Freckles & Doubt

I arose betimes this morning, owing to the ungodly necessity for a dentist's appointment at 7.30am. I'd be more bitter about this hideous intrusion into my righteous vacation oversleeping, except that (a) it was the only time available because my dentist is very popular, which is because he's very good, which is curiously reassuring quite apart from his lovely chairside manner; (b) when I'm still fuddled with sleep is not a bad time to have to endure sharp pokey things in my mouth, I'm honestly not noticing much; and (c) as a reward for virtue, he pronounced my teeth absolutely fine and cleared for Christmas. Take that, cosmic wossnames!

I then bounced around like a completely mad thing and achieved enormous amounts, including the last of my Christmas shopping, a visit to the police station, and the proofing and delivery to the graphic design company of the final vacation-infesting work project I needed to hunt down and kill. This last was disgustingly filled with layout errors - I'm red ink to the elbows and feeling vindictively satisfied. I am by no means a layout professional, but I've done quite enough of it in an amateur capacity to become extremely testy on the subject of ham-handed hacks who ignore the logic of header levels and don't bother to re-format tables after they've stripped the coding from the Word doc. In revenge, they're going to have to deal with the efforts of my minion who formats indents with a long line of spaces. Hah. Also, people still do that? Good lord.

The police station was for an affidavit, which was annoying in the extreme, and makes me rather regret my own Lawful Good tendencies. I'm really very Lawful Good. I pay my television licence annually, on time, despite the fact that I honestly think the last time I watched anything on TV was about three years ago, just before that big winter storm wrapped the TV antenna in knots and stuffed the reception. When my dad moved into frail care I goodly acquired him a separate licence. Now that he no longer needs it I haven't renewed it, which means I'm receiving increasingly querulous and threatening text messages from SABC, invoking legal action. It transpires they won't call off the lawyers until they have a copy of the death certificate, plus a signed affidavit from me testifying to the fact that the TV wasn't mine and has been given back. I am effectively being punished by acres of red tape for the fact that I'm obeying the rules - if I'd followed the general principles of about ninety percent of my South African brethren and hadn't bothered to license the wretched thing, I wouldn't have to go through this. But Lawful Good prevails. Bugger it.

It does, however, explain why I'm getting such an unholy kick out of Smallville - I'm onto Season 2, which is giving me giggling fits at intervals for no adequately defined reason. Superman, as superheroes go, is really the definition of Lawful Good. Smallville is a cute puppy, really short on brain but adorable and affectionate and inclined to chew your shoelaces. It deserves a post of its own, which I shall perpetrate in the none too distant future. Because I can. Besides, Superman. Or at least Clark Kent.

By which I mean, Victory for Microsoft, curse its name. (An integral part of my new personal religion is identifying That Company and all its works as having the same approximate relationship to Evil as tele-evangelism does to Christianity, i.e. being twice damned not only for Evil, but for commercial perversion of the absolute form). I have restored normal display, but only at the cost of an hour re-installing Win98, and another half hour removing all the dear little bits (Outlook, IE, internet connection, etc) that it insists on infecting me with, in the apparent misguided belief that I'd have any possible use for them other than triggering episodes of linoleum-chewing and foaming at the mouth. However, I can now see my screen again, and read e-mail, which means imminent nervous collapse is averted. So is the headache: the dancing spots in the vision were obviously the display problems, not Barthes, who I actually seem to have under control this afternoon.

A new and horrible student behaviour is rearing an ugly head. They get up and leave in the middle of my lectures. Droves of them. I think probably fifteen or twenty did it in the lecture this morning, out of a class of several hundred. The impression I have is that they listened to my carefully-chosen remarks for 20 minutes or so, and then decided I wasn't interesting, and took their valuable attention elsewhere. It makes me hopping mad. Even more so than the cellphone-answerers - there was only one of him, and he had the grace to look sheepish.

Of course, it's actually possible that they're all receiving silent cellphone calls in the lecture and haring off to answer them, which is in itself a scary thought. Have you noticed that all the cutesy cellphone ads in movies, the ones that ask you to switch your cellphone off, have all recently changed to asking you to switch it to silent? Subtext: it's okay to answer it in a movie, just not okay for it to ring. Basically, the cellphone companies are no longer able to suggest that switching off a cellphone is cool or desirable. We are seeing the rise of a generation who will be constitutionally incapable of switching off cellphones, since that entails, horrors, being out of touch.

I am not of this generation. I've lost my dratted cellphone again - I think I probably left it in someone's car. I keep forgetting about the wretched thing. If it were a tamagotchi, it would be dead. Memo to self: ixnay on the baby production, I'd probably leave it in a supermarket somewhere. Like my mother once did, memorably, with a submachine gun, or possibly assault rifle. (Fails militarygeek roll, despite years of exposure to bumpycat).