Freckles & Doubt

A weekend of giddy social whirling - two birthday bashes (curse all you Capricorns, clustering in the social circle in a sort of astrological clump), plus a lunch in honour of herne_kzn's flying visit to the Mother City (more notice next time, damn you!), and the dread jo&stv's extremely enjoyable housewarming last night. Not only is their new house ideally suited to entertaining, with its deck, pool and open spaces, but they're dashed good at putting together a perfect people-mix: enough close friends to be safe and familiar, enough new faces and people I don't often see to be interesting. The visit of everymoment and family to CT did, I have to say, up the quotient of Small Humans to hitherto unknown levels, but I think the non-reproducing Scrooge-like die-hards among us survived the experience fairly well. A swimming pool is apparently a very levelling thing, and happy kiddies splashing around in the water are curiously heart-warming. Not that I was in the pool any stage, the crowd levels being a bit high for my comfort in a swimming costume, but I went mildly mad with my nice new camera. Fruits of the labours available here.

The first few weeks of this year, with their combination of heatwaves and the horrible angst, guilt, self-loathing and conviction of my own worthlessness engendered by these thrice-damned book updates, came to a sort of head last night, and I proceeded to become somewhat sloshed. Apart from rendering me prone to attacks of the dreaded Comedy Hiccups, this usually makes me extremely voluble and determinedly polysyllabic. (Random snippet from a conversation with one of the new faces: "Are you tipsy? because if you are, you're also very highly educated.") 4am-wake-up with pounding headache aside, it also seems to have been cathartic and positive, because in between waiting for Flickr to cogitate over my uploads, I've done a stonkload of work on the book this morning, and am comfortably within an up-swing in terms of thinking that what I've written may not actually be all bad. I may not have Chapter 1 done by the end of the day, wolverine_nun, but it'll be bloody close.

I should add, for the sake of posterity, that my Evil Landlord was considerably drunker than I was last night, owing to the equally evil jo&stv feeding him quantities of Pimms. My sense of the later parts of the evening is a little blurry, but I do seem to remember him being thrown into the pool with all his clothes on. I am relieved to note that the perpetrator of this outrage was one of jo's seedy actuarial co-workers. It is reassuring to consider that our own social circle is beyond such infantile high jinks. Or, at the very least, considerably more aware of said Evil Landlord's skill with a rapier.

Since the damp, Cthulhoid, rotting-wall status of my bedroom is inducing lung-rot, I have been sleeping in the guest room for the last couple of months. This circumstance may, in retrospect, have something to do with the sharp rise in my bizarre sleep-walking behaviour - probably not unrelated to the fact that two out of the four guest-room walls are lined with books, and my vulnerable, sleeping brain is being warped by a combination of the seepage from all that pulp, and basic L-space.

Be that as it may, one of the many drawbacks of this relocation is that the Evil Landlord now sleeps on the other side of the wall, instead of at the other end of the house, and is thus peculiarly placed to ask me searching questions the next morning about my sleep-walking habits, since apparently he can hear me thundering around the room. This, however, works both ways. The other night was rendered particularly surreal by awakening sharply at about 2am to hear the not particularly dulcet tones of the Evil Landlord, raised sharply from the other side of the wall, in agitated litany, thus: "Fish! Fish! No, Fish! Fuck!"

I rolled over in bed, muzzily wondering if this was:
(a) Fish licking his ear;
(b) Fish landing heavily and unexpectedly on a tender portion of his anatomy; or
(c) Fish throwing up on his bed,
and, judging by the levels of anguish, plumping for (c). Then I went back to sleep.

(It was (c). O my prophetic soul, etc.)

I am immeasurably comforted and gratified by the outbreak of commiseration, consolation and constructive advice in the comments on my last post. Thank you, witterers all, I feel a lot better. The Usual Sunday Evening with the Usual Suspects (jo, stv, Friendly Psychologist) also helped a lot, especially since putting the three of them together on the sofa and liberally applying Long Island Iced Tea is productive of something perilously close to street theatre. I'm going to bed now. Maybe the room will stop spinning if I lie down.

Staggered home around elevenish last night from the usual excellently excessive jo&stv Thaifoodfest and drunk-up. 'Tis a truth universally acknowledged, I get more trashed at jo&stv's than at any other venue in the known universe. Why, I'm not sure, unless it's stv's over-identification with the Perfect Host trope (the tragically recurring Never-Empty Wine Glass phenomenon), but the fact remains, I tried to post this last night, and typed more errors in that last sentence than I did over the last ten posts combined. While narcissistic self-loathing, combined with years of exposure to student grammatical solecisms, allows me to minimalise actual typos even while technically drunk*, it seemed safer to abandon the draft and revisit it in the morning, or, as it happened, evening.

I've been suffering from some sort of low-grade virus for the last few days, making me feel as though I'm drunk and exhausted more or less 24/7, regardless of actual sleep patterns or alcohol consumption. This has made for a week of somewhat pale and disconnected teaching. You know you're in an academic rut when you can hold forth on Spenser's Faerie Queen, which has to be one of the most densely pretentious pieces of poetry in the English canon, more or less in trance state for several hours. I don't remember what I said, really, but the class took lots of notes. I'm sure the more interestingly trippy interpretations will get back to me in essays. Anyway, it turns out that the bug is in fact of the gastric variety, presumably the one that has been bounding around my immediate social environs with the promiscuous friendliness of a happy puppy. I have not quite reached the happy puppy state of actually being sick on the carpet, I simply feel as though I want to be on a more or less continual basis. Bleah.

* Mostly you can tell I'm drunk mainly by the increasing tendency towards multisyllabic tendentiousness, something I've picked up from a previous boyfriend who enunciated with increasingly bell-like clarity the drunker he got. (You know who you are. English postgraduatism can't be blamed for everything, after all).

Today's student T-shirt discovery: "WILL SHAG FOR FOOD," the lone gesture at individuality among a sea of brand names. Alas, I fear he'll starve.

In other news, shock! and likewise horror! The boob tube is back. I must have seen at least three of the gazelles in them, accompanied by that ineffable, unmistakeable air of precarious unease, together with a tendency to hitch at intervals. Of all the solecisms of the 80s, the boob tube was probably the worst. I'd hail it joyously as clear proof that the last few years' horrible tendency to featured bra straps is at an end, except that the alternative is so much worse.

Curriculum advice this morning was a bit of a blur, I hope I haven't accidentally signed anyone up for underwater basket weaving. Hell, let's face it, this whole weekend has been a bit of a blur. Blurry components as follows:

• Saturday: wrote encyclopedia entries all day. Was distracted in late afternoon by jo&stv in need of cheering up; boozed. Fled them in direction of Shakespeare only slightly sloshed. (Twelfth Night at Maynardville, beautifully warm in the open air, fun production with a good cast, but an itsy-bitsy-teensy-weensy bit flat, to my possibly jaded, or even drunken, gaze). Got home around midnight. Slept really badly.
• Sunday: woke up too early, wrote encyclopedia entries. Spent afternoon constructing complicated salads, possibly as an escape from Shrek. Fed complicated salads for supper to strawberryfrog and short_mort, meeting the latter for the first time (she's cool, and also knows modern fairy tale parodies I don't). Played Fluxx! until way too late (interesting card game with madly changing rules, possibly ideally suited to my fundamental tactical inability to plan ahead more than one and a half steps). Went to bed around midnight. Slept really badly.
• Monday: woke up too early, gave curriculum advice, with a short break to give intro talks to ickle firsties on why they really want to do English. Staggered blearily into office, wrote incoherent blog entry in attempt to escape from Shrek. Now all I have to do is wait around until 4.30pm, when I give another info talk to what I confidently expect will be an utterly empty lecture theatre, since students work out really early on that only strange Law aliens and social work students are on campus after 3.30. I may, facing my inescapable fate, also write an encyclopedia entry on Shrek, although it won't be coherent.

The recent rash of socialising is causing me to have the weirdest dreams. Last night I dreamed I was attending a massive party on a farm somewhere, with several hundred people wandering all over the estate. After a lot of drifting around feeling like a spare part I thought I recognised someone I knew on the dance floor and went up to dance. Except it turned out to be a total stranger, who promptly threw a large, ripe plum at me, plugging me neatly in the left eye. I woke up with my left eye socket all aching.

I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something, namely "Enough with the socialising!" And it's not surprising the nasty ending should happen on a dance floor, with which I have something of a love/hate relationship. As stv points out, dancing is one of those human activities, like playing pool or speaking a foreign language, that goes a lot better at exactly the right level of drunkenness. (I play my best pool, not that that's saying much, on exactly one and a half ciders).

There's a small, technical flaw in my habit of not eating anything all day before having supper at jo&stv's, a tendency exaggerated somewhat today by my continuing state of mild nausea. On the upside, on an empty stomach one has more room for stv's killer Thai cuisine. On the downside, or possibly further upside depending on how horizontally one is attached to the carpet at the time, the flowly freeing wine goes to one's head really quickly on an empty stomach. Consequently, having just rolled merrily home, I hereby disclaim all responsibility for any typos in this post. It's only the sternest sense of duty which is causing me to update at all.

This morning started really early owing to the need to wake up before 7am to let Mother into the house so that I could subsequently take her to the dentist while my sister collected her husband from the airport. (Family. It gets complicated). However, the day improved rapidly after a buying spree in the nursery (plant type rather than niece type), ending with me spending two hours on my knees happily composting bits of garden and planting things, while my mother practised Grandmother-fu on the screaming niece. The degree of enthusiasm with which I attacked the gardening session can be verified by the fact that I ended the morning grubby, muddy, destressed, and with compost down what would, had I more of a bust, be my cleavage, clearly indicating that I'm taking this Earth Mother stuff a little too seriously. At any rate, my new, private courtyard, as created by the happily concluded activities of the Army of Reconstruction, shows every sign of becoming, after a few more years of unrelenting effort, an absolute Oasis or Bower, suitable for boughs, books, wine and outbreaks of Omar Khayyam.

I spent most of last night in frantic, terrifying dreams in which I attempted desperately and unsuccessfully to achieve elaborate decorations for a New Year's party, mostly in the cramped and understocked confines of what turned out to be a very small Walmart transplanted to a Cape Town mall. Don't ask me why my subconscious, after constructing that elaborate symbolic attack on the dignity of the American state, also felt the need for me to strike a blow for New Year decorating fervour by purchasing a handful of small, garish, plastic snowmen and a few limp balloons. I suspect the whole thing is aimed at reminding me that I really should be sending out New Year invitations. Well, bugger that, subconscious. I need to finish this encyclopedia entry on metafiction before I can do anything as frivolous as planning mass attacks of socialising.

Did a second-hand-bookshop sweep today, and scored a mint condition Red Mars and Interview with the Vampire, the latter more because my Dear Little Students will write essays on the wretched tome, than because I actually have any desire to possess a copy. Besides, it has Tom Cruise on the cover. However, this is partially balanced by the simultaneous discovery of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, which has half of John Cusack on the cover, and the fifth Interzone anthology, so probably we're ahead on points.

Amazing how these social wossnames do the not-in-single-spies, but-batallions, thing. Today's thoroughly pleasant scheduled lunch with supervisor for purpose of hacking the revision proposal for this wretched book, turned into a thoroughly pleasant unexpected lunch with two additional gentlemen, one of whom was James-from-way-back, he of the wine-farm-operating parents. Cape Town is, as they say, a teeny weeny incestuous community. Oh, yeah. Good to catch up, at any rate, and additional bonus of a pleasantly argumentative discussion of the precise definition of a cult movie with the other unexpected gentleman, who is of the ilk of mad lunatic fringe sf-reading academics. We are a dying species, she says plaintively. But not dead yet.

Tonight was book club. I have come away from book club (a) sloshed, which is more or less routine, and (b) clutching only two books: an unspecified black volume with a corset on the front, and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. The latter, at least, is something I can admit to being tres happy about, and still retain my suave postmodern academic street cred. No comment re the former, although it's apparently a detective novel featuring an academic suspected of Satanic activities, so, given my recent experiences with the police, I felt it had a certain resonance. The restraint in snagging only two books is due to the fact that I shall be adding these to my metre-high pile of Borrowed Books, the ones which I haven't read yet. A quick geological assay reveals that the ones near the bottom of the pile (a) date back almost a year, and (b) are turning into peat. While they settle and compost, I have been reading 19th-century girls' classic fiction with somewhat desperate voracity, given that I have to mark the Honours essay tomorrow: five Anne of Green Gables novels in the last 24 hours. I am pleased to report that they are not as saccharine as either What Katy Did or Pollyanna. Then again, nothing is as saccharine as Pollyanna.

In other news, my niece has a seriously effective pair of lungs, and furry ears, although I believe that's normal for newborns. Meanwhile, the Army of Reconstruction have added sufficient layers of brick to the wall right outside my bedroom that the bricklayer will henceforth be at precisely the right height to look straight into my bathroom. This is going to make tomorrow's ablutions somewhat challenging, given my tendency to sleep in not much, clothing-wise. Darned builders.

I am beginning to fear that, indeed, my computer just hates me. This motherboard refuses to read more than one memory chip at a time, and only part of it. I am, for example, currently running at 220MG instead of 256. Today's party trick has been to lose the graphics drivers, so that my screen is running in (shudder) 16 colours, and declines to recognise any seductive driver updates I wave before it. I've spent the day writing lectures for tomorrow, and can't work out if it's the display issues or the narrative theory which is giving me migraine-like dancy spots in front of the eyes. Barthes and Genette, pretty heavy, but this screen is very, very ugly.

Anyway. Yesterday was good, if somewhat drunken. The dread jo&stv duo hit Cape Town in the last few days, and descended upon the house yesterday afternoon for a session of catch-up, powered mostly by gin and tonics and the Evil Landlord's killer pancakes (cinnamon liqueur, Baileys and cream, in beautiful layers, best drunk by tilting the head back and tossing them off in one go). I was already somewhat festive before heading out to carnun's housewarming, which was pretty darn festive in and of itself. More booze, catchup with various people I don't see enough of, silly hats and ties, about 5 different dinner or other dates made, slightly drunken wend homewards around midnight. And then the usual 2am wake-up when I actually sobered up, and the concomitant tossing and turning. For twenty minutes, after which I thought "bugger it!", wrote two pieces of more or less awful poetry and dosed myself silly with muscle relaxants. Today would have been a lot better if the Horrible Lady Next Door hadn't started it off at 9am by (apparently) deconstructing her house from the inside out, with (apparently) a large rubber-headed steam hammer. And if I hadn't bunked rapier practice for the previous two weeks running: my legs are jelly after an hour and a half of having my butt scientifically whupped by the two newest recruits, who are schoolgirls. *hangs head in shame*

I finished King Rat! In retrospect, I think it annoyed me most by having that fetishistic love affair with drum and bass, an erotic charge which I deeply, totally and utterly fail to get on any level. Interesting story, but, I thought, actually quite badly told. Read very much like an immature piece of work; his narrative style in Perdido Street Station and The Scar is far more accomplished. Anyway, as a self-reward for slogging through, am re-reading my P.G. Wodehouse collection, a statement which probably tells you everything you need to know about my character.

I recommend Lemony Snicket, the movie. Lovely, lovely visual sense of Gothic, well lit and filmed, Edward Goreyesque clothes, brilliant child actors, and the most fascinating end credits sequence I've seen in ages. And the Jude Law voiceover is perfect: quasi-serious ironic detachment, just like the books. I endured Jim Carrey. He was bearable.