| down these meme streets |
[Dec. 30th, 2009|10:08 pm] |
It has become traditional to do that thing where you mark the end of the year by running together the first sentence of your first post from every month, resulting in pleasingly surreal and surprisingly representative dadaist gibberish. Thusly:
I have to report quite the nicest new year wish I've had so far. Hello, February, who the hell let you in? Oo, er. Arrived safely in France. I love the bit where I tell a room full of anxious first-years that it's actually significantly difficult to get thrown out of the faculty, they're fine if they pass three courses in their first year. I was going to review Wolverine, honestly I was. Back at work, alas. Hooray, my dreams are back! Wheee! new words! Good grief, it's October. Gawsh. Oh, happy day! Doing my mystic gypsy bit, I divine the following about 2009:
- I still habitually start months with surprised exclamations.
- France loomed large in the year.
- I still enjoy the bit where I make students' lives better.
- Other than that I hate my job.
- Disappointing year for Hollywood popcorn movies. (Yes, I didn't like Star Trek either.)
- Still get high on words.
- For a year which really presented hitherto-unsuspected magnitudes of suck, I actually sound quite determinedly upbeat. That, or extremely sarcastic.
Today, in wanton retreat from all the orientation material I've been updating, I played Zelda in short, compensatory bursts in between packing up the booze cabinet so the Evil Landlord's sister could spirit it away. This necessitated rearranging (and incidentally New Year-cleaning) the kitchen to fit in all the cabinet contents, and thereafter constructing a map so the Evil Landlord could find it all again, although I admit it might have been more amusing to let him bumble around for ever before discovering that all the tall booze is now stashed in with the catfood.
The Zelda thing has re-started after a two-week hiatus after I had to call in stv as a consultant to get me through the horrible bit of the fire temple where I kept falling off the curving ramp trying to run it before the time limit, which he humiliated me utterly by doing first go, without touching the sides. In revenge I have subsequently kicked the butts of the bosses for both the fire and water temples, first go without touching the sides, and in the last one without even using up my healing potions. Currently hung up on trying to catch sufficiently large fish: got annoyed, watched more Supernatural, which (towards the end of Season 4) is extremely angsty and in which angels are bastards and Sam is being a dingbat. On the upside, meta episode is meta. In-episode slash references make me strangely happy.
I'm going to bed now, I seem to be babbling. |
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| box of delights |
[Dec. 27th, 2009|10:18 am] |
Bleah. Have some sort of Bug O'Doom. I fell into bed last night after a pleasingly strenuous evening conducting our traditional Boxing Day braai (20 people plus a thundering herd of 5 small girl-children - happy image of the evening, Evil Landlord being enthusiastically embraced around the knees by Alexandra, aged 2). Then I lay awake for hours in the more or less foetal position while my head pounded and great waves of nausea ran up and down my hapless form. (No, not the booze: I never get to drink much while I'm hosting, owing to the mad frantic. Which, I hasten to add, I rather enjoy. Also, my yearbook photo should be captioned Most Likely To Lose Her Gin At Parties).
This morning isn't much better - nausea still present, can't eat, head pounds, feeling shivery despite balmy day. Evil Landlord laughing at me a lot, but on the upside he did finish the washing up, which I stopped doing owing to the way my head fell off every time I bent over to put things into the dishwasher. Also, have been crashed on my bed for the last hour and a half, where I was unexpectedly joined by the Hobbit, who doesn't usually do beds. Odd cat: can't work out if he senses I'm ill and is trying to help, or if he senses my weakness and is waiting for me to pass out so he can gnaw on me.
Quite the most irritating part of having a recurring sinus problem is the fact that if you're feeling too sick to eat, you can't eat anything which means you can't really take anti-inflammatories for the sinus headache without them making you feel sick. Sicker. Whatever. This circle vicious, do not prod with sticks. Have managed an Advil after half a slice of dry toast, so the pain is receding a tad.
Am going back to bed now. Hope your day is better than mine. |
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| merry bah! humbug |
[Dec. 25th, 2009|08:22 am] |
I hope Christmas brings you all that you desire in the way of carousing, troll-nog and drunken Christmas carols.
Image, as usual, by Ursula Vernon. If you don't read Digger, you should. Sarcastic wombats ftw. |
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| I do not like its silly face |
[Dec. 23rd, 2009|09:28 pm] |
Shopping this morning, I put four bags of pecan nuts1 onto the till counter, and noticed that the woman had only rung up three of them. When I gently pointed out that in fact I owed her another R18.50 (and, ye gods, when did pecan nuts shoot up in price? memo to self, plant tree) she looked at me as though I was a particularly insane three-headed alien waving my twelve arms and spouting gibberish in Esperanto. She then rang up the extra item after triple- and quadruple-checking that this was actually what I meant, as though she couldn't quite believe it. When I'd paid she handed over my receipt with a sort of grudgingly suspicious thank-you for pointing out the error.
This weirds me out. We live in a world where greed and chicanery, on a scale from petty to epic and world-destroying, are the norm - to the extent where a moment's deliberate honesty actually brings the system grinding momentarily to a halt while the act is checked for hidden pitfalls, since if it's not a scam in itself, it's a self-destructive weakness worthy only of contempt. The newspaper billboards this morning were full of a new phishing scam targeting South Africans and based around World Cup tickets. Last week in the supermarket they'd just caught some poor woman attempting to shoplift an entire bag of cheese, twenty or thirty items. They caught her because the shoplifting is enough of an endemic problem that they have undercover security people pretending to be shoppers wandering around the store.
I don't actually like most of the human race very much just now. I think we've lost the plot. Capitalism and its ethos of it's-actually-virtuous-to-grab-for-yourself-now has apparently identified altruism as a foolish weakness which needs to be eradicated from the herd by sheer Darwinian principles. I don't know how the hell the inventors of the system expected it to self-regulate so that rampant greed doesn't grind up everything in its path, but grind it has. And I don't see how you re-introduce the old-fashioned virtues back to this post-capitalist world once you've opened Pandora's box, short of sending the world to moral boot camp with floggings and stern teachers. The system doesn't work any more. Maybe it never did. Maybe humanity isn't actually capable of rising above its own base nature. Maybe I've been reading altogether too much China Mieville and am turning into a socialist. Maybe it's just Christmas getting to me.
I'm going to bed now, my head hurts. On the upside, the new Kelly Link is dynamite, and makes me realise there may be an excuse for the human race after all.
1 Promised jo&stv carrot cake. |
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| now with extra verse |
[Dec. 22nd, 2009|07:03 pm] |
We had a sort of family Christmas tea thingy on Sunday, to swap presents as my sister's away up the coast on Christmas Day itself. I gave Da Niece my latest discovery, which involves two rather entertaining kiddie books by one John Himmelman, Chickens to the Rescue and Katie Loves the Kittens. The Katie one is amusingly rude about dogs, but the chickens one is pleasingly demented, featuring chickens in snorkelling gear, crash helmets and heavens alone knows what else, all with the requisite degree of fuss and feathers. Thusly:
The conversation went something like this:
SISTER: Kids' books these days are really lovely. Also, you always seem to find the subversive ones.
ME (thoughtfully, placing tips of fingers together in approved Patrician pose): Why, yes. Yes, I do.
It is remotely possible that she was also eyeing my Christmas tree, which this year is graced at its apex, inside the giant Christmas star, by a tiny green plush Cthulhu doll I won in a raffle at a CLAW tournament lo these many moons ago. He's very festive.
I feel that my Aunt Dahlia quotient is proceeding apace. Those sproggle-owing individuals among you who don't mind a spot of subversion, now with extra verse, I do heartily recommend John Himmelman.
In other, equally weird and lateral Christmas news, today I appear to have emerged from the stationers bearing something the tillslip insists is an "XMAS GAL SIN". I wish I could say that this gal plans to sin extra-subversively at Christmas, but I fear it'll be the usual: idolatry (still immersed in Supernatural), sloth, gluttony and taking the Lord's name in vain while I try to beat the (*#$^*^$ Fire Temple in Zelda. |
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| apparently I will be upbeat if it kills me |
[Dec. 18th, 2009|10:00 am] |
Gawsh, still happy. The approaching holiday must be doing its thing. Today I am gladdened by:
- Rain! It's raining! gentle, soft, completely unseasonal summer rain which is making things misty and slightly cool, but not cold. Of course, this is further evidence of climate change and what have you, and we're all screwed, but I'm happily damp.
- Improv Everywhere. They're kind of the Non-Evil Twin of candid camera: do weird, wacky stuff that makes people unexpectedly and laterally happy.
- Chicken pot pie. I pretty much forgot to eat yesterday, besides the brownies, so wandered home and made chicken pot pie for supper. It's comfort food. Also, a really nice recipe with leeks and gammon in a creamy sauce flavoured with lemon and mustard. Happily unhealthy.
- Supernatural motel décor. I swear, those boys scour America for the most trippy, psychedelic, catastrophically ugly motel rooms imaginable by man or demon. The set designers must have a blast creating them. I'd do a list, but the mad fansites beat me to it. Some of them have truly awful themes - the orange/bullfighter one and the black and silver disco one crack me up. Happily.
- Last day at work! Despite the fact that I'm going to have to spend part of the next two weeks working on Orientation material, Holiday! holidayholidayholiday! Happy!
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maxbarners's Friends Page
slightly unhinged
ick
of surprisingly good cheer