Freckles & Doubt

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.

When I was eight years old I gave up biting my nails. I remember the occasion quite vividly: one day I looked down at my nibbled-at hands, thought "that's ugly, I should stop that", and did so. I haven't bitten them since. This suggests that, while in later life my willpower seems to be a small, mad, fluffy thing crouched on a rock in the depths of my subconscious, refusing to stir when prodded with sticks, technically it does exist and should be in there somewhere. Consequently, in a spirit of enquiry, a few days ago I randomly decided to give up saying "fuck", just to see if I could - while I have a just appreciation for its Anglo-Saxon bluntness, I lard my conversation with it far too heavily, and occasionally can't help using it in a professional context, upon which people look at me sideways. So far so good - I've involuntarily uttered it once in the last three days, and that while slightly sloshed. I shall watch my own progress with interest.

The weekend seems to have been a bit of a mad social whirl. We (jo&stv and Evil Landlord and I) took my mother out for lunch to Overture on Saturday, as a thank-you for her entirely saintly energies in looking after my dad. She is an Amazing Person, TM, and richly deserved Overture's view, good-humoured and attentive staff (the manager was hilarious), flowly-freeing wine, kick-butt pumpkin risotto, hake with mussels, and pork belly with pork rillette beignet, the latter pretentious-sounding concoction being a sort of pork stuffing in a thin deep-fried pastry baggie, and frankly delectable. She possibly didn't richly deserve the lunacy levels of the conversation, but hopefully it was at least entertaining.

The EL has also recently had the counter in the dining room flung out and replaced with a fitted version with room for the bar 'fridge, and in the course of unpacking the old cupboards and repacking the new we found no less than four bottles of champagne. This means we lugged two of them plus the Cointreau over to jo&stv's for potjie last night, and made French 75s (Cointreau, gin, champagne, lemon, hold the sugar, I like them dry). These are evil. In a good way. And get you very sloshed very quickly. Then again, it's been a hellish couple of weeks and I think I deserved to get slightly drunk and almost say "fuck" several times. But only almost!

Now, onward! to arrange internet connectivity for my dad at his new frail care institution, into which he moves on Friday. friendly_shrink's nice husband has, bless him, sorted out the Windows install problem on dad's computer by giving me a legal copy, and I am fiendishly scheming to persuade the Evil Landlord to let me install an ADSL line, so I can hijack the Iburst and haul it over there for Dad. Since this entails allowing Telkom over our threshold, I may be making a hell of a lot of creme caramel in the next few weeks. Will the Evil Landlord accept Telkom sweetened with creme caramel? News at 11!

I think I may have had a deprived childhood. In a good way, that is. As you know, Bob, we didn't have a TV or video player in the house for my entire schooldays, except for one year in Standard Four; we also lived variously on research stations and outside tiny half-horse farming towns, so it was only in my last four years of high school that we were anywhere near something like a local multiplex cinema. By that stage I had seriously failed to acquire the movie-watching habit to any useful extent (hence the maddened catching up in the last decade or so); I was also the class dweeb in high school, which means I didn't really get dragged off on cinema expeditions with classmates.

As a result of this, I can honestly say that I managed to be a Western teenager in the 80s and still didn't ever actually see a John Hughes film. Not one. My teen angsts went unreflected, unrecognised, unmelanged into the muddied, steaming pool of the adolescent collective unconscious. I've also managed not to see any of them since, with the result that I've had to acquire all the necessary Hughes quotes second-hand and out of context, in an essentially Baudrillardian fashion.

The recent death of John Hughes, mayherestinpeace, vaguely prodded me to actually do something about this tragic lack, revealing, in the process, a tragic lack. I lasted for precisely fifteen minutes of Weird Science, which is agonising enough that I couldn't even wait for RDJ to show up. Embarrassment humour makes me want to curl up and die. I'm further on with The Breakfast Club, which at least has some witty moments and interesting characters, although the desire to set about Bender with a horsewhip does occasionally surface. I have still to acquire Ferris Bueller, the ultimate classic, or Pretty In Pink, which are apparently better movies.

But tragically, I think these films have lost their chance to actually speak to me: I have to try and project myself back into my teenaged self, overcoming in the process the disparity between an American high school experience and my own, and there are too many layers here. The affectionate, nostalgic recognition with which so many people refer to these films is forever denied me. All I can summon is a distant, intellectual appreciation of the texts' iconic function, and tendency to wonder, wistfully, whether they would actually have meant as much to me if I'd seen them when I was sixteen. Possibly not. My fellow students were more or less aliens to me, I see no real reason why their celluloid versions should be any different.

Possibly it's a bit like Twilight - in order to actually get it you need to be sixteen, and ruled entirely by your hormones and teen myths about sex. And devoid of irony, in which latter class I was always more or less doomed.

The last year is really the first time in my life I've had anything resembling disposable income, as a direct result of which my CD collection has joyously tripled and my DVD stash has multiplied out by a factor of 10 at least. One of the main things I've been doing, music-wise, apart from madly discovering new bands in all directions and indulging my Bowie obsession, is to gradually replace all the music I used to listen to when I was in my 20s and which I own only on poor-quality cassette or bootleg tape. (You may have noticed the Eurythmics phase a couple of months ago). This week: New Model Army. I have No Rest For the Wicked, Ghost of Cain and Thunder and Consolation on rotation. I'd forgotten how layered and diverse they can be, under all the punk sensibility and acoustic ballading, but mostly it's all making me feel happily 18.

Music is very weird in its ability to appeal not just on aesthetic or technical or even emotional grounds, but purely in terms of association. I have this huge problem with 80s pop cheese: most of it is extremely drecky, but certain songs which were current in my teen years plug directly into some vital region of my amygdala to result in shameless, spontaneous grinning and rhythmic wriggling. (For some reason "We Built This City on Rock And Roll" does it every time, which is embarrassing - I think it might be from listening to Radio 5 when I was in undergrad). It's all about who you were at the time, who you were with when a particular song was current - one of my favourite bits of cinema ever is the bit in High Fidelity with Rob rearranging his record collection autobiographically. I've retained a fondness for the Eurythmics partly because I was introduced to them when I was still at school by a boy on whom I had a horrible crush, and I still have very vivid memories of the afternoons I spent listening to records with him.

New Model Army is a bit dodgy because one of the things I associate with it is the Bastard Ex-Boyfriend From Hell, but I also remember nightclubs and parties and good friends who weren't the BEBFH, and fortunately those associations seem to be prevailing. (wytchfynder used to listen to NMA, in fact I still have a cassette of Ghost of Cain he gave me). God, I remember headbanging to NMA at the late lamented Playground, the CT goth haunt of choice in the early 90s, and occasionally at the Fringe. (Remember the Fringe? Alternative and reggae: it had a clientele who separated sharply into two camps, which used to nod at each other in passing as they surged on and off the dance floor while the DJ, possibly mischievously, alternated the two schools). Those were formative years, those were. It's almost magical, that you can stick a CD in the drive and sketch, with considerable urgency and vitality, the salient points of your own history.

Of course, all this is making me realise that I really need to replace the sound system in my car, which was nicked a couple of years ago. I'm heading off up into the Elgin area this weekend for Mike and Nikki's wedding, and while I thoroughly enjoy the hour's drive, it would be better for some music. But Mike, of course, dates from precisely the era I've been talking about, I shared digs with him in my Honours year. He's mad about Depeche Mode. I must acquire some Depeche Mode.

Memory is a weird thing. Why should it be, as I inexorably age, that I should nonetheless retain a vivid, almost tactile memory of sitting on the steps by the lower hockey field when I was 10 years old, watching a circle of my contemporaries play a clapping game? It wasn't a significant moment, and I have no memory of any of the contemporaries. And when I think of my grandparents' house in Harare, why is it always the bookcase by the door between the dining room and sitting room that I remember first? I mean, yes, it was full of science fiction, but so were at least two other bookshelves in the same area.

This waywardness is clearly behind the sudden desperate need, a few weeks back, to find a picture of a toy I randomly remember owning when I was 6 or 7 - a little plastic egg-shaped man with a weight in his curved bottom so he wobbled from side to side, but never quite fell over. I remember this distinctly - the plastic was flesh-coloured and slightly moulded, except for the base, which was a clear, bright primary colour. I think we had two, one with a blue base and one with a red. I spent an unfruitful few hours on Google, combining all the search terms I could think of except, for some reason, for "wobble", and coming up with nothing. Then I randomly saw a reference to them on someone's blog today. Of course they were called weebles. Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down. 1970s weebles were clearly superior to the glossier, unmoulded later ones, which also came out in Disney characters and gods know what else. Judging from the photos, either my memory is defective or my weebles were some sort of southern African knock-off, I'm sure their heads were more pointy.

It seems a little disproportionate that I can clearly remember my weeble but am completely unable to recollect the name or business of the student I saw yesterday. Memo to self: do not allow the dean to guess that my subconscious clearly finds students less interesting than weebles.

So, it's been this torrid, ten-year, slightly obsessive romance. It has required enormous amounts of my energy to start a relationship from nothing: woo the other, learn their ways, keep the interest going, make it work. I wouldn't say it's a break-up, precisely, but I'm realising, more and more, that the relationship is not healthy: I'm feeling these interactions as demands on me, and I'm starting to resent them to a quite disturbing extent. I'm not saying it's over between me and the SCA, but it's no longer satisfying for either of us, and at the very least I need a time out.

I have, of course, been moving towards this for the last year or so, during which the melt-down in my career has taken a quite inordinate amount of my mental energy: now I have a new job, which is not only demanding but is not quite the job I want, and which still takes ongoing mental negotiation to keep me from hair-tearing and the wringing of hands. I'm still not in a space where I can say I'm where I want to be, or have achieved most of the things I need to achieve. I am serious about keeping up the research and writing on top of an admin job, and that's going to take a lot of energy. I'm also horribly conscious of the fact that the lack of success in my career is at least partly because I've always given so much energy to things like roleplaying and the SCA. They've been truly wonderful experiences, but I should have been more moderate. There is also a truly sad corollary that that kind of hobby does me an active disservice in the eyes of my academic peers: every time I'm in public in garb, I find myself dreading an encounter with a colleague. Insecurity is an awful thing.

The problem with the SCA is that I was a founder member of our Shire, and have only really been absent from officer positions in the last year or so: I relate to it in terms of an ongoing sense of responsibility which leads me to volunteer to do things when I know I don't have the time or energy. (The consciousness of being a gosh-darned Pelican really doesn't help with this). We're a tiny group so the organisational work habitually devolves onto the shoulders of a few energetic people, and I beat myself up with extended guilt trips about the added pressure on everyone else if I opt out. This means it's a no-win situation - either I get involved and feel resentful about it, or I don't, and resent the bad feelings I inflict on myself.

I've stepped back a bit from the SCA lately, but it clearly hasn't been enough: stepping away entirely is, I think, a necessary thing to break these negative patterns, but it's going to be horribly hard. The local SCA crowd are among my closest and most valued friends, responsible for wonderful experiences and memories, and I already feel that my reluctance to involve myself is on some level a betrayal of them. Half of them are cheerily managing careers and young families on top of their SCA activities, and it makes me feel particularly useless and feeble to say "I can't do this." But I honestly can't. I can't seem to stop myself from volunteering, so I need to not be taking part at all, at least for a bit.

We have this big March event with overseas visitors who are particularly dear to me, and I shall do my best to fulfill my obligations for that. After that, I'm packing up and moving out, muttering things about "clean break" and "when I have my head together". It's going to be a horrible scene, probably with me in tears. I hope the SCA doesn't throw things.

Last Night I Dreamed: diverse and confused things. Trying to rent a house from someone's particularly mad and demanding mother. Being at a large partyish thing and carrying around someone's rather cute baby boy, occasionally upside down or in the bottom of my handbag. Rescuing people from a burning skyscraper, in the middle of which I was also trying to help a couple of confused academics interpret mystic Chinese semaphore, and realising that I had to go home to change because I was not formally enough dressed for the wedding. Possibly I shouldn't eat a portion of Bubbling Chocolate Tar-pit Death just before going to bed.

The nice lady at the gym has randomly given me the same locker key for three sessions in a row now. It's number 133. If I was the kind of person who bought lottery tickets, I'd see this as a Sign or Portent of somethingorother, but fortunately I class lottery tickets under numerology, and numerology under Pure Exploitative Hokum.

I am wimping out on New Year festivities tonight, owing to heatstress, headache, being severely mauled by the gym this morning (exhausted, no idea why), random antisociability, and the fact that I have to take my mother to the airport at 5.30 tomorrow morning. I shall, however, pause to do the Obligatory Year-End Assessory-Type Post.

• Things achieved by me this year: approval of the book updates; a sustained and serious gym routine resulting in fitness improvement in leaps and bounds, occasionally literally; an actual job with an actual salary, albeit not quite the job I was looking for (insert mystic Jedi hand gesture here). Given that last year's "not achieved" list listed "a permanent job, an actual salary as opposed to a pittance, a romance, any form of physical fitness, an updated book", I actually have to say that four out of five ain't half bad.
  
• Things discovered this year: Farscape, Facebook, Morrowind, knitting, David Bowie, fake fur, Judith Butler, motivational bunnies.
  
• Things not achieved by me: fleeing the country, crushing academia beneath my booted heel, enough writing.
  
• Resolutions for the new year: I have only one. Regardless of the outcome or upshot, I will not publicly angst about this new job.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was co-ordinating a mass attack by cats, riding chariots drawn by goats, on a herd of donkeys. The confusion was indescribable.

Clearly the blogsphere, in the shape of Dayle, feels that I am insufficiently random. Hurt! But, bonus, meme! I do like the way this removes the necessity to think up something non-Morrowind-related about which to post.

The Rules:
* We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
* Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
* People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
* At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
* Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

Fine, then:

• I once dislocated my left kneecap practicing waltz steps. This took place, may I add, while on a youth camp in the middle of rural Zimbabwe, necessitating being hauled off to the nearest hospital in the back of a truck, over very bumpy roads. Not recommended.
• While I am addicted to big black boots and the relevant black socks, all my socks have patterns of some sort on them (several sets with owls or cats). This is so that the nice charlady doesn't mix them up with the Evil Landlord's plain black socks. One cannot sufficiently stress the dangers of promiscuous sock-mixing.
• As a result of a traumatic school film experience in about Standard 2, I spent the next fifteen years of my life with an obsessive and more than somewhat irrational fear of erupting volcanoes, leading to random insecurity and incredible nightmares.
• My only stage experience was in Standard 5, when I played the lead role in a horrible little medieval play about a witch. I was a witch, and narrowly escaped being burned at the stake. As I recollect, a passing minstrel rescued me. I can still quote great chunks of the dialogue. (Bonus fact: along with all the colours of Joseph's Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which we put on at the same time).
• Too many items in my current wardrobe are purple.
• When roleplaying or computer-gaming I hate playing thieves or assassins. I seem to have a law-abiding gene which kicks in whenever I'm expected to steal, murder or otherwise act in a morally dodgy fashion.
• Bad habits I have acquired: hyperbole, unmarked quotation in normal conversation or bloggery, the Internet.
• Bad habits I have never acquired: nail-biting, smoking, watching TV. (Bad habits I have given up: make-up, high-heeled shoes, ShadowMagic).

I'm going to cheat, because one of the (bonus!) random things about me is that I'm a fanatical hater of chain letters. This meme therefore open to anyone who reads this and wants to pick it up. I recommend thinking up the random things just as you're drifting off to sleep, so conscious filters are off. I hadn't remembered the volcano thing in years.

Today's random linkery in the Department of Oh Wow That Explains A Lot: Haruki Murakami explains why he writes the way he does. (NYT article, reg required, I'm afraid). It's because he bases his writing style on jazz. This is actually remarkably illuminating.

'Tis the obligatory end-of-year post! Despite having had the designated 365 days of 2006, I still feel we're not really acquainted. And now it's this ancient, crone-like thing breathing out its last few hours. Time. Weird stuff.

As years go, it hasn't really been vintage: as wolverine_nun has pointed out with uncomfortable perspicacity, I've been marking time. The tally sheet is uncomfortably close to last year's, and thus looks rather like this:

• Things achieved by me this year: a bunch more encyclopedia entries, a sort of vaguely-extended semi-contract, actual progress on the book updates (although not enough), a bunch of reading, movie-watching and random web-surfing, a bunch of really good friends, another year of blogging.
• Things discovered this year: Moscow Mules, Belle & Sebastian, Alias, Spaced, Michael Marshall Smith.
• Things not achieved by me: a permanent job, an actual salary as opposed to a pittance, a romance, any form of physical fitness, an updated book.
• Realisations arrived at: (1) I shouldn't be here. My love for CT and friends and sister/niece notwithstanding, I don't have a career in this country and probably never will. (2) Not that it matters, as I suspect wide-scale social chaos and redefinition to result from global warming any time in the next decade, so all bets are off.
• Resolutions for the new year (almost identical to last year, i.e. not actually achieved much): work harder, write more, bum around a lot less on Teh Interwebs, go to the gym, and, most importantly, make a concerted and good-faith attempt to leave the country. NB do not allow self to be cowed or distracted by the epic and horrible task of relocating my book collection.

Bother. Have now worked self into introspective depression. Shall distract self satisfactorily from general downer conclusions by having a hell of a good party tonight, and wishing all and sundry a madly wonderful New Year. Also, thanks for hanging out here, either virtually or in reality. You're important.

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.