freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with weather

It's Monday, time for a rant list! Things That Have Got Right Up My Nose, and which I require to be blasted by the Cosmic Wossnames forthwith:

The weather. 39 degrees on Saturday, 37 yesterday. Today is only supposed to be 26, but my otherwise much appreciated little house tends to trap temperature extremes lovingly and recreate them for the next couple of days, so it's still like a cross between Durban and an inefficient oven cooking meringues up in here. I have adopted my mother's cunning recommendation, which is to waft around the house wrapped in a voluminous cotton scarf which I dip into cold water at approximately hourly intervals. But it melted my chocolate oranges on Saturday. Not cricket.
My fucking fancy new bifocals, which do not focus on either the screen or anything for close reading, and moreover hurt my nose. I have had them remade once already (removed prisms, no dice), and am currently wearing the old ones (too weak, scratched to hell) in order to deal with Registration Meltdowns, while the long-suffering optometrists make up a new pair with a new prescription and new frames. We have Ship of Theseused my new specs, in fact. If the new ones don't work I will, recking not the expense, be ordering a brand new pair of office specs, valid reading and computer screen only, and wearing the others, possibly alternately or, like Professor Branestawm, all at once, for distance. Phooey.
Student reading comprehension, which is adding new levels of futility and despair to my tech support function, and today presented me with a student offering me a screenshot of the apparently opaque and incomprehensible final registration screen, with a big blue "Submit" button and an instruction to "Click submit to finalise your registration submission", and an innocent query about why their registration has not been finalised. Because, I patiently point out, they have clearly not clicked "Submit". Oh, they say, they didn't realise. Aargh.
By the terms of my Ancient Treaty with Scroob, Parcelforce and all its works.

Things which have mitigated the rant-worthy list, above: the charmingly eccentric spelling tendencies of the student whose registration form specified yesterday, in cheerful all caps, a course called "ATHMORSPHERIC SCIENCE".

It was all cloudy and cool and vaguely rainy yesterday, which is altogether lovely. Sunday featured extremely high winds and occasional drizzle, causing me to have to bring the chilli bush inside as it was lying horizontal, and also having to re-upright the potted frangipani several times, before finally tucking it around a corner so it stopped blowing over. I think my frangipani's pot is too small, frankly. The plant is particularly designed to catch the wind easily, it's a giant, spindly thing a couple of feet taller than I am, with a dead straight trunk until about head height, at which point it branches into exactly three arms which produce leaves and/or flowers at weird, unpredictable intervals apparently not at all in tune with the actual seasons. Maybe having more room for its feet will help with the strange growth patterns as well as the top-heaviness. An all-container garden does create these little challenges.

The worst of orientation/reg is now over, mercifully, and I am doing that post-frantic thing of realising, the instant the pressure is off, exactly how bloody tired I am. I'm bloody tired. Friday evening was enlivened by a partially tiredness-induced freakout occasioned by an email from the company which is shipping Roxy and Sproing, jo&stv's dog and cat, to New Zealand. Roxy and Sproing are still in CT because of shipping company year-end shenanigans, and have been in the care of house-sitters. Lo these many moons ago I agreed to be an extra contact person to the pet-shipping process if necessary, but for some reason Friday's cheery email was addressed directly to me, and cheerily reminded me of Monday's final vet visit, the culmination of a whole series of vet visits over the last month, of which I was in complete ignorance and which I had not, of course, arranged.

The rational response was, of course, to realise that there's no way jo&stv would have left me to sort it all out without further reminders or contact or, at the very least, giving me the house-sitters' details, but I was tired enough that rationality was not, shall we say, at the fore. Fortunately a few panicky WhatsApp exchanges established that all was well, the vet visits had been arranged by people not actually working 11-hour days, and the address to me was an error. Phew. Because that was a very bad couple of hours.

The reason why it was bad is, of course, because the email prodded, with pin-point accuracy, a particular hangup of mine which is best exemplified in those recurring anxiety dreams I have where there's a huge, complex machine of some sort, performing a vital function, and the whole massive, inexorable thing hinges on me, and only me, having, at some time in the past, pressed a particular button, or done a particular check, or added particular things to the mix, or whatever, and I didn't, and now the whole thing is screwed and it's all my fault. In extreme cases the world ends, or if I move I die, and I promptly move, and die. By this logic, apparently, if I haven't done the vet visits Roxy and Sproing starve in the streets, forever separated from their owners.

I think I need to take some leave, irrational over-reactions are exhausting. On the upside, more rain tomorrow, and I should have a larger pot and enough potting soil to stabilise the frangipani and thus persuade myself that I can take appropriate action when necessary and the world will, in all probability, not end. Or, if it does, that's likely to be coincidental and not actually my fault.

My subject line is from the Fratellis, "Boy Scout to the end", from their album Eyes Wide, Tongue Tied, which, together with In your own sweet time have been playing on rotation in my car, because I'm really enjoying them both. Eyes Wide is strangely Americana-influenced and faintly countryish in tone and image, with a hint of what Jo calls "swamp rock"; Own Sweet Time is retroish and genre-hopping, including moments where I swear they are flat-out channeling the Beatles, but always catchy. I am addicted to Sugartown, which is 60s poppy and ridiculously fun.

Struggling a bit with what I think is a sinus problem, still doing that irritating thing where I randomly wake up in the morning with a pounding headache and nausea, and pretty much lose the day. New exciting symptom: my ears are ringing. More or less perpetually. It sounds like a distant, frenetic cricket, speeded up, and possibly mechanical. I am very tired and glandular and headachy.
On the upside, I have also randomly discovered that I am one of the small minority of people who can deliberately flex a weird muscle in their inner ear to make a sort of low rumbling sound. It's very odd. I do it by slightly tensing the hinge of my jaw and, strangely enough, the edges of my tongue. Bodies are odd. Mine particularly.
I have found a replacement for Stardew Valley, which I have played repeatedly until all meaning ls lost. My Time At Portia seems to have been constructed by systematically mining Zelda, Stardew, the Fallout 4 building mechanism, Minecraft, Yonder, and probably others I do not ken, for their cute and enjoyable features, and then cobbling them together into a sort of small-town cartoon post-apocalypse. I am not enamoured of the character design, which is unwontedly stereotypical and a bit grotesque, and I don't think the writing is quite as strong as Stardew, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable and immersive playing experience, and hits all my "systematically building things" buttons with fair enough accuracy that I am finding it difficult to stop playing in order to go to bed, despite my frankly ridiculous levels of exhaustion.
Winter has hit! it bucketed with rain all Sunday night and into the morning, causing Cape Town traffic to instantly seize up, as is its rainy-weather wont, and the cats to gravitate either to me or the new fluffy blanket on the bed, of which they seem to approve. You can tell that the weather is getting colder because they have buried their status-jockeying differences to almost, but not quite, cuddle.

Jyn has done that kitty-growing thing where I blinked and suddenly she was larger, burlier and very clearly adult when a moment ago she was slim and teenaged. The status-jockeying is clearly because Pandora's grasp on the Top Cat position is shaky and doomed. You can tell from Jyn's expression, which is faintly smug.

Randomly cooler last night, thank FSM, cloud cover came up and the air was very mildly icy. Possibly just in time to save both my mental health and my considerably drooping container garden.This weather, I do not like it. It is not friendly.

Other things I do not like: watching my own lecture videos to critique my lecturing style and quality, on the general grounds that since my teaching existence is this weird marginal thing which is utterly unsupported by my institution, faculty or co-workers and no-one else is going to nurture it, I have to put the work into nurturing it myself. I don't like watching myself on video. (a) My general posture and appearance beat me over the head with how physically unfit I am, even allowing for the inevitable weight-gain effect of the camera. I look terrible. (b) Following the thread of my own lecture inevitably highlights how fatigued I am currently; you can see it in the hesitation and pauses, in the way I lose the thread of what I'm saying and have to grope for coherence. (c) The above two points notwithstanding, these weren't terrible lectures, they just could have been a whole lot better. Two of them were quite good. Students asked interesting questions and seemed engaged. But as my output goes they were under par.

They probably won't get a chance to be better, because I think they may have been the last ones I'll ever offer, I cannot continue to be here, it's clearly very bad for me.

Things I do actually like: it's Friday, thank FSM again. My garden has drooped a bit but is still alive, and pleasingly green. The jasmine is in flower and smells delectable, and the flame lily has sprouted again. Also, this lovely article goes a fair way towards at least partially restoring one's faith in eco-recovery, human ingenuity, rational systems and engaged youth.

Cape Town is having a January heatwave, which I resent somewhat given that it's October. This week has been temperatures in the high 30s, which the weather site assures me is ten degrees higher than the average for this time of year, so thanks, global warming and climate change. I have been sleeping in a mosquito net in sheer self defence. (That is, in a mosquito net and nothing else. The cats appear to be enjoying the additional skin contact, which is hardly helping the problem). The unseasonable temperatures are also stressing my garden-watering schedule something 'orrible, the pots dry out in a day rather than the usual two or three, and as a lone lorne single person I am simply not generating enough grey water to compensate. At this point longer showers may be a moral necessity. (Moral if you're a druid, at any rate. For the purposes of this exercise please assume I'm a druid. The indecent burgeoning of the inhabitants of my container garden over the last few weeks under the aforementioned sunlight suggests that it's not too much of a stretch).

The installation of actual curtain rails in my front windows has been a small but measurable point of mitigation of all this nasty cheap imitation sunshine stuff. (As opposed to real weather, which has clouds and rain in it). Actual curtains rather than those ridiculous blinds noticeably drop the temperatures when you close them to exclude the afternoon sun, which otherwise streams in uninterrupted and with worrying ferocity. My slightly cheap and stop-gap curtains are a pleasing sea-green in colour, rendering my study agreeably underwatery to an extent which is itself cooling to the soul.

I am, needless to say, also retreating into my usual heat-wave remedy, which is to obsessively re-play Skyrim, because snowy landscapes. It is a possibly worrying index of my current state of work-hatred and general misanthropy that I am, in this playthrough, playing dead against my usual type, and following both the Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest lines. I could react against current global moral meltdown by being particularly noble and upright, or I could, apparently, decide that there's no point and in any case I am out of fucks to give. Murder, mayhem and plunder, yay. Why the hell not, everyone else is.

I do, however, shudder to think what actual January is going to give us in the way of temperatures if this is October. Move over, Death Valley. 50s here we come.

It is surprisingly unsurprising to have turned up at Andrew S's "I'm in CT and it's my birthday!" braai yesterday to discover that approximately half the guests, self included, were wearing some iteration of a Star Wars t-shirt. Because old CLAW crowd, and we're all unabashedly geeky and clearly feel enabled in the expression of same by contact with the old tribe. Either that, or it's some sort of territorial display. But I have been reading an awful lot of Teen Wolf fanfic and my view may be unduly coloured by over-exposure to dodgy unscientific pack dynamics. At any rate, very pleasant gathering, and lovely to catch up with people I haven't seen in way too long owing to ingrowing hermitage.

It appears to be spring, which was useful for braai purposes, the weather has been lovely, clear and crisp. CT dams are at 70%, and there's more rain predicted for this week. I am, as usual, consoling myself for the inexorable approach of January heat-waves by wandering around my spring-loaded garden, patting odd exemplars of the burgeoning foliage on the head and exhorting it to further efforts with an insouciant verbosity which I suspect has led my neighbours to mentally categorise me as "crazy cat lady", an appellation which which I am down.

One of the mad floral activists is below, half a tray of violas which I grew from seed. This was the result of a slightly odd supermarket promotion at our local Checkers, where for a couple of months they handed out at the check-out a pile of little seed-growing packs, three or four depending on how much money you spent. These comprised a small cardboard box/pot thingy, a square of paper with embedded seeds, a few labels identifying the particular seed type, and the bit I really loved, a miniature hockey puck of compressed and dehydrated potting soil. When you stuck this in a saucer and added water, it madly expanded and crumbled to make actual soil in a fascinating and semi-magical fashion. In a spirit of experimentation I actually planted one batch of these, despite the fact that I can't grow things from seed worth a damn, and they all sprouted, possibly because Science. The cauliflower and parsley went spindly and leggy and didn't last long, but the violas produced the below, and there's something else quietly growing small, sturdy leaves in the other half of the box, it would be lovely if I could remember what the hell it was. Something floral rather than vegetable. I hope it survives long enough to identify it.

I cannot help but think that it was a slightly misguided promotional concept, to hand out plant-growing kits (a) in the middle of winter, and (b) in the middle of a drought, but the compressed soil was Cool Science, and on the upside, violas! I love their little velvety faces, especially this strain, which have goatees. When I went out into the courtyard this morning they all had their faces turned to the sun, except one, who had it turned backwards in a bit of a sulk. I think the others were mean to him overnight.

My subject line is e e cummings, which is inevitable given spring.

Well, that was the Y2K of Cape storms, that was. I can't work out if it was not as horrible as anticipated because the whole city over-reacted up front, or precisely because we pre-empted it so well and bunkered down for it - schools and universities closed, minimal people on the roads, everyone had laid in stocks of water and food and kept their heads down for thirty-six hours while the weather rampaged. It was very windy and more than somewhat damp, and very dramatic, and there are trees down all over and some people lost roofs or power, but as far as I can tell the tiny death toll (9 to date) was almost half from a single lightning strike and most of the other half from the horrible Knysna fires. I don't want to minimise those deaths, which are awful, or the undoubted damage and loss and suffering in the vulnerable informal settlements, but given our huge numbers of people in shantytowns, it really could have been a lot worse and I'm really glad it wasn't.

I also have to say that the CT city utilities people seem to have been amazing - trees were cleared and power restored very quickly, from the tenor of a lot of social media responses. I was without power for 24 hours, it went out at 3pm on Wednesday and they only got it back at about that time yesterday (they apparently sent a confused team out on Wed afternoon when we reported it, and they bumbled off to the wrong road and stood scratching their heads at being unable to find the problem - they took chainsaws to the tree on the line yesterday and sorted it out), so Wednesday night was all me and the cats huddled in front of gas heaters and candles heating cocoa and soup on the gas stove.

It also made me realise how dramatically my habitual leisure activities rely on civilisation. Can't game. Can't read or knit, light not good enough. Can't watch movies. Can't read fanfic or cruise Tumblr on the Ipad, which has a light enough screen for it, because can't internet. I went to bed very early, under slightly freaked out cats - the noise of the wind banging the mad hippy neighbour's fancy wireless aerial was rather extreme. I was supposed to take Jyn in for spaying on Tuesday night, but postponed, and I'm glad I did. Apart from worrying about power cuts in the middle of veterinary operations, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get through to pick her up on Wednesday, and in the event she was worried enough by the storm noise that it was good she was at home with me for comforting. Her doom will come next week, alas.

I am also pleased to report that, other than the power outage, no damage seems to have resulted to the house - the landlord's roof repairs last year held well, no leaks, and the big potted ficus didn't blow over (it did when I first moved in, twice, under less dramatic winds, but I'd subsequently moved it into a more sheltered spot and taken it off its drainage bricks, so score). And really, a container garden is the best possible scenario for Massive Gale Force Winds, I'd moved the large fruit trees into sheltered corners and anything fragile into the laundry or house, and it was all fine. Is it awful that I rather enjoyed it? I do like a full-body storm experience, all elemental and grrr and exciting.

I also spent a windy Tuesday night watching Arrival, about which I shall blog separately because I Have Notes, and the first couple of episodes of the new Supergirl series, which is another entry in the Fluffy Clockwork Kittens of Superheroes stakes. As a series Supergirl seems to be cute and amiable, but its fluffy clockwork kitten is constructed a bit ineptly so that, while it doesn't actually bounce off walls, it also doesn't quite achieve the lifelike - everything is done slightly too fast with a mechanical gait. But it's rather endearing, on the whole.

Pandora is clearly all threatened by the kitten and is in need of cuddles and reassurance, she is currently sleeping on my desk in front of me, cuddled up to my front, her head on my wrist. She's purring happily while I apply skritches and validation. Jyn is fossicking around the house, excavating the living room rug, chasing cat toys in brief, attention-deficit snatches and generally spreading small-scale kitten mayhem. Every time she meeps, chirrups or trills, Pandora's tail lashes, three times exactly, then stops. It's like a push-button response. It's very funny.

They are, however, generally getting on OK, despite the fact that they appear mutually determined to only eat each other's food; there only occasional growling, as Pandy ruthlessly suppresses kitten rudeness. I have to admit that it can't be pleasant to have one's lashing tail perpetually jumped on, because apparently Jyn has a death-wish. Memo to self, geeky naming conventions have narrative implications, oops.

This was quite a nice momentary still life:

... which is going to go very bad in about three seconds.

Yup.

I am very happy to be on leave for a week. I am even happier because yesterday Cape Town broke out into an actual, verifiable thunderstorm, almost highveld quality: it pissed down with rain, and there was a continuous thunder and lightning session for the better part of half an hour. I spent about ten minutes standing on the portico at our building entrance just drinking in the noise and light, becoming marginally damp but with an enormous enough grin on my face that various students were clearly laughing at me. Which is fine. Purveyor of innocent enjoyment to the post-adolescent masses, that's me. I love thunderstorms quite in defiance of any semblance of suavity. It's still pleasantly cooler today, and my plants are all happily damp. A good start to my break.

My subject line is, of course, Alice Through the Looking-glass. Although I very much fear that the reverse is true.

Gawsh, but midsummer has a terrible effect on me. It's been stinking hot for the last few weeks; today's random gentle rain had me leaping out of the house with glad cries, stoked for the day in a way I haven't been in months. (Tracy sent me an email this morning with a tongue-in-cheek closing instruction to "have a sparkly day!", which made me giggle but is possibly more relevant than it's been in weeks). I am useless in the hot weather; my brain shuts down, my energy drops, I pull in my horns and set myself to endure rather than actually living. I don't go anywhere or do anything, and find myself shying away from social engagements of almost any sort.

Part of the Reverse SAD Effect is also, I think, because of the shape of the academic year and the fact that my horrible confluence of orientation and registration duties hits me just after the year begins. It's a bit later than usual this year because of our disrupted academic schedule after protests, but in a way that's simply drawing out the horrible anticipation. Part of the reason I tend to curl up hedgehoggily and pretend I don't exist when a social invitation comes my way at this time of year is because I am internally braced for a four-week period in which demands will be made on me more or less continuously by several thousand people, and some sort of unconscious personal barrier is springing up protectively to husband my energy. It doesn't help that the demands slowly ramp up from the moment I get back, so I've been registering more or less wall-to-wall rugby players since Monday last week. (Rugby players make a really solid wall. And also, for some reason, almost uniformly attempt to register without bringing writing implements of any sort. I assume it has something to do with the size of their hands).

I suppose what all this is saying is a sort of lateral apology to my friends, and to many missed social opportunities lately: I promise I don't hate you. I'm just hoarding spoons.

(Subject line is New Model Army, "Green and the grey", which was playing in my car, but coincidentally also describes today's weather.)

I am slightly saddened that the Great Year Of Subject Line Bowie Mourning is still in force, as really this post should be entitled "Into each life some rain must fall". On the upside, the actual subject line I chose does come from possibly my favorite track on Blackstar, "Girl Loves Me", which is bouncy and catchy and written in a sort of frangled Clockwork-Orangesque mad post-apocalyptic vernacular¹, which is not unapposite to my week.

The Cosmic Wossnames are gonna mess with me, is who. I am on leave. It's lovely. I'm catching up on sleep, and apparently all I need to do is to leave work for my dream-life to swing back into nightly focus with an audible click. And in my personal value system, shaped as it is by a drought-scarred Zimbabwean childhood, actual rain falling into my life, as it has done for the last few days, is cause for rejoicing. It's been bucketing, and cold, and the cats and I have been congregated around the contented purr of the gas heater for large swathes of time. I would prefer, however, if the otherwise much-enjoyed precipitation could refrain from precipitating actually inside the house.

So the bathroom sprang a leak on Tuesday. A little one, in the corner, where it rained gently on the towels. My nice landlord came round on Thursday and spent several hours tromping around on the roof, doing mystic passes with sealant and cloth coverings and what have you. This appears to have been something of a catastrophic fail in the DIY department, one of those epic fumbles that made everything worse, because Saturday's heavy rain revealed that the original leak had multiplied its output by a factor of ten, the bathroom had sprung two additional leaks in solidarity, and there were another series of sinister plopping noises in the living-room ceiling. Plus one small, diffident leak from the skylight contributing intermittently and with mathematical accuracy to the center of the carpet. I have no idea what the hell he did up there, but the roof really didn't like it. I await, somewhat damply, his no doubt shamefaced return to make good.

In retrospect possibly the leaking roof was inevitable, because I've been playing Fallout 4, which is littered with destroyed houses and makeshift shacks all with gaping holes in their roofs. But I can't even retreat from the deluge into more literal, if abstracted, postapocalyptic ruination, because the Cosmic Wossnames' two-punch sabotage followed its own inexorable logic: if I take ten days of leave and download Fallout 4 as the gaming project for said time, two days into the leave my computer will awake bright and early to an existential crisis in which it has convinced itself that it doesn't have a graphics card. Crawling in emo denial under its metaphorical bed, it will paralyse its own functions to the point where it not only wholesalely refuses to admit the existence of the graphics card on which it has been happily playing Fallout for two days, it will also reduce its screen resolution to a lowly 800x600 and refuse to change it at any price.

I dunno. It's distinctly possible that my computer is hallucinating it's Kylo Ren; if this is the case, hopefully the nice geeky types at my local computer shop will apply sufficient therapy to disabuse it of this misapprehension. If it's not, in fact, hallucinating and the (brand new, circa two days after the Inquisition release date) graphics card has in fact died, I apologize for the Kylo Ren slur and reflect, with some satisfaction, that at least the damned card is still under warranty. Either way, hopefully my computer returns to my bosom today, and I can stop this ridiculous half-existence where I experience the world through an IPad and my phone. Blarg. Any errors in this post are entirely attributable to the IPad's over-zealous and unduly American auto-correct. The verbosity is, however, absolutely my own. It's been over-watered.

¹ Actually, subsequent research suggests it's half Nadsat and half Polari, which is something of an enchanting mix.

Spoilers: it isn't. Hellish heatwave hot, so that my ankles have swollen to the point where it hurts to walk. And unconscionably filled not only with the usual last-minute orientation and registration panic, but with hyped-up and desperate early registration, rude students, and an additional fun-filled layer of attempting to predict completely unpredictable student protest patterns and work things around them. I have never been in so many contingency meetings in my life. Ninety percent of it will, I confidently predict, be either irrelevant or ineffective.

I invented a closing salutation today, in an email to stv about laundry. (Strange but true). It reads, "wishing you cool breezes and buckets of ice and the summary disappearance, humanely but with finality, of 99% of the human race."

Yes. I think that would do it. If ever I needed a button which reads "HOMICIDAL MISANTHROPY", now is the time.

My subject line is David Bowie, and, fair warning, probably will be so for the foreseeable future. This is from "Everyone Says Hi", which is a lurking favourite of mine and is a sweet, nostalgic little tune about someone moving away and/or, I darkly suspect, dying. The last post the subject line was from "Time", which I love for its jazzy piano and innate cynicism.

Things I hate about this time of year:

The frantic. I had to cancel a weekend away this last weekend, to finish up orientation material and advisor briefing material and annotate the final draft of my masters student's thesis, which she chose this psychological instant to submit. This did, fortunately, mean that I was at home for the very embarrassed daughter of the next-door-neighbour to come and tell me she'd accidentally bumped her 4x4 against the outside water tap on the edge of my property zone, causing a split pipe and cascades of water everywhere. She sorted out and paid for a plumber, and her father patched and painted the wall the following day, so as neighbourly slip-ups go it was managed perfectly. But I'd rather have been on the Breede River.
The immutable laws of admin which say that the wages of being deeply organised and disseminating info continuously to students is inevitable scads of email queries in reply to my announcements, at least half of which are asking questions I've answered in a previous announcement. The law of the admin jungle is not to let them know you exist, but I unfortunately don't do much good to students while lurking in a thicket. Lashing my tail. While my eyes glitter in the dark.
The bloody weather. It's unbearably hot again, and I am not sleeping very well in my regrettably stuffy house.
The looming threat of further student disruptions, which hold out the horrible possibility of disrupted registration, which would screw things up so badly I shudder to contemplate it. We had serious meetings last week about contingency plans in case we have to close campus again. My professional administrative opinion: if it happens we're fucked.

Things about this time of year which are actually OK and consolatory:

Early-registering rugby players. They're solid slabs of muscle, which is aesthetically pleasing, and for some reason are always extra-polite. A brief, scurrilous and regrettable exchange between advisors before the rugby players actually arrived this morning attributed this noticeable politeness variously to (a) scrum spirit and fascist coaching, (b) conservative Afrikaans upbringings, (c) concussive damage, and (d) steroids.
Meeps of plaintive student gratitude from the ones whose lives I do, in a sort of frenzied whirlwind, manage to sort out.
The fact that I'm so flat-out busy from the moment I hit campus that the day goes really fast. As will the next month. It's merciful, really. Humane time-dilation. Sanity-saving.
The looming threat of further student disruptions, as if they close campus I can stay at home and work peaceably without my bloody phone ringing off the hook with almost entirely misdirected calls.

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.

It is at this stage fairly possible that I've found myself a house rental, enabling me to remove myself from the domicile of the Evil Landlord, a gesture which will be accompanied by the unmistakeable sound-effects of stretching, twanging and pained meeping noises as deep-seated roots resist uprooting for all they're worth. Unless there's something fairly horrible lurking beneath the innocent surface of the rental agreement I should be moving within a couple of weeks, and have hence been forced to buckle down and, avoiding the ricochets of disturbed .303 bookworms, weed my giant L-space book collection so I have some faint hope of compressing it all into boxes for travel without actually collapsing the local space-time continuum. My study floor is currently bedecked with tottering piles of volumes, faintly tear-stained as a result of the emotional upheaval of deciding to chuck them.

I will, of course, stick most of them into voluminous bags and haul them off to the local charity shop, but before I do that I'd like to give CT-based witterers of the sf/fantasy persuasion (i.e. most of you) a crack at claiming any of them which look as though they might usefully enhance your reading life. Photographic listage follows. If you want any of these, please let me know and I'll label them yours and shunt them in your general direction via trained mongoose or brown paper parcel switches in the park, or something. (This is the first installment. It's approximately a sixth of them, and I haven't tackled the non-sf yet).

DSCN2706

The house, for the curious, is a semi-detached recently-renovated two-bedroom Victorian in Lynfrae, which is a subset of Claremont; I re-toured it this morning in the company of Claire and Stv for moral support and second opinions, and they like it as much as I do, which is quite a lot. And it's not just because it's bucketing with rain at the moment and the whole world is a nicer place.

My subject line is, of course, Terry Pratchett, although I can't remember which book it's from and am callously leaving that as an exercise for the reader.

Praise FSM, it's raining. I haven't slept properly in a week, which is approximately the duration of the weird summer-resurging heatwave Cape Town has been experiencing, and which has felt like February but with added steam. We had the university open day on Saturday, which was a stinker heat-wise. Our university is high-profile and attracts millyuns of students, parents in tow. The building with the department stands was a shoulder-to-shoulder roiling mass of students, parents and reluctant academics, exuding an atrocious fug of sweat and bewilderment: I hovered in the doorway for a moment, thought "Nope" and left. A world of nope. I have borderline crowd phobia issues anyway, it was quite bad enough to be addressing 500 potential students, parents in tow, at once from the relative comfort of an air-conditioned lecture theatre.

Probably as a direct result of (a) resentment at being on campus on my hard-earned Saturday, (b) general lingering job-malaise after the run-in with the boss, and (c) the heat, I have been playing a hell of a lot of Skyrim recently. It's incredibly soothing to be trundling through snowy landscapes while it's 35 degrees outside. But I did the traditional No Work At All this weekend. This has not, fortunately, prevented me from giving a generally energetic and interactive lecture, the internet eroticism ones which started today and which technically I should have prepped to within an inch of their technosavvy lives over the weekend. Weirdly, it sometimes helps not to over-prepare, things have an organic spontaneity and ability to follow the lead of the student input which they otherwise lack. Achievement Unlocked: infect with XKCD appreciation a class to which it was hitherto absolutely unknown. There are, however, at least four voluble Tumblr enthusiasts in the group, which makes for interesting additions to the conversation. Every time I start teaching again I am forcibly reminded of how much I like students.

In other news, I am still house-hunting, and it's a dismal landscape full of emptiness and occasional possibilities which stick their heads cautiously, gopher-like, above ground and are instantly snapped up by bands of roving rental predators, i.e. everyone else who's also looking for university-adjacent housing within a reasonable price range. Absolutely the best thing I could do to make this easier is to resign from my job in favour of one which is much more highly paid. Don't think I haven't been tempted. But if anyone knows anyone who's renting out a place, please let me know. Nepotistic access to the ground floor of opportunities is pretty much my best bet right now.

The weather is officially absurd: Cape Town traditionally does February heatwaves, but usually not for so long, or so hot. It was pushing 40 for a couple of days, and I survived the weekend only by spending a portion of it submerged in jo&stv's pool, sipping champagne. I'm insomniac and headachy and stressed and tend to lie awake in my superheated bedroom panting gently and wishing for a nice comfortable death, preferably by hypothermia or freeze-ray. It's like the sultry heat before a highveld storm, only continuously, relentlessly, and without the catharsis of the actual rain. Am not happy. Am clearly on the wrong continent. I know the northern hemisphere is having a horrible winter, and I'm sorry if you're frozen or flooded or snowbound, but honestly, this is its own kind of unspeakable.

I shall proceed to avoid the horror by somewhat belatedly chronicling our last Movie Club, which was the weekend before last. Jo's choice: theme, Abused Sexualised Girls Strike Back And Kick Butt, although to variable effect. The films, in a classic whiplash configuration, and encompassing frankly improbable extremes in terms of thoughtfulness and political acumen: Sucker Punch, and Hard Candy.

Sucker Punch is a terrible film. I'm really glad to have seen it, because as a pure distillation of ingrained Hollywood sexism and exploitation it's an extremely powerful document, but it's an astonishingly bad piece of storytelling. I have to admit it has a certain amount of visual style and the germ, somewhere in the putrid depths, of a potentially interesting idea, but it's otherwise without redeeming feature. The most terrifying thing about it is, I think, the fact that watching it gave me the sneaking, inescapable fear that Zach Snyder, its perpetrator, is actually under the delusion that he was celebrating female empowerment. Which he really wasn't. The premise involves skimpily-clad girls incarcerated in a variety of institutions under highly sexualised threat, and escaping from it into layers of fantasy in which they fulfil video-game-style quests with the maximum possible amount of stylishly-shot action sequences, guns, swordfights, leering villainy and massive explosions. Given that the film skips between giant samurai statues, Nazi steampunk zombies, orcs, dragons, planes, zeppelins and Bioshock-style Big Daddies, the whole thing boils down to what Stv defined as "MashCeption: The Music Video". Or, possibly MashCeption, the Video Game. Something entailing lots of mash-ups and multi-levelled dream sequences and loads of visual style at the expense of plot, at any rate.

And in the final analysis it's about absolutely the opposite of female empowerment. It does no good whatsoever to take abused women and give them big guns and swords and allow them to kick butt if (a) all said women are vacant, childlike blanks whose abuse at the hands of lecherous monsters is dwelt on with slavering fascination, (b) they're all hyper-sexualised and skimpily if not fetishistically clad, (c) their every move in the "empowering" fantasy is dictated by benevolent, rescuing male figures, (d) the bulk of them end up dead, and (e) the whole thing is shot like a particularly hyperactive and clichéd wet dream. It's ultimately a deeply ugly film that spat me out the other end in a state of stunned disbelief. But also with a sort of horrible satisfaction, because after all the film simply takes to the logical extreme the kinds of objectifications and exploitations which are actually at the heart of a frighteningly high proportion of Hollywood blockbuster movies, in which women are ravaged, empty things splayed across the screen for the gratification of a gaze which is assumed to be entitled, unconstrained, heterosexual and male. Our cultural systems are pretty broken; this film should not be excoriated as an aberration but as a symptom of a system whose darker corners, thus mercilessly exposed, are nauseating.

Hard Candy is a very good film. We watched these in the right order, because after Sucker Punch it was a bracing blast of fresh air. Its take on the theme highlights Sucker Punch as the bizarro mirror world thing it is: Hard Candy is still about male sexual predator versus pubescent girl, but the power poles are ruthlessly dissected, examined and reassembled. I'm not going to talk about the film's plot detail, because its effect is very spoiler-vulnerable, but it's exquisitely cast, shot, paced and constructed. Compared to the gratuitous CGI sprawl of Sucker Punch it's a minimalist work of art, effectively two characters and one set. Ellen Page is revelatory (also, mad props to Ellen Page for her recent coming out as gay, both a brave and an important thing), and Patrick Wilson is as good as he always is, which is very. The cinematography is amazing: the house which forms the set is all clean lines and modern, blocky colours, and the camera lingers on these for moments of full-screen primary colour which punctuate and pace the action, underlining the film's overall mood of analytic contemplation. It's also a very tense viewing experience, full of build and shock and horrified expectation and, I have to say, a fair amount of vindictive satisfaction.

Watching it in tandem with Sucker Punch highlights the differences, particularly the extent to which Page's character is almost entirely unsexualised, with a matter-of-fact thoughtfulness about her which undercuts potentially flirty moments and allows her to swing between childlike innocence and tomboyish determination. But the juxtaposition also demands that the film be subjected to the same questions: is this about female power? does it escape the exploitative presentation of women seen in the blockbuster? And of course you have to be aware that the highly-charged power relationship the film depicts is fully capable of being sexualised even given Page's performance; of mining the young body under the lens for purposes of titillation rather than thought. It also, despite the film's plot twists, runs the risks of demonising the victim, presenting her as damaged and inhuman: the film's violence is both more restrained and more real than Sucker Punch's. But on the whole I think my vote is for success rather than failure on political grounds. It's an uncomfortable watch, but for the right reasons - because it shakes up your assumptions, explores and redefines rather than adopting, externalises the rot in our cultural constructs rather than either eliding or exploiting them. I'm not sure "enjoyed" is the right word, but this is a good film, and I respect and admire what it achieved. Although, my pervy fairy-tale fancying heart being what it is, they could have done a lot more with the Red Riding Hood motif. I'm just sayin'.

My subject line is from the Eurythmics, "Wide Eyed Girl", mostly because I automatically think of Annie Lennox when I think of women kicking butt. Also Buffy, River, Phryne Fisher and Captain Marvel, but song lyrics are traditional.

For once I have remembered to note that it's my blog's birthday. I first posted on 31st January 2005. That's nine years of blogging. 1 657 entries, counting this one. That's one every 1.98 days, if the weather hasn't robbed me of my tiny vestiges of mathematical ability. People have posted 10 732 comments. The longest hiatus in posting has been the ten days or so in July 2011 while I was in hospital with my feet exploded. I think it's fair to assume that I quite like writing stuff, for some reason. Or am actually addicted to words. Or uncommonly cussed. Probably all three.

Cape Town is having heatwaves. I think it's almost allowed to, usually they come in February and that's ... in a few hours, now. (Alas January. I'm sure there was something else I was planning to do with you, but oh well). Be that as it may, today was ungodly, stinking, improbable hot. This is something of a continuing theme: this weekend the foot pedal on my sewing machine inconveniently burst into smoke and melted plastic in the middle of a skirt reconstruction, so possibly Hell is closer to the surface than usual. I spent the only tolerable hour or two this afternoon sitting in the living room (in the middle of a power cut, for some reason - Capetonians, turn off your aircon. It isn't fair that you have it when I don't) with my feet in a bucket of water and ice. Turns out this reduces my swollen ankles immediately and dramatically, which is useful, as the combination of heat and running round conducting orientation for four days gives me puffy feet like whoa and dammit. I can't even blame the DVT, they used to do this while I was running roleplaying cons and SCA events, years before my leg inconveniently exploded on the way to Australia. I don't like this weather. Have you noticed?

Fortunately, given the heat, the Revenge of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Army of Reconstruction has finished the remodelling of the front wall and departed for points unknown, which means we don't have to deal with dust as well as heat in that sort of misguided fake Western movie fashion. They have left behind a rather spanky carport and pristine section of new wall in addition to the traditional blasted heath which always attends their efforts. Viz.:

I thumb my nose in the general direction of the hadeda aerial bombardment of my car, now frustrated. Hah!

I know "I'll stop the world" from Nouvelle Vague, for whom I have a somewhat unbecoming passion quite apart from their bossa nova version of this song, which has an insidiously beautiful lyric line. I do vaguely know the Modern English original (quite a fun music video, despite o lord the 80s), but it's not a patch on the cover.

Things you do not expect to see on a respectable campus while trotting off to the library for your important pile of Girly Swot books (subset: crash course in African cinema): live horses. Six of them. Tethered in the shade against the columns of the old Student's Union, peaceably chomping. There's something fairly major filming on campus at the moment, the place has been a madhouse: the stairs have sprouted fake extra columns and exotic greenery and weird screens positioned with arcane precision. I parked my car next to and partially under a giant cherry-picker boom sort of thing this morning, and there are approximately three million acres of random, presumably desperately important cabling snaking down the avenue, tended by skinny grip types in Bauhaus t-shirts. Actual African film, in fact. Curiously appropriate.

It's too bloody hot for serious thought (what's with February heatwaves before Christmas? Not Cricket), so have a random linkery round-up, I need to clear these tabs.

If you go to the UK Vogue page and type the Konami code, extremely entertaining things happen when you keep on hitting A. Random internet easter eggs ftw.
For some demented reason this ridiculous Boba Fett love story really amuses me, possibly because of the way the sarlacc is drawn. The rancor BFF one is also cute.
Sherlock fandom is in a tizzy because of the Caitlin Moran faux pas (I never liked the wretched woman, her book is actively irritating) - she had the inexpressibly tone-deaf bad taste to pressure/trick the lead actors into reading erotic fanfic aloud at a screening. Daily Dot has a good summary. It really isn't safe these days to try and taunt subcultures you perceive as geeky and pitiable, they end up having way more power and self-awareness than you expect. I cannot help but be amused, though, at the cosmic inevitability of Moran attempting to sabotage Sherlock and failing dismally. It is, after all, simply an enactment of the Doyle plot. (Sebastian Moran is Moriarty's sniper sidekick in canon, if your Sherlock geekery is a bit rusty).
Random fanfic recc! I am currently actually re-reading The Least of All Possible Mistakes, which is a rather well-written and often laugh-out-loud funny Sherlock fic featuring a Sherlock given to entertaining tantrums and a Mycroft/gender-swapped-Lestrade relationship which is both amusing and real. The fandom fascination with Mycroft fascinates me. I blame Mark Gatiss entirely.

I finally sent out the Boxing Day braai email last night, after more than average levels of procrastination and forgettory. If you weren't on the list but usually are it's probably because of my cheese-brain, please drop me a reproachful line.

The subject line is the Konami Code, which as a concept and a catch-phrase as well as a random bit of esoterica has always amused the hell out of me.

Several Things!

I spent the weekend holed up in my study marking Honours and second-year essays, with the net result that when the EL bounded into the kitchen on Sunday morning with a cheery greeting he was the first person I'd actually spoken to since 9pm on Friday night. 36 hours in my own head, particularly my own head colonised by student effusions, is really rather a lot. You end up forgetting how to actually form sentences. Or was that the effect of all the student writing? Discuss.
On Friday the sound system in my car had a psychotic episode and for some reason started playing through the albums on the MP3 player in reverse alphabetical order by artist, which means I unaccountably jumped from Arcade Fire to Velvet Underground. (Have become very addicted to The Suburbs, possibly in preparation for Reflektor, which is released today. New Arcade Fire! Score!). I haven't aired my Velvet Underground collection for a couple of years, so it was quite fun to play through Loaded and the one with Nico, which is my favourite. Then my Twitter feed exploded last night with the news of Lou Reed's death. It seems like an appropriate fortuity to an extent which is potentially slightly sinister. I am unable to escape the faint suspicion that in fact I was afflicted with a sort of anticipatory musical ghost. It seems like Lou Reed's style. Of which he had rather a lot. RIP on one hell of a life. (Lovely Neil Gaiman interview here, if you're into that sort of thing).
On the subject of the Circle of Life and what have you, congrats to dicedcaret and his nice lady wife on their acquisition of sudden offspring of the female persuasion. Her name is Eva, she arrived safely on Friday via caesarian, all apparently well.
A random text message arrived this morning purporting to be from the City of Cape Town's weather advisory service, and warning of "Severe storms with large hail" today. Insofar as (a) today is cloudless and hot and has quickly burned off the morning fog, and (b) I'm not actually subscribed to any weather advisory service, this also seems a bit sinister. I am inclining to the notion that I've somehow received a text from an alternate universe in another leg of the Trousers of Time. Or exceptionally lateral phishing spam.
I could have lived very happily for the rest of my life without having encountered, in a student essay, the term "phallic fluids". She was writing about Dracula, but still. Not even the worst of fanfic does that sort of thing.

Subject line from Velvet Underground, natch. "Pale Blue Eyes". His lyrics tend to the oddly complex and evocative.

Heavens to Betsy, it's June. You can tell by the driving rain, hail and icy cold, which are causing me to both freeze and rejoice in equal quantities, because I'm odd that way. Cape Town is in the middle of a giant three-day storm (someone's amazing pic of hailstones lying like snow in the city here), and Hobbit was recently discovered, after 24 hours of absence, curled in a ball of denial under the braai in the shed. It's bloody cold out there, I can only think he must have been hiding from the thunder. Twit. I also have a cold in the head attended by Sid the Sinus Headache, and am conducting today as an extended negotiation between the work that I need to do and my equal and opposite need to go home and hibernate. The sweet child who arrived for curriculum advice this morning struck a serious blow in the service of work ethic when, upon being granted the course change she wanted, she gave an ear-splitting squeal of joy, rushed around the desk and hugged me. She probably added a good hour to the time my butt remains in this chair, which at current showing has me fleeing the place at about 2.30 sharp.

She also mitigates to some extent against the perfectly obnoxious older-brother-of-student who rendered my Thursday afternoon hideous by shouting abuse at me for half an hour by the clock because his little sister can't graduate as expected, and whose toxicity permeated through most of the weekend, resulting in me being withdrawn and useless and having truly weird dreams. I blame him entirely for the current state of lurgi. He freaked me out, being really quite threatening, and it took me a good couple of days to throw off the lowering sense of failure and self-blame. He was an arsehole, who clearly intended at the outset to perform his anger until he'd browbeaten the faculty into acquiescence, and I don't think anything I could have said would have calmed him down, even if he'd let me get a word in edgeways. (I think that the fact that I was female probably made it worse: there's a certain kind of Zimbabwean black male for whom a woman questioning his authority is anathema). Fortunately he was trying to circumnavigate an iron-clad faculty rule which is never relaxed under any circumstances, and the whole performance was doomed. Idiot.

On the upside, this linguistic dissection of annoying teenage sounds was particularly giggle-inducing in the context of my students. You must watch the video, it's brilliant.

I have, for once, remembered that a new month entails a subject line reference post, but this got longer than I intended, I'll defer the payment of intellectual debts until tomorrow. In an attempt at a new approach to this: today's subject line courtesy of Vampire Weekend, whose first two albums I have been playing on rotation for the last couple of weeks. Lovely indie rock with an African music influence, it's bouncy and melodically inventive and clever and has a kwaito-ish edge which makes it weirdly familiar. The quote is off "Unbelievers", which is on their new album and not yet out in this country - I've been hitting YouTube.

Profile

December 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Modular by branchandroot
Theme: Purple Haze by timeasmymeasure

Freckles & Doubt

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

Entries tagged with weather

the fog of war

a hole in my head where the rain gets in

an indeterminate number of things

the mollusc of your choice

too damned hot

the air of spring smelling of never and forever

Cape of Storms

one thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it

the world is something that seems to happen somewhere else

Who the fuck's gonna mess with me?

hope the weather's good

speaks of senseless things

postcolonic

a genteel black hole that knows how to read

petrichor

a wide eyed girl of a tender age

I'll stop the world and melt with you

up up down down left right left right B A

if I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see

the world is a cold, cold place to be

Profile

December 2024

Syndicate

Page Summary

Tags

Style Credit