Freckles & Doubt

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

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

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

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

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

I was driving up Klipper Rd to campus yesterday morning, and there was a dude stopped on the side of the road with his car on fire. Literally on fire. The bonnet was aflame in a more or less circular patch across most of it. I have no idea what would cause that degree of catastrophic failure, but it was beyond catastrophic. Someone actually photographed it, which must have been a few minutes after I passed it, viz:



When I drove down in the evening it was a burned-out shell. No paint left at all. Gutted. It may have actually exploded. It was weirdly post-apocalyptic, and vaguely associated in my mind with student protesters burning buses. Maybe the car self-destructed in solidarity? But I can't actually get my head around how bad the engine problem actually has to be for that to happen so suddenly and completely.

Something else I can't get my head around: student narcissism. I was stopped ten minutes before the end of the day by a student, who wanted advice, from me, now, and would not accept that I wasn't available, wasn't the right person, and the advice she needed could be given tomorrow by other advisors who were there expressly for that purpose. Followed me to my office. Sat in the chair asking questions about course choices, and every time I told her "no, please sort this out tomorrow", seemed not to comprehend. Argued more, tried to slide in more course questions, talked about her medical condition and the difficulties she was having, which seemed to be largely imaginary. I eventually invented an appointment, twenty minutes later, and threw her out, still trying to con me into giving her detailed advice for which I had consistently told her I was not available. Who does that? what the hell is going on in her head that she cannot compute that I have other pressing commitments which make me unavailable to her, and to address which there is an elaborate system to ensure she receives the advice she needs? I accept that students are largely just post-adolescent and have not yet experienced the Total Perspective Vortex, but seriously, I think that was pathological.