fun. I do like students, although, ye gods and little fishes, the ickle firsties get younger every year... (Memo to self: must not refer to them as Ickle Firsties in public, mostly because I suspect a tragically small proportion of them would get the reference. Although actually one of my audience today was the pleasant young lady who is probably South Africa's leading hopeless drooling Harry Potter fangirl, running websites and workshops and what have you. I was also madly grilled by a smallish gentleman about the sf I teach, my overwhelming impression being that he didn't think much of it). Anyway. While most of them were apparently about twelve years old to my jaundiced Granny Weatherwaxoid gaze, they were bright, involved and asked intelligent questions. Also, the air con in the lecture theatre was actually working. Perhaps there's hope.

All this academic admin means that I haven't really been working, research-wise, unless you count re-reading all six Harry Potters in the last week, and watching all four films; last night I embarked on a re-watch of the Lord of the Rings opus, extended editions. You could call it work, I suppose, I do have relevant encyclopedia entries looming. But for now I have incautiously arranged to trundle through Newlands Forest with my Friendly Psychologist this afternoon, after which I shall recover from the heatstroke by allowing the dynamic jo&stv duo to feed me wine and excellent Thai cuisine. It's not such a bad life, really.

Good news! Serenity is a damn fine movie. Good enough that it's still well worth watching under the following circumstances:

• in the form of a pirated copy downloaded off the internet, with Dutch subtitles,
• projected onto a screen made from a sheet, and carefully ironed before starting,
• by a projector illegally borrowed from work, which requires, in order to project properly, two small tables balanced one on top of the other, two d4s to hold the front up, and a fan held next to it so that it doesn't overheat,
• in spite of which it overheats anyway and turns the picture randomly orange and blue and intervals,
• even though it's working off a bad CD copy which randomly stops every now and then and gives a whole series of gibberish error messages, with numbers,
• causing the room full of computer geeks to spend fifteen minutes in argumentative technobabble to decide what things to randomly type into what appeared to be a Linux command line in order to make it play again.

It was a rather fun evening, all told, and curiously appropriate to the rather Heath Robinson operation of Serenity herself. I am, however, despite my considerable enjoyment and admiration of the film under adverse circumstances, Cross With Joss. Since some of you deprived CT types haven't seen the movie yet, I shall hide more in-depth analysis behind the cut. ( Cross With Joss. )

I should pause at this point to reassure you that I am not generally behind pirating DVDs off artists I admire; I've already ordered Serenity, the Region 2 DVD comes out next month, apparently, and will be airmailed to me posthaste, so I have Done My Bit For Serenity II.

It seems to have been a big weekend for sf movies. I watched an 80s anime film on Friday afternoon with first_fallen. Captain Harlock In Arcadia was... well, very anime, which means it was, in Western terms, really slowly paced, filled with apparently naive and howling character cliches reproduced with the most absolute seriousness, and had a nice line in strange anachronism and weird juxtapositions (World War II, far future aliens, pirates, samurai and German knighthood. Oy, vey). In a weird sort of way I rather enjoyed it. Not, however, as much as I enjoyed today's retro afternoon spent with wolverine_nun, watching the original Battlestar Galactica movie and the 1980s Flash Gordon. Re-watching BG is giving me an increased appreciation of the recent re-make: some very interesting resonances and updates between the two versions, and some lovely moments of homage. Flash is possibly the movie which imprinted me hopelessly with B-movie sci-fi at a tender age: I have very, very vivid memories of watching it when I was about 12. Mostly, I think, the amazing undercurrents, and in some cases, extremely up-front overcurrents, of dodgy eroticism possibly stunned me into hapless memory: phallic spaceships, shiny men's hot-pants, concubines, whippings and all. But it has survived amazingly well, possibly because it's made with such deliberate campness and tongue-in-cheek irony.

Having watched approximately 8 hours of cinema in the last 24, it's probably not surprising that I have a pounding headache; I leave you with the slightly mind-bending thought of what my dreams are going to look like over the next few days, given my recent mental diet...

Summer! It's bloody hot, and I have a headache, but the day is bearable because Cape Town is having an outbreak of southeaster, and it's gusting like a bugger out there. I love driving in heavy wind. I have to be preternaturally alert on the highway in my small, light Mermaid-car, to tack appropriately into the buffets. A misspent youth reading Arthur Ransome finally becomes, in the most unlikely way, useful.

I am forced to the conclusion that most of the Usual Suspects are busy lying around groaning after what my family calls Too Much Kissmass; except for strawberryfrog and pinkthulhu, who are clearly hanging around in my comments pages, whiling away the dead time at work. Ah, them holidays. Mine is still filled with millyuns of social engagements; I've just staggered home, headache-infested, from a truly lovely evening hosted by Mike for rumint, at the former's larney penthouse, filled, as usual, with incredible food. This message brought to you courtesy of the twenty-minute gap between arriving home and the painkillers kicking in, at which time I shall describe a graceful ninety-degree arc to the horizontal position, with any luck coinciding it approximately with my bed. This evening also unexpectedly featured the famous James, who, after having been absent from my life for the better part of ten years, is suddenly popping up all over. (Including reading this blog - hi, James!).

The dreaded wytchfynder's new challenge: the top 5 things you'd like to be that start with the same letter as your journal name. I'm cursing Dorothy Parker and the bloody E, since mostly what I'd like to be right now is blissfully oblivious. However, here's my list.

• Eminent.
• Egregious.
• Eccentric.
• Emancipated.
• Euphonious.

Etcetera. Go on, you try.

I do not want these sleeping habits, they are skr-aaaaa-tched. Sunday night was rendered hideous by the usual insomnia, and thereafter, once I did get to sleep, horrible dreams, culminating in an episode where I woke up to find myself crouched next to the bed with my duvet held above my head to stop the rain of arrows from the ceiling from actually hitting me. Bloody half-dreaming hallucinations are so vivid, I could damned well hear the beastly things thudding into the fabric. It took me a while to wake up enough to realise that there were no arrows, and to apologise to the cat (who was somewhat bemused and hurt at being flung unexpectedly across the room by my sleep-walking) and get back into bed. I suspect I'm reacting to the slings and arrows of my outrageous academic life.

So I had a headache all of yesterday from lack of sleep, and a codeine hangover most of today. There's a singular terror in spending 15 minutes reading through notes for the lecture you're about to give, only to realise that you haven't taken in a word. Fortunately actual trial revealed that I can, in fact, lecture on Frankenstein more or less in my sleep. Memo to self, teaching material may be stagnating. The lecture appears to have been more or less coherent, although one student did come up to me afterwards to let me know that my habit of referring to "Christian mythology" is causing him emotional distress. Drug-hazed or not, I think I managed to convey my essential and absolute failure of empathy in reasonably friendly and professional terms.

The day was not assisted by me staggering into the kitchen just after waking up and dressing, to discover it occupied by an entirely unknown man in overalls. This was alarming, as I thought I'd heard the Evil Landlord leave for work 20 mins earlier. In fact, it transpired that he was discussing garage-building operations with the architect and builder - they start next week, right outside my bedroom window, oh joy. I wish he'd warn me about these visits, my experience of intruders in the house is sufficient that it gave me an adrenalin jolt that made me shaky for the next half hour. A fact, may I add, that the Evil Landlord finds hilarious. *growl*