Freckles & Doubt

I am, once again, a very tired thing in the limp chewed string category, it's been a long year, and one very full of emergencies and makeshifts and adaptations, all demanding unlikely quantities of my time and mental energy. It was exam committee season last week; over four days, including the weekend, I individually checked around 1500 student records. (With the added minor challenge that my wildly expensive brand spanky new bifocals weren't working, and wouldn't let me focus on close stuff, to the point where I had to revert to the old specs and send the new ones back for remaking, apparently without the prisms, which are giving me auras and headaches.) And the exclusion review committee meeting, in which we lovingly review every excluded student in the faculty and try to find ways to readmit them without the whole appeal thing, took out half the subsequent weekend, with 7 hours of depressingly disastrous records on Friday and 4 on Saturday morning, so I feel I am somewhat justified in being wiped.

I really wanted and needed to be on leave this week to recover, but can't, because results were released to students yesterday, and since 7.30am yesterday I have answered over a hundred desperate student emails panicking about exclusions and failures and insufficient accolades and what have you. About one in 20 of which are genuine errors, and the rest are causing me, in my slightly punch-drunk state, to type up replies which unequivocally deconstruct their attempts to graduate despite a pivotal failed course, while gently crooning to myself, to no fixed tune, "There are ruuuuuules, and they apply to yooooooooou".

This is a slightly unhappy, welcome-to-adulthood sucker-punch these poor kids are facing. Most of them wade right in with righteous indignation, insisting that there must be some way around it, it's only one course, can't they do it concurrently with postgrad, or get a rewrite, or a re-mark, or just count up their credits instead of their courses, because Plans next year, and Money, and Aargh. And the answer, unfortunately, is No, because there are Ruuuuuules, and they apply to Yooooooou. And I think the resulting outrage and sense of victimhood is because of two things: (a) their insufficiently developed organs of perspective, which as Just Post-Adolescents they are still develping, so that The End of Their World is still The End of THE World, and how can anyone not see the importance of accommodating them. Compounded by (b), late stage capitalism and consumerism, they are the Customer, there is always a way to accommodate them, they've paid for this, how dare!

Which, no. Welcome to the cold hard reality of adulthood, rules still apply. Like, (for everyone except actual billionaires, about whom the less said the better), gravity, and taxes, and speeding fines, and having to go to work in order to eat. And, in fact, having to meet the degree requirements in order to graduate. Adulthood is in many ways amazing, and I wouldn't go back to teenagerhood for anything except an absolute guarantee I could keep my memories and adult perspective and replay it properly like a botched video game run, but sometimes adulthood, in terms of consequences, simply sucks. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it does.

And it may be some small consolation that, if adulthood sometimes sucks, at least we are all in this together, no-one is immune. COVID doesn't help in the Adulthood Sucks stakes; my mum hasn't been able to visit for two years, my sister and niece are currently down with it (fortunately very mildly), so Christmas is cancelled. Which is not as dire as it sounds, my family's never been big on festive wossnames, I'm really not much bothered by that aspect. Which is just as well, I have to spend most of the break catching up the orientation prep I haven't had time for, in time for the new academic year and reg season to hit in January. I'll rest when it's all over. Sometime in March. Aargh.

I allowed Christmas to gently drift on past this year, largely unmarked and definitely unmourned. My personal combination of rampant atheism and psychotically anti-capitalist loathing of merry Yuletide marketing makes Christmas something to be pointedly avoided, and I left it as a kind of island of non-event in the middle of "Christmas eve" dinner with jo&stv and Pixie (slow-roasted lamb, also Eton mess and a sort of chocolate pear custard thing achieved by leaving the crust off my usual chocolate pear tart in deference to Pixie's gluten intolerance, also little or no mention of actual Christmas) and Boxing Day lunch with my sister and niece later today. My sole festive nods were in cooking myself a pork fillet stuffed with mushrooms, and in indulging my fast-becoming Christmas day tradition of reading the annual Drarry advent fanfic by saras_girl, who has a lovely archive of them on AO3, with the 2018 one on her lj starting here. They are lovely, gentle, slow-moving Christmas fics which usually feature snow and pining, and a Harry Potter resolutely doing anything else with his life but fight dark wizards, which I have always found a compellingly logical response to having no choice but to be a Boy Hero.

I usually post an entertaining Christmas song of some sort. This year it's not really Christmassy, but it's kinda atmospheric and also made me both unabashedly geek out, and snort-laugh repeatedly. "Hall of the Mountain King" performed by tuned Tesla coils.



And, because Ursula Vernon no longer produces her annual Christmas-wishing cute creature, this seems to be a reasonable substitute. Merry Christmas Hawaaian Monk Seal. With an eel stuck up its nose. (The article is deliriously wonderful.)



I hope everyone had exactly the kind of Christmas they wanted and enjoyed.

Ooh. Weird, weird dream last night: looking at self in mirror, while talking, and having my reflection's lips move completely and disconcertingly out of sync with what I was saying. Then I stepped away, and right behind me, perfectly hidden until I moved, was a man in middle-easternish robes and headscarf and sunglasses, looking menacing. Then I turned around, and I was on a huge, futuristic stage in the middle of a dark stadium full of people, all watching. At which point, fortunately, the cat landed on my stomach on her way out the window and I woke up. Somewhat freaked, to be honest.

I didn't do a Christmas post yesterday because the Internets had not vouchsafed me their usual benevolence in the form of a chirpy/irreverent Christmas doodle. But they did this morning, so have a retroactive Merry Festive Wossname! I hope it was a Good Day within the meaning of your personal Christmas act. I carefully arranged it so I didn't have to leave the house, and I noodled around cooking and prodding the garden and Skyping my mother and patting the cat, and it was lovely. And almost completely unlike Christmas, which is kinda the point. We did Polish Jo-consolatory Christmas Eve, with barszcz (for which I still have an unseemly affection) and dumplings, and I'll do a gesture at the Christmas stuff today, having Boxing Day lunch with my sister and niece. About the only thing which reconciles me to the heaving, fixated desperation of Christmas shopping crowds is the smug knowledge that I don't have to participate. Both sets of my Christmas gifts were bought online, heh.



Rogue One is apparently still colonising my brain. I wish I could attribute this, it's bounding unsourced around Tumblr, it may have originated on Elite Geek's facebook, but who knows? Whatever they teach them in schools these days, it apparently isn't referencing.

And my subject line is Wham!, naturally, because the latest outbreak of 2016 viciousness has been (a) Carrie Fisher in hospital in a critical condition after a heart attack, and (b) George Michael passing away quietly in his sleep. Fuck it.

Apparently I have opted out of christmas this year. Not that I ever really opt in to any great extent, but I have cancelled my lunch plans owing to low-grade virus and nausea (sorry, Claire!), and have been at home playing Inquisition all day, enjoying the mild rain and coolth, and pretending it's a normal holiday sort of space. This caused me a twinge of guilt for all of about .1 of a nanosecond, and a vague self-pitying gosh-aren't-I-a-sad-thing for about the same amount of time, and then I thought, actually, no, stuff it, this is perfect, and exactly how I want to spend the day, and I'll be buggered if I'll feel ashamed of it. Bah, in fact, humbug. Although without malice and entirely without Scrooge's misanthropic grumpiness. I'm not misanthropically grumpy. I am quietly content. Christmas has my goodwill and best wishes as long as it continues to pass me by.

I think consumerism killed christmas for me, actually. I quite enjoy how kids enjoy christmas, and with the right mix of people giant christmas meals can be fun, but for me the season is poisoned at source by the relentless, jingle-themed, tinsel-encrusted pressure to buy, buy, buy - to expensively furnish the lavish iconage demanded by a social contract I don't think I ever really signed. It destroys any joy I might otherwise take in giving people presents; it makes me feel anxious, threatened, overwhelmed, resentful and slightly homicidal. I need not specify to my habitual readers, I hope, that the season has absolutely no religious significance for me whatsoever, so there's not even that. (As a recovering ex-pagan who still somewhat enjoys the symbolism I might feel impelled to have jolly winter Solstice feasts in a be-loudly-merry-to-make-winter-go-away sort of fashion, except that we're in the wrong hemisphere and it's too bloody hot. Maybe I'll have one in June. Idea.)

At any rate, all of the above notwithstanding, I hope that the seasonal wossnames have been appropriate and splendid for you all, and that any family gatherings have been characterised by good cheer and plenty rather than the stress and tension which can be the Dark Side of many of our traditions. Happy, in fact, Christmas. Or equivalent. To the depth you prefer.

I go kill demons now, and close fade rifts, and romance cute inarticulate Templars, because I can. It's Christmas.

(My subject line is a horribly lateral Sherlock quote which relies on hideous amounts of context to appreciate the full and layered signification clashes of the interchange. The preceding sentence is "But it's Christmas!", and the context is blackmail and villainy. Non-Sherlock fans can move right along, although all things considered they've probably abandoned me many moons ago in sheer baffled fury.)

A random Christmas post! happy festive wossnames to you and yours, and have a handful of randomly off-beat semi-Christmassy things.

Ursula Vernon is doing the 12 days of Christmas with things from her garden, but she has posted her usual Christmas image, this one entitled "Fake Christmas tree".



As always with her art, it's the narrative which makes it. "Bob the hamster was pleased with his new Christmas tree. It didn’t drop needles, it wasn’t a fire hazard, and it didn’t look fake like all those cheap plastic ones. It did wander off occasionally, but it always came back when he filled the food dish."

Next year I'm simply putting antlers and Christmas lights on Hobbit.

In a surprise move where it's not actually David Bowie, here's a rather lovely, jazzy rendition of "Little Drummer Boy" off the Charlie Brown Christmas movie. I'm always amazed we never had a family tradition of watching that, my dad was madly into Peanuts. Of course, having an actual TV and video player at any point might have helped.



This was a hot tip off JGL's Twitter.

Finally, things ending in "olly" include "wolly", as in having a lot of wols. dancing_crow pointed me to these, which are ceramic versions of all the Doctors as wols. They're ridiculously expensive, which is the only thing preventing me from acquiring Doctors Nine through Eleven posthaste, but beautiful and clearly worth every cent. There's something about the Doctor which visually translates very well to wols, quite apart from the pun on the hooting.



This concludes your scheduled Christmas content. I shall now proceed to have a day as much unlike Christmas as humanly possible by playing Skyrim, mostly because its snowy landscapes make me feel cooler in these damned heatwaves. Bring me another planet, this one is skraaatched.

By way of dancing upon the aged and recumbent corpse of 2011 in an appropriately upbeat fashion, herewith Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, Prince and Princess of Whimsyquirkalicious, being, frankly, adorable.



Surprise! Ms Deschanel has a lovely voice, which seems ideally suited to the vintage of the song. JGL is perfectly competent, but gets by mainly on charm. JGL always gets by on charm.

Tonight we are having a medium to small select dinner with a medium to small and select bunch of people, which has become our annual gesture in defiance of Giant New Year Celebrations. 2011 has been in many ways a complete bugger, and adorable celebrity duets notwithstanding, I shall trample its corpse with righteous satisfaction and the assistance of French 75s. As I go forth to randomly stuff chickens with wild rice, I wish to you witterers all the best for the new year. It can, they say, only get better.

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.

Good lord, I opted out of Christmas this year. My mother's 6-day delay rather put the kibosh on family Christmas dinners of any description, and we ended up having a more or less spontaneous three-generation all-girl Christmas day lounging around the house and garden drinking tea, catching up, and opening a few presents in a desultory sort of way. (My sister gave me pink champagne for Christmas. I utterly approve). Lunch: dug around 'fridge for random smoked chicken, seed loaf, tomatoes, fruit. Nary a whisker of turkey in sight. It was bloody marvellous. I think I may randomly cook a full-on turkey and ham Christmas dinner in July, when it's cold, just for the hell of it, but the lack of it at actual Christmas was completely fine by me. I hope everyone else had a Christmas that was equally and perfectly tailored to their needs and expectations.

I have been motoring through Smallville at speed, occasionally with my long-suffering mother in tow (fortunately she also likes Superman), and am currently approaching the end of the second season. The writing is improving, although there are still moments of complete psychological irrationality in the service of narrative kludge, which is annoying. (Just tell her already! good lord!). I am, however, deriving an unwholesome pleasure from watching Lex and Lionel Luthor exchange all these platitudes about family loyalty with about fifteen layers of irony, sarcasm and manipulative snark beneath the surface cheese.

While on the subject of fangirling, if you didn't follow Neil Gaiman's link to the Year's Best Media Corrections, you darned well should. Scroll down about a third of the page to the long Apology of the Year from News.com.au: it's a deliriously wonderful and deadpan pander to Trekkiedom, done with affection and wit and considerable technical geek-out about Enterprise starship classes. It made me, as is traditional, snerkle like a loon.

We had a sort of family Christmas tea thingy on Sunday, to swap presents as my sister's away up the coast on Christmas Day itself. I gave Da Niece my latest discovery, which involves two rather entertaining kiddie books by one John Himmelman, Chickens to the Rescue and Katie Loves the Kittens. The Katie one is amusingly rude about dogs, but the chickens one is pleasingly demented, featuring chickens in snorkelling gear, crash helmets and heavens alone knows what else, all with the requisite degree of fuss and feathers. Thusly:



The conversation went something like this:

SISTER: Kids' books these days are really lovely. Also, you always seem to find the subversive ones.
ME (thoughtfully, placing tips of fingers together in approved Patrician pose): Why, yes. Yes, I do.

It is remotely possible that she was also eyeing my Christmas tree, which this year is graced at its apex, inside the giant Christmas star, by a tiny green plush Cthulhu doll I won in a raffle at a CLAW tournament lo these many moons ago. He's very festive.

I feel that my Aunt Dahlia quotient is proceeding apace. Those sproggle-owing individuals among you who don't mind a spot of subversion, now with extra verse, I do heartily recommend John Himmelman.

In other, equally weird and lateral Christmas news, today I appear to have emerged from the stationers bearing something the tillslip insists is an "XMAS GAL SIN". I wish I could say that this gal plans to sin extra-subversively at Christmas, but I fear it'll be the usual: idolatry (still immersed in Supernatural), sloth, gluttony and taking the Lord's name in vain while I try to beat the (*#$^*^$ Fire Temple in Zelda.

Summer is here! Lhud sing cuckoo; also, bah, humbug and the usual grumbling. It's early days yet, however, and in fact the sunny days with not too much actual heat are mostly tolerable, what with the recent rain, green growth everywhere and the little birdies going twit. Or, in the case of the mad pair of peregrines who nest on the hospital opposite our house, screaming their avian pea-brain heads off, presumably in some sort of mating frenzy. There's no accounting for taste; I, for one, am profoundly turned off by yelling. (Punk, so not an aphrodisiac). The warmer days also seem to bring the milk of human kindness bubbling to the surface, and there's been a positive orgy of courtesy and goodwill as we all let each other into the rush-hour traffic, beaming like loons. (This is necessary, the traffic has been unusually dire in the last few days). In keeping with this lightened mood (albeit temporarily, watch me growl once the heat-waves start), summer makes me break out the P.G. Wodehouse. Strange but true.

Summer also means I'm into the cotton skirts, along with their associated doom: t-shirts bare to the onlooker's gaze without intervening warmer covering, and, therefore, the dire necessity for a bra, the which I joyously do not wear all the way through autumn, winter and spring. This is one of the things I actually hate about summer, mostly because there's a sort of Seekrit Girl Club to which I do not belong, viz. the one which shares the arcane knowledge about how to stop your bra straps from perpetually slipping off your shoulders. I lack this skill. I am clearly, for the purposes of bra strap wrangling, not a girl at all. I spend most of summer mournfully raising and lowering the length of the straps, in a sad, futile sort of way, like a short-sighted peeping tom at a parlour blind. What's the secret here? string? superglue? complicated contraptions with magnets? nine-inch nails through the shoulders? I swear, I'm seriously considering the latter. I cannot but feel that it redounds negatively to my professionalism to have my eyes glaze over at intervals, usually in the middle of impassioned curriculum advice, while I grope down my sleeve via the neck.

Happy Summer Sights of the last few days, though: turning in for home past the Common, an elderly man trying to persuade his bull terrier that walkies were, in fact, Over. Man's body angled at 45^o away from dog. Dog's legs all at equal and opposite angle as he digs his feet into the ground, mule-like, and refuses to move. Upshot: by considerable straining on man's part, dog dragged along ground, leaving ruts. I laughed all the way home.

Finally, more graphical info-porn for smoczek: Best Science Visualisations. My disaster-movie-loving soul is obscurely soothed by California falling into the sea as the San Andreas cocks up its toes.