Freckles & Doubt

I've been thinking of this as a four-day headache, except that actually it's in day 6, so obviously I can't count. To be perfectly fair, it's only the initial migraine and the last two days which have been horrible, although today is making interested noises about forming a club with its predecessors, it wishes to subscribe to their newsletter. The bugger is that the Warfarin Regimen, TM, means I can't take anti-inflammatories, so I'm driven to tramadol, which doesn't work and won't let me sleep, or codeine, which makes me sleep so I can't work. Since I have the traditional, annual 2cm-thick pile of board schedules to annotate today, this is less than optimal.

Please consider this paragraph to include the also traditional, annual rant about board schedule checking, how a computer should do it, redundant waste of ill-suited personpower, insult to my academic training, etc etc. Thank you. I feel better now. Also, if aliens are going to abduct me any time soon, please do it now, so I don't have to finish checking the bloody thing. Thxbai.

By way of not being absolutely boring, here is a lovely article about the fact that contemporary Hollywood is basically in the demographic-pandering fanfic business. It's true. Fanfic is everywhere. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.

I go to meet my doom. Excelsior.

One of these fine days I'm going to wake up all Sid-ravaged, force down some breakfast to armour my stomach against the anti-inflammatories, stagger blearily into my bathroom to grope for the Advil, and not immediately drop one down the basin plughole. Apart from the fact that this butterfingers tendency is almost doubling my Advil quota and causing the nice chemist man to look at me narrowly every time I buy another pack, it adds insult to injury to contemplate the fact that the basin drain system must have the most decongested, least inflamed tubes on the planet. There's no justice.

In other news: new Guild episode, first in Season 4, and Fawkes is still prevalent, yay! I find myself hopelessly rooting for the Fawkes/Codex relationship: they're both so screwed up, but I can't help feeling that if they could only synchronise their separate rare moments of functionality, they'd be good together. (And a cynical voice of internal reason with considerable experience in my romantic history enquires, sarcastically, "Projecting much?"). The Season 4 trailer is all over the show, try here. "Naughty monkey sex" is my new favourite phrase. (Alternatively, ignore all of the above. Am I the lone voice of Guild fandom in this corner of the internets? It is a sad and isolate state. It's also leaving me with a sneaking desire to try WoW, except that that, probable enrichment of my internet lectures notwithstanding, that way madness lies).

Right, vampire Snow Whites beckon, although they're not going to get the attention they deserve until the bloody Advil kicks in. I find it doubly unfair that the sinus headache tendency seems to have joined forces with the dear little clockwork-regular PMT headache, causing a monthly 2-day epic double-whammy - hormonal headache plus concrete skull symptoms, not pretty. It's all making me seriously consider the nice operation thing where they scrape out your sinuses, which sounds icky but which may be a tenable alternative to all this business of dropping pills down the sink. And whinging at the internets. Dear internets, you're such a comfort to me.

The Techno-Jinx is putting on its spurs and stetson to ride again, dammit - this ADSL has taken to randomly falling over every week or so, for six or eight hours, for no adequately defined reason, and then randomly re-discovering its raison d'être and reconnecting all off its own bat. My nice Imaginet guys are of the opinion that the Telkom re-cabling dude did something monumentally stupid, which I have to say sounds surprisingly likely, and they are chasing up Hellcom and demanding redress on my behalf. Anyway, hell hath no grumpy like an Extemp suddenly deprived the next chapter in the middle of a particularly sizzling Spike/Buffy fanfic. Fortunately the Imaginet fiddling seems to have put it back up. For now, she says darkly.

It also doesn't help that I spent the last two days taking exhaustive notes at an exhausting workshop, which was remarkably filled with sweetness, light and co-operation for a bunch of academics talking about merging departments, but which has nonetheless left me feeling like a piece of string on which Sid has been nibbling for two days, with a sad and absolute lack of the more dodgy vampire-sex implications of nibbling. Every now and then Sid gets his sinusy dander up and declines absolutely to respond to pain-killers. I'm at the point where I'm eyeing the rum bottle speculatively.

However! I am pleased to report that the combination of exhaustion and exposure to multisyllabic academic jargon in spades is not, in fact, precluding interesting dreams. The other night I had a journey to the deep, windy, winding, dust-filled canyons of Mars, to bury the space-ship under a handy mountain and build the beautiful wide-balconied sandstone house at the head of the gorge, in order to raise strange alien flowers in pots. The advent of the small, pale, plump, sweetly childlike actual Martians was a bit of a blow as we had to pack up and leave, and they were really rather rude to us. Then last night I had a serious secret-agent hunt on, down the length of a fast-moving train through a desert landscape and in Victorian dress, going after the slim olive-skinned teenagers possessed of the nasty demon things which gave them the swirling eyes, and who I subsequently shot with considerable skill. There's something particularly satisfying about the kind of dream where you find you know exactly how to load and fire both an automatic and a Desert Eagle loaded with swanky occult bullets, at super-speeds and with throwaway calm. (Even if subsequent research reveals that the thing the dream labelled "Desert Eagle" was actually a particularly long-barrelled revolver). I found myself taking mental notes for future reference, just in case. I just hope my subconscious actually put the damned safety catch in the right place.

I shall now go and watch the season finale of Vampire Diaries, having the sense, possibly unjustly, that I've bloody earned it.

Still sinusy, spaced, with cement in my cheekbones and an incipient headache about two feet back from my eyes. Lurking. On the upside, being at home yesterday meant I could supervise (a) the gardener, who continues annoying but at least washed my car, and (b) the house alarm guys, who rewired various sensors disrupted by the renovations, and then cheerfully told me that no, in fact the alarm wasn't working, it can't send a signal to the control room. No, they can't fix it. No, they can't even look at it. The system is too old, they won't repair it, it needs to be replaced. Since the Evil Landlord in fact only arranged for the rewiring after an extended wrestle with the bloody salesman, who is the kind of person who oversells to the point where you don't want to give him any money at all, and who was pushing for us to install a new 20-zone system "in case we want to expand" (to beam sensors in the garden, apparently), I find this curiously suspicious. Rotten swizz, if you ask me.

Also, the particular issue with the alarm failing to communicate means that it keeps innocently trying, thereby knocking out the phone line for 20 minutes and the ADSL for about an hour, or until you reboot the modem, leaving me with no internet for the day as the technicians kept on setting off the alarm in the course of their fiddling. I was, to say the least, narked. Fortunately this is exactly the kind of situation for which the EL's particular brand of Germanic stubbornness is made, and I can just leave him to get on with biting the heads off alarm company droids and burying their bodies in the garden. He's such a comfort to me.

Of course, my Sid-induced absolute lack of brain or initiative means that I've been driven to spend the time by re-watching Castle from the start, since no-one I know yet has the last five or six episodes of the second season and I'm still jonesing for precisely that level of fluff. (Besides, a classic detective plot has a very precise and different pleasure the second time around, as you spot all the clues). This has engendered a certain amount of meditation on the subject of guest actors, their weird recurrences, and that strange form of recognition they cause.

I've obviously now hit a specific sort of threshold where I've watched just enough recent American television to be able to routinely identify minor actors I've seen before. The first five episodes of Castle present the head zombie bad guy from "The Zeppo" playing a meth-head, Supernatural's Agent Victor Henricksen as the friend who helps bury the body plus the kid in "Croatoan" as a spoiled rich brat, Director Brandon from Alias as a corrupt ex-cop private eye, and the haunted lady from "Shadows" (early X-Files), playing a councilman's wife. Later episodes feature Roxy Wasserman from Middleman and a positive plethora of Buffy alumni, including Graham the square-jawed Initiative agent, Riley himself as an amnesiac, and the slightly delectable Principal Wood. The peculiar pleasure of watching TV on the computer is that you can pause the damned thing the instant a familiar face pops up, and head straight to IMDB to ID them accurately instead of having to sit there for the rest of the episode twitching because you can't remember where you've seen them before. (Or is that just me?)

But it does make me think that the guest-acting world must be very small. I don't watch a lot of TV, at least as compared to most non-five-armed-aliens, and they're really starting to pop up now. (And this is quite separate from the tendency of people like Joss and JJ Abrams to re-use actors from one series to another). One factor is, I think, that a bunch of the fantasy/sf TV I watch is apparently made in Vancouver, probably quite a small acting pool, although that doesn't explain all the crossovers with Buffy, filmed in LA. The actors also tend to get really, really typecast, which suggests many of them are types with a fairly limited range. Acting must be a really odd world in which to live and work: some of them have worked for dozens and dozens of series in minor parts. I find myself, possibly as a result of the temperature I was running yesterday, trying to invent LARP scenarios in which feature all the characters played by a single actor. Don't try this at home, kids. Your brain may explode.

Of course, the second side-effect of all this Castle is that I had enjoyably dodgy Nathan Fillion dreams all night, so score.

Remember the giant cable spiderweb left behind by the Army of Reconstruction? Bits of it visible here? It still exists, as the last major thing we need sorted out post the Renovations of Doom. So two weeks ago I phoned Telkom and told them we needed a complete internal telephone rewire on account of all the free-floating cables with the bare wires showing, and they said "Oh all right then" and gave me a reference number.

Today I embarked on the painful, futile, self-flagellatory process of finding out why I've heard nothing further. This necessitates Phoning Telkom Helplines, an activity widely held to be popular in the Ninth Circle of Hell, and involving 45 minutes of the same thirty seconds of syrupy hold music, four different operatives in a Möbius strip of "I am not the one, phone the other helpline", and the eventual revelation that my initial call went to the wrong place, was logged by the wrong person, given an invalid reference number, I'm the wrong person to be doing this, and will I please start from scratch, in hard copy, having first metamorphosed myself into the account holder. At which point I lost it badly, informed the final consultant, at considerable volume, that Telkom's services suck, their company sucks, their customer service ethos blows goats, and they're basically incompetent as a commercial entity, and slammed the phone down. (Note, even in psychotic rage I managed to avoid a personal attack on the hapless operator, whose only fault is her choice of employer).

I am no longer quivering solely because I've just eaten an entire bar of cranberry and macadamia nougat, which I bought for my sister last night (she's a nougat fiend) and had to take away again because they've put her on Warfarin and apparently it interacts with cranberries. (Change in diagnosis: not, in fact, Bell's Palsy, but actually a tiny lesion in an artery at the base of her skull, eventually revealed via a second MRI, three radiologists and a techy dweeb who's really enthusiastic about manipulating MRI images to reveal miniscule events. She's still getting better in leaps and bounds, and prognosis is just as good). I am also retaining mental health by the fixed contemplation of a four-day weekend coming up, Salty Cracker at Yindee's tonight, and a grim determination to bunk work at 3.30 sharp recking not the Dean's outraged stare.

Rant list update: (1) Telkom. (2) Parcelforce. That pretty much does it.

Cape Town has been ridiculously, absurdly, stinkingly hot, and yesterday was a complete killer, certainly the worst this hot season. It was made worse by the fact that in the heat of the afternoon I had to do a run to the Motor Neurone Disease Association to drop off the wheelchair and walker my dad had been using. The Association is a truly wonderful group of people who offer support and services to MND sufferers and their families, and we wouldn't really have been able to deal with all this without them. But the errand made me realise quite how much I loathed and detested that bloody wheelchair - a great, ungainly, difficult creature, hard to steer and tricky to collapse and reassemble when transporting it. It was a necessary thing and allowed my dad to get around, but I swear the wretched machine was possessed of an imp of perversity.

The combination of the heat and my last tussle with the Wheelchair of Intractability left me a bit shaken and twitching, so I wandered into the air-conditioned calm of the bargain book place in Pinelands, and browsed for half an hour. Result: two cookbooks, a clutch of Philip K. Dick, and Guilty Pleasures, the first of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels. (These last two make interesting bedfellows. For a value of "interesting" involving, I suspect, bad sex on mind-bending drugs).

Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series is one of the long-term success stories of the madly-burgeoning paranormal romance/urban fantasy category: Anita Blake is a modern-day vampire hunter and "animist", i.e. she raises the dead. (And lowers them, too.) I really had very low expectations of this series, since The Word On The Net has been that while many people adore the books they quickly degenerate into gratuitous supernatural sex. This is, however, apparently worse in the later books (there are almost twenty of the things) and I was interested to see what the first one was like - not least because I'm about to embark on my vampire lecture series again, and I get a bit completist about vampire texts. (If a student references a vampire text I haven't read/watched, there is Serious Shame.)

Um. It was actually fairly dreadful. The character is interesting, but unrealistic, the world likewise, and the whole is not well written. It was fascinating to see the parallels with Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels, since both deal with a world in which vampires have Come Out and are an accepted part of society and a source of major sexual fascination. Harris's first book was in 2001, Hamilton's in 1993, so one cannot acquit Harris of influence, but the truth is her treatment of the same basic premise is infinitely more accomplished. Above all I have to say that Hamilton's simple control of narrative and plot are severely lacking - the story is bitty, floundering and strangely unfocused. The sexual elements are also considerably more perverse while being, to my mind, infinitely less convincing. I wasn't gripped and I certainly wasn't titillated. In fact, phooey. Despite Hamilton's attempt at a get-out-of-jail-free quality pass in the book's title it's the Sookie novels I have read and re-read as a definite and unabashed guilty pleasure, and the whole set of which I own. I won't be going back to Anita Blake.

On the other hand, I'm sinusy and, cooler temperatures today notwithstanding, heatstressed, and have a horrible headache. Maybe I should have read Anita Blake in winter. But maybe it wouldn't make a difference.

Sid the Sinus Headache is flexing his gosh-darned muscles and growling again, so I shall attempt to distract him by being Literary. True Blood and Doctor Who 4 notwithstanding, I've actually managed to do some reading lately, which is just as well because my Bookshelf of Unread Doom is stretching L-spacily again...

So, Sarah Rees Brennan. Better known as Maya, authoress of, among other things, bunches of Harry/Draco slash and also "Draco Malfoy the Amazing Dancing Rat", which is one of my favourite pieces of Potterfic, not least because it rather entertainingly ships Draco/Hermione and features geeky homework-related flirting over lots of coffee. She's also just published her first YA fantasy, called The Demon's Lexicon, which I have just read.

This was fun. Fairly straightforward urban fantasy stuff - contemporary England, demons, teen brothers, and the snappy and often funny dialogue which is her trademark. She also evinces the particular qualities I've come to associate with fan fiction, even at the more accomplished end of the spectrum her work inhabits, which boil down to (a) bucketloads of angst, and (b) pretty boys being emotionally intense. (Another case in point: Cassandra Clare's City of Bones). Really, this is what slash is all about: not the sex, per se, but male characters embroiled in difficult, demanding, complicated feelings, whether they like it or not. In Demon's Lexicon it's a brotherly rather than a romantic relationship, but the vibe feels very familiar.

This also accounts, perhaps, for the overall impression I have of the book: while it's intensely readable and boasts a rather spectacular and well-done plot twist, it also feels young, not just because it's aimed at young adults, but because it's a young writer. The first half or so of the book drags slightly, marking time while the payoff is set up: Ms. Brennan is definitely in command of her characters, but she's not quite in command of her narrative. My sense, however, is that she very definitely will be in the not too distant future, and I shall watch her career with interest. (She says, pushing her pince-nez back on the end of her nose and channelling a Victorian lawyer).

The other fantasy novel I've read recently is John C. Wright's The Last Guardian of Everness, which my Evil Landlord left carelessly lying around an obscure corner of his bookshelf where I happened to be rootling. I loved Wright's Orphans of Chaos series, which I described as a "sort of weird semi-inexplicable Victorian/modern heroic school story". Everness does a splashy and inelegant belly-flop into Lovecraft's Dreamlands, immersing itself thoroughly while spreading detritus around wholesale: the detached, drifty approach to a world beautiful, strange, inexplicable, threatening and corrupt is absolutely nail-on-the-head in terms of tone and feel. Also, bonus mad faerie women, cheerfully crude and sociopathic Selkie and giant set-piece battles between death knights, animated stone statues and small, confused military detachments with machine-guns. This book is trippy, beautiful and gut-wrenching by turns: it's like being repeatedly hit over the head by an exquisite statue constructed in five dimensions from bloody human bones. On the whole I think I like it. Certainly enough to dig up the sequel.

In other news, Woolworths eaten by vampires. Just because I'm relieved that someone else experiences the same degree of lateral to their conversations.

Devastated though I am by the news that David Tennant is leaving Doctor Who, I contemplate with joy and satisfaction his purported replacement: the Marquis of Carabas. I loved that actor in Neverwhere, he seriously rocked that coat and he has the perfect manic energy, without which I don't think it's actually possible to follow in the Ecclestone/Tennant footsteps.

This public service announcement brought to you as a faint, pre-emptive strike against a day characterised by Extreme Administration and quantities of putting-out-crisis-fires, all in insufficient time and with the added help of yesterday's pounding headache, still clutching my cerebellum in a vice-like grip.

*vanishes with despairing squeak into huge piles of paper, brandishing painkillers*

It's been raining off and on all weekend, which makes me and my garden happy, and it's still gently drizzling today. This is going some way towards reconciling me towards the headache and general disinclination I am suffering as a result of allowing Mike to ply me with altogether too much wine yesterday afternoon at his farewell braai. (He's buggering off to Oxford for a few years to do a PhD. Yay, more docs!). The bastard kept taking away my sensible glass of water and replacing it with a glass of wine, and I'm consequently a little fragile this morning. On the upside I drank enough to allow me to hold actual conversations with a notable array of complete strangers, which is a Great Leap Forward. Normally I curl up and die in a corner. Social butterfly, not.

So, Doctor Who. ( On mature reflection, I still don't have a lot of time for Russell Davies. )

Last Night I Dreamed: I was travelling across a rather attractive country, or countries, with rolling farmlands and ranges of mountains and a sandy coastline; unfortunately the whole thing was being threatened by some kind of hazy thing in the air, which was rolling in from the sea and gradually overtaking the country with unspecified ill effects. In the course of travelling with a refugee train I discovered that the country had recently abandoned the practice of growing a special kind of tree outside their homes; the tree had the power to suck in the nasty haze in a sort of mini vortex. At some stage I also realised the incredible significance of a glowing mother and daughter on horseback, who we passed in a field next to the road, and whose cart full of supplies we subsequently appropriated.

Ways Not To Wake Up: alarm goes off this morning, I lie in bed blearily thinking, aargh, it's Thursday, where did the week go? Then a mad electrical jolt pervades my system and I sit bolt upright, thinking AARGH! IT'S THURSDAY!, because Wednesday night is jo's game, and I was at home all evening obliviously watching X-Files and arguing with the Evil Landlord about who got to deflea the cats, and jo's going to kill me, why didn't anyone PHONE me? And I'm busy composing apologetic emails in my head when slowly it pervades: today is Wednesday, the game is tonight.

Damn, it was real, though. It took about ten minutes for my heart rate to slow. While this did catapult me into the morning in a state of vibrating wakefulness, it also didn't do much to ameliorate the otherwise incredibly sucky things with which the day has hit me, the pounding headache being the least of it.

Random Linkery in the Department of Important Feministy Stuff: rather an interesting analysis of sexist responses to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Thought-provoking.