freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with introspection

I checked my work calendar yesterday to see what Zoom meeting joys are lined up for me this week (only one meeting so far, although it's a particularly annoying university-level one), and realised that this coming weekend is Easter. Easter under current circumstances is peculiarly meaningless: to one of my completely irreligious bent it's just a four-day weekend, and these days every day feels like weekend, when not actually in Zoom meetings. But it made me realise how completely the epidemic has reshaped the flow of daily life, because usually I anticipate the extra days off weeks in advance, and this time it's crept up on me completely.

My ten days of leave, two weeks before this all started, were very carefully chosen to occupy a slot in the semester where I had no curriculum change deadlines and could take the necessary post-reg recovery space as early as possible. And I deliberately don't time the leave over the 10-day vac or the Easter weekend, because I can use those to artifically extend my rest period. The vac is very quiet, traffic is low and it's not exhausting to drive to work, and with no students around there's not much to do and it's all very peaceful and reasonably restful. And then Easter hits, giving me a succession of 4-day weeks, which are very good for the fatigue. So if I'm clever I can have 10 days of leave, quiet vac week, 4-day week, 4-day week, and then, because this is SA and public holidays R Us, a 5-day and then a 4-day week because Freedom Day on the 27th. April is a very light month. It needs to be, given how exhausted I am after the reg/orientation/change of curriculum three-punch.

And none of it matters now. All that calculation and planning are meaningless, because I'm at home constantly. It's all just... fallen away. As has, in fact, the urgency and stress around finding a temp receptionist in my unit, and browbeating the staffing committee into financing a permanent one. Because no students, therefore no continuous demands for my attention, and even if there were, I'm not in office so they can't get at me. There's no point in job hunting, because all the places I want a new job have closed their borders. It really does recontextualise one's normal worries to have (a) the giant ones replace it (will I get the virus? will thousands die? will society collapse?), and (b) quiet days at home in which to come to terms with all this.

And it still feels wrong to be finding positives. Possibly a good thing this afternoon's meeting will be the opposite of enjoyable, apparently I am feeling the need for the flesh to be mortified.

As I expected, Jyn had to have her horrible neck abscess lanced, and I took her in today to have the drain removed. Cat healing is very odd, it's so hyper-fast that you can't leave a lanced infection to heal on its own, the likelihood is too high that it'll heal over before it's drained properly and lock the infection inside, so she has spent a few days with a horrible plastic bit protruding from her neck. This has, I have to say, discommoded her not one whit, she did that instantaneous bounce-back thing cats do when you treat an infection, and when I brought her home after the op she became almost immediately full of beans and hyper affectionate. I am still, however, torn between relief and guilt, I always feel as though I should have detected these things earlier, and spared her that trauma.

Trekking around in lockdown is bizarre. The city is not absolutely deserted, there are a few cars on the road (including, weirdly enough, a speed trap on Liesbeek this morning, wtf? really not an essential service, people, get back inside), and the grocery store yesterday was frankly a bit of a cautious, arms-length scrimmage. But the empty streets are doing very strange things to me. Too much of this new context is simply too ideal to me - it plugs right into the considerable bits of my psyche which are perpetually exhausted, drained and fretted by city living, crowds and traffic. Not leaving the house for the better part of a week is balm to my soul, and the current cityscape, grocery stores excepted, neatly embodies the way I wish things were, really. A part of me is, in defiance of attempts to lock it down and properly rub its nose in the real horror of the epidemic, trying to rejoice.

So, being at home is lovely and the city is very civilised when I have to venture out, and frequent faculty and university committee Zoom meetings are not rendering me too homicidal, mostly because I follow a simple principle of turning my camera and mic off and playing Ipad Stardew Valley on the desk in front of me by way of panacea to all the ivory tower denizens reeling and writhing and fainting in coils. But I am very tired. Partially because giant apocalyptic epidemic and crumbling academic year and stress, but partially also because of the considerable mental energy needed to impart a sense of proportion to the inner recluse who is, shamefully, lying back and enjoying this. This particular manifestion of the primitive dinosaur self should not be indulged.

The country goes into lockdown tomorrow night, which seems sensible, and was predictable enough that I did a huge shop for it on Sunday in advance of actual announcements. In defiance of probability I had no problem stocking up on catfood and kitty litter this morning, which I forgot about on Sunday. (Nastily vindictive satisfaction in bypassing the massive queue outside Woolworths early today and going straight into the empty pet food store, clearly pet owners' priorities are all wrong). I shouldn't have to leave the house for a couple of weeks other than one chemist trip when a prescription runs out.

I find the "batten the hatches" approach curiously comforting, I suppose because retreating into one's castle and pulling up the drawbridge gives one a miniature arena in which one does, in fact, and quite unlike any other aspect of this crisis, have control. Also, I am a hard-wired introvert and like being at home for long, indefinite stretches. My condolences to those of you who are extroverted enough that this is going to be genuinely hard.

Of course, all control is illusionary. I woke up this morning to the persistent sound of water running through the ceiling pipes, which sounded as though the geyser was endlessly refilling itself. The nice landlord man is currently diverting pipes in the back courtyard, I appear to have a massive leak somewhere in the main water pipe that crosses the house from the intake - fortunately not in the ceiling, probably somewhere under the back step. The joys of rental are such that this is Not My Problem, and I am placidly playing The Witcher while he sorts it out. (A process fraught with added complication given that one of his first discoveries was that some pettily larcenous individual has made off with all the mains taps from the water point in the road outside, presumably to sell for scrap metal. Ah, as my mother says, Africa.) I am merely grateful that the sound effects of the leak made themselves known two days before, rather than two days after, the lockdown.

This pandemic, social media coverage notwithstanding, still feels curiously remote. Provisional. I am battening the hatches against something that's not quite real to me, personally, however real the deaths are across the world. Washing my hands and observing personal distance while buying catfood are almost ritualistic acts, placatory to some malevolent godlet I don't actually worship - however essential I know they are, they feel empty. Selfishly, I hope I can preserve that illusion.

Blissfully rainy and cold for the last couple of days, my garden is all happy and full of rain-washed leaves. It makes the Skyrim replay less urgent, I don't have quite the same desperate need to deny the globally warmed African temperatures by frolicking through snowy landscapes, but I'm right at the end of two major quest lines I haven't played before, so have had additional reasons to plunge straight back into gaming when I get home.

This is the replay where, in fairly uncharacteristic denial of my usual Lawful Good hard-wiring, I am playing through the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest lines. Thieves Guild is, obviously, about wholesale nicking stuff, and also restoring a crumbling guild to its former glory days; the Dark Brotherhood is an assassin's guild, with a particularly nasty Daedric godling at the heart of it. (The Daedric lords in Elder Scrolls games are potentially very nasty indeed, and I tend to avoid all but a handful of the nicer ones like the murder-ridden pits of extra-dimensional perversion they are). And part of my vague yen to get all anti-establishment up in here is, I think, because the world in general and my academic corner of it in particular are making me despair of systems in general, and wish to bestow on them a hearty Up Yours, at least in an abstract and virtual sense.

But the other reason I've managed to go beyond my usual point of initial "nope" in these quest lines is, weirdly enough, role-playing, because this time round I'm playing a Khajit. These are the cat-people race of the Elder Scrolls world, humanoid, furry, rather lovely tigerish faces. My current iteration has caracal ears, which are my favourite feline ears of all time. Khajit have good bonuses for thievery and sneaking, but mostly Khajit identity is enabling my non-lawful activity by dint of the fact that Skyrim is beautifully constructed as a parochial, insular little snowfield full of patriotic Nordic types who distrust and exclude outsiders, and random NPC samplings of whom have some choicely racist things to say on the subject of cat-people. You start the game narrowly escaping random execution for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I emerged from the starting sequence in a fine frame of seething indignation towards Nords, the Empire and random discrimination which made it comparatively easy to decide, right, you bastards, you owe me everything you have. Also, you tried to kill me, so I'll kill you right back.

It's surprisingly freeing. I don't think I'll drift in any wholesale way towards this kind of anti-establishment gameplay as a general rule, it's really quite alien to me, but at this particular moment, and given the more dysfunctional kinks of my personality, it's probably weirdly healthy. I am, at base, incredibly bad at anger. I find it very difficult to direct it against the world; I will turn it, nine times out of ten, against myself, into generalised self-loathing. As I burgle yet another snooty Nordic home with vindictive satisfaction, somewhere, without knowing why, my ex-therapist is spontaneously punching the air.

Weird sleep and dream patterns in the last few days, I had some sort of bug on Wednesday and was a bit flattened with nausea and stomach cramps, and it seems to have messed with my sleep cycles. I ended up lying awake the other night randomly remembering a piquant detail from my past, that being the time I met Terry Pratchett - it must have been in the early 90s, he came on a book tour to Cape Town, and did a talk at the university. ("The problem with South Africa is that it's like trying to open a box with a crowbar which is inside the box.") The local guys who were on the old alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup were also keen to meet with him in a smaller group setting, and got hold of me because I was chair of the Tolkien Society at the time and they (quite correctly) thought I might also like to meet Pterry. Retrospect suggests that I didn't actually fully understand what they were asking, because I ended up hijacking their intimate get-together dinner and turning it into a Tolkien society cheese-and-wine event for about forty people. I suspect they've never actually forgiven me. Seems fair. I'm sorry I was so oblivious.

At any rate, it was a lovely evening, quickly degenerating into most of us clustered around listening to Pterry talk, which was hilarious. (He did the "who likes ginger, garlic, cats" poll - apparently his fans overwhelmingly like all three). I remember the event vividly because at one point he did a shambling orangutan impersonation and picked fleas off me. But most of all I remember it because someone asked him for more details about what Magrat was like, and he looked around the room, pointed at me, and said "Like your friend there, but without the self-assurance".

The physical equivalences were probably valid - I was a particularly skinny thing back then, if not quite the traditional ironing board, was wearing a full-length black chintz dress, and had very long hair which, as now, I never blowdried, so it tended to frizz madly in all directions. Occult jewellery may also have been implicated. What weirds me out now, looking back on it, though, is the crack about self-assurance.

See, I'm not self-confident. I am awkward and reticent and self-conscious in large gatherings or meeting new people. My disaster of an academic career is testament to my wholesale ability to take on board negative opinions about me from anyone in my general vicinity, and I've never had an active enough belief in my academic abilities to hold to them in the teeth of criticism. I build up confidence very slowly, and tend to acquire it from the structures I represent; I conducted a two-hour meeting today with senior academics, and had absolutely no problem doing so with authority and dispatch, but that's taken me a decade to learn. I'm absolutely calm and self-assured in front of a lecture hall full of students, even when they heckle, because I can immerse myself in the teacher, and that, again, I've learned over time. One of the reasons I'm finding it so hard to leave this job, I think, is because I am exhausted at the mere though of having to build up that confidence again in a different context and role. And while academia and this job may have beaten the confidence out of me since those days, I think it's more likely that Pterry only saw me as confident because I was being Tolkien Society Chair at the time, and the role gave me the authority I might otherwise lack.

I never really did identify with Magrat, possibly because her slightly limp ineffectuality is everything I am afraid I actually am, but maybe Pterry's use of me as a model was one of his classically uncanny and withering insights. Or maybe my commitment to the role is simply that good and he genuinely thought I was self-assured. I dunno. Either way, for the record, these days I'm really much more of a Granny Weatherwax.

Students are suspiciously quiet this semester, what the hell. We had a downright placid change of curriculum period, and for the last few weeks the trickle of students panicking in my office has been more of an intermittent dribble. While I am subliminally waiting for the other shoe to drop and, I dunno, a full-on Deep One cult to surface in the Chinese fountain on the plaza or something, it does at least mean that over the last week I was twiddling my thumbs enough that I managed to read the first five novels in the Anne of Green Gables series off Gutenberg in my office browser. Which, I have to add for posterity, is a literary diet far less likely to traumatise any students who accidentally catch sight of it than either of my more usual work-avoidant browser habits, viz. fanfic and Tumblr, both of which are prone to erupt without warning into explicit gay porn.

I haven't read Anne properly for years, I motored through the first one six or seven years ago in order to supervise a more than usually fumbling Honours thesis. I had forgotten a lot about it, and the reminder has given rise to two sharply opposed responses.

On the one hand - lord, it's sentimental. Very much an artefact of its time; I looked for it because I keep seeing references to the new Anne with an E tv series, but I think one of the reasons I kept reading is because the world it depicts is so idyllic, ordered and sane, in sharp contradistinction to ours, which really isn't any of the above, right now. Anne's sentimentality leads it to idealised ideas of relationships and, particularly, women's roles in them (also, children, to occasionally nauseating extremes), but there's something very comforting in the simple nature of its conflicts and in the series' sustained belief in the essential benevolence of people. I found myself glossing over the saccharine bits and the horribly outdated gender politics because the characters are so interesting and real and likeable despite them.

On the other hand - sentimental, saccharine, idealised though it is, something in Anne herself was, I think, formative, and I still read her with enormous pleasure and recognition. I never had her unfettered spontaneity, but like her I was a child whose vivid emotional life was internal and imaginative and romanticised - still is, really - and whose best school subject was English. Anne's status as a word-witch among her peers is something I, as an awkward introvert, passionately desired, because unlike other aspirations it wasn't entirely impossible - it was a superpower I intellectually possessed and could conceivably unlock if I only had the confidence or unselfconsciousness or social skills. I never did, of course, but it was comforting, I think, to contemplate an idealised identity which was created by becoming more powerfully myself rather than less.

Dated sentimentality aside, Anne is a vivid creation and I was happy to re-discover her. I should look out for the new series, it seems to be worthwhile.

I seem to be vanishing into myself in strange and alarming ways just at present, so herewith a Resolution to resume the meeping into the void which constitutes my blogging activities: perhaps, if I write, I will persuade myself that I exist. I do not like the twilight limbo occasioned by my continuing, repulsed and miserable desire to flee my job, and by the identity-crisis-induced helpless inaction which that desire generates in the absence of any immediately obvious alternatives. It's a shadowy, liminal hellscape, and I'm a shadow in it. On the other hand, I lost myself in my own ten-year-old blog posts for half an hour a few days ago, looking for a book reference, and it made me feel more real than I have in months. Words, it turns out, when they are my words and I have wrought them to my will, flood the shadow space with light: they give me a sense of identity. Thus blogging again. Go, little words! construct me!

Also, the blog dive reminded me of the Bunny. Remember the Bunny, and the anvil doom which ended his miserable twee existence? I remember it fondly.

I have, in the last few months, negotiated two massive and prolongued doses of 'flu, with added sinus infection and glandular wossname, and am still very tired, which may be implicated in the sense of vanishing. I am also stressed, because my small Jyn kitty picked up an abscess while I was away last weekend but one, and I didn't find the Suspicious Lump until Tuesday night. I made a vet appointment the next morning, but by the time I took her in on Wednesday afternoon, the horrible thing had ballooned to about three times its size, and had to be lanced, mere antibiotics no longer being sufficient. She has a giant shaved patch and interesting drains and things (man, feline healing is weirdly fast, and occasions strange workarounds) and has been bleeding gently on pale surfaces for the last week. She recovered very quickly after the op, and was almost immediately full of beans again, to an extent which made me realise how horrible she must have been feeling; I'd put the subdued affect down to Feline Displeasure at my absence. But I used to suffer from recurrent abscesses as a kid, I know only too well the enormous, incredible relief of having the damned thing dealt with, both in reduction of pain and pressure, and in the recovery from the general nausea and an infection causes. I feel her. Poor Jinian. Also, being me, I feel horribly guilty that I didn't pick it up immediately, before it got to the point of needing lancing. Cat owner fail.

Pandora is being quite kind to her, which is nice. Proof of a photographic nature (Jyn's wound is on her neck behind her right ear, and thus allows a pleasing illusion of wholeness):

In parenthesis: it is my almost invariable habit to sign all of my emails, other than the most absolutely formal ones to Big Cheeses, "jt" - my initials, in lower case. I've done this for years, at least as long as I've had this job. It occurs to me, in the context of vanishing, that this is a self-minimising technique. Little lower case me. Unassuming, and unlikely to infringe on anyone's space. It figures.

Over the last year I have discovered Growing Things From Seed. There's something oddly satisfying and semi-magical about willing a whole, solid, verifiable plant into existence from a tiny, apparently lifeless speck of plant matter. In this particular case it wasn't seed or even bulbs, but rhizomes, which are weird finger-like chunks you plant horizontally without knowing which end will grow. (Teh Internets assured me solemnly that the plant works out which way is up). My three rhizomes grew, as scheduled, flame lilies, which rejoice in the somewhat hyperbolic Latin name gloriosa superba. A flame lily is beautiful and slightly unlikely, and astonishingly flamelike. They're native to Southern Africa, and I cherish memories of them growing wild in the bush near various homes in Zimbabwe. The flowers are very vivid, and in the slight dusk of a wooded area seem to float. I also discover, on growing these particular ones, that they have this particularly elegant adaptation - they're semi-climbing, in that they grow straight up but don't quite stand alone, and the end of every long, narrow leaf has the ability to curl around a thin support and cling to it. I find this enchanting: so economical! none of this messing around with growing separate tendrils.

I wanted to grow flame lilies because I've always loved them and I associate them very strongly with my childhood, but they're also the national flower of Zimbabwe. Before that, they were the national flower of Rhodesia.

I have been a denizen of my pinko-liberal Commie Cherished Institution for nearly three decades now, absorbing postcolonialist rhetoric like an unenlightened sponge, and there is absolutely no way in hell I lament lost Rhodesia in any political sense. It was a deeply illegitimate regime, founded on white privilege, exploitative and dehumanising to its black people, and not nearly as up-front as South Africa about its basic apartheid divides. The fact that the black regime which took over is equally morally bankrupt and just as destructive doesn't mitigate this in the slightest, Two Wrongs maths being what it is.

But it was also my childhood home, and I had a child's essentially innocent experience of it. Flame lilies are an extremely emblematic shorthand not only for the things I loved about Zimbabwe - its landscapes and animals, the ordered and productive agricultural world I grew up in, my family's place in creating that order - but for a sort of naive and nebulous nationalism. I felt, driving down the jacaranda avenue in the capital or having tea in the city's big department store, a subliminal, undefined pride in the country's achievements in civilisation and functionality.

I think it's significant that I grew flame lilies this summer. I was rocked astonishingly hard last year by the Dylann Roof massacre - the American mass shooting where a disgusting little 20-something white boy went into a black church in Charleston and gunned down nine people with hollow-point bullets. Dylann Roof was a white supremacist trying to start a race war. He had a website called The Last Rhodesian, and his jacket displayed both the apartheid South African flag, and that of Rhodesia. I'm slightly more detached from South African apartheid: I arrived in this country shortly before apartheid ended, and in a weird sort of way it was not entirely my guilt to feel. Rhodesia, though - Rhodesia is. Growing flame lilies was, I realise, an unconscious attempt to try and recoup some of my childhood sense of pride, because seeing that Rhodesian flag on Dylann Roof's jacket was a gut-punch, an inexorable reminder that the country I loved was really an illusion, that my experience of it was a cushioned and privileged lie. Rhodesia is now a particularly vile symbol to the kind of bigoted dickhead whose existence I find basically offensive, and in fact it always was. The flame lily was never mine.

It's hard to reconcile. The Rhodesia to which Dylann Roof imagines he belongs doesn't exist, and it would be an ugly thing if it did. But by the same token, my version doesn't exist either. It never did. It was a child's construct, crafted in blindness and complacence. And in innocence, but I'm way too old for innocence. I can grow as many flame lilies as I want, but I can't make them mean what I want them to. What they mean is now infinitely complicated and filled with guilty regret. My subject line is Magnetic Fields, who say accusingly "If you think you can leave the past behind / If you think you can simply press rewind / You must be out of your mind". I'm not sure if they're talking to Dylann Roof, or me.

I cling to my research pursuits by the skin of my teeth these days, cramming it into odd corners and for the large part watching with helpless regret as mental and physical fatigue torpedo what little footholds I can carve out. One of the upshots is that these days I go into the university library about twice a year, if that - not because I'm not researching at all, I am, but by and large research these days is done virtually rather than with hard-copy books, and such hard-copy books as are essential to my research interests are somewhat fringe and I tend to simply buy copies for myself. (Memo to self: Kindle. Because exploding bookshelves.) However, I am overdue by two months for 2000 words on the importance of Vladimir Propp to fairy tale criticism (because why pick a reasonably-sized topic, a sense of proportion is for the weak) and my copy of Morphology of the Folktale has vanished completely enough that I'm beginning to wonder if I hallucinated actually owning it, so on Friday I Braved The Library.

I should not, as a literature academic, be alienated by an academic library. Being alienated by a library is an alienating experience on a whole level above the library itself being alienating. They radically redesigned the space a couple of years ago, and moved things around, and ever since then I walk in and am immediately lost. It's a very beautifully appointed and glitzy space, and has added several zeroes onto the number of student study seats, but I realised today what the root of the change is: it's now a student-focused space, not an academic-focused space. I get lost because all the signposting is about where and how students can study, and which areas are for undergrads, and how you may use your cellphone. There are no guides at all to where you might find the actual books. The previous library layout gave clear, unequivocal maps by Dewey number, and the lack of those leaves me free-floating and slightly panicky, because on walking in, you can't actually see any books at all other than the few shelves of reference volumes in the front. I was rescued by a kindly library colleague (it's useful knowing all these people from university committees), and she commented that the head librarian is contemplating getting rid of large numbers of the books, based on what people are actually reading.

I don't want to sound like a Jurassic reactionary about this - this is the way things are going, information is increasingly virtual, and the shift to a focus on the student experience is an important and necessary address to the exclusionary elitism of academia's more traditional forms. And if I was a more consistent Academic, in the sense of using these facilities for more than about 5% of my job description, I would have got the alienation over in a few weeks and simply adapted to the new status quo, rather than spreading it out torturously over several years. But I mourn the old library, and the physicality of the experience when your wanderings among the shelves were done in the consciousness of the accreted weight of all those books. I used to read for fun in undergrad, mostly as a substitute for an actual social life: I remember randomly picking up fiction just because the name seemed significant, William Morris and Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf and John Fowles and the weirder corners of Tolkien. I'm not sure I could still do that in the new space, or if the books would be there for me to stumble upon. It's all too goal-oriented now.

And I really, really mourn my lost sense of mastery of the space. I struggle with academic identity at the best of times; to be at sea in the quintessential academic space, to be unable to locate the texts which are central to my research identity, was actively eroding to a particular facet of my sense of self. It wasn't pleasant.

I have my dark suspicions as to whether or not the new library even generates L-space. I don't think .303 bookworms exist virtually, or if they do, we're all completely screwed. It's worrying, is all. My worry is indexed by the fact that my subject line is Doctor Who, more specifically "The Silence in the Library." Because of course it is.

I am at home today with 'flu, as I am phlegmy and disgusting and shouldn't breathe on anyone, and moreover have a head full of cement. Also, I need to hold Hobbit's hand a bit, he got beaten up by the neighbourhood tom again this morning, and is wandering around all subdued, with matted fur and covered with leaves. I think the bastard must have rolled him in a flower bed.

So, being at home, it's vaguely synchronous that Tumblr is currently doing a meme about how many houses you've lived in over your whole life. I like the mental exercise this offers, and am doing it just because. Answer, as far as I can remember: 13.

I was born in Bulawayo, so the first house I lived in must have been the one on the research station up in the Matopos hills. (My dad was in agricultural research so we moved around a lot between research stations). I remember the red cement floors and the terraced garden and the view across the valley.
The hardboard cottage in Harare my parents lived in briefly. I think I have a memory of this, it entails a darkish living room with rough walls inset with stone, and an arch.
The first house on the research station outside Fort Victoria, which is now Masvingo. It had a huge kopjie behind the house, where we used to find glass beads in the sand, and a rather twisty, dark forest with a narrow path through it to the house next door where we went to play with a girl called Kate.
The second house on the same research station, during the Rhodesian War so with security fencing around it. There was a giant mulberry tree in the back garden, we used to play under it. We had bantam chickens which were pets, and my dad's pointer had nine puppies who used to seethe around in a pen at the back. There was a "swimming pool", actually an old reservoir with no pump or filter, it used to go absolutely green and fill up with leaves and frogs.
The house in suburban Harare where we lived for a year while my dad was finishing the biometrics for his PhD. It was very weird to me, being very ordinary suburban in style; we had a TV for the first time in my life, there had never been reception on any of the research stations.
The house on the research station outside Marondera, with the lovely trees in the garden, and owls hooting at night. We had rabbits and tortoises, and that's where we acquired the rescued baby owls we raised to adulthood, thus starting a lifelong fixation which makes giving me presents ridiculously easy. The garden had this weird stage area at one end, a bit raised with a bamboo hedge for wings, we used to do amateur theatrical thingies with the friends from next door.
The house my parents bought in Harare when my dad left research - it was the first house they'd actually owned. It was an ex farmhouse, long and rambling, and had been done up by the previous owners, who had the unfortunate shared characteristics of being DIY fiends and rather slap-dash, so it leaked and bits fell down. Huge garden, we grew popcorn and kept goats. If you stood on the front patio and looked down the garden to the fields, you could draw a line with a ruler at goat head height under which no green thing grew.
I'm not counting the couple of stints in digs rooms during undergrad, variously in my aunt's house in Newlands (tense), and Tom's mad mother's garage in Bergvliet (very dirty). The first house I rented myself in postgrad was the digs in Twickenham Rd I shared with Michael, who was a roleplaying crowd friend. It was my Honours year; I was broke, breaking up with The Bastard Ex-Boyfriend From Hell, and on the whole rather broken, and I really can't blame Michael from moving out in a marked manner. The house had absolutely no furniture bar a bed, stove, desk and kitchen table, and was consequently rather good for gothy parties with lots of dancing.
After a disastrous year in a flat with an anal-retentive semi-friend, the next house was the Osborne Rd digs of legend and song, variously with Michelle, Dylan and a different Mike. Those were slightly insane and very enjoyable years. Highlights included that legendary party with both gluhwein and cheese fondue, and, possibly not unrelated, ripping up the ancient and horrible carpets in favour of the lovely pine floors. We had a parade of cats who mostly expired or moved out mysteriously, including Pixie and Polonius (black siblings), the dreaded Widget, her five kittens, and finally the legendary Fish.
After Dylan's mother reclaimed the house, I spent a couple of months in a different house with Michelle and Michael, who were by that point a couple; it was white and clinical and in Harfield Village.
Then Mowbray, three years in an old Victorian on the railway line with Donald, who was a bit laissez faire as home owners go and declined to upgrade the security in any way. After about the fifth burglary was actually an armed robbery, I moved out. Donald is a psychologist and saw clients in the front room; it wasn't particularly compatible with my tendency to run about three different societies (roleplaying, SCA, tai chi) from the house simultaneously.
The domicile of the Evil Landlord, for fifteen years. Good lord. I don't need to tell you anything about that if you've read my blog at all...
My current house, which is unlike all of the above in being mine, mine, mine and never leaving. Which is a catchphrase from the Michelle/Dylan days.

I have lived in lots of houses, she says with exemplary obviousness. Can anyone top that total? On mature reflection, while I have lived with lovely people on the whole, I really like being on my own.

(My subject line is from the Brian Eno/David Byrne album, which offers pretty much the definite anthem on this theme unless you count Madness).

When I was in my last year of junior school, i.e. aged 11 or 12 or so, I had the lead role in a school play. Well, to be precise, in the small, serious mini-play which served as the opener to the school's production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, in which I was a member of the chorus. Possibly the lead member of the chorus, come to think of it, the director used to give me the mike when the chorus was being more than usually unintelligent about their timing, pointing inexorably to the fact that I am somewhat musical but have little or no actual voice. That was a horribly over-regimented production of Joseph, rehearsed to the point where, to this day, I have a party trick where I can still recite all of the colours of the amazing technicolour dreamcoat, which I learned obsessively because I was terrified of the director and he used to yell if you weren't word-perfect. (Red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and ruby and orange and violet and fawn and lilac and... I'll stop now.) I can also, if challenged, sit down at the piano and play most of the gosh-darned songs. That director was a scary man.

But the point is, I'm really bad at acting, because of extreme self-consciousness and the tendency to freeze and go deer-in-headlights when undue attention is paid me by rooms full of strangers. The small, serious mini-play in which I played the aforementioned lead role was a horrible little effusion written by said scary director, and acted entirely and rather reluctantly by his Standard 5A class. It was medieval in setting, possibly engendering a hopeless imprinting which explains my helpless compulsion towards the SCA, and my lead role was that of a girl who's almost burned at the stake as a witch because her village thinks she's weird. (Clearly, given the dynamics of my Standard 5 class, he was casting to type). I can still recite some of her long, pretentious speeches. "I was Petronella Savrolet, and I was young. My father was an officer in the Black Watch. He died, and I was left alone in the house." I think they were burned into my skull by sheer terror. (I did like her long white lacy dress and cape, though. Further SCA implications).

Fortunately the nature of the character meant that stage fright was largely indistinguishable from actual acting, and my subsequent career suggests that the ability to give long, pretentious speeches with bell-like clarity to a large audience was inscribed somewhere on my DNA. Those weren't the problem. The problem was the part where actual acting was unavoidable. There was a bit towards the climax of the play, when the villagers are all crowding round and waving pitchforks and shouting "She is not like us! she must be burned! she is a WITCH!" where I was supposed to scream and faint. Weirdly enough, given that I've never had any dramatic training at all, the fainting was no problem, I crumpled very gracefully to the ground without even thinking about it very much, and retained the ability in later life - I probably still could if my knees wouldn't immediately detach with extreme prejudice. Somewhere in my DNA is also clearly one of those small, furry creatures who play dead when terrified.

What I couldn't do is scream. The degree of noise and social violation encompassed by simply throwing my head back and letting rip was absolutely unthinkable. Even with the completely terrifying director looming over me threateningly and mocking my inhibitions, I couldn't do it. (He was a bastard, that man). He eventually had to employ one of my classmates, the rather sweet guy who played the minstrel who rescued me at the last minute from fiery, inhibited death, to stand in the wings and scream on my behalf. It must have sounded rather odd.

I had a point in all this. One of them was to actually blog something, because I haven't for over a month, and because a random memory hit me and this flow-of-consciousness thing strikes me as being a reasonable strategy in trying to get back to blogging. The other is to realise how emblematic that little anecdote is, and how far I've utterly failed to overcome some of those issues as a (technically) grown-up. Still hopelessly self-conscious. Still unable to scream even when threatened. Still inclined to wait passively until rescued. Thus still prone to spend several weeks depressed and hermitting, and not blogging or socialising, and to have it be functionally impossible to ask for help or even allow the feeling to be seen, particularly. When in doubt, play dead. Can still collapse and huddle, apparently. Can't scream.

I'm sorry I haven't seen anyone much, lately. I shall try to Be Better, and to aim, at the very least, for quiet, plaintive meeping. Or, at the very least, blogging. There may be more flow of consciousness, this was cathartic. You Have Been Warned.

(My subject line is mostly because I've been playing Mass Effect again, and it does tend to colonise one's imagery.)

The ALS ice-bucket challenge is making me feel really odd. However valid the fund-raising and consciousness-raising aspect of the whole thing, there's a bizarre disconnect between a celebrity meme and the thing that killed my dad.

Watch on YouTube

I love BC's take on it, but I can't really laugh at it. Then again, I still can't really cry about my dad. Maybe the painful mix of message is appropriate, after all.

(My subject line is Swinburne's "Garden of Proserpine", still my favourite poem about death, and the one that most encapsulates the relief when my dad was finally able to escape. And I'm sorry to be so morbid.)

Right, well, thank fuck that's done. I emerge from two weeks with my head down on this bloody paper, having just sent 6000-odd words off to my nice ex-supervisor so that she can confirm my argument isn't actually on crack. I am buggered. I've been putting words onto the damned screen for up to six hours a day for two weeks from the midst of a 15-volume pile of critical tomes, while simultaneously writhing with distaste and hating the universe in general and everything in it in particular, with special reference to African film and all its works. It's been very slow and torturous, and I'm still not convinced I'm safe from being ceremonially lynched by a mob of petulant postcolonialists, but the worst is over. Even if there are giant flaws in my argument I'm now editing rather than writing, and it's the writing which is like drawing blood at the moment. In the unsexy non-vampire way.

I suffer from existential crises when doing this sort of thing. I start disbelieving in my own academic existence, and it makes the writing process really rather hard. At least if there are words on the screen for me to work with I have some evidence in favour of my status as tangible and instrumental. Really, a lot of my life is spent as a sort of a wistful academic ghost.

The particular bugger about this bloody paper has been that I've felt impelled to write it to the exclusion of almost everything else. This means that I have not done interesting things to my nice house (newsflash: I still love living on my own even when I hate the universe because academia), or adequately paid attention to my cat, or done any socialising, really, that hasn't entailed jo&stv battering down my door and either plying me with food or dragging me out. Which means there was really rather enjoyable tango at the Crypt on Tuesday, but otherwise not a lot. It's not that I hate everyone, I promise.

I am also on leave for the next ten days, three of which will include an entirely self-indulgent jaunt to Barholomeus Klip, that luxury farmhouse guest lodge thing with the amazing and practically continuous food. I can't really afford this, I'm pre-emptively spending a chunk of my November bonus, but I decline to feel remorse or guilt. Stuff it. I've earned it. Not to mention the fact that it's the end of the first semester and I'm more than somewhat dead on my feet.

So, how is everyone? Are any other Capetonians cordially freezing to death at the moment, or is it just me? It's been icy, down in the 6-degree range, with snow on them thar hills. The air has teeth. I have unearthed my Giant Coat of Sweepingness and have been sashaying up to campus every morning imagining I'm Sherlock. It adds a certain useful layer of impatient disdain to the interactions with students. I hope you are all well, and warmer than I.

I didn't do the official year retrospective post last year, possibly as a result of the major fit of pique which resulted from those bastards nicking the television last New Year's Eve while we were off partying. Since it's quite a nice exercise in stock-taking I am hereby resuscitating the retrospective tradition, pausing only to note with some pleasure that no actual bastards robbed the house last night while we were off having civilised six-course dinners for eleven at jo&stv's. (Memo to self, post that recipe I invented for the mushroom salad thingy). I shall also, by way of comparison, briefly survey 2012, because the gap is irritating me like a missing tooth. Can you tell that I'm the kind of computer gamer who absolutely has to visit every corner of a map and pick up all the loot? You probably can.

Weirdly enough given that this year was characterised by a giant month-long depressive slump somewhere in the middle of it, I think it's generally been a more positive than negative year in my personal universe. It's been mostly blissfully free of massive personal or medical disasters, and I'm certainly feeling more functional and on-track in basic life issues than I was a year ago - some unresolved things that were hanging over my head have finally been resolved, like cars and house agents. There's some evidence that fairly intense therapy may actually have some utility: while I can't say I've solved all my self-sabotaging tendencies, I'm far more aware of them than I was, and generally less likely to be destructively hard on myself. I feel slightly more confident, slightly more open, and rather more likely to do things I want and need to do without feeling that other people's needs should come first. Yay therapy.

Things achieved by me this year: The writing up and submission of two papers, plus various encyclopaedia entry updates and a couple of new ones (one submitted already, the other to be submitted really soon now since the final deadline was yesterday). An invitation to contribute a chapter to a rather prestigious fairy-tale film anthology. A driver's licence and a spanky new car. The start of an actual exercise routine, in a small but so far reasonably consistent way. A sense of improved management of fatigue and associated bodily ills. The gradual re-focus of my job towards more interesting policy-setting rather than administrivia. General validation of my work achievements by various Deans and other superiors. Ongoing relationships with lovely and essential friends.
(Things achieved in 2012: more international travel on (a) my Cherished Institution's dime (two fairy-tale conferences) and (b) as a keynote speaker partially funded by the conference (that Harry Potter one). After really rather a lot of HR wrangling, the upgrading of my post and job description to bump it up a payclass and include a 10% research/teaching component. A learner's licence. A new agent for the French house. A therapist.)
Things discovered by me this year: Ipads, Nimona, truffle oil, the reality of depression, taxis, fresh broad beans, Blu-Ray, subject line footnote refs, Sherlock fanfic, evening constitutionals, Captain Marvel, mole mapping, freeform LARP-writing, social self-preservation, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Benedict Cumberbatch, Vampire Weekend.
(Things discovered by me in 2012: Veronica Mars, Tamora Pierce, Tumblr, Goats, WordPress, subject line reference posts, Phryne Fisher, Avengers fanfic, Kingdoms of Amalur, Scotland, the Lake District, Ghent, Kristen Cashore, madly ordering internet art, Chrome, Kickstarter, Sherlock.)
Things achieved by other people this year which affect me: the Evil Landlord's acquisition of a girlfriend.
Things not achieved by me: as usual, fleeing the country, crushing academia beneath my booted heel, enough writing, enough exercise. Although I think I have failed to meet many of these goals rather less catastrophically than some previous years.
Resolutions for the new year: continue upward trends wherever possible in writing, exercising, socialising, self-management. Try to move out of ruts and comfort zones. Be, wherever possible, happy.

A ceremonial happy new year to all of you lot. I hope it exceeds all positive expectations.

Subject line from "Auld lang syne", for fairly obvious reasons.

I've been on a bit of a quest over the last year or so to update the artwork in my living space, which has hitherto tended towards slightly amateur block-mounting of random posters, some of which date back to undergrad and damned well look their age. This is something of a solitary quest: the EL's indifference to home furnishings of a decorative nature verges on the sublime, and his input stops abruptly at the heraldic shield over the mantlepiece. My own taste is very much towards pop art, often with a fan twist, and I have made merry hay with various internet art sites and the local framer, with results which would probably cause exquisite pain in anyone with actual artistic chops such as I do not in any way possess. However, I am deeply happy with my Ursula Vernon and Martin Leman cats, giant greeny-blue stylised owl, Firefly silhouette collection and those dreamy, alienated superheroes in the atmosphere above Earth. This particular picture is in my bedroom, generously sized and properly framed (the slightly small image is all I could include, because of the artist's completely legitimate protection of her work on her website). Noelle Stevens also produces Nimona, which is possibly my currently favourite web comic; I adore the slightly spiky, faux-naive precision of her images.

I love her art, but I also loved the theme here: happy introversion, with that fascinating colour inversion which puts all the madly partying people in sombre blues and purples, and the girl/cat/tea/book ideal in warm orange and peach. It encapsulates everything that is currently true about my ability to interact with people, particularly at the moment with the merry gang of depression/fatigue/glandular fever/sinusitis having its wicked way with my hapless form. (Not nearly as savagely as a few weeks ago, but there are lingering traces).

See, the weird thing is that I am predisposed to quite like people. My job requires that I engage empathetically with a continual string of distressed students, and after six years of this I still like students and wish to improve their lives to the best of my ability. I'm good at empathy. My therapist, poor lady, spends half of her life hacking through the thickets of what I think other people are feeling in order to get at my own heavily-protected feelings, and we still have that argument about the extent to which it is ok to prioritise other people's needs over your own. (For the record: more often than she thinks it is). I love my friends, and stand firmly by my assertion that I have the loveliest friends in the known universe - and in that I include the bunch of you who hang out here and who I have never actually met in person, or who I see only every few years when we coincide continents. I love dinners with friends, mutual tea-drinking sessions, role-playing games, movie evenings. I have been known to cautiously enjoy parties. But, ye gods, it has to be at carefully spaced intervals, and on my own terms.

Part of the problem is, I think, crowds. Students are probably okay because they come through my door mostly singly or in pairs; they don't overwhelm me with input. I don't deal well with having to force my way through herds of gazelles in those mad fifteen minutes between lectures, and generally try to time any movements out of my office not to collide with them. But even if I have to navigate campus crowds, I know it's temporary - I can psych myself up for it, and pace my endurance knowing that it's finite. That's the other half of it - having, in the immortal idiom of the internet, sufficient spoons. Dealing With People is a finite allocation of energy. At the end of the day it tends to be gone, which is why I don't socialise much during the week. I can do parties, particularly if they're full of people I know, and alcohol helps, but I need to get a good run-up at mental preparation, and I've left a hell of a lot of parties very early over the last couple of years.

So, this giant chunk of introspection brought to you courtesy of the fact that I told my book club last night that I'd be taking a sabbatical from it for a while, because I can't do it any more. Part of the problem is that I'm not reading book club books, which sit in my bookshelf reproachfully and weigh on my conscience, but it's also about energy and groups. It's only six or seven people, but there tends to be lots of wine and chat, multiple streams of discussion and catch-up and laughter, and while I enjoy it in many ways, it also exhausts me. They're lovely ladies, but over the last few months I've missed several sessions, and have increasingly had to exert supreme mental discipline to persuade myself to attend the few I did make. I don't use socialising to recharge; it drains energy rather than bolstering it. It also, regardless of how much I like the people, makes me anxious, often only subliminally, but when I get home after any social evening I always require at least an hour of something solitary and soothing - computer games or reading fanfic the current favourites - before I can actually unwind enough to sleep. This does not work well with either insomnia or fatigue.

So, yes. I love that picture. It shows the happy introvert. Better still, it shows the happy introvert quietly recharging, so that when energy levels permit, I can leap out into the world and engage with all the people I really like. Because introversion is not misanthropy, and there's only so much you can get from cats.

Subject line from early Eurythmics, specifically "Savage", which is what was randomly playing off my MP3 player in the car this morning, but which is one of my favourites of theirs despite its possible slight dodginess. You can play with me there sometimes, if you catch me in the mood.

I do not appear to feel much like blogging at the moment. Right now that's possibly because I have a Horrible Cold In The Head, courtesy of my mother, who also has a Horrible Cold In The Head which she picked up from my niece. Children are plague pits. Fact. Anyway, we're both dragging ourselves around the house gravitating to heat sources (it's bloody cold, there must be snow on the mountains), her with a pestilential snuffle, me with a head full of cement. I have re-read two-thirds of my Phryne Fisher collection in the last three days. Bohemian flapper detectives may be keeping me sane.

In default of anything more intelligent, I present for your delectation the intelligence of others.

This is an incredibly interesting interview with William Gibson in which he talks about his own influences and writing processes, but even more about the interaction between the world and science fiction. My favourite bit is the ending:

If you’d gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel that consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today, they’d have read your proposal and said, Well, it’s impossible. This is ridiculous. This doesn’t even make any sense. ... Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planet’s climate, with possibly drastic consequences. There’s an epidemic, highly contagious, lethal sexual disease that destroys the human immune system, raging virtually uncontrolled throughout much of Africa. New York has been attacked by Islamist fundamentalists, who have destroyed the two tallest buildings in the city, and the United States in response has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. ... You haven’t even gotten to the Internet. By the time you were telling about the Internet, they’d be showing you the door. It’s just too much science fiction.

By way of antidote to all this contemporary bleakness, this is a rather lovely graduation address which exhorts graduates to be kinder, and thereby gives me lovely ammunition in some of the recent arguments I've been having with my therapist. My commitment to the therapeutic process has a very well-defined limit beyond which I simply don't buy the idea that it's OK to prioritise yourself above all else. It is an index of the success of the therapeutic process so far that I'm actually capable of arguing with her about it.

I need to go and blow my nose, again. I hope you are all well.

Subject line quote is, of course, from the opening sentence of Gibson's Neuromancer, which he apparently wrote without having any idea of where the novel was going to subsequently go. Writers' differing processes are fascinating.

My poor little Mermaid finally died. The Mermaid was, lest this sound unduly surreal, the white CitiGolf I've been driving for the last eight years or so, who earned her sobriquet from the mystic and largely inexplicable inscription on her number plate. Perhaps as a result of this she evinced an uncanny attraction to water over the time I drove her, not always with the best results given the traditional workings of the infernal combustion engine. She always had a tendency to run her cooling system dry and overheat, and over the years I've had the radiator replaced entirely, had insane quantities of water removed from the distributor cap after an unusually deep puddle experience, had water poured into my boots via the front panel as a result of rain becoming cached under the bonnet, and had the bodywork reconditioned because of the exuberant leaks which tended to manifest in jolly Cape Town storms. She finally expired a few days ago, completely in character, when the leaky head gasket I've been pussyfooting around all year got to the point where it let water into the system, and she started driving in a jerky, hiccuppy sort of way which definitely Boded. Poor Mermaid. Always yearning for the ocean in a doomed and futile sort of fashion.

So last night the nice man from Ray's magical auto-mechanic place came round, and after confirming my diagnosis ("I really shouldn't be driving her, should I?" "Uh...no.") bought her off me on the turn, pressing oodles of cash into my slightly fluttering hands, detached me from the registration papers and a receipt, and drove her, hiccuping gently, away, bound for a complete re-conditioning and resale at his capable hands. I hadn't expected it so quickly, and had to do an extremely speedy purge of the interior of all the random guff which piles up over time. (The yield: gorilla lock, mermaid charm from rear-view mirror, bottle of sunscreen, bottle of engine oil for babying the leaky head with, eight shopping bags, an exploded map book, my now entirely useless campus parking disk, a coke bottle full of water for babying the leaky cooling system with, a metric buttload of random paper bits those poor sods handout at traffic lights, five nursery plastic sheets for carrying plants on, a flourishing crop of mould in the boot, and that umbrella I thought I'd lost last winter, thus continuing the watery theme).

Watching her toddle off, I felt completely bereft. A car driven over time becomes a personality, both an organism for whose continued well-being one is responsible and a trusted compatriot who bears one's chattels and one's lazy form tirelessly about the show. Her possibly dodgy Dagon-worshipping traits aside, the Mermaid has served me faithfully; she's ported me around the city, up the campus hill daily, over the Neck repeatedly into Hout Bay to visit my father, on tarred roads and dirt, in hail and pelting winter rain and February heatwaves and those amazing Cape Town winds which try to playfully blow you off the freeway. She hasn't done much distance stuff, but has successfully ambled out to Arniston a couple of times. She had a game little heater but no air-con, the world's most terrible gearbox, and a faulty passenger-door interior handle which used to randomly entrap passengers to no discernible pattern, causing amusing levels of panicked scrabbling. (I always chose to interpret it as a sign of affection, a reluctance to relinquish the cherished passenger, but I doubt they felt it). She didn't have the personality of my Biscuit Tin, but I was fond of her, and used mutate "Mermaid" into "Merrymaid" at odd moments, and drive around singing Gilbert and Sullivan.

I feel as though I've carelessly allowed something fragile and complicated with whom I have a relationship of trust to slip out of my control. Did I damage her carelessly? Will she be OK? Will her next owner look after her properly? Shouldn't I have vetted them, like you do for dogs? Do I over-invest in inanimate objects?

So I'm carless again, and slightly tearful. Various confluences of the Cosmic Wossnames have determined that I'm trying to find myself a Toyota Yaris, if only because it narrows the field to manageable levels which stave off panic attack, and in defiance of the fact that it's a silly name. The Jo, with ineffable kindliness and self-sacrifice, has volunteered to haul me around to various auto dealers on Friday, and to pat my hand gently as I try to grapple with the technicalities of test-drives and finance and what have you. There's a sheaf of car ad printouts on my desk and a page of annoyed scrawls which determine, after horrible hold music has caused the ear-wax to melt and dribble out of my ears, that it's not going to be worth going through my bank, as they hedge their loans about with sharp stakes and unpalatable restrictions. As a result of the indefinitely-delayed adulthood occasioned by indefinite grad studenthood, this is the first time I've had to do this. I'm in a state of wibble.

However, this does mean that the state of fatigued uselessness which has dogged me for the last year and a half, may finally be lifting. The things I needed to do by the end of this year included a new car, a driver's licence and a new agent for the French house. I have a learner's, a car plan which will by gum by a car in jig time, and a contract from the new agent in my inbox. Two and a half out of three ain't bad.

Current Mood: verbose, apparently. Sorry.

I went to an SCA event on Saturday for the first time in... ooh, count them, nearly five years. (The break-up post was here). Saturday's event was not actually me Getting Back Together With The SCA, it was a once-off, prompted by the serious award-collecting of three dear friends. Since some of you who read this are SCAdians, I shall take a paragraph to dance happily around, gloating, cheering and throwing flowers. Mairi Jean, Garsiyya and Katherine are now all Companions of the Order of the Pelican, generating a sudden and spontaneous mini-Pelican Circle in the midst of the Southern Tors. (Which is the new way that's emerged of talking about the Joburg and Cape Town groups, respectively Griffin's Tor and Adamastor, and is curiously catchy). The current Queen of Drachenwald came down for the event, but brought no feathered folk with her, so I was the only extant Pelican in a radius of approximately five thousand miles. Under these circumstances it was absolutely unthinkable for me not to be present for all the pomp and circumstance and heraldry and court invocations and also the hugging and crying and passing of tissues, which definitely happened.

I am so glad I was there, and so unbelievably happy that this incredibly well-deserved honour has been awarded my dear and hard-working friends. But it was so, so odd to be back in garb again, and speaking the language, and feeling the status, and taking onto myself all the weight of participation and organisation which was the cause, ultimately, of me leaving in the first place. The event ran from 10am until 5pm, with a picnic lunch and two courts; for the entire day I was pretty much in there with the organising, helping to put up tents, acting as lady-in-waiting to her Majesty, arranging court, arranging vigils, participating in the court ritual, and then getting stuck into clean-up afterwards. It was as if I'd never been away.

Several people asked, rather wistfully, if this meant that I'd be back for events in the future, and I fell over my own tongue trying to respond. Because, here's the thing. However good a day it was - and it was - and however much I still value the things the SCA stands for, it still messes with my head. I woke up on Sunday after a restless and insomniac night, and lay in bed aching in every muscle and with heavy-headed consciousness of bone-deep exhaustion, and thought, "Oh, right. That's why I gave this up." Honestly, I felt as thought I'd been binge drinking for twelve hours straight, despite the fact that no more than half a goblet of perry passed my lips the whole day. (And, thanks, Ameline, the perry was lovely!). I'm still considerably below par today, and my feet and ankles are a mess.

The problem is, I think, that events tire me way beyond the physical: they represent continual interaction, continual demands on my energy and input, at a level which exceeds several times over my actual capacity. Looking back at the time I decided to stop playing, it's pretty much at the time when I was realising that I was fighting chronic fatigue from the damned glandular fever. It's only become worse after last year's little medical contremps. And, simultaneously, it happened at the time when I accepted a full-time job which entails a large chunk of time interacting with people in various intense and demanding ways. If the SCA is about anything, it's about people. I ain't got no more people time in me, or mental energy for trying to reconcile the highly complicated constellation of enjoyment and input and obligations and work and pleasure and guilt and friends which makes up my possibly co-dependent relationship with the SCA.

I had fun on Saturday, and it was deeply satisfying both to be present for the awards and to see all these people again. (And, score! I actually still fit into most of my garb! Even if the rabbit-fur trim on that surcoat had Gone Evil and exploded into clouds of hair when looked at sternly, necessitating its summary removal). But I don't think I'll be back barring similar circumstances. Saturday was interesting because it demonstrated fairly ineluctably that leaving was the right decision. This makes me sad.

Current Mood: complicated

It's apparently the sixth of the month. Not sure how that happened. It's gone past in a blur of meetings and stressed students. I had a very weird dream last night in which I was exploring a derelict haunted house in the woods somewhere, and kept encountering a ghost of a 4-year-old girl in a black dress who ran through the rooms with a fairly cheerful, focused, childlike intent, and looked perfectly substantial except for her tendency to run through people. I think my subconscious thinks I'm not real.

It does mean that I'm unfashionably late to acknowledge my intellectual debts, and the Duchess will have my head off forthwith. Consequently, Words Wot I Have Swiped In November:

2nd: Arcade Fire, "Wake Up", my second favourite song of theirs, and one of the ones I was rhapsodising about in the post.
5th: slightly sadistic Guy Fawkes rhymes. I've always loved the phrase "Gunpower, treason and plot", it's magnificently satisfying. Something about the balance of assonance with the scansion (the 3-2-1 syllable arc is pleasingly rhythmic) and the powerful plosive punch of "plot".
8th: I am quoting stoner-Fran Krantz in Cabin in the Woods. The bit where he arrives driving with a bong.
20th: my contractually obligated David Bowie quote, from "Always Crashing the Same Car", slightly doom-ladenly given that I was talking about taking my driver's test. (Again).
26th: the phrase is, of course, John Scalzi's. And highly characteristic.
27th: "Train in Vain" is a Clash song that I actually know better from the Manic Street Preachers cover. It's one of those weird songs which doesn't actually have the title phrase anywhere in the lyrics.
29th: if you don't recognise "The Hunting of the Snark" I'm saddened and disappointed.

Current Mood: contemplative

I have acquired, by some mystic process over the last year or two, a taste for fruit teas. I've always mentally classified them, along with rooibos, as "disgusting pseudo-tea", but then my erstwhile MA student Stacey gave me a bag of something with pomegranate and apple and I was hooked. This is terribly useful: these days if I have a milk drink of any sort before I go to bed I don't sleep because of all the mucus colonising my lungs, so a soothing blackcurrant and vanilla makes a lovely end to the day. It also means that I'm going through honey at a rate of knots, as I like fruit tea with a teaspoon of honey in it (and, ye gods, is that stuff becoming expensive. I always vaguely worried about the death of bees, and now I really do).

The other night I was digging in the jar for the last dregs, and absent-mindedly put a fingerful of honey straight into my mouth instead of the mug. I haven't done that in years: I'm not madly into honey on its own, and don't eat it on bread or waffles or the like. But that taste thing is startling, even more evocative than smell. Suddenly I was back in the room outside the research-station house we lived in when I was a child of 7 or 8, a whitewashed extension reached only from the outside, via a flight of steps. My dad kept bees for a lot of my childhood, and the outside room was where he stored the frames of comb and the jars and the extractor, and the strange white armour and veil he wore to work with the hives. (And the smoker. A bee-smoker is a weird little metal box with an open cone thingy you puff smoke out of - it always fascinated me).

I have no idea if my memories of the extractor are real or partially fantastic, but they're very vivid. I think my dad may, with characteristic Zimbo resourcefulness, have designed it himself, and either made it or caused it to be made. It was a large, white-painted drum on legs, with a spinning contraption on the inside holding the frames with the full comb, a giant handle to wind it with, and a spout at the bottom to collect the honey. You loaded the frames into the spinning thing and wound like hell, and all the honey, propelled by centrifugal force, flew out to the walls of the drum and ran down into the spout, to be collected either into drums, or directly into jars. (I suspect drums, I think there may have been straining and clarifying bits still to do). The noise it made was considerable, and somehow exciting and technical. It was a very sci-fi thing, that extractor.

Honey is magical stuff. I remember the bottling process, the slow, sensuous, organic flow of the viscous dollops into the carefully-sterilised jars; the few random bees who were always bumping around the room; the heavy sweetness of the scent, and the sharp smell of the wax which was melted down from the empty combs, and which my mother used to use for her batiks. The bee-room was at once a fascinating and an alarming space, to a child rife with both the attraction of the honey, and the fear of the drowsy, disoriented bees bumbling around, with the ever-present potential for pain if you accidentally brushed or stepped on one. We were occasionally given chunks of comb to suck and then chew, the weird, tooth-coating texture of the wax a definite offset against the honey itself. I've never liked comb much. It's possibly why I loved the extractor.

Bee-keeping is an integral part of my childhood: the thread of honey's availability in our meals, a luxury taken for granted; the neat boxes of jars we, I think, used to sell; and my dad all clumsy and alien in the suit with the veil. There was a terribly unfortunate concatenation of bee-keeping with goat-keeping a bit later on, when I was a teenager and we'd moved into town; bees respond very badly to goats, and a swarm moved into the stable where the bee stuff was kept, and attacked the three goats who were living down in the paddock. My mother, amazing lady that she is, braved the swarm to rescue the goats and hauled them off the vet, she and all three of them swollen with stings. They all survived, although at least one of the goats had been so badly stung around the ears that she lost large chunks of them, and always presented thereafter a rather rakishly ragged look.

I suspect that one of the appeals of honey is in precisely this beautiful balance of reward and danger, its inextricability from the humble hard-working bee with the nasty sting, and the burning pain which marks the self-immolatory death of the guardian. Honey makes us thieves; its sweetness is stolen. And a spoonful of honey, apparently, holds the past.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: for some reason, Pet Shop Boys in my HEAD!

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Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with introspection

Day 11: total perspective vortex

Day 8: inner conflict

various flavours of moat

rage against the machine

headology

kindred spirits

floating in a most peculiar way

you want to kindle that old flame

she's a footprint on the beach and the tide's coming in

connecting to places we have known

in space no-one can hear you burn

men that laugh and weep

postcolonic

we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit

these are my guns, these are my furs, this is my living room

tuned to a dead channel

You'll know that fish has lately fed on what remains of Ethelred

I'm damned if I see how the hellican

oh my fur and whiskers!

how doth the little busy bee

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December 2024

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