Freckles & Doubt

It's been a weird kind of day. The campus is blissfully quiet in the middle of the vac, haunted only by vague gaggles of students in the middle distance, blowing vuvuzelas contemplatively as they wait for buses to various games. I saw no-one yesterday; today I had an equally empty day except for an odd little surge at around 11.30, when five students arrived for advice at approximately the same time and hung around in a micro-queue outside my door, where they talked and laughed and made rude but supportive comments about Bafana Bafana while I dealt with their various angsts in series. Other than that, I've been reading the back issues of Wil Wheaton's blog: as a sort of side-effect of all this STNG-watching, I've become fascinated with the Wesley Crusher phenomenon and the effect all that hatred had on a teen actor. SF Fandom is apparently lovely and intimate and invested and supportive up until the moment it can't separate text from reality and actually damages you.

At 1.30 I dashed madly into town to submit my visa application for this conference trip. I haven't driven the new intersection at Hospital Bend in that direction before: there's this deeply Zen moment when you leave the freeway only in order to join exactly the same freeway again 100m later from the other side. Apparently you can cross the same freeway twice. Or can't cross it once. Or something. What is the sound of one car not changing lanes?

The British visa application people are efficient like whoa and dammit: they have this whole system of online appointments and form submissions, festooned with shiny jack-booted warnings about arriving ON TIME for your appointment, with EXACTLY THESE DOCUMENTS plus any others you think might help, entirely up to you, and I had to restrain an impulse to include testimonials from my cats and a photograph of my favourite tomato plant, just to be lateral. Their whole system is automated with number-issuing machines and displays when your number is up, in addition to the extremely crisp and perfectly clear announcements over the public address system - it's kind of the Platonic ideal of the Groote Schuur process, only well thought out and not actually clogged by all these inconvenient poor people. (I seem to be all socialist again. I blame China Miéville). It also all seemed a bit futile, since there were precisely three of us there. I arrived five minutes early, went straight through to two counters without waiting, and left ten minutes later, feeling slightly stunned. The visa is granted within four working days. I was worrying that I only have six weeks until I leave. Silly, pilly me.

The drive home after work was even more surreal. There's a SA/France game on, apparently. Apparently this causes nine-tenths of the population of the city to be dragged willy-nilly to their TV sets by magnetic lines of force, there to sit helplessly while rush hour fails to happen without them. The streets were deserted. Under the freeway overpass coming off campus, there was a life-sized cardboard cutout tied to a signpost, depicting a person standing next to an old-fashioned bicycle, beautifully drawn in black and white. The basket was full of logs, in the sense that it was an actual basket filled with actual three-dimensional logs. No poster or inscription in any way explained this phenomenon. Twenty metres later a youngish coloured dude stood by the side of the road, head tilted to the sky, mouth wide open as though screaming, or possibly singing opera, although no actual sound emerged. In my rear-view mirror I saw him stagger out into the road behind me, head still raised, narrowly missing an oncoming car which forced him to dash back to the curb, arms flailing in a sort of scarecrow shamble. The bicycle-image plus the oddness of the man felt uncannily like some kind of inscrutable performance art; it went very well with the empty streets. It's also entirely possible I hallucinated the whole thing.

Plan for tonight: actually sleep through the night, avoiding both the usual 2am wake-up, and the increasingly trippy series of sleep-walking dreams in which I've forgotten to do something terribly important to the incomprehensible grid of squares on my bedside table, and thus wake up repeatedly trying desperately to sort it out before the waves of zombies get me. I think they're zombies. Occasionally they're amorous wood-elves. It's all a bit weird.

smoczek introduced me to this plant, she found a specimen in the rather lovely nursery at Montebello. I don't usually have a lot of time for succulents, being more of a European-foresty sort of person, but this absolutely fascinated me. It's a bryophyllum, a genus of kalanchoe; it's a viviparous plant, i.e. produces fully-formed offspring still attached to the body of the parent, like humans or vipers; and it has this bizarre, wierd, completely alien habit of propogating by growing little rooted baby plants all along the edge of its leaves. You have no idea how odd this looks - it's like suddenly stumbling across a plant from another planet entirely, with its own strange biology. The little rooted babies fall off when they're large enough, and cheerfully root under the mother plant in a sort of carpet.

It's apparently also known as a Mexican Hat Plant, which seems altogether too mundane and jovial a name for something clearly not originating on this planet. Besides, a Mexican hat looks nothing like this, unless I imagine the classic sombrero growing little baby sombreros all around its rim, which is cute but unlikely.



You can see the few remaining plantlets on the leaves here; they grew in rows, but most of them have fallen off and rooted. It also has a very strange habit of morphing its leaf shape: the extra frills on the inner edge of the leaf where it joins the stem are new, and seem to have grown in response to the new shoot forming. If it's from another planet there are definite parallels in the environment, since it's cheerfully growing on the kitchen counter, flanked by my marble rolling pin and a small clutch of wols, in defiance of everything all the books say about it needing full sun.

It may actually be a triffid. I am charmed by the possibility.

Oh, thank Morpheus, my dreams are back. I've always dreamed very vividly and tended to remember them in the morning, and they usually have a more or less coherent narrative thread (studying fairy tale will do that to your subconscious) and, while not quite in the Ursula Vernon category of surreal, a plethora of bizarre and unlikely elements. But they've been in abeyance over the last couple of years; I'm not sure if this is because I've been working as an administrator full time and it's killing my imagination, or because I've been stressed to hell and back because of my dad, or if it's something as mundane as the fact that I've been waking up earlier with an alarm clock and it's disrupting the cycle so I don't remember them. I'm inclining to the last because for the last couple of months I've given up on going to work really early, owing to sinus and glandular wossnames and a concomitant really crying need for sleep, and the vivid dream life is slowly trickling back. (Then again, I'm also lecturing on vampires and fanfic, so perhaps it's about the imaginative life after all).

I am now blogging said dreams because wolverine_nun says I have to, and wolverine nuns are scary. I shall also cut them, as they run to the slightly epic and not everyone actually enjoys wading through other people's subconscious impulses. (I love it. Does that make me weird?) ( Dreams To Follow )

In completely unrelated news, I've been doing the last remnants of tidying up after the Renovations Of Doom, and have realised I have probably four or five 14th-century SCA outfits which I am not going to wear any time soon, if at all given that if I ever drift back to the SCA I bet my body shape will have changed completely. Since even hanging on to my two favourite outfits Just In Case takes up a whack of space, I need to get shot of the extras asap. Do any of you SCA hordes want them personally? Several cotton underdresses, several sideless surcoats. If not, who's currently in charge of Gold Key?

There's a mysterious LCD Soundsystem two-disk album lurking in my CD collection, brought blinking into the light in the process of arranging all my CDs onto their new shelves. (Fact! The letter B takes up almost one whole shelf out of five, on account of the David Bowie/Belle & Sebastian alphabetical confluence. It must be Fate.) I wot nothing of LCD Soundsystem, nor why such a disk might end up in my collection. Did someone lend it to me? if so, why? It really doesn't look like my kind of thing, although I have to admit that to date I haven't fired it up in the player, owing to (a) the fact that it declines to play unless I download files, which always narks me off, and (b) fear of the unknown. The Wikipedia article specifies a "dirty electronic beat", which is so not me. Also, I've been watching altogether too much Fringe and there's a good chance that unspecified disks will employ highly manipulated sound-waves to turn my brain to jelly or mutate me into a hedgehog or something, owing to all the weird science.

I'd randomly suspect maxbarners, man in my immediate social circle most likely to be associated with "electronic beat", but he denies all knowledge. Suspicious.

If you're responsible for the above, please own up, and also, more importantly, explain why?

So, I have the oddest friends within a considerable radius of this bit of the galactic spiral arm. At least, this is currently my best explanation for it. I got back from Muizenberg at about 11pm last night, having had supper with The Nicest Ex-Supervisor In The World, to find a small, lovingly-bubble-rapped parcel sitting just inside the front gate, tucked up against the wall. Upon cautious investigation (because I've been watching waaaaay too much Supernatural and in my slightly exhausted state was vaguely expecting a dripping packet of occultly-significant organs) I discovered the following:



I do have a known wol fixation, so presumably this is for me, although this could always be an unduly narcissistic assumption. My best theories: either (a) someone came past late last night, saw by his darkened study that the Evil Landlord had given up on Dragon Age (which was generating an above-average level of swearing last time I looked) and gone to bed, and my car wasn't there, and simply left the parcel; or (b)someone classifies this as a "non-functional owl" and, knowing my known proclivities, was too afraid to give it to me face-to-face. Of course there's always (c), which is not actually incompatible with either of the above: someone's trying to mess with my head. In which case this is an Owl with a Purpose and is thus entirely functional, silly.

Either way, thank you, whoever. It's a cute owl, and the solid, slightly pearly glass makes him pick up the light and glow slightly. Alternatively, if undue narcissism prevails and in fact it's your owl that you accidentally left there for good and sufficient reason which fails to leap immediately to mind, my apologies, and you know where to find him.

There's a series of noticeboards in a Groote Schuur corridor with heading labels which read, from left to right, "NEHAWU NUPSAW DENOSA PAWUSA HOSPERSA PSA". This is clearly an infernal incantation of some sort; it's obviously in an alien tongue, and has a definite rhythm to it. Chant it seventeen times in the presence of black candles, African garlic and a goat, and you'll summon something horrible. Probably Manto. In her true form. The one with the tentacles.

In other news, kiddies respond to the Beatles. This is terrifyingly cute, and in tone not unrelated to the Tiny Art Director.

I had a whole long District 9 response written but I seem to have lost it. Well, phooey. I don't think this film wants me to review it. I may reconstruct it this afternoon in between excursions to the fifth circle of Hell, aka board schedules.

I do not believe that I just drove past a Daily Voice billboard imploring "CHICKEN! SAVE US FROM EVIL!" I must surely have misread it, as a result of having no brain. Not even the Daily Voice could be that weird. Screaming headlines about the dubious gender of the most recent World Record athlete notwithstanding.

The no brain is probably attributable to the rather disturbed night I had, on account of ongoing dreams that there was a spider on my headboard. A fat, fluffy spider rather like a pompom with legs. The size of my palm. Bright red.¹ Glaring at me and shooting me at intervals with its zappy laser eyes. It is not conducive to rest to be continually wriggling somnambulistically to dodge arachnoid-oculo-laser bolts, or bumbling vaguely around the bedroom in search of something to squash it with. I feel a bit frayed.

In other weird news, I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Century of the Fruitbat. I have a new cellphone, enabling me to discover that my touching belief in the poor cellphone reception in my office is in fact erroneous: it's perfectly fine with the new phone. Clearly the old phone was given to reluctance and dilettante fainting fits. The recent airtime fail caused me to grit my teeth and sign up for the cheapest possible contract, which still gives me twice as much airtime as I'll use, and a phone which can actually receive pictures, fancy-schmancy SMS formats and, possibly, radio waves from Mars. The era of blank SMS messages is over! It also has a camera, which I'll try out as soon as I work out which way to point it, and ring tones capable of soothing chimes rather than plangent beeping. I'm a bit scared of it, frankly.

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¹ In retrospect, I think it may have been a Chuzzle.

It's been lining up for a horrible week, all three days of it notwithstanding (and may I add, the South African public holiday schedule is insane). However, it has been materially improved by the discovery of Max Raabe and his Palast Orchestra, who re-interpret contemporary pop songs in the style of Weimar Germany. He sounds like a slightly fuller-voiced Noel Coward. This makes me deliriously happy: I have giggled hysterically for the last thirty minutes, to the point where my stomach muscles are aching. (Memo to self, should go back to gym, really).

I present, for your delectation, the Max Raabe version of "Tainted Love":



Also, "Oops, I did it again". (This is pleasingly cruel; to succeed in making a Britney song sound like Cole Porter is something of a coup).



And, finally, "Super Trooper". (This, for some reason, cracked me up completely).


I owe it all to the Whatever.

I seem to be back in Cape Town. On Friday morning the nice cleaning lady came dashing into my study, a bit wild-eyed. She was gazing out the window while ironing, to see a car pull up in the road outside; two guys got out, smashed the back window of the neighbour's Conquest, nicked something from the back seat, leaped back into their car and drove away, all while she was putting down the iron and drawing breath to shout. Current thievery clearly tends to the high-speed.

While on the subject of postcolonial despair, during the UK trip we had tea with my aunt, who's doing the classic Zimbabwean thing of working in the UK for six months of the year looking after the elderly, in order to finance the other six months in Zim. She bought 17 of the following for a US dollar.

Partial solar eclipse yesterday, who saw it? I managed to view it completely accidentally, courtesy of my Cherished Institution's spanky new Vice Chancellor, whose hands-on management style has led him to (a) gently boot out the Deputy Vice Chancellors scheduled to welcome students in my orientation programmes in favour of welcoming them himself, and (b) spend ten minutes wandering around the Plaza amid dancing, shouting, singing freshers and OLs, lending out his smoked lenses and encouraging people to have a look. I find this curiously endearing.

Also, eclipses are strange, disturbing, rather wonderful things. There's a deep, atavistic part of human nature which knows that that simply shouldn't happen to the sun, and that it's therefore magical.