The faculty office is all over Mary Celeste today - three people down with the gastric bug. Another two were down yesterday, not counting me, and I await tomorrow's tally with bated breath. It seems to have been one of those friendly-puppy sort of bugs, bouncing around slobbering happily on all and sundry. I still feel pale and gut-punched, and words cannot express how bored I am with eating toast, but generally I'm a lot better. Yay.

In between the trail of end-of-term student angst piling up outside my door I've been doing a final editing pass through this index, and I just pressed "Send" to shunt it the hell off to the press, to cries of joy from the nice editing lady who appreciates my appreciation of deadlines. I feel... slightly lost. This thing has eaten my life for three weeks (I'm sorry to have been so boring), and it's incredibly weird to contemplate an evening in which I don't rush home at 4pm to index frantically for another four hours. Weird in a good way, though.

I'm not just out of alphabet, I'm also out of X-Files. Last night I finished watching the X-Files finale - the end, not just of poor limping Season 9, but of the series as a whole. On the whole, while I enjoyed quite goodly chunks of the season, I'm narked and disappointed by its closure. ( Comments may be spoilery, so are lurking after the cut. )

Darn it. Teh Internets, bless them, seem unable to give me a picture of Will Smith being beaten against the side of a car by a flailing alien tentacle. Witterers are please to imagine same, as an approximation of my current state.

The being-beaten sensation is peculiarly appropriate, given the complete absence of the weekend from the "being useful in the indexing stakes" slate. I was draggy and out of it all Saturday, and then woke up at 3am on Sunday morning with the most epic, nasty and virtuoso manifestation yet of Sid the Sinus Headache - I swear the little bugger was hammering a six-inch railroad spike through my right temple, causing me to lie in bed and whimper helplessly for about twenty minutes until I could rouse and find a painkiller. He was almost certainly laying railroad tracks, as the headache migrated gently through Sunday from right temple, to centre forehead, to left temple, to just above the left ear. It came accompanied by a wild temperature and nausea, to the point where I couldn't actually sit up for more than about five minutes at a time throughout Sunday. Happy illness ironies: I was feeling too sick to eat anything, which means I couldn't take the Advil which would have sorted out the sinus headache. It's these little details which tell you the Cosmic Wossnames are poking each other in the ribs and snickering. On my week of leave, too. No fair.

Anyway. I'm still headachy today, but put in two chapters worth of indexing with a relative presence of brain. I seem to be suffering from a profusion of entries, which I may have to ruthlessly rationalise once I've finished.

X-Files report: I'm actually getting to like Doggett, he's a believable and mostly likeable character. I could happily watch him and Scully interact for several seasons, but I'm all doom-laden because I know they don't. Agent Reyes has just been introduced. Agent Reyes put my teeth completely on edge within about three seconds of her first appearance, and it's only getting worse. Possibly the only reason to continue watching the bloody series with her as a feature is in the vague hopes that they accidentally land a spaceship on her and squash her flat. She's a disgusting combination of superciliousness and sheer stupid flakiness, and when she stands there pontificating smugly about her "feelings" and "openness" while simultaneously refusing to believe anything Scully says, I want to haul off and punch her. That episode about the Native American shamanistic sickness-eater was amazing, though. In a slightly gross way.

Today's Rant List:

1. Vague students whose idea of curriculum advice is to plump down in the chair in my office and tell me that they want to study computers. They are entirely unable to tell me which aspect of computers, or even why they want to study them. Also, we're the Humanities faculty and don't even offer computer studies.
   
2. Distressed parents who cry in my office because daughter isn't doing as well as hoped, and who continually interrupt my careful reassurances to engage in further hair-tearing which demonstrates only too clearly that they haven't been listening to a word I've said.
   
3. Scratchy contact lenses. Bloody expensive scratchy contact lenses.
   
4. Admin. The thing I most hate about this damned admin is that it's all little, scrappy bits of thing that skitter away from my attention. Give me a good, solid, hefty chunk of project and I'm fine, but this bitty approach is like being nibbled to death by invisible ADD mice. Then again, one major indexing project coming up, so possibly I should be careful what I wish for.
   
5. Students are clogging the bandwidth again. Soon they will be clogging it with their blood! Then I can view gossip blogs in peace.
   
6. Parcelforce. (Because I promised Scroob, and gestating ladies need moral support).

I shall console myself with linkery. Has The Large Hadron Collider Destroyed The World Yet? (Nicked from first_fallen. Hee.)

And Jane Austen's Batman, an exercise in voice which leaves me paralysed with admiration.

Still X-Filesing, since I'm having hissy fits about my Evil Landlord's apparently complete inability to tell me that he'd like to watch Farscape: he stands around in the middle distance and looks puppy-dog instead, a particular form of non-communication which is giving me a strong desire to kick him, and is also causing me to bloody-mindedly watch X-Files until he damned well asks me not to. On the upside, I'd forgotten about Bruce Campbell guest starring in that one about the demon babies. Beautifully cast: he has the perfect combination of square jaw and not-quite-real emoting for the role.

I shall also console myself with dalmatians. I am Not A Dog Person, but I grew up on Dodie Smith, who is, as you all know, she says threateningly, the author of not only I Capture The Castle, the perfect novel of the adolescent viewpoint on life, love and family eccentricity, but The Hundred And One Dalmatians, made famous by the Disney adaptation, and its practically unknown sequel, The Starlight Barking. I'm fond of Dalmatians because of its comfortable, slightly dreamy, hyper-correct English tone, and of course for Cruella de Vil, absolutely the perfect villainess, with her drawing room panelled in red streaky marble like raw meat, her half-white, half-black hair and her Absolutely Simple White Mink Coat. But I love The Starlight Barking because it's more or less hallucinatory in feel. The hundred-plus dalmatians, living happily in an English country house with their devoted owners the Dearlys, wake up one morning to find out that all humans and other animals are fast asleep, only dogs are awake. Also, random canine telekinetic and telepathic powers appear to have manifested. They travel up to London, where the runt of the original litter, Cadpig, is now the Prime Minister's dog. I love the slightly satirical scenes of the dog cabinet, run by all the ministers' dogs, as they try to come to terms with the suddenly narcoleptic country; I also love the happy, dreamlike enablement of all the new powers. The books have always offered a slightly twee sense of animal identity, but the characters have a great deal of charm and the book's moral lesson is more than somewhat heart-warming. Mostly, though, I love this book because it's simply weird.

This techno-jinx is getting out of hand. The Evil Landlord's computer died yesterday, again, after no more than a week of actually working. It's got over the hissy-fit random rebooting: now it sulks in the basement, hunching its shoulders and resolutely refusing to boot up at all. Since his computer does all the Iburst stuff, I am once again without home net access. Phooey. However, my recently acquired Heroes of Might and Magic III and IV disk vanished mysteriously into the EL's study on Sunday and hasn't been seen since apart from faint griffin-noises and the occasional bout of tactical cursing, so there's an off chance he might be prompted to get the bloody computer fixed in anything other than geological time.

Then, by way of rubbing in the sad futility of all things electronic, we had a "scheduled" (in the sense that we had no warning at all) power cut last night, right in the middle of that particularly good X-Files episode about the Cigarette Smoking Man and JFK, which was pushing all my paranoid conspiracy happy buttons. Until, that is, it was replaced by pitch blackness. (Actually, the last time this happened I was also watching X-Files. Either I watch way too much X-Files, or there's a sinister connection here). Fortunately, being a good SCA household we have no shortage of candles, candlesticks and matches. I would have knitted by candlelight except that the pattern I want to try with the banana fibre was on my computer. Today I printed it out, secure in the knowledge that this will mean we won't have anything resembling a power cut for weeks.

The Heroes disk has been turned over to the EL mostly because, as a sort of bizarre side-effect of handing in the final book updates, I'm actually reading again. The most recent discovery: Libba Bray. She's a YA paranormal writer, and the two novels I've read (A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels) are Victorian fantasy school stories. They're very non-Harry-Potter, though: it's all girls, not just a girls' school, but magical realms which are controlled by a female priesthood. The novels also have a rather fascinating feel and focus with an atmosphere that's a bit hot-housy, all that adolescent angst, burgeoning sexuality and hormonally-driven Really Bad Decision-Making. (Also, corsets, hot Indian youths, unconventional art teachers and a certain amount of running around the woods naked). Some of the young ladies, or at least the choices they make, make me want to slap them, but in a completely realistic way. I think far too few writers actually tap into the true wayward narcissism of the adolescent. Maybe because they don't want to remember it? I remember all too clearly being inutterably dim about things.

Right. Have just had unpleasant interview with a student whose curriculum disasters are obviously All Our Fault, TM, nothing to do with him. This has left me shredded enough that I'm going to bunk gym on the grounds of exhaustion, shreddedness and a sprained ankle, and trundle homeward to spend the evening doing nothing much. I think Sid is lurking, I slept for nearly ten hours last night and am absolutely drained. Also, starmadeshadow brought me Dresden Files to read. Yay!

I had to be on campus again this morning (late orientation, bleah), and on the way back home was overtaken on the freeway by three motorbikes, those shiny insectoid ones with the high snarling engine note, their riders all in black and heraldic colours, with armoured knees and elbows. I changed lanes to let them past, and watched them recede into the distance with a quite distinct feeling of amused pleasure. Ah, motorbikes. I can feel a random analysis coming on.

I've said before that the only thing I actually miss about the Bastard Ex-Boyfriend From Hell is his motorbike, and the sheer pleasure of speed is certainly apart of the motorbike appeal - a powerful engine coupled with the immediacy of the experience, nothing to separate you from the world whipping past. It's also true that motorbikes exude an aura of danger, not just because of the mystique of the biker, but because they're inherently dangerous, impractical and overpowered. You're more likely to kill yourself horribly on a motorbike than you are in a car, and that fact embeds itself into the idea of a bike with equal parts of fascination and slight unease. A bike is, in itself, a mild twos-up to the Establishment, an assertion of independence, danger and slightly ridiculous leather outfits.

But there's also something about a group of motorcycles together, a sort of visceral thrill that's not entirely about the Hell's Angels associations. Several bikes together has a faint gang resonance, an idea of a communal experience of speed which is isolated against the safer travel choices of the rest of the world. It's faintly threatening even if they're not sporting gang tattoos - threatening, I think, in the same way that the classic X-Files moment of a half-dozen identical black limos screeching to a stop outside the Forbidden Government Secret Installation can be¹. Groups of bikers don't just evoke biker gangs, but presidential cavalcades, post-apocalyptic road pirates, and Judge Dredd. It's about power, of course, bikes are always about power, but in this case it's organised, unknown power about which you end up feeling slightly paranoid.

All of which being said, I'm not really claiming to stand weak-kneed at the side of the road while a bike gang sweeps past. The image is just too clichéd, too obvious: I think I end up enjoying it as I do many things, ironically, complicit for the moment in the biker's assumption of power and rebellion, but refusing to believe they could actually mean it seriously.

¹ The last X-Files episode I watched guest starred, somewhat unexpectedly, Giovanni Ribisi and Jack Black. Giovanni Ribisi is a scary-good actor when he puts his mind to it, his turn as the slightly retarded teen-aged psychopath was chilling. Younger Leonardo di Caprio, eat your heart out. And what is it with actors with Italian names playing retarded characters, anyway? some kind of union?