Freckles & Doubt

It's bucketing down outside, and in the interstices between lectures the foyer of my building is filled with damp-puppy students staring dolefully out into the downpour amid the smell of wet hair. We are clearly in autumn, a season of pleasing damp and benevolent chill, and I have broken out the first boots of the season. I am happy. I am, however, also faintly worried to consider the inexorable drift of my language vis à vis students towards dehumanising diminutives - when they're not gazelles, they're puppies. The latter is perhaps a more healthy characterisation along the maternal/cute axis than than the former, which has a lurking hint of the predatory. I do, of course, owe the "gazelles" designation to starmadeshadow, who views the quivering herds from the vantage point of her own leopard-like stalk. She is planning on returning her big-cat self to Cape Town more permanently in the near future, causing much callooing and, for that matter, callaying in the ranks.

I have spent the morning immersed in the inevitable realities of my working life, viz. checking student transcripts. This has vouchsafed to me several insights, most notably (a) that my advisors, train I them never so carefully, are bloody useless at checking course pre-requisites despite repeated reminders and pointed inscriptions on lists of "common advisor mistakes". Insight (b) is, however, more interesting and rather less depressing. Honestly, the skills and experience on which I draw most frequently in this job are those of my frivolous role-playing proclivities. I spend my days wrangling student character sheets, the lists of numbers which quantify experience and achievement, each individual mapped carefully within the constraints of the system. I am alert to rule-breaking, to player dissatisfaction and lack of success, to the judicious balance between challenge and reward, test and fulfilment. I also rely heavily on the experience gained from DMing players like rumint, whose control of the system and its potential exploits is absolute and terrifying. It's all one in the eye, really, to anyone who thinks of D&D and beyond as a waste of time. Not only is play intrinsically about experimentation and learning in a low-stakes environment, it's about understanding the shaping of behaviour through structure. Which also explains, I suppose, why I've drifted inexorably into genre theory in my academic life.

Talking about genre: David Bowie is busy releasing his first album in about ten years. The one single, "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)", and particularly its video, is an utterly fascinating disquisition on fame, identity, androgyny, and an explicit and rather wry dialogue with his own past. Also, Tilda Swinton. The music is very Reality-era, which works for me.

Cape Town! currently the locus at regular intervals of storms, heavy rain, hail, high winds, cats puddled around heaters, a soaring electricity bill, and that savage bite in the air that tells you somewhere in the fortunate upcountry there is snow. I am, needless to say, an extremely happy pervy cold-weather-fondler. This last is despite a certain amount of unavoidable angst, given that I leave for a three-week overseas trip on Saturday, and while plane tickets, hotels, visas and various other bits and bobs are duly sorted, I have only written one of the two papers I'm supposed to be giving. (For no adequately defined reason, an entirely unnecessary re-read of Memory, Sorry and Thorn appears to be implicated in this last dereliction of duty). However, deathless insights into feminist re-writes of "Aschenputtle" will buy it over the next few evenings, stat. News at eleven.

In support of this, should there be, as yesterday, a brief and unlikely lull in the atmospherics resulting in a resurgence of the worry-factor, there is always the soothing option of http://www.rainymood.com/. It was clearly designed specifically for me, and I'll probably run it nonstop during the February heatwaves.

And, by way of inspiration, there are always the Bulwer-Lyttons. This year they have caused me unholy glee in the SF section by the perpetration of ungodly puns.

Professor Lemieux had anticipated that his latest paper would be received with skepticism within the small, fractious circle of professional cosmologists, few of whom were prepared to accept his hypothesis that our universe had been created in a marijuana-induced industrial accident by insectoid aliens; nevertheless, he was stung when Hawking airily dismissed it as the Bug Bong Theory.

Hee.

This morning I woke up to thunder, and petrichor, and a tight cluster of alarmed cats around my feet. They hate the thunder, and slink through the house on a sort of ambulatory cower. I, on the other hand, drove up to work in the pelting rain laughing like a loon, and uttering little shrieks of joy every time the lightning arced across the mountain. Still a highveld girl at heart, and I miss thunderstorms on a deep and physical level which I'm only really conscious of when it actually thunders.

They're a very bodily experience, thunderstorms. Not just because the feel and the scent of heavy rain and the vibration of thunder are so deeply sensual, but because, I think, the air is so charged. I feel electric: alive and tingling. It also helps that the thunderstorm has cleared the air and cooled things down after two days of intense, sticky, ennervating heat wave, causing me to revive like my drooping and underwatered garden. If we're going to go the highveld route of heatwaves as the necessary foreplay to a climax of thunderstorm, I can endure them a lot better.

Yesterday's heatwave was also made endurable, of course, by a sumptuous champagne breakfast with jo&stv, followed by lounging in the swimming pool. Followed by lots and lots of Skyrim. Prancing around a snowy virtual landscape is probably the next best thing to actual air conditioning. My game at the moment, however, is subject to sudden rains of Stormcloak and Imperial corpses, who descend unexpectedly from thin air and thud to the ground, causing city guards to become quite naturally concerned. I'm imagining a concerted effort of giants somewhere launching them irritably into the air a long way off. Also, my dog is floating. I think the last patch broke stuff again. Sigh.

Last three days of registration to survive. Wish me luck.

Mental Floss has just given me the word I always knew I needed. "Petrichor: The clean, pleasant smell that accompanies rain falling on dry ground. It’s from the Greek petra (stone) and ichor (the blood of Greek gods and goddesses). The term was coined by two Australian researchers in 1964."

Hooray for Australian researchers. That rain smell is one I associate strongly with highveld thunderstorms and the start of the rains - it's particularly vivid when it's the first rain after the arid heat of the dry season. But even Cape Town rains manage to recreate it, especially at the moment with the alternation of hot and rainy. It's a sharp, keen, vivid, slightly wild smell, rife with generative promise, and I love the way those Australian researchers have constructed the word - petrichor is perfectly believable as the residue of a slightly otherworldly power. Like most instances of precipitation, it makes me very happy.

(And, yes, I'm quoting Toto lyrics. I like that song. So sue me.)

For some reason this year's Christmas seasonal stuff hasn't annoyed me as much as it usually does. It all seems a bit subdued: the city isn't packed with tourists to any unacceptable extent, the shop displays are not generally as in-your-face as usual, and my homicidal mutterings about the inappropriateness of jolly snow-encrusted Santas in African summer are more than somewhat below par. It might be that I'm still too tired to work up a good head of irritation steam, or that I'm working later than usual into the month and am tucked away neatly in an ivory tower away from the shopping frenzy. It's also helping that my sister and I have a no-presents-except-for-the-niece pact this year¹, and I am spared the usual harrowings of present-acquisition. This is a surprising sense of release, and caused me to reflexively go off and donate madly to charity instead (Wikipedia, and St. Luke's Hospice - the former because its citation-needed refrain is wildly useful in explaining plagiarism to students, the latter because they were really lovely to my dad).

In a neatly circular conclusion to this wayward-puppy post, Toto have recently re-formed for a benefit tour for one of their members, who is an ALS sufferer. ALS was what my dad had. Everything is connected.

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¹ Presents for Da Niece are not a problem, because I acquire them off Teh Internets through the year. One of this year's books was Look! A book!, which Cory Doctorow recommended on the basis of its success with his 7-year-old daughter. It's wonderful, detailed artwork with a lovely sense of whimsy; Da Niece seems very taken with it. She's 6 this year, so it's proving a bit of a challenge to hit the right level of either complex enough to interest her when it's read to her, or simple enough that she can start to read it herself. I think this one works quite well in the latter category. In the former, she's about to hit the stage where she's ready for Diana Wynne Jones, and for Ursula Vernon's Dragonbreath series. Heh.

Being at home is lovely. I'm beginning to almost start to feel as though I may be slowly developing a grip on beginning to feel rested. But a continual home presence is also making me realise that I'm a mere amateur in the taking-it-easy stakes. Damn, but cats spend 90% of their lives asleep. It's beautiful spring weather, starting to become hot outside (insert ritual cursing here), but the house is still cool, being a high-ceilinged edifice shaded by trees and facing the wrong way. (A fact which annually saves my sanity during the February heatwaves). The cats are thus moving only to follow the sunbeams around.



The Evil Landlord considers this room to be his library. I consider it to be the guest room. The cats regard it as their own personal sun-room. Most days there are three of them on the bed.

Hobbit, on the other hand, has a different approach. Since the ridiculous thickness of his fur renders sunbathing redundant, his daily routine entails being as close to human company as possible. I won't let him sleep between me and the computer, his favourite spot, so he has appropriated the stool+cushion arrangement on which I used to elevate my leg in those giddy post-hospital days, and which I have neglected to disassemble owing to his fondness for it. It operates as a sort of feline throne: I think the care with which he centres himself on the cushion is perfectly self-conscious.



I now return to my morning's activity, which entails drifting around in a vague sort of way as I wait for the nice policeman to arrive and interview me about my burglar, who the nice police have caught. Hooray! But it's weird how difficult it is to settle to any productive activity while you're waiting for the doorbell to ring.

The above being the noise of:

1. Rain on the roof. And on the laundry on the line until I remembered to bring it in, in the middle of the morning's Easter wafflefest with the Usual Suspects. I'm still full. But happy, and happily aware of the garden being happily damp.
   
   
2. Me hitting a very large, very fat mosquito very hard at 3.23am this morning, which was the time I woke up randomly and couldn't get back to sleep for two hours. Part of this was the irritating jet-fighter whine, the other part was because my sinuses were in a state of revolt, probably because I incautiously attended a braai. My body hates me, which is OK, because I hate it right back.
   
   
3. Me hitting darkspawn very hard with a very large blade that's all coruscating with electricity and also randomly paralyses opponents at intervals. Dragon Age is still eating my life. I'm ok with that. Also, one of my companions has a pet nug called Schmooples. This makes me giggle like a loon quite often.
   
   
4. Superheroes hitting things, possibly with other things. You can probably narrow the sound effect by referring to this handy chart.

Must sleep now. Happy Easter!

I have a new keyboard and mouse! they are smooth and slick and clicky. I am also totally enamoured of the fact that they are utterly and genuinely cordless and cheerfully read the USB wireless dongle through the desk without need for spaghetti. I seem to have completely missed this development in wireless tech, it was a happy epiphany to hunt with increasing desperation through the packaging for necessary cordy bit, to realise that its absence was a a joyous revelation rather than a cruel joke. In other news, I'm not getting out much at the moment. Does it show?

In an ineffable and recurring conflation of cats and illumination, I have also just bought a combination laser pointer and UV light. The latter is for bumbling around in the dark with, to work out exactly where the maurauding tomcat has sprayed. The former is for purposes of reducing Hobbit to the status of a giant, frenetic and rather galumphing kitten, and me to helpless giggles. On the XKCD principle, laser pointer games may also end up doing for the tomcat in a rather more zappy and science fictional fashion, which is OK by me. That XKCD is my all-time favourite ever, at least until the next one comes along.

It's been raining, off and on, all day. Despite having been diligently taking notes for an insanely intense and difficult meeting all day, and being a tad frayed as a result, I am also given to minor and random outbreaks of a sort of "bop bop prance shuffle hip-wriggle" routine, which is basically the Happy Rain Dance of a Damp Garden. This is astonishingly like Marigold's WoW booty dance, only not as endearingly drawn.

Now I shall go to bed, first stopping to disentwine the Hobbit from my bedside rug, which he's been killing enthusiastically since I started typing. Laser pointers apparently make him hyperactive. Figures.

Weather still stinking: I am negotiating the day by dint of dousing myself liberally with the mist sprayer at intervals, under the pretence of spraying my Japanese peace lily. It survived my three week absence with precisely one watering (I came in to the office specially) without dying, I figure it's deserved it. The weather, praise FSM, is supposed to cool down from tomorrow, and there should be rain over the weekend. Not a moment too soon. In the meantime, Cape Town is taunting me with small, fat, puffy clouds shaped like snowmen. Or scoops of ice-cream. Or other cold things.



In other news, Bohemian Rhapsody played with four violins. It would be better as a string quartet, on the Section Quartet principle, but this is rather fun. I love quartet versions of rock music, they strip the song down to its essentials so you can see what it's actually doing, musically - it's far more revealing than a full orchestral version. It's also odd, because generally I loathe violin. This, however, works.



In other, other news, eek. Today is the 6th. This makes it my Evil Landlord's birthday. I had totally not registered the date. Or, in fact, the year. Happy birthday, Evil Landlord.

Oh, my, heatwave. It's mercifully clouded and windy today, but it's been ungodly out there. Every time I come home I realise anew why it is that the pagans got into tree-worshipping: I want to fall down at the plane tree's shady feet and adore. Stepping into the shade from the griddle of the road outside is practically a religious experience. The tree shades the whole side of the house, which is blissfully cool as a result; I hate to think what life would be like if supernatural tree-thieves spirited away the plane tree overnight.

As a result, possibly, of all the heat, and the side-effect that it's a positive pleasure to wander around the garden with a hosepipe de-wilting all the vegetation, my vegetables and herbs are going gangbusters. My small but enthusiastic chilli bush, in particular, is dementedly producing a completely unlikely quantity of chillis, far more than I could possibly use even if I cooked insane thai, Indian and Mexican cuisine for the next six weeks.

This is the result of ten minutes of picking: I've had to throw out another twenty or so which I got to too late and which have shrivelled, and I missed a few full-sized ones on the bush. The mad thing will certainly procuce a second crop, it did last year.



Fired with enthusiasm, I pickled them.



It's curiously satisfying. Apart from the fact that I love pickled chillis and find the vinegar fumes all bracing, there's a sort of back-to-the-land self-sufficiency in pickling your own (albeit miniature) crop. Even if it's a tiny, token gesture, it brings me just one step closer to surviving the zombie apocalypse. Although, to be fair, while the South African crime-rate means most of our homes are fairly zombie-proof, the overall defensibility of this house is badly compromised by the dining-room window.

I feel all virtuous: before 10am this morning I'd taken the car through to Diep River to be assessed for bodywork (it leaks like a sieve and they're going to have to remove the front and back windows and do some serious repair to rusted edges) and hit the bank to finalise complicated transfers of money to artisans in France. (This house is costing me a fortune. But the lease is signed and my agent has the cheque for the first month's rent and the deposit: in the next few months it'll hopefully be bringing in money rather than draining it like a giant plughole some bastard just installed on my account).

And all this activity was achieved in the morning's joyously pouring, bucketing, giant-blatting-raindrop rain, accompanied by madly gusting winds and my small cries of uncomplicated glee. I'm now sitting at my desk with the heater cranked to the max, warming my feet and drying my jeans from the recent dash to do some shopping, which necessitated stomping through puddles under my enormous umbrella with a huge and ridiculous grin on my face. I also had to brave the elements to take the gardener to the station on the grounds that there's no way he can possibly work today. The recent lawn-planting activities plus the downpour means that the garden is a treacherous bog, and I rather fear that at any moment the poor guy might step on a particularly soggy patch and vanish up to his neck, there to be trapped in the sucking mud while bedraggled moles gnaw on his lower extremities. I'm not a huge fan of our gardener, but there are limits to my sadism.

I'm not sure why there are limits to my sadism, actually, given that I've spent odd moments of the last few days distracting myself from recalcitrant vampire Snow Whites by devouring the first five volumes of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan graphic novels. These function more or less as a depraved, cynical, evil-minded, hyperactive and deeply political mash-up of gonzo journalism, cyberpunk, black humour, ultraviolence and an extended drug trip of the nastier variety. I love them, but I'm quite frankly surprised that I'm enjoying them as much as I am: there's a level of unabashed nastiness - and bodily fluids - which would usually alienate me completely. Spider Jerusalem, the insane journalist who's the centre character, uses a bowel disruptor as his weapon of choice, and kicks heads in with cheerful abandon and buckets of blood wherever it seems deserved. The various horribly logical and filthy things the future world does with tech have been dreamed up by a particularly acute, corrupt and fevered imagination, although the political beastliness is straight out of the here and now. As literature goes, it's Not Nice.

I think I'm responding to the stories because they're so intelligently angry and so bleakly despairing as well as being so funny: this is a projected future on speed jerky fast-forward, a bewilderingly diverse, cynical, consumerist and corrupt milieu which allows Ellis to point accusing fingers at our own world through the dizzying clouds of exaggeration. The storytelling is superb, built around Spider Jerusalem's own blistering rants which employ a beautifully-balanced dynamic tension between his iconoclastic personal amorality and his bone-deep political morality, and the artwork has a level of nastily vivid detail and hyperactive, unhealthy life which is very, very telling. (Also, Patrick Stewart¹, with measured British grace, introduces the fifth volume, which completely blows my brain).

These books are not at all my sort of thing, and I love them unreservedly. I shall aquire the other half of the collection posthaste, once I've tamed my credit card a tad, while somewhere my inner Victorian governess is eroded just a little more. And a good thing too - she's prissy.

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¹ Whose birthday it was yesterday. You must go here to celebrate, if you're the kind of person who'll dissolve as helplessly into giggles as I did at a perfectly wonderfully horrible STNG joke.