Freckles & Doubt

you know, I think that epic month-long 'flu may, in retrospect, actually have been COVID, because I am still not right - still coughing, phlegmy, tired, tending to throw out random medical wossnames to no fixed pattern. (Second breast abscess in a year! wtf? why the hell should my Truly Weird Boobs spontaneously generate deep-seated abscesses to no fixed pattern or purpose, by way of Interesting Addition to their existing tendencies to fibroids, cysts and Generalised Bra Loathing? the abscesses hurt like hell and make me feel like death, and the necessary 10-day antibiotic course to suppress them makes me feel only marginally less like curling up into a ball like a woodlouse and trying to hibernate for a decade or two. And then a UTI. Yay.)

And, of course, I don't know if the epic month-long 'flu was actually COVID or not because at the time, I couldn't find a COVID testing centre, and the doctor more or less shrugged and told me to self-isolate for ten days just in case. This country has, for reasons best known to itself but probably not unrelated to our very large segment of population living near the poverty level, proliferated COVID testing centres rather than making self-administered COVID tests freely available. Which is all fine and well, there was a drive-through testing station on Main Road a minute away from my house for two years, except of course we lifted lockdown and mask mandates about three weeks before my 'flu hit (which, suspicious timing, anyway), and the testing centres all folded their tents in the night and stole away. I have subsequently discovered, way after the fact, that my local pharmacist will still administer a COVID test on request, but nobody seems to sell them.

It's Schroedinger's Pandemic again. Although it's still around, we are studiously all looking in the other direction and going "la la la", so it's not really happening. Which I know is really a function of relatively high vaccination levels and a reasonable degree of exposure immunity, and most people who catch it are vaccinated and don't get it seriously, but still, it feels very laissez faire. (My mum informs me that the husband of a school friend caught it, spent six weeks in a coma and died earlier this year, so it's definitely still out there, but he was for no adequately defined reason not actually vaccinated, which seems mad under the circs).

Anyway. One result of lockdown for two years has been that I didn't use any of my medical leave allocation at all for that period. I've used ten days of it in the last month and a half. I am surprised to find myself thinking of lockdown with frankly wistful nostalgia - it seems to be better for my physical health as well as mental. But apparently in later life I am regressing to Princess in Tower mode. Despite the potentially significant fact that I have been randomly growing my hair long again, I shall resolutely ignore any potential princes.

Oh thank fuck, that was The Pivotal Point. The moment, in this whole registration/orientation clusterfuck, where I have created and made accessible pretty much everything that will allow both registration and orientation to function, at least after a fashion. Guidelines are written and uploaded to a shared drive, people are recruited and trained, websites are poised to go live and have lots of people with access to them, troubles of various sorts have been shot, the whole shaky edifice has rumbled into motion and is tottering onward. If I am eaten by the cats tomorrow, or abducted by aliens, or succumb suddenly to COVID, the processes will be less efficient, and a number of people, some of whom deserve it, will have to work a lot harder to compensate, but the whole thing shouldn't fall over.

If I do suddenly disappear, incidentally, you will be able to tell it's the alien abduction from the absence not only of me but of the cats, the computers and my book collection, and also probably from the fallen placard in the back garden, the one lying forlornly amid the scorch marks on the astroturf, and reading, in Plaintive Italic, "TAKE ME AWAY FROM ALL THIS". You can imagine me waving to Perseverance and Ingenuity as we cruise past Mars, because Perseverance's adventures are making me very, very happy. (Tracy, sorry, I owe you a WhatsApp, I keep getting sidetracked by crises).

My subject line is from XKCD's Death Star theory of viral immunisation, which is an absolutely beautiful act of symbolic conflation and possibly my favourite thing to happen this year so far. (Also, the Star Wars narrative has a particular and horrible application to my twin Death Stars of registration and orientation: I kill one, then simply have to start from scratch and kill the other). If the aliens don't, in fact, abduct my willing self, and this benighted country ever gets it together to vaccinate me, every time I wander incautiously into public spaces I will fondly imagine hordes of tiny X-wings going "AAAAAAAAAAA!" and scrambling in droves to battle incoming evil.

Trying to generate an Annual Scorecard for 2020 is really rather like surveying the shattered ruins and desecrated coastline where Great Cthulhu rampaged out of the ocean, and trying to award it points for formal landscape gardening. It feels both futile and hubristic. Which isn't going to stop me from doing it, because Tradition Must Be Observed, but if I'm carried off by nightgaunts tonight you'll know why.

It's not even as though 2020 has been, objectively, the worst year in my life: large tracts of its day-to-day have been placid, even pleasant, and I have some slightly epic bad stuff to which to compare it. I have survived, in the course of a life spent in a relatively small corner of southern Africa, one war, two regime changes, my parents' divorce, a home invasion, some unusually destructive romantic relationships, two graduate degrees, depression, injury, a DVT with pulmonary embolisms, two years of student protests, and the slow death by motor neurone disease of my incomeless father. I can't say that 2020 has been the worst year of my life, because (a) its manifest evils impacted me personally only at second hand, and (b) it's difficult to quantify across such disparate experiences, like the Professor Branestawm process of trying to do sums in apples and oranges and get the answer in lemon curd tarts. Both the protests and my dad's death were probably more savage in terms of actual psychological wear and tear on me personally.

But on a global scale 2020 has definitely been the most comprehensively befuckened, and has reshaped most dramatically the structure and tenor of my daily life. I was fortunate, in 2020, to have a guaranteed salary and the infrastructure to work at home, and to escape both COVID infection and the infection or death of anyone close to me. I am horribly, horribly conscious that huge numbers of others, both at home and globally, have been nothing like so lucky in either medical or financial terms: that kind of privilege is an empathic responsibility. It's also a testament to the clusterfuck that this year has been that America's BLM movement and increasing drift to a fascist state, and the UK's Brexit stupidities, have been eclipsed. In any other year they would be the top of everyone's worry list, not a couple of items down in a plethora of ills.

Things achieved by me in 2020: Survival with health and sanity more or less intact, which is in itself a commendable achievement under the circumstances. Sufficient self-discipline to be very, very careful and aware of COVID precautions. The successful and relatively painless translation of major faculty admin processes into remote formats. An ordered and increasingly comfortable home (being at home 24/7 is really good for noticing and remedying minor home decorating deficiencies, who knew?). Considerably advanced strategies in surviving endless Teams meeting while keeping the swearing and screaming firmly on mute.

Things not achieved by me: A new job, shaking the dust of the country off my booted feet, global political optimism. Since the epidemic kiboshed all of the above fairly comprehensively there isn't really much I could do about it, so I propose not, for once, to feel guilty.

Losses: respect for the US and UK's political systems; any desire to live in either. 1.8 million COVID deaths, which is staggering enough to be faintly unreal. It will only get worse.

Things discovered by me in 2020: mask-construction, mask-wearing, hand sanitiser, working from home, Teams, Zoom and their horrible ilk, robot vacuums, white chocolate in lemon cheesecake, The Amazing Devil, console ownership, Becky Chambers, Vitamin D, The Witcher in both book and game form and the inevitable fanfic (was that all only this year? good lord), even higher than the usual levels of apocalypse-anticipatory grocery hoarding, sharing memes with my niece (the Destiel meltdown was a gift), American and UK politics as a rather nastily tragicomic spectator sport.

Resolutions for 2021: remember to brush my teeth in the morning, working from home has screwed with my usual home-leaving routine and I keep forgetting. Any further commitment, resolution-wise, seems incautious. I am confidently expecting 2021 to be as much of a shitshow, if not more so, and it definitely will be COVID-wise; there's slightly more hope that the US political nastinesses will die down with sane incumbents in office, and with any luck the UK will break up so that sensible portions of it can rejoin the EU. However, I am not sanguine, and will therefore make no further resolutions other than to keep my head down, survive and remain healthy.

Yesterday was a public holiday*. Owing to the featureless slide of pandemic days spent working from home, I had completely forgotten about this, so I staggered out of bed at a quarter to eight as usual, placated the cats, watered the garden, sat down at my desk and cleared my inbox before realising, an hour later, that I needn't be working, actually. Apparently the pandemic and attendant socio-cultural wossnames is capable of delivering pleasant surprises occasionally. Pleased, I spent the rest of the Day of Reconciliation peaceably slaughtering raiders and supermutants in Fallout, so at least I was on theme.

Other tiny silver linings to this year's horrible black clouds: working from home means I am actively and somewhat more effectually druiding than usual. The giant granadilla vine in the big box died a few months back, which I honestly don't think was me, the neighbour's spirited attempt at Audrey II died at the same time, so I am darkly suspecting a granadilla-fancying disease. Possibly COVID. In the spirit of battening down the hatches in an apocalypse, I tried planting veggies again, which worked appallingly when I tried it when I first moved in here (I killed tomatoes! tomatoes are unkillable!), but which has seemed to benefit from the continuous attention. I now have broad beans, and spring onions, and fancy dark-leaved lettuce! One bean plant randomly died for some reason, I think something gnawed its feet off, I shall cautiously put a baby tomato into the gap and hope.



* Day of Reconciliation, which is, if you think about it, a bizarrely edgy and blood-soaked sort of commemoration, representing as it does two opposed military achievements: the Afrikaner victory over the Zulus at Blood River, and the founding of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing in the struggle years, and its subsequent campaign of bombings etc. Which didn't, I have to say, create nearly the body count of Blood River. I find the duality of the date to offer rather an odd notion of "reconciliation". More of a meaningful nod, with aggressive eye contact, from the new dispensation to the old. And ritualistically and slightly threateningly remembering war doesn't seem to me to be a good basis for peace, really.

My subject line is T S Eliot, weirdly, the one oddly rhythmic and rhyming bit in the middle of "Burnt Norton" which I've always loved, and around which I once wrote a largely unsuccessful science fiction story which was rejected, with a very nice note, by an sf magazine.

Today's weird fact! abandoning the lockdown day count in my subject lines appears to have somewhat neutralised my posting avoidance, I think I was being actively repelled by the amount of counting I needed to do on my slightly mathematically-challenged fingers in order to work out what day we were in. Alternatively, it's just depressing to contemplate how many days there have been since this whole nasty mess started. (Bonus weird fact: I enjoyed maths at school, despite crashing spectacularly out of the A-level version, but the other day I realised I can no longer remember how to do the particularly elegant abstract origami of either calculus or simultaneous equations. This is sad. I should find a YouTube video or something).

Today's additional and completely unrelated weird fact: having a healthy videogaming habit can create some incredibly bizarre cross-universe identifications given the fact that Western video games appear to draw from a comparatively small pool of voice actors. I am very voice- and accent-conscious when playing, it's a huge component in my choices for videogame romances (mmmm Fenris), and I'm getting weirdly good at picking up familiar tones, even behind slightly different accents and in completely different contexts. (The fact that I obsessively replay favourite games is probably also implicated, to be honest). This tends to leave me with rather odd predispositions to like or dislike particular NPCs based on the roles played by their voice actors in completely different games.

I am still hacking happily through Kingdoms of Amalur, which is still pretty and fey and consoling, while allowing me to work out my frustrations by hitting Bad Things very hard with lightning attacks and a Big Sword. While it's not a companion-oriented RPG in the mode of Bioware, it has a huge NPC cast and seems to particularly use familiar voices. Viz.:

• OMG almost the entire cast of Critical Role is in here! Good grief! I don't even know their voices particularly well, given that I've never actually watched an episode of Critical Role and have imbibed what I know of it via clips on Tumblr, but it explained a lot about the niggling familiarities when I pulled up the cast list. (Also, Laura Bailey is Serena in Skyrim, I'd just played that DLC before Amaluring, who knew!)
  
• Some of the minor characters are played by that one dude who plays minor Dark Elf characters in Skyrim, the guy with the slightly nasal baritone. Given the tendency of IMDB to list voice actors with one or two main roles and then "additional voices", I don't know who it is, but every time I hear him I look wildly around for dragons. Oh, wait, I know who it is, it's Erandur, which makes it Keith Szarabajka, which I think is impressive on my part because it means I identified him playing characters like "Citizen" and "Soldier" in Amalur, and they don't have huge amounts of dialogue.
  
• There are also multiple turns from the guy who does the vaguely Scandinavian accent for lots of the Nords in Skyrim, notably Vilkas, which IMDB says makes him Michael Gough. It was seriously dislocating to have the Vilkas personality - slow, serious, meathead - coming from high-ranking Fae lords in Amalur.
  
• Great tracts of Dragon Age. Seriously. Commander Cullen's voice actor (Greg Ellis) has played three different NPCs in the two days of Amalur gameplay, and I find the dissonance between Cullen's voice and the NPCs rather bewildering. Also, now I'm jonesing to replay Inquisition. I really liked Cullen. Can you tell I really liked Cullen?
  
• Simon Templeman, most notably Logain in Origins, but also a bunch of Mass Effect characters (Admiral Han'Gerrel, and Gavin Archer).
  
• That slightly dodgy Traveler who insists on calling me Dove all the time is the voice of Vicar Max from Outer Worlds, which explains why I never liked him, really. No offence to David B. Mitchell. He does a good sleaze.

I find it sad, in retrospect, but ultimately unsurprising that most of the voices I identify easily are male. The women tend to sound more similar to me, and I suspect that I am also being slightly ejected from identifying strongly with female characters because they tend to be written by male writers, and thus to conform more slavishly to stereotypes, particularly sexualised stereotypes. Ayln Shir has a lovely, throaty contralto, but the character wears such a ridiculous skimpy chain-mail bikini that I listen to her in a state of perpetual irritation.

But looking at the cast list of Amalur, there's something else going on here too: while there is quite a large female voice cast, there are comparatively few important female NPCs, most of the big roles with lots of dialogue are male. And, doing a random check on the female voice actors, they tend to skew a lot younger than the male. I don't recognise them because most of them don't have such a huge body of voice work: they not only have less access to plum roles, they have been at it for a lot shorter time.

This was supposed to be an amused survey of voice actor crossovers, it didn't set out to be a feminist rant, but apparently it ain't easy being a Gurrl in Kultcha, particularly Kultcha of the videogame persuasion. Systematic sexism is hell on female voices, in every sense of the word.

Oo er time has rather crept up on me again, alas. Featureless lockdown days meander past like lazy insomniac sheep-counting sheep, dozens have ambled hypnotically over the fence before you notice. Although I should add for posterity, and jo&stv, who apparently sit in New Zealand and worry that they have relocated my entire social life to another continent, that I had one (1) whole in-person social interaction this weekend, I visited Vi and had gin on the lovely stoep of her nice new house, both of us carefully masked and social distanced and in the fresh air. Apparently I can uncurl from the hedgehoggy ball if prodded sufficiently.

Also, I hired the nice neighbour, who does odd jobs and is suffering worklessness under lockdown, to climb up ladders and replace all my lightbulbs yesterday, as I do not trust my dodgy balance/ineffective left arm combination at dizzy heights when alone in the house, my body would lie there for days, probably gnawed on by unimpressed cats, if I maintained my usual form and fell off. So that's two actual in-person interactions in a week, I am a merry hive of social activity. He also unscrewed the lightbulb cover in the oven, which the landlord tightened so efficiently I haven't been able to budge it, and put up the replacement house number outside (bastards nicked the old ones) so that my deliveries do not wander plaintively up and down the road, apparently unable to interpolate Number 10 from the aggressively labelled Number 12 next door. My house is now Well Lit and Plottable. Next up, when I have recovered from all this socialising, he can come and replace the washers in all the taps, currently you have to turn the hot tap in the sink anything between five and fifteen times before it randomly consents to disgorge actual water. And the shower one falls off.

Jo&stv have actually relocated my entire social life to another continent, but I honestly don't miss it much. I miss them, but not the social life. And not being able to unscrew things or climb up ladders are really very minor and fixable drawbacks to the otherwise wholesale joy of living alone. Even under lockdown. I am still enjoying lockdown. Sorry.

How can it be August already? For a shapeless horror, its proportions all wrong, whose actual days are featureless and leaden, this year's monstrosity actually moves very fast. 2020: the wrong sort of zombie.

I am distracting myself extremely hard from work (first week of term and concomitant curriculum change nightmare, plus residual angst from performance review fuckery) by reading rather a lot. This week's discovery: the re-release on Kindle of a whole bunch of Joan Aiken's adult Gothic thrillers (Amazon page here, if only because I like the covers). I love Joan Aiken's kids' stuff, her fairy tales (Necklace of Raindrops et al, with the amazing Jan Pieńkowski silhouette art) and the alternate history series which starts with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and which I reviewed in more detail here.

Her adult Gothic is something else entirely. It's like the bastard love-child of Mary Stewart and Agatha Christie, with a dash of Edgar Allen Poe: domestic where Stewart is all exotic locations, atmospheric where Christie is clinical, and at times quite astonishingly lowering, threatening and claustrophobic. People do horrible things to other people in these books, as much manipulation as murder. Despite their comparatively modern setting they have a really sure sense of Gothic weather and place: the various houses are, properly for Gothic, very much characters in their own right. The slightly fey whimsy of the Dido series is almost entirely absent, although at least one of the adult novels shares with Dido's story the general correlation of musical ability with villainy. Somewhere in Joan Aiken's past a musician savaged her very badly.

You'd think that reading this sort of thing during lockdown in a pandemic would be counterintuitive, but in fact it's cathartic: there's something appropriate and resonant in the experience of these hedged, desperate heroines trying to escape their oncoming, inevitable doom. I feel you, sisters. Same.

Well, it's definitely been a week. We opened second semester change of curriculum on Monday, which necessitated designing and building a complete process for dealing with probably rather more than the usual thousand or so submissions (students are dropping courses like buttered toast) remotely rather than in person. This means that for the week I have been managing multiple processes, including training and individual tech support for both students and advisors, on multiple platforms, viz:

• the submission by students on the student database of change of curriuclum forms;
  
• the activities on the student database of 13 different advisors of varying levels of tech-savvy in checking and approving such forms (complicated and fiddly, because our database is Peoplesoft and doesn't do in one easy click what it can do in 12 obscure clicks and a sacrificial goat);
  
• since the database submission process doesn't allow for discussion with the student, the submissions by students on our web-based content delivery site of requests for individual curriculum advice;
  
• the submissions by students to the forum on our web-based content delivery site to ask quick/easy rules and process questions;
  
• the activities of 13 advisors of varying levels of tech-savvy in offering curriculum advice via the web-based content delivery system, according to a strict timetable and at two separate contact points;
  
• the submission by students via email of curriculum change queries which cordially ignore, or didn't read properly, the instructions I sent out regarding seeking advice via the above rather than me;
  
• reproachful alerts to advisor solecisms in processing from administrators via email;
  
• frantic technical or tech support queries from advisors via email;
  
• frantic technical or tech support queries from advisors via the advisor WhatsApp group;
  
• occasional frantic technical or tech support queries from advisors via phone call, because apparently WhatsApp isn't enough;
  
• occasional stop-gap Teams briefing sessions offering tech support via shared screens, to reinforce the training I gave them all last week, also by Teams, about which, hiss spit.

I am managing all of the above via the dubious assistance of a keyboard with a sticky letter T, which means that it only actually produces a T about half the time, and only if I hit it particularly hard. My level of stress is causing me to routinely misspell things, in particular my usual bugbear "curriculum", which I get wrong about half the time probably because of Freudian pressures (I have corrected it FOUR TIMES in this post alone). The lack of the T is adding a new dimension to this, most notably that my tendency to the classic internet "teh" instead of "the" is, sans T, causing me to sound unduly Canadian.

However! I am bloody but unbowed. The system is working, of a fashion, advisors are becoming rapidly more tech-savvy by processes of practice, hand-holding and main force and have been frankly lamb-like in keeping up with their duties, and my new keyboard arrives today. The gods willing and the creek don't rise (which it will, there's a major cold front in, for large tracts of yesterday it was raining horizontally), we may yet navigate this more or less unscathed. I cannot attest, however, to the probable state of my sanity or energy, I am exhausted. But, mostly, triumphant. I'll take it.

Raining again, it's all damp and cool and soft, I love this weather. Jyn is following her usual rainy-day process, which is to fuffle around in the back courtyard getting wet, and then climb onto my desk and stand damply and expectantly between me and the keyboard. This is my cue to grab the towel I keep by the desk for precisely this purpose and to dry her off while she purrs like a loon and tried to tuck her head under my chin. It's our little ritual. She's done it twice in the last twenty minutes, I think she enjoys the attention, and I enjoy leaving her all fluffy and spiked, and laughing at her a lot.

It is fortunate that this particular rainy spell is fairly mild, temperature-wise, not the serious cold we've had in previous weeks, as my geyser is being dodgy and forced me to endure a lukewarm shower last night. Damned thing has either a buggered element or a buggered thermostat and has taken to tripping the main switch randomly, either while I shower or while I'm running the hot water to do the dishes. This is Act II of its little electrical drama: Act I, a week or so back, was a subliminally threatening little drama during which it took to tripping the switches and then not switching off at all when I turned it back on, resulting in water emerging from the taps just short of boiling, and forcing me to keep the geyser power mostly switched off, as exploding geysers are frankly inconvenient. The landlord fiddled with it last week, and now Act II is a gradual dimininuendo of heating application over several days, from "not quite hot enough" to "barely warm". The landlord will arrive tomorrow to replace the element and/or thermostat, which is lucky, as if anything would truly bring home the horrors of our slow-motion pandemic apocalypse, it would be having to endure lockdown without benefit of hot water, and without the option of raiding long-suffering friends to make use of their ablution facilities. Some cruelties are simply excessive.

My desk chair arrived! choosing, of course, the one single stretch in the 8 hours of the working day when I was actually on a video call, which I suppose is the Cosmic Wossnames for you, but on the upside it wasn't actually a work call, I was catching up illegally with jo&stv on the grounds of, fuck, I worked one 12-hour Friday and one 7-hour Saturday weekend before last, the faculty owes me this.

So, desk chair. Not, in fact, eaten by eels en route, although I spent most of Monday and Tuesday darkly suspecting that eels had at least nibbled it, as it was new and spanky and adjustable and, despite frequent fiddling with multiple levers, bloody uncomfortable. Which turned out to simply be my butt and limbs adjusting to a different chair than the one I've sat in for a decade, who knew, because it's fine today. Possibly I'm just getting old. Sigh.

It occurs to me that the 12-hour Friday and 7-hour Saturday in fact handily explained my absence from Teh Intarwebs for ten days or so, we had a curriculum change deadline and the Dear Little Students, despite careful announcements and desperate pleas to the contrary, all piled up their submissions on the last day, concentrated in the last two hours before the deadline, leaving me with a hundred or so to process before Monday. I was really quite exhausted for most of last week. I enjoy working with students, really I do, they are bright and interesting and frequently lovely, but just-post-adolescent narcissism and the concomitant lack of development in the organs of perspective make them a little wearing at times. Yes, in the abstract getting the form in twenty minutes before deadline is "in on time", but consider that this faculty contains over five thousand of you, if you all do it at once the system collapses. Sigh.

On the upside, @GinevraCat posted on Twitter this recipe for quick chocolate lava cakes, which I have just made myself for lunch, and bugger health food, anyway. Pro tip: it helps to actually include the egg, which I accidentally overlooked, first time round, leaving me with the interesting problem of how to extract the solidified chocolate tar from the bottom of the ramekins, it appears to have fused. I haven't achieved that kind of rookie baking fail since I was approximately a teenager, I have been cackling derisively at myself all afternoon. Good chocolate lava, though. Eventually.