Today's two most recent google search terms in my browser: "college impact theory" and "103 Ways to Annoy Lord Voldemort". This tells you absolutely everything you need to know about my working life. On the upside, this Harry Potter paper is taking vague conceptual shape. I darkly suspect we may actually be dealing with institutional climate theory.

In other news, if one more student panics his/her way through that door and turns out not to be clutching the relevant paperwork, I may find myself perpetrating spontaneous avada kedavra tests in a working environment.

The mad social whirl continues unabated. Fed raclette to jo&stv and d_hofryn on Sunday night, mmmm, cheese. Fed lasagne to waynne&jean last night, on the grounds that renovatory sods have dug up the entire floor of their house (except the bedroom) and they can't cook, sit, shower, or eat or breathe without excessive intrusion by dust. (I am all braced for our own renovations, starting in a week or two following the unexpectedly efficient approving of the plans by Council, go figure. Also go dragonroost, Man with Plan). Tonight, game. Tomorrow night, ballet. Friday night, the grad ceremony for all my orientation leaders. Weekend, collapse in the horizontal position and sleep for more hours than the weekend actually contains. Not a social butterfly, me. Require recharge time. Like a dodgy battery. Particularly since I'm once again feeling as though someone socked me in the throat several times before wantonly unplugging me from the wall socket and sticking me into the Duracell bunny to run pink fluffy marathons, or whatever. Body, she is scratched.

It's not helping that my Favourite Masters Student, TM, dropped by my office this morning in order to enthuse about all the fascinating reading she's doing, the which I have no time to do. Phooey. The problem with the glory days of postgrad lounging, free of 9-5 commitments and defined by drifting in a becomingly dilettante fashion between the computer screen, the tea supplies and the pile of new sf and toothsome, weighty critical tomes, is that one doesn't bloody appreciate them when they're happening. Mostly, of course, because one is too busy whinging about the total shortage of money, but hey, money isn't everything. By Freudian slippage I originally wrote "money isn't anything". Word.

Waaah! I wanna be a grad student again. Or, at the very least, an academic. I'm losing the lingo, because administration and student advice do not, alas, allow one to exercise the muscles of nuanced, insightful sophistication of thought - not even over the weekends, because I'm too bloody tired. If I stick around much longer I'm going to become an administrator, and heaven forfend.

Hah! Vindicated. I urge all currently wrong-thinking people (i.e. those who thought Star Trek was a good film) to read Sarah Rees Brennan's parody, which irrevocably highlights all the logical flaws in its "plot". She's a fanfic writer (wrote as Maya) who has just had her first original YA fantasy published, a copy of which I have ordered in recognition of her righteous mockery. (Actually, not really, I ordered the book yesterday because I really enjoy her writing. But the parody would have made me order it if I hadn't already.)

Now off to display my own, much less exciting Book over lunch to the HoD of the English dept who still refuses to hire me. Cosmic Irony ftw. At least it's raining. Rain makes me happy. Happily damp.

Edited to add: it occurs to me, belatedly, to comment on the fact that my subject line is a deliberately layered appropriation of a quote from a work which explicitly quotes, restates and parodies a film which is itself a self-conscious reworking which continually references the complex construction in fan consciousness of a rather old and klunky actual text we all hold dear. Baudrillard would be so proud. As, for that matter, would Jameson and old Uncle Umberto and all.

I just wandered out of my office to discover that the road outside our building had unexpectedly transformed itself into a smallish grove, or largish copse. Closer inspection revealed that this was, in fact, about 50 shrubs in pots on the back of a trailer. This is presumably in honour of the university open day tomorrow, possibly in order to provide camouflage from the safety of which all the lurking academics can gnash their teeth at the passing youth. One has to wonder, though, at the fact that Western civilisation has reached a point where some managerial Power muses, "Gosh, how can we make our university's academic cred appeal to potential students? I know! Bring me ... a shrubbery!"

This morning I braved the wilds of the airport in order to extricate the trunk containing my father's personal effects from the maw, or possibly claws, of various shipping agencies, customs officials and assorted chorus. This was a curiously Zen procedure owing to the strange prevailing religion which causes the Planner of Airports to set up signposts as hidden, occulted grails or shrines in some holy quest, rather than as any sort of guide of actual use to the traveller. My vaguely wandering circles did, in the end, bear fruit, although the trunk itself fits so exactly into the back of my car that I rather suspect I'm going to have to remove it with a can-opener. It's these little challenges that tell you you're worthy. Quite of what, history does not relate.

I would be more excited about the Fridayness of it all were I not destined to spend all of tomorrow explaining, slowly and clearly, faculty course structures to confused Matrics, probably from behind the safety of a smallish bush. I also have a family row scheduled for Sunday morning, which has caused my stomach to assume the position of the Gordian knot for most of the last week. On the upside, tonight jo&stv kidnap me for noodles and Coraline, which isn't actually quite as surreal as it sounds.

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. The sharp intake of breath. The helpless, relieved grins. The relaxation of the shoulders as hope dawns. Until this point most of them are petrified that they'll be flung out into the snow if they fail one. Sometimes I really enjoy my job.

Back to lecturing today, which also possibly explains my unusually buoyant mood, to the extent of wandering down the corridor singing "Tell me why! I don't like Mondays..." happily to myself. (Bob Geldorf notwithstanding. Lord, that's an irritating little man). Holding forth for forty-five minutes on the essential unreality of sex in representation seems to calm my inner kvetch quite nicely, thank you, which is fortunate as the Monday shock after a three-day weekend is usually quite nasty. Also, bonus, made a point of using both "resonate" and "evoke" at least once during the lecture. Just for you, stvil. Plus mandatory references to Buffy, Anne Rice diss, and revelation of the existence of Weasleycest to stunned and disbelieving Humanities third-years.

I miss teaching. Memo to self, trade in career, it is skraaatched.

In the Department of Random Idioms Acquired From FSM Knows Where, is anyone else familiar with the term "white night" to describe insomnia? It also, of course, describes the deliriously cheesy (in the Young Brie category) 80s movie with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines, about escaping from Soviet Russia: I remember the movie primarily for the Lionel Ritchie theme tune and the frankly marvellous mid-film pas de deux of the two dancers, somehow melding classical ballet with modern/tap moves. However, she says, skilfully resisting the seductions of sidetrack, Teh Internets seem to think that "white night" in the idiomatic sense is a translation from the French, and means a night spent without sleep, presumably related to the near-polar-latitudes experience of midsummer nights when it never actually gets dark.

All of this suggests that I can't actually define last night's experience as a "white night", being as how I went to bed at ten, slept until two, woke up in a state of mad alertness and couldn't, despite application of cocoa, Terry Pratchett and soothing visualisations, get to sleep again until somewhere in the region of 4.30. Then my alarm went off at a quarter to six, causing some unladylike vocabulary to manifest. I am headachy, disoriented and annoyed; also, trying to arrange computer lab sessions over four programmes with three kinds of training or test for each of 1200 students in five potential labs is making my head go round and round.

And, in the Department Of Things Not To Do When Trying To Establish Academic Cred: consistently refer to Kipling's Just So Stories throughout an English department seminar when you really mean The Jungle Book. Phooey. On the upside, bonus academic waffle points for successfully comparing McCarthy's The Road with Gaiman's Graveyard Book in one epic, thematic analysis.

tsukikoneko had a rather good Halloween party on Friday night, complete with people in somewhat excellent costumes, and a cake shaped like a ghost (cute). I copped out of the costume thing, although a random selection of sort-of-Halloweeny items from my wardrobe seems to have kicked me out dressed as myself circa about 1993, i.e. gothy (sans the make-up. I no longer actually possess any make-up, even if I felt like relapsing. Curiously liberating, actually). I was feeling a bit antisocial and thus had to have about three glasses of wine before relaxing enough to enjoy it, which resulted in poor librsa, who'd incautiously asked me a leading question, having his ear enthusiastically bent for about half an hour as I madly compared Sheri Tepper's Grass with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is the substance of a rather tentacular feminist/genre/gothic paper that has been callously refusing to allow me to write it in any coherent sense for about three years now. Fortunately librsa is good at leading questions and wine is good at unlocking my thought processes, with the result that a crucial insight hit me amidships after about ten minutes of babbling, causing me to go "OMG! it's all about failed parenthood resulting in monstrous offspring!", after which I wove drunkenly home to spend about half of the rest of the weekend enthusiastically reshuffling my notes and watching the argument slot neatly into place. Which means I'm no further on Harry Potter. Sorry, wolverine_nun. But it all makes me realise how isolated I am in this university from people who actually understand the genre stuff I do. Also, that possibly I should write more papers while drunk.

It was also rather a felinated evening. Apart from re-acquainting myself with tsukikoneko's Machek, who I helped bottle-feed as an extremely small scrap of kitten and who is fat, unbelievably beautiful (silver-grey tabby, my favourite flavour) and a total slut for affection, one of the guests had dressed as a witch and brought along her "familiar", a sphinx. (That's the weird hairless breed). It was very cute, velvety to the touch, and also bizarrely and completely chilled - I swear she'd drugged it, although she maintained it's simply a calm cat. You try to wrap any of mine in a blanket and drag it into a Halloween party, you end up with your Halloween costume involuntarily being "Survivor" - of a mountain lion attack, or possibly the zombie apocalypse.

Bugger, it must be Monday, it's The Sentences That Ate Cape Town. Sorry. (Also, I'm a bit zoned from waking up randomly at 5am this morning and being unable to get back to sleep, resulting in a 7am arrival in my office and two hours of extremely productive work before the first student disaster knocked on my door. Not to mention the comfortable glow of superiority. I wanted to leave handfuls of small reproachful etched frimpt shells on my boss's desk, but fortunately wiser counsels prevailed. Besides, she's exponentially more efficient than I am, and I rather like her.)

Last Night I Dreamed: a complicated sort of Alias-style dream involving subterranean secret bases accessed from the bottom of a river (tricky for dragging in reluctant prisoners). Said base was controlled by a giant, organic, semi-sentient computer system called ROAR (don't ask me why, it's probably an obscure faculty acronym) which at the central point of the dream was sabotaged by Cary Elwes, who was a double agent (no doubt present because of his dodgy ambiguous agent turn on X-files), by means of evilly substituting a fake replica for the small charcoal pill at the point of the laser which ran the computer. (My subconscious is also not a science grad). I was just too late to stop the substitution, resulting in the whole world being shunted off into an alternate reality in which ROAR was crippled.

The Daily Voice strikes again! This time, LESBIAN KILLED BY EVIL BUSH! or, possibly, LESBIAN KILLED IN EVIL BUSH! This is rife with possibility: (a) shrubbery, (b) the current anti-gay sentiment in the American administration, and (c) maddened dodgy euphemism. Also note the characteristic Daily Voice use of EVIL! It could never be a mildly annoying bush, or even a slightly badly-behaved one.

Ounce managed to distinguish himself this weekend by setting fire to his tail. He climbed into the Evil Landlord's lap while said EL was pewter-casting, turned around three times in that characteristic feline way, and passed his tail through the gas burner, causing it to merrily catch alight. He then lay there in blissful obliviousness to the conflagration, purring madly, while the EL extinguished the flames. Honestly, that cat has even less brain than Golux. Stv suggests that Ounce's drink is probably the Flirtini. I concur.

Have just sent jo&stv home full of reasonably successful tiramisu (I'm still in the recipe-tinkering stage), so that I can, at least, say that I achieved something this weekend. Oh, and most of today was spent reading Harry Potter papers and scrawling acerbic notes for this paper I'm writing jointly with wolverine_nun. Glory, but you did a lot of research for this, w-n! Shall try and have something coherent for you by next weekend. Currently, I'm deeply suspicious of the pedagogic principles inherent in the HP novels, and inclined to disagree with the critics who see the hands-off teaching styles of the Hogwarts faculty as a chance for children to engage in self-directed study. Call me old-fashioned, but a curriculum slanted towards defeating Voldemort is not, in my book, addressing the inner needs of the individual child.

Yesterday's favourite student howler: gave curriculum advice to a young lady who's determined to do her Law "bar code exam". New developments in the legal profession: all our graduates can scan bar codes with their teeth.

This review/reshuffle of the index is far more major a job than I'd anticipated, and will take me every non-student-advice-giving moment up until the deadline on Thursday. (So you're off the hook, librsa, with your kind offer of proofreading - there simply ain't time. But thank you anyway. The willingness of all and sundry to pitch into this book-writing lark is heart-warming, although possibly insane. Three separate people in the last week have asked for a rundown on the topic. Poor suckers). I also discover, however, that either the organic processes of indexing mean my criteria for entries change all the time, or I simply can't count. The word search approach is revealing all sorts of simply wrong page numbers, I don't know what the hell I was thinking at the time. Possibly "aargh". But at least it is getting a fairly thorough proof-read.

In other news, maybe it's indexing which gives me gut cramps. Or simply the stress. But I'm pale and nauseous again. Phooey.

Wow. In the Department of the Randomly Surreal, I've just taken a phone call to my office landline in which the annoying MTN voice lady announced that I had an SMS. This was followed by a throaty male baritone which observed, in perfectly level tones and without noticeable word breaks, "MY MOM HAD STROLL WE HAD TO SEE HER IN." What is this, the new spam?

The last few days, for some reason, are making me fully grok the significance of the Georgette Heyer phrase "an irritation of the nerves." My nerves are irritated. Things fret me when they shouldn't, which is possibly why the usual EL non-communication is getting to me. On the other hand, twenty minutes browsing the Can Haz Cheeseburger archive were very soothing. I'm not a huge fan of LOLcats, only about one in twenty is truly amusing, but cute kitties are good for the soul.

My mother's youngest sister used to live in Cape Town, and was a notable figure in my childhood for the perfectly lovely books she used to send us. Literate aunts are extremely important, as I frequently tell my niece. Anyway, my favourite among the books that she sent was Anne Fine's The Summer House Loon, which is unusual in the annals of my childhood kiddielit memories in that it isn't actually fantasy. It's a sort of social and emotional comedy, I suppose, seen through the eyes of the barely-teenaged Ione, who both observes and manipulates the interactions between her blind professor father, his beautiful typist, and Ned, the dopey, hippy, shambling, entirely endearing grad student who's in love with the typist. I think I had a crush on Ned when I was a kid, actually, he's a wonderful combination of intelligent, funny and helpless. The story ambles gently and wittily between relationship angst, academic rivalry, early Sardinian trade routes, impromptu party-arranging, teenaged manipulativeness and first experiences of drunkenness; it's sharply well-observed and pleasantly inconsequential. I think its huge strength, though, is the way it immerses you in Ione's adolescent world, in its classic combination of narcissism and fascinated observation of grown-up motivations and concerns. I also suspect that this book is at least partially responsible for my attraction to the world of academia.