Freckles & Doubt

I woke up spontaneously at a quarter to five this morning, which means it must be a random day ending in "Y", and bugger insomnia, anyway. Since I am functionally incapable of getting back to sleep once I've woken up, I did the usual, which entails stealth!tea (the plumbing in this house makes loud, weird noises in the neighbour's roof if you don't switch on taps strategically and in carefully-observed patterns, so obscenely early tea-drinking requires care) and climbing back into bed with two cats, a mug of Earl Grey and the Ipad, whereon I am currently reading Kindle books because the screen is larger. And I had just randomly bought the new Naomi Novik, which is called A Deadly Education, and which I thereafter read cover to cover in a giant, ravenous gollup between 5am and 8am, at which point I exhaled, muttered "She's so good! she's so fucking brilliant" in slightly resentful tones, and staggered off to work.

(Parenthesis: staggering off to work is so much better when it's literally staggering into the study to switch on the computer, and does not require dressing, driving, brushing one's hair or actual coherence).

I completely adored Naomi Novik's fairy tales, Spinning Silver (Jewish take on Rumplestiltskin; brilliant) and Uprooted (really dangerous darkly magical forests, also wizard's towers; brilliant). I also completely adored A Deadly Education, which is what you'd get if you crossed Lord of the Flies and the Hunger Games with A Wizard of Earthsea and executed the result with considerable verve in the mode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer while flipping a giant Up Yours over your shoulder in the general direction of J K Rowling. Which is to say, it's a very dark magical school story about what happens when both magic and magical education are carnivorous and predatory.

It's also about power and privilege. Everything Naomi Novik writes is about power and privilege, she's actually an extremely and deceptively political writer. She also did Napoleonic wars with dragons, remember? You are so busy being charmed by her tough, pragmatic protagonists that you don't notice the politics until it's socked you between the eyes with a brick. (She also severely does crossovers, apparently, which I suppose is logical enough given the fan fiction.) I was not so half-asleep this morning that I could not detect that this dark magic school story is also a more than somewhat searing critique of capitalism.

Anyway, I recommend Deadly Education,if you don't mind your school stories with a side order of death and really nasty politics. In addition to the politics, it has really interesting people. I am now more than somewhat slavering for the sequel. Sigh.

(Cottage Economy, William Cobbett, 1833)

I am a disgrace to my Zimbabwean roots in that I do not drink beer, and have, as suggested above, entirely replaced it with tea. Brothel here I come. Apparently. Also, while a good gossip with a friend over a cuppa is a lovesome thing, most of my tea-drinking is a solitary vice, which suggests that I have replaced gossip with fanfic and internet memes. Seems appropriate.

We are in the middle of marks checking, which means I've spent the last two days immersed in board schedules, as a capper to a week of trying with increasing desperation to pin down reluctant and frequently self-absorbed academics for committee duty. Please insert the annual rant here, with the caveat that this year the whole protests/delayed exams thing has made things so immeasurably much more complicated and annoying that the actual board schedule checking was comparatively pleasant. Nothing like a Total Perspective Vortex, after all.

I am working at home today as a small tornado of electricians is rewiring my campus office. They tried to do it in the middle of the marks checking organisation chaos, and I fended them off with sticks. I and the cats approve mightily of this working-at-home thing. I am a slightly pale, wrung, shadowy thing at the moment, not because of tea (the tea's helping) but because of administrative exhaustion and heatstress, and not having to move very much is singularly pleasant.

It's Hellweek! The first week of term has stomped around, my life is full of incessant student demands and queues for change of curriculum, advisors are defaulting in all directions, and I have random insomnia and am navigating all of the above on five hours of sleep. Despite which, I'm curiously cheerful, possibly because I'm manic on sleep deprivation, and propose to distract myself pleasantly by burbling about tea.

This morning's challenges were materially increased by the discovery that my campus Twinings cache was tragically empty. I have a serious Earl Grey addiction. I mean, serious. Six mugs a day serious, although more at the moment because I'm stressed, and continuous caffeine with bergamot apparently soothes me to the point where I don't actually go for student throats with my teeth. (My brower's spellchecker also doesn't know how to spell "bergamot", which I consider something of a personal betrayal). Said addiction is peculiarly crippling because a six cups a day habit has apparently habituated me to Twinings to the extent where any other brand tastes bizarre and unlikely. We will draw a veil over the cat-faces I make when forced by cruel circumstances to drink so-called "tea" that isn't Earl Grey at all. Inhuman, is what.

I am not only ridiculously picky about my tea brand, I am hyper-ridiculously picky about how I drink it. I don't like it too strong; the teabag must steep for no more than five seconds. I am not fond of that sense that tannin is coating my teeth, although even at my strength habits sheer volume is probably coating my stomach, and is definitely coating my mugs. Irreverent friends (possibly Phleep) have categorised my milk requirements as "Show it the cow"; rigorous testing with a measuring spoon reveals that in fact I need between 5 and 7 mls of milk to make it drinkable, and I have on occasion made myself tea, incautiously overmilked it, curled my lip, and poured the resulting tragic beverage down the sink before re-making it from scratch. I brought myself down from two spoons of sugar to one about a decade ago, but haven't, despite frequent attempts, managed to reduce it any further. Since at present I'm evincing a tendency not to eat at all until supper, I figure I probably need the blood sugar. There is, in short, a good and sufficient reason why, if you offer me tea in your home, I will probably gently shoulder you aside and make it myself. Because, honestly, there's only so much I can expect from my friends, and precisely two of them have ever learned to make it to my exacting and unreasonable specifications.

People give me boxes of tea. It's very sweet. The aforementioned Phleep, who also takes his caffeine seriously, brings me tins from Harrods every so often, and it's my actually-palatable fallback for those terrible moments when all the supermarkets in my immediate radius run simultaneously out of Twinings. Occasionally students give me tea, as a thank-you for my intrepid negotiation of particularly uphill tracts of curriculum advice, also incidentally raising my hopes for the basic observation skills of the younger generation. Which brings me to the actual purpose of this post, which is to record for posterity the fact that something called "New English Teas", of which I have never heard prior to this kindly student donation, (a) does a nice line in pretty scrolly boxes and packaging their Earl Grey, (b) claims to be "BEST BEFORE END: 6153", which seems frankly unlikely, and (c) tastes almost, but not quite, completely unlike Earl Grey. However, I contrive to soldier on grimly.

On the general principle of sharing internet joy wherever it may be found, this is a thing of subtle beauty whose payback, when you work it out, causes (a) giggling, and (b) forgiveness of the fact that it's actually a rickroll.

My subject line, not unnaturally, quotes "Tea for Two", which, since we seem to be doing random personal factoids today, I am fond of mostly because of an anecdote my father used to tell about Victor Borge playing it upside down.

A brief vignette from an actual telephone conversation recently conducted:

(INT, administrative office. Desk cluttered with papers, cat pictures on the wall, steaming cup of Earl Grey desk right. EXTEMPORANEA discovered at desk, gazing at computer screen clogged with FEC rules, with furrowed brow).

PHONE: *rings*
ME: Hello, extemporanea speaking.
STUDENT (in slow, sleepy tones): Um, hello, I'm phoning to find out if you've received an email.
*Long pause. Further amplification is not forthcoming.*
ME (with commendable patience): I receive several dozen emails a day. What was it about, and when did you send it?
STUDENT (vaguely): About five minutes ago.
*Another long pause. Tumbleweeds.*
ME (patience clearly eroding): Which email are you referring to?
STUDENT: I sent it from my Gmail account.
ME (now thoroughly exasperated): Who am I speaking to?
STUDENT (with soul's-awakening realisation): Oh. Oh, yes. *gives actual name and details, stumbling over name as though it's actually an alias. I deal with his reasonably simple problem, put down phone, sigh.*

(INT. now features visible chew marks on the desk).

I still haven't received the actual email.

By way of distraction, this Nando's ad is making its way around my Twitter feed and environs, although actually I first saw it on nimnod's blog. It's pure, unadulterated comedy genius, and causes me to laugh unexpectedly every time I remember it, which given the tenor of my week (hideous) is a definite bonus.

I am home! words cannot express my joy. Kindly imagine me hobbling around in a pained but ecstatic circle dance, with gestures of relief and freedom. I have Earl Grey, I have a real computer with proper screen and keyboard, I have my kitties sitting off in the middle distance looking bored and unimpressed, which is their traditional response to me being away for any length of time. I also have my amazing mother, who has arrived for her mid-year holiday only to have to divide her time between assisting me to hobble around the house, and scritching Todal behind the ears. (Todal got bitten quite badly by some unspecified fiend-creature while I was away, and has a bald patch and umpteen stitches in her back, and a cone around her head which precludes her accessing her own itchy spots. The level of medical malfunction in this house currently is a bit scary. On the upside, Toad is making up for a lot of Hobbit-bullying by virtue of the fact that he's scared of her cone and runs away like a big wimp when she approaches. I fancy she's enjoying this.)

Apparently I can expect six months on warfarin (no wild diet changes, no anti-inflammatories, no more than a glass of wine a day), another month or so before this leg stops hurting, and a recovery period of up to a couple of weeks before I cease feebly wibbling to the point where I can venture back to work. This means that I leave the Faculty in the lurch in the first week of term, which is a change of curriculum period and one of the busiest of my year, full of responsibility for complicated advisor timetables, and infinite student queries. There are very few back-up systems to replace my several quite unique functions at this time, so it's going to be salutary for all of us, and will hopefully allow me to implement a campaign to rationalise and support some of the more exhausting requirements of this job in future. I am also pleased to report a really quite surprisingly low level of guilt at the whole leaving-them-in-the-lurch bit. This kind of drastic body-she-is-scratched thing happens to me because I'm exhausted and run-down, and the job is to blame for a lot of that.

Anyway. Languishing in hospital chatting to my mother in the last couple of days has resulted in an extremely happy-making random revelation, which I shall proceed to share in the interests of geek cred. Rampant atheism, skepticism and a hearty dislike of Tom Cruise have given me a serious loathing for weird cults in general and Scientology in particular, but this may also be genetic. It causes me untold joy to learn that my grandfather, my mother's father, was on the Board of Censors for Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, and he was apparently instrumental in having Scientology banned from the country. That was obviously reversed at some stage, the church is active in Zim now, but they booted old L. Ron the hell out in the 60s. My mother remembers my grandfather bringing home huge piles of info on Scientology to read through, and that he hated the cult with quite a passionate hatred and worked very hard to have it banned. I love this. It's a lovely bit of family history worthy of innocent pride. My grandfather was a difficult, introverted man, but he was a sturdy rationalist and could clearly kick butt when required to.

Obligatory Reverse Inside-Out Australia Blog photograph: Sydney was prone to really beautiful clouds.

Today I have:

1. Interviewed 22 potential orientation leaders, most of whom were lovely and restore my faith in human nature at least partially;
   
   
2. Given two lectures, comprising (a) a brisk discussion of the iniquities of Facebook, (b) a quick jaunt around the highly gendered socio-cultural resonances to the terms "slut" and "man-whore" and (c) a dissection, in fascinated detail, of the nasty chat-room-sex scene from Closer;
   
   
3. Made four separate cups of tea, none of which I had time to finish before they went cold;
   
   
4. Realised, midway through all of the above, that I completely omitted to post a Micfic last night, and didn't bring the damned thing up to campus so I can post it now;
   
   
5. Done all of the above on slightly over four hours of sleep, as a result of a hideously insomniac night characterised by (a) a really odd dream waking me up at 1am so that I only got back to sleep around 2, (b) a persistent mosquito waking me up at 3am so that I only got back to sleep at around 5, and (c) the alarm waking me up at 7 with a distressing finality I can only feebly resent owing to concomitant lack of brain.

Tomorrow should be better; only 18 OLs to interview (unless more schedule before then, which they probably will), and one lecture. I shall face them on (a) more sleep, courtesy of those nice pills the nice doctor lady gave me, and (b) Red Bull, which I haven't had time to procure today.

Excelsior!

So, orientation starts tomorrow. I've worked a week of 11-hour days in preparation, and most of yesterday and today, in between odd bouts of socialising (librsa's birthday picnic yesterday, lunch with friendly_shrink today). Two hours of photocopying this morning, an extended wrestle with advisor schedules and an online evaluation yesterday, an evening spent writing up everything I know about curriculum advice in alphabetical order, which was a strangely surreal procedure. I even put up a Microfic, although it's a very quick and unpolished effort.

It is remotely possible that I'm prepared for tomorrow. This is not, of course, going to prevent me from lying awake tonight fretting about all the little details I've forgotten, and whether my OLs will rise magnificently to the occasion or will crumble under the onslaught. (They've always done the former, but I'm paranoid).

General lessons learned this last week:

1. Never administer enormous logistical challenges if you're a control freak.
   
2. This is where my health problems are stemming from. I've been fine for months, but my sinuses are acting up today for the first time since around August. Bloody stress.
   
3. It may produce presentations rife with thundering cliché, but Powerpoint is weirdly easy to use. It certainly beats my previous line in dodgy overhead projector copies.
   
4. Earl Grey makes the world go round.

I shall now go and watch a celebratory Smallville episode before toddling goodly off to bed at 9pm in preparation for a 6am start. Sigh. Season 4. They're making Clark play football. I don't get American football. It's a completely bizarre combination of macho and mincing, and I'm finding it both incomprehensible and insanely boring to watch. I say this from the point of view of someone who finds a slow, pleasant enjoyment in several arcane hours of cricket. I suppose it takes all sorts.

Wish me luck! I shall be thin on the ground for the next few days.

Gah. One of those days when I've boiled the kettle four times and still haven't managed to make the cup of tea. This is the time of year when I most hate my job: I am juggling four major and complicated organisational challenges, at least part of all of which involves students phoning me up and being plaintive. The Nibbled To Death By Hordes Of Mice quotient is very high. Also, insomnia last night doesn't help, while I lie awake remembering important things I haven't done. Just to add to the joy, the campus internet has decided to nominate today as one of meditation, which means there's a fractional delay on every letter I type. It's very annoying.

On the upside, the amazing people at Loot have apparently arm-wrestled the Evil Anti-Season-4 Smallville Cult into submission, because my copy has apparently been shipped. Owing to Smallville's tendency to finish its seasons on cheesy cliffhangers with practically everyone possibly dead or incarcerated in insane asylums, I'm more than usually twitchy at the lack of instant gratification. Also, I really miss Joss's tendency to damned well finish a season arc. It suggests an actual confidence in the return of his audience which the Cheap Shot Cliffhanger simply doesn't. Sigh. I am, nonetheless, rather looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with oodles of kryptonite, bucketloads of teen angst, the ongoing train smash that is Luthor family dynamics, and Clark Kent's cheekbones.

Now I shall go back to assessing the curricula of student appeal cases, wrangling OLs, fielding plaintive admissions emails and herding curriculum advisors into training. Much of the actual hard grind of finishing up handouts and websites and things for these projects is, alas, going to be done this weekend. I think my Evil Landlord's fell influence on the weekend work front is rotting my moral fibre.

I seem to have spent a lot of last night arguing with the head of department while trying to sign up for the correct Psychology courses to complete my major, with the intention of doing Honours and actually becoming a psychologist. The outstanding courses involve a lot of stats, so it's probably fortunate that at this point the unspecified saboteurs did their evil stuff and tinkered with the giant baroque fountain to connect it with the volcanic subterranean river so it spewed an enormous geyser of boiling water about a kilometre into the air, showering Cape Town with hot rain. I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something about my job. Also, I blame the comparative tameness of the imagery on the fact that I didn't actually get to see the Harry Potter film yesterday, since my mother was involved in baby-sitting duties and she wants to see it too. Maybe tonight.

I was for some reason in a very good mood for most of yesterday, as evinced by my tendency to wander around the faculty singing Belle and Sebastian to myself, while students and admin gave me funny looks. Today I'm wrestling with the labyrinthine improbabilities of Music degrees and am monumentally grumpy. On the upside, Sven&Tanya gave me an amazing giant book of chocolate recipes for my birthday, and I finally stopped vacillating between the 14 different versions of chocolate brownies sufficiently to actually try one out over the weekend. Music degree hair-tearing thus nicely leavened by copious application of Earl Grey and occasional interludes of chocolatey goodness (lovely recipe, but I have to learn the precise skill of undercooking brownies to leave them all moist in the middle. More practice clearly indicated.). Next up: the chocolate torte with swirled cream cheese topping, and the brownie recipe with bits of embedded nougat. Damn.

Quite the worst part about a full-time job - or, possibly the combination of full-time job with Sid and glandular wossnames - is that it renders me incapable of much over the weekends, as I veg out and gently recover sanity. This, alas, is not good for my research goals, or for the marking I should have been doing. Do I care? Not a whole lot, no.

In default of actual brain, or actual ability to be interesting, I shall fall back on the eternal blogging standbys: viz, grammar, and cats. ( Behind the cut, since both are photo-heavy. )