Freckles & Doubt

It's autumn. The Cape is all bracing and crisp, with a shiver in the evenings and a particular pale clarity to the sunlight. Things are dying down, tucking in for winter. Planting vegetables at this time of the year as a result of renovation delays is doomed, hopeless, will never work. Right? Yes? Right?



Um. Someone give my veggie boxes the memo. On account how how they're all going "sproing." I mean, it's a sheltered, sunny courtyard, but this is ridiculous. (That mutant squash thing is self-seeded, and has giant yellow blossoms under all those leaves).

Also, someone give Hobbit the memo that says he's not allowed on the dining room table, even through it's beautifully situated for afternoon sun.



No? Oh, well, then. At least he's decorative.

Is it unpleasantly vindictive that I'm wandering around this morning occasionally punching the air and shouting "Yes!" because Avatar (ritual ptooey) didn't win the Best Picture or Best Director Oscars? Despite, may I add, a lot of media speculation that it would pull in at least one of them? It didn't even sweep the technical categories, although I don't really begrudge it the Art Direction and Visual Effects ones, those were pretty much a lock.

I know that the Oscars are a bit of a joke and not ultimately about real quality, but still they indicate what a lot of people are thinking, and thus my misanthropic lack of faith in human nature and cultural wossname is at least partially ameliorated. I haven't seen The Hurt Locker and probably won't, it's not my kind of movie at all, but it sounds like an infinitely more worthy thing to receive accolades. Also, I hope Katherine Bigelow rubs her ex-hubby's nose unmercifully in her victory, it might make him think twice about his script next time.

Now I have a wonderful mental image of James Cameron having his nose rubbed in a saucer of blue milk. I'm not sure, but he may have whiskers for the occasion.

Non-blue Monday is also non-blue because, while I'm sinusy and still a bit sniffly about my dad, Cape Town gave me a lovely thunderstorm with actual rain last night, as a relief from the bloody heatwave which has rendered the weekend hideous. I'm back at work today, but generally feeling a lot more human.

I haven't kept a dream diary for a while because they've been uniformly dull, but they seem to be taking off again, suggesting that worry about ill family members is a bit paralysing to the imagination. Last night I dreamed I was part of a group of about fifty people, most of them friends of mine, hiding out in an underground complex in the woods which turned out to be an alien spacecraft which we needed to activate in order to escape the apolcalypse. (There's always an apocalypse). We were constructing unspecified things from bits of furniture and arguing about how many people would fit. The spacecraft's AI was embodied in a robotic mouse which had befriended one of the younger members of the group. I woke up as we were setting off on an expedition through the woods, fighting off orcs and bugbears at intervals and being rescued by flocks of birds sent by the spacecraft.

Yesterday was suicide hot. Ungodly hot. Possibly apocalypse hot. Hell may have opened, briefly. The English cricket team folded completely against South Africa, it was that bad (SA innings 312/2. Gawsh). Today is better, cloudy and slightly cooler. It's also the Evil Landlord's birthday, so anyone who knows him, please do the usual email thingy! it's his big 40 and he's trying to pretend it isn't happening. To which I say, bollocks.

Yesterday's heat also means I retreated cravenly into the arms of the air-conditioned cinema as soon as I finished work. It's a bit difficult for me to review 500 Days of Summer because I think the Pajiba review nailed it so cleverly, but hey, it's that or actually get on with reviewing excluded student transcripts, which is uniformly depressing. 500 Days, despite being a cute, quirky movie about falling in love, watched by me, single for the last 8 years, all on my own in the cinema¹, surprisingly wasn't.( I don't think you can actually spoil this film, but have a cut anyway. )

This has been a good decade for indie whimsicality. Shall add this one to Eternal Sunshine, Waitress and the rest on the Must Acquire list. The one Pajiba identifies as "whimsyquirkalicious", and about my fondness for the movies on which I am completely unashamed.

---

¹ This is a rhetorical whinge, I actually love watching movies on my own.

Memo to self: it's possibly counter-productive to watch Supernatural at night when I'm alone in the house (the Evil Landlord being off at Here Be Dragons), as at a generous estimate I only see about 70% of any one episode, owing to being too scared to look at the screen. The creepy build-up music does it for me every time. This is also causing me to remember that in fact I only used to be able to watch X-Files, back in the day when it was on TV, by dint of importing bumpycat to come and hold my hand every Friday night. I am an enormous wuss. Next plan: watch Supernatural from the other side of the room while filing bills.

On the upside, Sam is cute. On the further upside, Cape Town weather continues bizarre - it's bucketing with rain, and there are branches down all over the garden from the high winds. I am a happy bunny, albeit a quivering, wild-eyed happy bunny convinced there's something under my bed. The main problem is that there often is something under my bed, on account of how Golux likes to go and fossick around in there, among the boxes of role-playing dreck and the small, feral herds of straying boots, making interesting bumping noises in the night. It's probably all good for the moral fibre, if tending to make the nervous fibre a bit twangy.

The weather is mad again. There was a thunderstorm in the small hours of the morning, complete with thunder and lightning and raindrops so huge and fat they landed separately and distinctly, like a small pachyderm parachute brigade. The noise on my tin bedroom roof was indescribable, I actually got out of bed and bumbled over to the window (falling, as is obligatory, over the cat) to check that it wasn't hail. (This entailed standing there starkers except for my glasses and peering outside until my vision had cleared enough to see that there were no actual drifts of hailstones on the flags. I will not invite you to picture this proceeding in the interests of mental health). The first few splats of rain left wet circles about four centimetres across. Some weirdly giant precipitation up there.

Thunderstorms make me deeply happy, enough that I didn't actually resent being woken up - I have a theory that I subliminally wake myself up deliberately so I can enjoy the sound of rain, anyway. What I did resent was the idiot who thereafter phoned my cellphone at 5.40am, waking me from a sound rediscovered sleep for a wrong number. Who the hell phones anyone at 5.40am anyway? It's not a time, it's a hideous limbo space filled with meaninglessness and the deranged, dawn-inspired tweeting of manic birds. (Manic, damp birds in this case, and serve them right). I am consequently a little fragile this morning, and am only succeeding in bribing myself through the day by copious application of chocolate biscuits. On the upside, for some weird reason sleep-deprivation makes me ungodly productive for the first half of the day. Between processing great tottering piles of credit transfers I have also managed to order more Scary Go Round T-shirts, pay my bills and read a deliriously wonderful paper by someone using Harry Potter to teach basic political science ("ethnic conflict, power political studies and dysfunctional bureaucracies").

I recommend, as a wake-up shock, today's XKCD, which is being all nostalgic about Geocities. It actually made me recoil from the screen with a shout of "Aaargh! My eyes!" Thank the gods the internet Got Better and is no longer a newt in the design stakes. Mostly.

Finally, today's happy-making discovery from Worthless Word For The Day: my subject line employed in the cause of being beautifully rude about religious bigotry. John Ruskin: "So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture; and that nothing else is." Hee. The proceeding, for a given value of "scripture", also applies, in fact, to politics, education and popular music, and probably also to parrot-breeding and French cuisine.

Good grief, it's October. Hate it when that happens. All sneaky-uppy on you. And, of course, spring, which means my eyes are perpetually scratchy and my nose itches. Wait, that's why I punched the last three students in the eye. Oops. On the upside, the city smells of new-mown grass, my garden is going "sproing!" in all directions, and I have the crazy impulse to read a lot of e e cummings, stat.

This week has been completely insane, made more so by the fact that I've been completely spaced for most of it. I'm suspecting that the culprit is some kind of low-grade virus, or possibly the rams. I seem to have been in a daze of either socialising, or cooking for same, since about Friday. You know it's a bit of a problem when you go to work to relax and catch up on the internet. (Don't tell the Dean).

I have, however, completely addicted the EL to The Middleman, he initiates watching sessions and sits there snerkling like a loon. (If loons snerkle. Actually, they so do - possibly more of a chortle, but completely demented). Episode 7 is "The Cursed Tuba Contingency", featuring the Bad Guy who is "basically Highlander, with a tuba". Goofy Middlemisms include "Great Barrier Reef!" and "Tropic of Cancer!", suggesting a sort of geographical theme, as well as "Sweet Molly Brown!". Bonus points for the Carpassian Hog Roach, random geeky acronym-fu on the American Shrimp and Crab Amalgamated Processors, and the chorused repetition of the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Yup, still love this show.

Rain! It's been pouring down gently, in a harmonious, soaking sort of fashion, since yesterday. This is of course my fault: yesterday at around lunchtime I realised I hadn't watered my herb garden for days, causing the sage and vietnamese coriander to flop around like dying fish; as soon as I finished watering, the clouds blew over and the heavens opened. I am a small, localised, rather perverse rain goddess. Clearly.

Apart from the rain, other happy-making things that have recently arrived include (a) my mother, and (b) a completely unexpected and unsolicited copy of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, with no indication as to donor. I'm not sure if this is a slightly lateral birthday present, or if the person who borrowed my original copy has accidentally dropped it overboard or into the heart of a volcano or something, and uses this anonymous route to sort of not quite own up. Either way, thank you. I'll really get around to reading that now, promise.

Speaking of which, Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic Month! I shall now proceed to cheat. (This is somewhat traditional with these things, I fear). Lois McMaster Bujold should be known to most of you - if you don't read her Barrayar series of more or less postmodern space operas, you're missing out on a hell of a lot of fun. Her Chalion fantasy novels are not strictly a series, although the books are loosely connected - The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt have some characters in common but mostly what they do is explore the operation of a world under a particular religious system. The gods of Chalion are real, believable and fascinating in construction, permeating their world with a beautiful, rational logic. They're based around mother/father/son/daughter archetypes, each with their corresponding seasonal attribute and areas of patronage, and the fifth god, the Bastard, takes up anything that doesn't fit, an escape valve for all this over-determination. I'm madly atheist mostly because I've never found a religion that even faintly works for me on logical grounds; this one fascinates me because it does work, and the gods are meaningful, rational constructions who actually seem worthy of worship. Bujold's characters are as usual vividly drawn and generally likeable, or at the very least understandable; the adventures are tightly-plotted and provide interesting twists, and the politics is woven fascinatingly into the religious backdrop.

In a nutshell: gods, believers, disbelievers. Temples, demons, saints, ghosts, revenants, soldiers, diplomats, queens. Possessions, dispossessions, curses, battles, love stories, slavery, pilgrimages, madness. Giant ice bears. Soul transference. Random Chaucerian homages. Holy zoos. Personal growth. A religion that works. Did I mention the religion that works? Also, she's only written three of them, but admits that logically there should be five, one for each god. She's done the Daughter of Spring, the Son of Autumn and the Bastard. I await the other two with ill-concealed impatience.

Edited to add: Did I say it was raining gently? I lied. It's raining extremely, extravagantly, absurdly, like nine billion maids with buckets are pouring them out at once. I've just driven back from Hout Bay at a snail-like crawl, with red mud and water sheeting across the roads and giant, deceptively innocuous puddles in the corners. There were three cars stopped on the verge in Rondebosch, just after one particularly epic puddle through which all three of them had presumably dashed in a sheet of spray, thus watering their distributor caps nicely and causing the car to choke. Me, I remembered this possibility, and toddled decorously through the puddles, sternly repressing the three-year-old bit of me that wanted to make a splash. It's raining indecently. It's beyond excessive. It's making me incredibly happy.

We had a thunderstorm this morning! very happy-making, although not productive of actual rain. The weather is surprisingly hot and sultry, although that may simply be my roaring temperature talking.

Spent the day at home yesterday on account of feeling dreadful, rinse and repeat today. Had to trundle up to campus briefly yesterday to give my last lecture, since it was the last day of term, no rescheduling possible, and there was Vital Exam Stuff I'd promised to tell them. The brief outing left me feeling rather weird - dizzy, sweaty, shaky - although still uncannily able to burble more or less coherently about fanfic, cultural appropriation, demographics, geniune female-centred erotica, and what have you. Informed class that if I had a brain I'd spend the last ten minutes neatly tying up the disparate and yet strangely linked themes of the lecture series, encompassing vampire texts, sex blogs and fan fiction in one giant meta-theory of eroticism, representation and unreality, but since the 'flu had left me with no brain worth mentioning, the synthesis was left as an exercise for the student. They seemed surprisingly cool with this, which suggests that I must somehow have at least partially vouchsafed to them the surreality of the underlying metaphor. Also, amused, but that may have been because I was revealing my enormous geekhood by quoting bits of Cassie Claire from memory.

Spent a lot of the day reading Sharon Shinn, a surprisingly girly stash of which I discovered on my Evil Landlord's groaning shelves. She seems to be one of those writers who defaults to a romance structure, in the sense of Mills and Boon romance, but very entertainingly. Interesting magic, and her people are very real.

Phooey. More Cape Town fires, this time on Devil's Peak, which means the campus is being persistently buzzed by helicopters grabbing water from the university dam. It all feels a bit post-apocalyptic, what with the 'copter noise and smoke and all. On the other hand it's been all wind and cloud for a couple of days, with that cold, heavy air that's more like a liquid than a gas. Autumn is here! I feel better already.

I'd be happier, though, with more sleep: am contemplating an Infernal Bunny Machine for disposal of my alarm clock, it's causing me active pain to wake up every morning with the bloody thing beeping while it's still dark outside. In my ongoing love affair with sleep, light is the sinister seducer breaking up the happy love nest.

Work has calmed down to the point where I can amble off and do more interesting things occasionally. I have to go into town to collect my visa this morning, which means I'll have an excuse to drop by Naga and see how many closing-down-sale items I can cram into a small corner of my credit card. This evening I plan to gird my loins, empty my bladder and take myself off to see Watchmen. Watch this space.

Nope, still no brain. This is probably (a) because it's so hot that I have a thundering headache and my chocolate stash has melted again, (b) because of cities. Bring me a cottage in the country, stat. And a new chocolate stash.

Other than that, I'm fundamentally dull.