Freckles & Doubt

Britain still does that thing to me where a random piece of landscape is like an unexpected blade to the heart: a combination of a sharp, intimate sort of realisation with a sense of slightly deadened loss. I suppose it's the legacy of a colonial upbringing with a highly British-centred experience of children's literature, so that the land itself is above all an imagined space, and its sudden reality poignant and shocking.

I was last actually in Edinburgh when I was about 8 years old, on a family holiday which I remember only in snatches (Edinburgh castle was cold and the hill was steep). But today the bus took me past the Spitfire memorial on a roundabout near the airport, and my response was one of visceral memory. We didn't fly to Scotland on that family holiday, as far as I can recall. I don't know if we even drove anywhere near the airport, but my subconscious firmly believes my dad was all enthusiastic about the replica of the old plane mounted in flight. My dad was a frustrated pilot, who flew gliders and spend his national service in the air force as a packer. The memory, even if it's a false one - the sense of familiarity - was very strong, with the same sense of not-quite-real distance.

The potential horrors of a 12-hour plane flight with a DVT in my recent past were, in the event, not as horrible as I feared. I think the challenge of this sort of trip is really in the expectation: once you're actually on the ground doing what needs to be done, it's just one foot in front of another, logically in sequence - paper-writing, packing, not having ones knees explode en route, the slightly complicated bus journeys to traverse the ordered, fertile country between Edinburgh and the university. The bit I was really dreading, actually, was injecting myself with anti-coagulant just before boarding, and in the event it was a total non-event - a nifty little self-contained syringe which is thin and sharp enough that it slides in with rather terrible ease to the soft tissue of one's stomach flab. (Reasons, I suppose, not to have a toned stomach). And I leaped up religiously every two hours and stood in the galley area waving my feet around in a circulatory sort of fashion.

I feel better than I usually do after that flight, actually. No sleep, of course, but less stiffness or swollen feet. Also, I have watched the latest Mission Impossible (silly plot, excellent cast except for Tom, that Jeremy Renner lad is really growing on me, Tintin (fun, faithful and rather beautiful in every aspect except Tintin himself), the new Muppet movie (awwwwww) and the second RDJ Sherlock Holmes. This last was a dreadful movie: RDJ's Sherlock has become a caricatured buffoon who owes nearly nothing to the source material. I'm not angry, just disappointed and a little hurt.

The town of St. Andrews - or, really, the university with a sort of frill of town on it, since I am in the midst of campus in a rather lovely B&B on the high street - is beautiful, medieval, green, immaculate. I am typing this on a wireless connection which randomly refused to work when I first booted up, I expect because of rogue Windows upgrades stuffing with my settings. I don't have the technical skill to work out why these things happen, it appears to be some sort of implacable enmity between long strings of arcane acronyms tending heavily to P and T and V, but I spent an hour systematically changing every setting I could think of until something worked. I feel obscurely triumphant. Not a geek, really: slow and inept, but persistent. Ah, Barracuda.

I am also, as you can tell from the flow of consciousness, suffering the logical effect of having not slept in nearly 36 hours, 20 or so of which have been spent either in airports or in aircraft. I'm a bit punch-drunk. I shall have dinner with the conference organisers tonight, count myself ahead on points if I actually remember or consciously control more than about a third of what I say, and shall go to bed extremely early. Tomorrow I give a keynote which is apparently being filmed for the benefit of the UK media attention this conference is randomly garnering, and which I suspect is about twice as long as its slot and will have to be ruthlessly pruned on the fly. Wish me luck.

The owner of this B&B apparently sold his old house in Edinburgh to JK Rowling herself a while back. I am obscurely cheered by this.

Goodness, April. I cannot condone the helter-skelter promiscuity with which the months leap headlong into each other's recently-vacated beds. In particular, I cannot but feel peeved at the fact that April this year seems to have heralded a full-on glandular resurgence, which means I'm dragging myself around the show in a dazed and non-functional state, wibbling. However, five-day break over Easter. (I took Thursday off to spend it with my Mama, who arrives from points British on Wednesday night, hurrah!)

It being a new month, I am obliged to follow my New Year's Resolution, namely to acknowledge the sources of my involuted subject line references. March shakes down as follows:

1st: English proverb. Have you ever noticed how many English proverbs are concerned with the weather? Poor things.
6th: David Bowie, lyrics of "Teenage Wildlife", appropriately enough given the subject of the post.
8th: beautifully apposite quote from Avengers trailer.
11th: quote from Rango.
16th: Quote from one of Gollum's riddles.
20th: quote from one of my favourite T-shirts, although not, confusingly, the anti-Twilight T-shirt featured in the post. We rejoice in a plethora of anti-Twilight t-shirts, suggesting that there's hope for today's youth.
24th: Logan quote from Veronica Mars. Logan is eminently quotable. Also, Logan/Veronica 4 EVAH!
27th: an infusion of my usual "< Weekday > Wol is..." formula with a mutated LOLcat slogan.
29th: Quote from "Teach Your Children Well", which is a catchy but saccharine Crosby Stills & Nash song I learned in guitar club at school.
21st. Self-conscious invocation of the traditional diss of a clichéd fantasy novel or D&D game, and simultaneously a deliberate subtextual referral to the slash fan fiction I teach in the course whose web pages the hacker is routinely hacking.

In other news, if you haven't yet seen The Guild's new musical number + video, do so. It's a marvellous geeky revenge fantasy, but it's also an incredibly clever piece of film which plays lovely games with visual matches and with pretentious rock-band tropes.

Mondays are always a bit hellish in my neck of the woods - apart from all the students brooding over their curriuclum woes over the weekend and arriving bright and early on Monday to talk about them in unnecessary detail, I always have at least one meeting. Today was two, one of them with the Dean (always slightly elevated stress levels), and was also enlivened by the kind of student who takes exception to the Mere! Idea! of rules applying to her when it's clearly All! Our! Fault!, and throws her weight around by threatening to escalate things to Senior Figures (here the VC, which isn't quite in the Jacob Zuma class, but still). I am therefore somewhat frayed, and need soothing things to contemplate. virtualkathy sent me these. They're soothing.



I have been right through the April archive (twice) for the Lemonspank blog from which the photo hails, and cannot find the original post, hence the link to the photo only. I'm confused, the wols are decontextualised, and there's nothing I can do about it. Sorry.

Lordy, I'm tired. The last few weeks have represented a steadily-mounting degree of fatigue which has made me progressively slower, more irritable and more prone to talk in the husky contralto of someone who's spent the night imbibing whisky and cigarettes and is losing noun control badly. As I keep saying to students as I grope for words, I'm not actually drunk. I'd just like to be. And I have another week of this. I suspect it may be survivable, but only just.

Exhaustion tends to detach me a little from reality, to make everything just that little bit surreal or malignant. It's this state that has, I think, made me so receptive to reading Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which has struck me forcibly as a truly chilling and effective ghost story with resonances of Henry James and Sheridan Lefanu and (oddly) Lovecraft. It seems bizarre and unlikely that, up until about a month ago, I'd never actually heard of it, since it was published in 1959, and is apparently a classic of the literary ghost genre. With one of those odd and possibly sinister synchronicities, it's popped up in mentions across several unrelated blogs that I read, and I ordered a copy in a spirit of enquiry.

It's an incredibly effective book. While operating as a classic haunted-house narrative, it's more about personalities than anything else - the personalities of the occupants of the house (Eleanor, in particular, is exquisitely drawn), and above all of the house itself. Like Turn of the Screw, it slides you backwards and forwards between belief in the manifestations and belief in the insane perceptions of the characters; like LeFanu, it's about the gradual building of atmosphere and implication into perfectly-poised moments of horrified realisation and chill. And, like Lovecraft, it's about the power of the unseen, the inexplicable, the unexplained; it's all the more powerful because it's not a detective story, the mystery is never penetrated. It grabbed me good and proper; even in my current state of tiredness and stress I found myself staying up later than I should to read. I Recommend This Book, if you like chills, or if you like twisty psychological implications, or if you simply like good writing.

And in the midst of all the scary stuff, it has one of the most scathing and comic portrayals of spiritualistically-inclined insensitive stupidity that I've ever read.

If we needed any evidence at all that the Cosmic Wossnames are actually vaguely Cthulhoid entities prone to either nasty mockery or blind indifference, I could demonstrate it from my experience of January every year. Thusly:

1. I'm running orientation and registration simultaneously while fighting off admissions and curriculum queries from new students, returning students, excluded students, late-applying students (hopeless this year, we're well over capacity), random students, plaintive students, and the parents, friends, well-wishers, dogs and aunts of all of the above. (Especially the aunts. Aunts of students are demonstrably even more crazy than the parents). I'm, in effect, doing three people's jobs.
   
2. By inscrutable cosmic wossname, a whole bunch of dearly beloved friends have birthday in January, necessitating participation in shindigs and jamborees of all descriptions.
   
3. January is the month chosen by my Cherished Institution to deploy their own Army of Deconstruction for wide-ranging building tasks. I can't leave my office window open for air at the moment because of the nice man with the jackhammer on the scaffolding just outside it. And,
   
4. We have heatwaves. This week has been infernal, brain-melting, incandescent hell.

In addition to all of above, I arrived at work at 9am yesterday, worked like a frantic thing until 4, dashed off to have my hair cut, went home, worked like a frantic thing until 11pm, and then fell into bed. I don't think my state of health is actually up to this sort of thing, I'm more or less useless this morning.

Meep. However, the subject line is, as usual lately, from Goats. Read Goats. It prevents your ice-cream from melting. (It also drives you crazy when you read the entire archive and arrive at the end to discover that it stops, mid-plot, in 2010. However, I have forgiven it).

Oh, dear, I have fallen in to Goats. I am already a die-hard fan of the writer's other comic strip, Scenes from a Multiverse, but Goats has been going since 1997, and there's a lot of completely surreal archive for me to peruse. I think I'm in around 2004; the artwork is definitely improving. My daily levels of surreal are now pleasingly high, inundated as they are by satanic chickens, kinky aliens, zombie fish, overclocked lemons, and adorable Vulcan bratwursts with nice sweaters.

Also, I like the name Toothgnip. It's fun to say. I may have to acquire another cat simply so I can christen it Toothgnip.

Mostly, however, it's amazingly comforting that I can chalk up the state of mind resulting from another exhausting day in a job I hate to space wizard battles. Explains a lot.

The knell of blogdoom the internets over is the moment when one's mother asks, with polite parental concern, why one hasn't been blogging to the regular (slightly obsessive) schedule. Oops, busted. The reasons for my recent non-bloggery are many and varied, but mostly it's because I've spent the last week solid playing Skyrim, the sequel to Oblivion. It's probably fortunate that the inexorable roll of time sent me back to work this morning, only semi-fatigued and vaguely functional, otherwise I might still be spending twelve hours a day bashing my way around its Vikingoid, very beautiful and snow-encrusted haunts.

Skyrim and its immediate ancestors are the fantasy, sword-wielding, magic-slinging, hack-and-slash equivalent to a first-person shooter, but with far stronger RPG elements - character class specialisation, rather a nifty experience/level system, the occasional need for a moral choice in a quest outcome. As a substitute for the intricate companion interactions of Dragon Age it ain't up to much, not least because I really have no compelling desire to unpick it analytically via the medium of bloggery. However, some observations:

• Glory, but its landscapes are exquisite. I love that I can bash my way off across the countryside in any direction, with only the minor impediment of meticulously-detailed precipices, canyons, fortress walls and those bloody ice trolls to prevent me, while stumbling over an apparently endless plethora of random mini-quests. The countryside is unreasonably beautiful, whether tundra or snowscape or forest or cave, and the level of detail on plants and stones and what have you is exquisite.
  
• Its people, conversely, simply look weird. Possibly I'm over-habituated to the unreasonably beautiful visual aesthetic of Dragon Age, but somewhere in the bowels of the setting there appears to be a check-box labelled "Enable gnarly troglodyte people", and it's resolutely checked. Their Elves are ugly. Their Elves! How can you have ugly Elves? It's against all nature. But it explains why they don't employ a romance option. No-one's attractive enough.
  
• Fundamentally, one makes a living in these settings by wandering around the countryside finding graves, ancient burial chambers and lost-civilisation ruins to rob, an activity rendered only mildly non-trivial by the screaming hordes of undead, bandits and renegade necromancers. However, I still cannot bring myself to steal things from the living. Fortunately the game labels all illegal theft objects in red, so they're easy to avoid.
  
• The equivalent of the Morrowind cliff racer, i.e. "low-grade monster most likely to make me squeak by sneaking up behind me to attack unexpectedly", is the skeever, a sort of hefty rat thing whose tails are useful in alchemy. They're weeny, but nasty because they attack below knee level where I can't see them and have usually gnawed me for a reasonable total of Tiny Animal Crits (non-Rolemaster players move along, nothing to see here) before I've worked out what's happening.
  
• I must say, publically and with resolute definition, that the mouse-controlled looking around is an abomination unto Nuggan. I seem to be hard-wired to key movement, which means I lack all control and finesse with the mouse. This isn't too much of an issue until I'm in a combat with multiple enemies, at which point I absolutely lose track of where everyone is and "wild swings" doesn't begin to cover it. There's a reason why I never hire hirelings. It's not worth the swearing as, yet again, I accidentally decapitate one. Also, the game balance is weird. I'm playing on the lowest level of difficulty, and still find certain combats horribly challenging, possibly owing to aforementioned lack of mouse skills. But killing dragons is easy. Go figure.
  
• I love buying houses. And furnishing houses. And filling the houses up with random bits of stuff I procured during aforementioned grave-robbing expeditions and can't bear to sell because they look cool. (Troll skulls! The glowy axe I refuse to give to the Daedra lord on the grounds that he's evil and the quest pissed me off. Dwemer centurion dynamo! It glows!). Survey says I'm probably a girl. However, the logic and interface of putting things down, particularly in specific places, has been directly imported from Oblivion without any much-needed refinements, and consequently blows goats.
  
• This game is craft-ridden to an extent which makes me ridiculously happy. You don't just pick up ingredients to make potions, you find ore to make armour, or tan the hides of the creatures you kill for leather, and then improve the items to increase their value and efficacy. Then you enchant them, at vast expense and difficulty. If you wander around with a pickaxe in your backpack you may stumble around veins of ore which you can merrily mine, before refining in a smelter. I think the SCA has infected me unduly, I adore this aspect of the game.
  
• Skyrim bards only know three songs, one of them scurrilous and the other given to radical re-interpretation depending on whether the town/singer supports the Empire or the rebellion. You don't hear the third much, which is a pity because it's beautiful, hauntingly Nordic-sounding and, unlike the first two, actually good.
  
• I am very happy with this game, but I have to say its habit of randomly crashing several times a day for no reason is rather mitigating the immersion experience. Dammit.

My first day back at work was, for some reason probably not unconnected to guilt levels, ridiculously productive. However, I'm dead. I think this fatigue thing still needs management. Probably by playing Skyrim self-indulgently. Alas.

... just resting. Very bad week for fatigue, I'm floating around the house in a state of more or less stunned and unable to parry, while feeling as though someone socked me in the left cheekbone. (Had tooth extracted on Friday. Ow.) I have managed to successfully avoid marking, sewing, gardening, paper-writing, learner's licence booking, odd bits of work, and most foods that require chewing, together with pretty much anything else that requires actual energy, since about Thursday. On the upside, the LJ bar has a beautiful Hallowe'en night sky with bats, a whole stash of superhero DVDs arrive tomorrow, and the third upgrade to our ADSL cap in five days means internet is restored, too. (Being at home is hell on the bandwidth, even before the EL screws with my careful self-rationing by downloading the .net framework).

I have various posts planned, including a Cat Valente review, a random analysis of U2 and several other flavours of what have you, but today is not that day. Today is the day I once again veg out in front of a random fluffy movie and go to bed early. Sorry.

Anyone else done anything interesting lately? The whole world cannot possibly be as boring as I am ...

I really am taking a ridiculous number of pills at the moment. Honestly, if you grabbed me by the neck and shook me I'd rattle, probably just before I uttered a short shriek of rage and plugged you in the eye. (Some of the pills are anti-PMT vitamins, and they're only mostly working. Can you tell?). My spanky new cellphone has a 6pm alarm set, which is absolutely necessary as I'm actually quite absurdly fatigued at the moment and am remembering less and less with more and more facility. At 6pm sharp, wading through the ankle-deep cats who know their supper time is 6pm and who have become conditioned with Pavlovian intensity to the sound of the alarm, I take the following:

1. Warfarin, a little pink pill. Currently ambling between 5mg and 7.5mg, as my INR levels are still surprisingly low. Either I have a high natural tolerance to Warfarin, or I'm eating cranberries in my sleep.
   
2. A giant purple multivitamin pill, full of B-vitamins and evening primrose oil and those other girly-assisting substances which are supposed to stop me from slaying six on a lunar cycle.
   
3. A small, tastefully pastel green agnucaston pill, a herbal somethingorother which stimulates dopamine production and thus also tends to reduce the number of corpses I have to feed to the cats.
   
4. A giant off-white horse-pill antibiotic monstrosity. This is because I had a root canal half done a couple of weeks ago, and the temporary filling did its usual thing of dying the death about a day and a half after I saw the dentist, so the tooth is (a) merrily disintegrating, (b) mostly composed of a giant hole which traps quite unlikely quantities of food in it, probably measurable in bushels, and (c) hurting like hell, which suggests it's infected. Fortunately my nice dentist warned me of this possibility and gave me a pre-emptive prescription. I'd like to know why the hell he doesn't just take the simple step of constructing his temporary fillings out of something other than cottage cheese.
   
5. A probiotic, on account of above. In capsule form. I love pills in capsules. Apart from the cheery superhero colours, they're much easier to take and are moreover consolingly space-age.
   
6. A small blue trepiline pill. This is an out-of-date antidepressant whose major effect seems to be drowsiness, so I take it (a) randomly now and then when I'm going through an insomniac phase, but (b) currently daily, as it's supposed to reduce the likelihood of migraines, and I really don't want to repeat last month's merry little session.
   
7. A nice painkiller, usually the cheery yellow Syndol equivalent. I'm not allowed to take anti-inflammatories on Warfarin. Paracetamol isn't touching the sides, and the tramadol which the nice physician prescribed has a really weird effect on my insomnia: it makes me spacey and somnolent and floaty, but I come sharply awake every time I start to drift off. Really very odd. I try to avoid codeine, but not when there's toothache involved.

I'm not naturally a pill-taking life form. This is ridiculous, particulary since the last week has been very bad for exhaustion (it seems to come in waves), so it doesn't feel as though they're actually doing anything useful. Phooey. On the other hand, there's probably a new career for me somewhere in a salsa band, to which I would contribute percussion by the simple expedient of wriggling my hips.

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.