Freckles & Doubt

Good grief. I just scored a completely random University Avenue parking disk. That is, I am now legally permitted to grab the closest possible parking to my office, behind the booms, requiring card access, and generally reserved for deanly gods, HoDs and those admin bods who cling with limpet-like tenacity to the highest possible rung on the ladder. I fall into none of these categories, and have for fifteen years grimly climbed six flights of stairs to reach my car. The Cosmic Wossnames are clearly setting out to compensate me for a job which I do well but reluctantly and which is currently turning me into a lizard.

The Dynamic Duo, viz. jo&stv, came round to visit at an advanced hour of last night, rescuing me from swearing at the TV (Roswell is being more than usually silly with more than usually ridiculous marital plots¹), to say happy birthday to the EL. He was, of course, out, being fed birthday dinners by his dear old silver-haired German mother (a very sweet and slightly scary lady). Disturbed by his absence, jo&stv proceeded to fill the temporary void by raiding his bedroom and constructing an unreasonable Evil Landlord fascimile, ( thusly. )

Oh, yes. That. The subject line is courtesy of Charles Stross, who is an Odd Man, TM.

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¹ Marital plots are always more or less ridiculous, especially when teenagers are involved. Honestly.

I know the PA system in my local supermarket is bad (even when they're not trying to talk over their current, premature soundtrack of bad R&B covers of syrupy Christmas carols), but I'd swear that this morning the manager said "Manfred, calling Manfred, please will all available chicken sexers come to Receiving". I... I think my brain is stunned.

I also wish to record for posterity the indecent amount of pleasure I'm finding in tracking down weird and wacky kids' books for my three-year-old niece. This morning: I STINK!, which is a pleasingly rumbustious soliloquy from a garbage truck.

I've just fielded a phone call which went as follows:

PHONE: ring, ring.
ME: *suppressed muttershutup* Hello, extemporanea speaking.
PHONE: Fine, how?
ME: Um, sorry...?
PHONE: (impatiently) Fine! How??
ME: ...

I know that there's a tendency in southern Africa for second-language speakers to weirdly shorten and mistime the usual greeting litany, so that you'll often find someone telling you how they are before you've actually asked; this, however, has to be the most insanely compressed version I've ever encountered. I don't know if the effect is a desperate stab at conversational efficiency, or if they're simply confusing the words.

I suppose it's only fair to note that I'd probably do even worse if suddenly asked to take my part in the heavily ritualised and status-conscious Shona greeting, which I last practised when I was about 14. I vaguely remember it had "Ndarara. Kana mararawo" somewhere as a response to the standard "Mangwanani". (Good lord. Apparently I'm saying I slept well. I would, in fact, have pulled it out of distant memory without waiting for "Marara sei", i.e. the actual question. Which just goes to show.)

I spent the weekend doing absolutely nothing. Other than finishing up Season 3 of Farscape (woe! I was getting all fond of Crais!), I honestly can't think of anything I actually achieved. Oh, made banana bread for wolverine_nun. New Seekrit Ingredient in banana bread: dark rum. Lovely flavour.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was one of a party of children trying to defend their island home against pirate attack. Fortunately these were stupid pirates, and our somewhat simplistic ploys of sneaking around setting booby traps seemed to work quite well. I personally pushed several of them off a cliff before the huge swirly impressionistic storm rolled in.

Thank FSM that week is over. It was moderately hellish, but also full of the tiny moments of vindication best exemplified by the dilly young first-year yesterday who, after a half-hour consult during which I patiently redesigned her disasterous curriculum and explained why half the rules she thought she was following are actually undergrad urban myth, looked at me all starry-eyed and said "Wow! Curriculum advice really can make a difference!" I feel like an inspirational poster.

Now all I have to do is give an orientation workshop this afternoon, watch Pan's Labyrinth again, write two lectures, give them on Monday and Tuesday, deal with the fallout from last week (i.e. all the students who missed the course change deadline and feel it's my job to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away), and I can actually relax.

Today's moment of weirdness: I had a pottery jug of cut roses on the living room table, and they've done magnificiently for two weeks, but finally died. When I tried to move the jug, I couldn't. Literally couldn't - full strength pull was insufficient to budge it, as though it had been bolted to the table. Oops, I thought, strangely bloody-minded poltergeist activity? I called in my secret weapon, viz. the Evil Landlord, and we eventually managed to pry the jug loose with a knife-blade. The pottery was obviously not entirely watertight, and had been slowly leaching through, to create a solid layer of mould which had effectively welded the jug to the table. Scary stuff. I think I might almost rather have had the poltergeist, there's something creepy in micro-organisms pitting their will against yours like that. At least the supernatural is explicable in terms of it being supernatural.

In entirely unrelated news, the speakers which came (free) with this new computer have a subwoofer, which is giving David Bowie a hitherto unsuspected level of bass which I can feel through the soles of my feet.

This week of leave is beautifully timed, I'm beginning to feel almost human after a couple of days of doing not much. On the downside, my brain is apparently disconnecting, leading to strange manifestations such as completely random posting on the subject of cats. I suppose it was inevitable after all the ranting yesterday about Tolkien's palpable cat-hatred¹.

Courtesy of Making Light, observe the perverse beauty that is Torchwood LOLcat fanfic. This is very funny. Trust me.

The Evil Landlord has a flourishing second career as a sort of extended cat-cushion, and of an evening submits to being multiply felinely draped with astonishing patience. Occasionally, cuteness results. I leave the LOLcat caption as an exercise to the reader, although YR NOZE I CAN HAZ IT does spring inevitably to mind, as does the kind of swelling violin music associated with the fade-out clinch in a chickflick. You should also note that Todal is sitting on the EL's lap at the same time as Ounce is sitting on his chest, evidence here. The Dear Little Felines don't do it to me, on account of how (a) Ounce is still convinced I kill and eat him daily, and (b) being grumped at and flung across the room often offends.

¹ Isn't it amazing how you can post a carefully-considered dissection of Lewis and sexuality, together with a random segue into Tolkien-dissing, and have the comments spring to life with an impassioned discussion of The Incredible Hulk? Human perversity is a strange and wonderful thing.

People are very odd. Every now and then someone - a student, a parent, a fellow administrator - wanders into my office and does a complete double take because half of one wall is full of books. This is a motley collection - all my undergrad textbooks, a complete Dickens, a shelf of fantasy/sf and another two each of gothic and fairy tale, a slightly random array of tomes on internet culture and pornography, or both. Most of these wondering individuals don't look at the content, though. Most of them look at me blankly and say "Are all those books yours?!" in tones of awe.

I have to suppress an urge to look down my nose at them and say "This is a university." I suppose it's not their fault that they've been forced to confront an administrator who's more or less a cunning façade for a lit major with particularly bizarre interests, but actually that isn't the problem. The problem is their clearly slightly panicky response to the idea of books in bulk. (And I have to say, my pitiful collection is nothing compared to some of the cluttered, dank and tangled L-space snarls in which lurk, dusty, literate and hermit-crabbed, some of the senior professors). L-space-inducing quantities of books in shelves, piles and herds are so much a given of my existence, it always freaks me out slightly to find people who are thrown by the idea. When the Evil Landlord and I viewed the house we currently occupy just before he bought it, it contained absolutely no books at all - I think there was a pile of glossy magazines on a shelf in the living room, an area I have subsequently derisively filled with the piano. Now, of course, this alarming intellectual sterility is negated by the tottering mounds of literature which bedeck every available space, and then some. I can't imagine living without books. I can't even imagine being able to imagine living without books.

Now I shall head home eftsoons and right speedily, before I actually bite the head off a student and spit the skull through the window with a derisive "ptooey". I think there's been a knock at my door or a phone call every ten minutes since about 11am, and I'm in something of an epic grump. On the other hand, here is an Elizabeth Bear story which manages to make the Cthulhu mythos sad, poignant and rather sweetly sexy, which is quite an achievement.

Memory is a weird thing. Why should it be, as I inexorably age, that I should nonetheless retain a vivid, almost tactile memory of sitting on the steps by the lower hockey field when I was 10 years old, watching a circle of my contemporaries play a clapping game? It wasn't a significant moment, and I have no memory of any of the contemporaries. And when I think of my grandparents' house in Harare, why is it always the bookcase by the door between the dining room and sitting room that I remember first? I mean, yes, it was full of science fiction, but so were at least two other bookshelves in the same area.

This waywardness is clearly behind the sudden desperate need, a few weeks back, to find a picture of a toy I randomly remember owning when I was 6 or 7 - a little plastic egg-shaped man with a weight in his curved bottom so he wobbled from side to side, but never quite fell over. I remember this distinctly - the plastic was flesh-coloured and slightly moulded, except for the base, which was a clear, bright primary colour. I think we had two, one with a blue base and one with a red. I spent an unfruitful few hours on Google, combining all the search terms I could think of except, for some reason, for "wobble", and coming up with nothing. Then I randomly saw a reference to them on someone's blog today. Of course they were called weebles. Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down. 1970s weebles were clearly superior to the glossier, unmoulded later ones, which also came out in Disney characters and gods know what else. Judging from the photos, either my memory is defective or my weebles were some sort of southern African knock-off, I'm sure their heads were more pointy.

It seems a little disproportionate that I can clearly remember my weeble but am completely unable to recollect the name or business of the student I saw yesterday. Memo to self: do not allow the dean to guess that my subconscious clearly finds students less interesting than weebles.

Meep. Completely insane day, one of those ones where you don't hit ground between arriving an hour early and leaving an hour late. I haven't read my blogs! No wonder I feel sad, plaintive and withdrawn.

Hussar last night was excellent, and filled with rollicking jollity as well as completely excessive quantities of good food. I recommend getting a new job just so you can splash out on their wildebeest pâté. The bill for the four of us, in a doom-laden omen, came to R666.00. As the dreaded stvil says, clearly the Number of the Wildebeest. Fortunately, no-one was hauled off to Hell on the way home, or at any rate not so we noticed. There was a certain amount of Zinfandel consumed.

Is it just me, or does "Zinfandel" look like a slightly obscure female Elven name? Aragorn's great-aunt, perhaps?

Last Night I Dreamed: a confused and frustrating dream in which I was trying to buy an egg-whisk shaped like a squid.

My long-suffering mother brought many of my Amazon acquisitions with her when she visited in December, among them a three-pack DVD set comprising Labyrinth¹, The Dark Crystal and Mirrormask. What with one thing and another, I hadn't ambled around to watching Mirrormask² until yesterday afternoon, when the EL and the jo&stv and I broke it out.

OK, so you take the basic plot premise of Labyrinth: teenage girl deals with family/psychological problems through a dream-quest. You get Neil Gaiman to script it with his customary wit and warmth. You find a completely unknown actress with very far from conventional good looks and a down-to-earth, slightly sultry quality, to play the lead role. Then you take Dave McKean, already guilty of the fractured, haunting, heartbreakingly beautiful covers for Sandman, and filter the whole thing through his visual imagination, without - and this is important - any actual artistic or commercial limitations whatsoever.

You end up with this:



And this:



Mirrormask stunned me. It's about as far from Labyrinth as you can possibly get given the superficial similarity of the plot; Labyrinth, for all its charm, was frequently cutesy and generally rather shallow. This wasn't: it's a perfectly surreal document, offering without apology resonant, frequently inexplicable images which colonise your imagination unabashedly and cryptically, leaving reason to wander plaintively about, bumping into things. It's, frankly, weird, and rather trippy, or what I imagine trippy would be given that I have never, so to speak, tripped. The real-world emotional story is reasonably real, perhaps a little underdeveloped, but it doesn't matter: what stays with you is the imagery, the completely insane and random characters, the strange leaps of almost-logic, the extremely odd bits of humour. This is a visuality-geek's movie. It's also an art movie, not a popular film: anyone expecting Labyrinth would have been completely weirded out, so it's no wonder it tanked at the box office.

I cannot, in short, recommend it highly enough, at least to those who actually like having their minds blown. Mind-blowing will do me quite fine, thank you. I will be finding new pleasure in this film for multiple watchings to come.

¹ Which I ordered well before the current Bowie fixation, so score one for me in the gypsy soothsayer department.

² While watching Labyrinth twice. For obvious reasons. Is there anyone female who was between the ages of 8 and 25 in the 80s who doesn't have a thing about Jareth?

The nice lady at the gym has randomly given me the same locker key for three sessions in a row now. It's number 133. If I was the kind of person who bought lottery tickets, I'd see this as a Sign or Portent of somethingorother, but fortunately I class lottery tickets under numerology, and numerology under Pure Exploitative Hokum.

I am wimping out on New Year festivities tonight, owing to heatstress, headache, being severely mauled by the gym this morning (exhausted, no idea why), random antisociability, and the fact that I have to take my mother to the airport at 5.30 tomorrow morning. I shall, however, pause to do the Obligatory Year-End Assessory-Type Post.

• Things achieved by me this year: approval of the book updates; a sustained and serious gym routine resulting in fitness improvement in leaps and bounds, occasionally literally; an actual job with an actual salary, albeit not quite the job I was looking for (insert mystic Jedi hand gesture here). Given that last year's "not achieved" list listed "a permanent job, an actual salary as opposed to a pittance, a romance, any form of physical fitness, an updated book", I actually have to say that four out of five ain't half bad.
  
• Things discovered this year: Farscape, Facebook, Morrowind, knitting, David Bowie, fake fur, Judith Butler, motivational bunnies.
  
• Things not achieved by me: fleeing the country, crushing academia beneath my booted heel, enough writing.
  
• Resolutions for the new year: I have only one. Regardless of the outcome or upshot, I will not publicly angst about this new job.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was co-ordinating a mass attack by cats, riding chariots drawn by goats, on a herd of donkeys. The confusion was indescribable.