Phooey, had a whole post written and LJ inexplicably ate it. I now have a mental image of my poor little paragraphs wandering, lost and aimless, through the wastes of cyberspace, slowly disintegrating. On mature reflection this is not unlike the basic human urge, which I do not share, to believe in some kind of survival of consciousness after death, except that there's probably more actual reason to believe in an after-image of data than there is to believe in an after-image of consciousness.

This random and unprompted cosmic musing brought to you courtesy of a week packed with disintegrating students, some of whom present no really compelling argument for the persistence of consciousness before death, let alone after. On the upside, one of them dropped by my office for absolutely no reason other than to tell me how much she enjoyed my fanfic lectures in the first term. This kind of thing creates an identical effect to that of a chance acquaintance suddenly presenting you with a giant bouquet of flowers on general principles. Also, fanficcers get everywhere, like Hobbit fur.

I don't remember most of the lost post, like the Last Post but less musical. I do remember, however, linking to Gizmodo's rather entertaining analysis of the historical development of incompatible electrical plug formats across different countries. This has produced my current Favourite Sentence Du Jour: "Basically, the best way to guess who's got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature." At last, a use for postcolonial literature. Who knew? (This last statement brought to you courtesy of Academic Bitterness, and not to be taken out of context. Some of my best friends are postcolonial literature).

Now off to fight my current, Fridayish urge to lock my door and pretend I don't exist for the rest of the day. The current degree of student trauma is creating a sad tendency for me to get all empathetically weepy while giving curriculum advice. I think I need a debrief.

In the Department Of We Learn Something New Every Day, I can now disassemble and reassemble a collapsible wheelchair, admittedly with much fumbling while my dad quietly laughs at my approximation of mechanical skill, but hey. He knew he hadn't fathered an engineer. Have also learned to take wheelchairs backwards down slopes, which is apparently Article 1 in the Wheelchair Highway Code. I'm sure other articles prohibit me bashing the damned thing into doors and (occasionally) pulling up too late and bashing my dad's feet into the fronts of counters. I'm a good driver. Really. At any rate my dad is now safely ensconced in hospital for a minor op, without any particularly torrid wheelchair traffic accidents. The nice medical people are going to install something I've been referring to as a peg without realising that it's actually a PEG tube, or percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube. Eating's a bitch when you can't swallow.

Early-morning hospital jaunts seem to have dislocated my day a tad, I'm feeling a bit random. Randomly, then: maxbarners pointed me to this deliriously happy article about a new form of spider called Heteropoda davidbowie. I have to say, the resemblance is striking: I think it's the spider's eye-makeup.



And, even more randomly: recycling! Has it ever occurred to you that the process of checking plastic bottles for their recycling status is uncannily like sexing kittens? You hold them up in a good light and peer searchingly at their nethers.

Perfect birthday! wake up to bucketing rain and high winds, lie in bed enjoying it without having to dash off to work. When maxbarners arrives, tragically without smoczek because her work is being evil, hijack his plan to go out for a birthday breakfast and instead use him as an excuse to make waffles. With chocolate ice cream, because that's all that was in the house. Consume vast and unlikely quantities of same.

Read multitudinous birthday messages on Twitter and Facebook and email, being touched and surprised that so many people remembered. Realise that both Facebook and LJ send out reminders if you tell them your birthday, which I apparently did. Be touched and happy anyway.

Spend the afternoon in a warm kitchen with cats and tea and loud rock music, cooking enormous meals and chocolate cake for my favourite group of role-playing lunatics this evening. Why, yes, role-playing is my idea of a perfect way to spend a birthday evening. Why, yes, I am an enormous geek.

That Dreaded Age has apparently found me still firmly in the Cooking Huge Meals For Friends camp, to which I say, damn straight. It's also given me a bit of a warning about doddering dillyness, being as how I accidentally left my wallet on the counter in the liquor store this afternoon, necessitating one of those embarassing groping sessions at the Woolies checkout, immediately followed by fleeing the store without paying. On the upside, the Cosmic Wossnames dictate that I wasn't actually pickpocketed, and didn't drop the wretched thing in the street, and that the liquor store clerk returned it to me with the minimum of mockery, so I think we're ahead.

My subconscious seems to be firmly convinced that this is just another birthday and I'm really no more than a day older now than I was yesterday, so I seem refreshingly free of Milestone Angst. Thanks to everyone for wishes, will reply individually, eventually, but for now know that there's a Warm Glow that's not entirely about the Earl Grey. Also, looking forward to seeing a pleasing proportion of you on Saturday.

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.

Hmmm. Wayward brain, c'est moi. The last set of subject lines on this blog have referenced, from the bottom, Belle & Sebastian lyrics, heraldry humour, a weak and inexcusable pun, Crowded House lyrics, A. A. Milne, netspeak, Yoda, The Firm's "Star Trekking", and a quote from the Spike sexual-dysfunction scene in Buffy Season 4. Either I'm ridiculously well rounded or I have the attention span of a stunned herring.

In the Department of Consciousness-Challenged Members of the Genus Clupea, this morning I woke up about half an hour before my alarm clock went off and decided to dash up to campus in the first flush of nasty traffic at about 7.15 instead of waiting until it dies down a bit after 8. Twenty minutes later, inching through Rondebosch, I realised it was Wednesday and I'd joyously locked up the house and set the alarm in blithe disregard of the fact that it's the gardener's day. Three seconds later I also realised that I hadn't switched off the alarm clock before I left. Gritting my teeth and turning the car around with a fine insouciance in the face of oncoming traffic, it was forcibly borne upon me that I had one of my contact lenses in back-to-front. I consider it to be a triumph of the will that I returned home with only a few restrained cuss words, and didn't immediately crawl straight back into bed. But my noble plan to finish the marking before the day started was, alas, doomed.

The vagaries of the week have been slightly complicated by the fact that my dad's in Groote Schuur this week, going through a batch of tests in the neurology ward, so the levels of Kafkaesque surreal have been increased materially by the need to negotiate the Giant Medical Bureaucracy That Ate Observatory. The people are surprisingly sweet, but I swear that building warps space-time. It has more floors than it should, and they're all twice as tall as they should be so that one flight of stairs is approximately endless. Also, directions don't work. A compass in that place would merely spin, in a desultory and hapless fashion, until rescued by kindly doctors.

However, consolation from the Department of Helpless Fangirling: China Miéville on crime novels. I've always stoutly maintained that crime novels are non-realist and offer the same narrative pleasures as fantasy, so it's nice to have my opinion (and large collection) confirmed by someone of Mr. Mieville's intellectual stature. This last being indexed by his ability to perpetrate, apparently straight-faced, not only the wonderful phrase I have snagged for today's subject line, but the following set of statements:

The various manly Virgils who appear ex nihilo to escort Marlowe through his oneiric purgatories are not characters, but eloquent opacities in man-shape: much more interesting. Dalgliesh’s irresistibility to hyperrealised moral panics du jour – the poor man manages to contract SARS – is an elegiac opera of Holland Park angst, rather than any quotidian gazette of a policeman’s unhappy lot.

Of course, he's China Miéville and therefore gets away with it, but any student who pulled that on me in an essay would acquire righteous quibbles in the margin in green pen, probably along the lines of "you're over-writing!", "somewhat prolix (look it up)", and "do you actually know what these words mean?" Also, probably, "aargh".

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.

Yup, that was Odegra, that was. In addition to the frankly torrid traffic patterns over the last few days, the sigil-writing bugger has also ensured that tracing the dread sigil over Cape Town's roads has caused my car to run suddenly and catastrophically out of oil. I put in a pint a week ago; driving out to have dinner in Muizenberg with The Nicest Ex-Supervisor In The World last night, I experienced a sudden rude buzzing noise and an oil light, and poking the engine with sticks revealed about 2mm of a sort of sludge at the bottom of the sump. Presumably the full load of oil has been distributed in a long, dribbling slick to reinforce the sigil, which the Sigil-Writing Bugger probably set fire to in the small hours of the morning, cackling horribly. Next effect: Table Mountain slides inexorably into the sea. News at 11.

Fortunately putting four pints of oil into the car did, in fact, fill her up enough to allow me to limp home, grumbling, whereupon my Evil Landlord, nice man, lent me his car and I ended up in Muizenberg only an hour late, driving much too fast as I do in his car, which has a far bigger engine and music on tap. The Nicest Ex-Supervisor In The World has the highly civilised opinion that a good dinner date with an ex-student entails champagne, home-made jambalaya and a watching of The Devil Wears Prada, with a minimal amount of actual film or cultural analysis and a maximal quotient of Meryl Streep fangirling. (Thoroughly enjoyed the film, although I found myself watching the clothes/make-up application scenes, and the truly horrible high-heeled shoes, with a sort of detached anthropological fascination. Counting on my fingers, I don't think I've worn make-up for in excess of about seven years now, and I feel fine. Meryl Streep, on the other hand, is fabulous and can wear make-up any time she likes.)

This weekend I absolutely have to sort out my reader for the internet eroticism lectures I'm giving the week after next. They're only about a month overdue, after all. I go to embrace the eight-book-thick pile of tomes on blogging which awaits me, doom-like, next to the sofa. Before that, however, because it's funny: Alien Vs. Predator.

Some bastard is fiddling with the Dread Sigil Odegra again in Cape Town at the moment - traffic last night was unspeakable, Rondebosch was almost gridlocked from about 4.30 to after 6.30, which is the time I gave up trying to get over to Hout Bay to visit my dad. I figured that if it had taken me 35 minutes to fail to leave Rondebosch, the rest of it was pretty much doomed. It wasn't much fun this morning, either, 40 mins up to campus, only to find the network down. I think the Cosmic Wossnames are prodding me with sticks, and snerkling nastily as I get all twitchy without my daily blogs.

On the upside, the Department of Crazed Tabloid Surrealism is fully operational. Today's gem: MY EVIL GOAT LOVE CURSE! In true billboard headline fashion the words ramify into a host of possible meanings, leaving one unsure if the unfortunate speaker is evilly cursed to love goats, cursed in love by an evil goat, or has a nice line in expletives (I have to say, I'm having the kind of day which does, in fact, inspire me to mutter "Evil goat love!" under my breath at intervals).

On the further upside, three-day weekend, with various pleasing social wossnames lined up including, after a gap of years, Mythos! It is remotely possible that I may not actually bite any more student heads off on Tuesday, although I plan to keep "Evil goat love!" in reserve just in case.

My life currently has a sort of baroque inevitability about it. The whole orientation chaos/dislocated knee/root canal debacle took a slightly bizarre twist a few weeks back, when I was supposed to have the full root canal treatment plus a crown, which is called that because it's constructed from gold and diamonds and is an irreplaceable historical artefact, or at least priced like one. Except that I couldn't have the treatment because my dentist had fallen off his mountain bike and broken his wrist. (Possibly my mere presence in his surgery for the initial treatment imbued him with terminal klutziness).

The necessary delay of the process to mid-April, when at least I'm back from France, was rendered a little troublesome by the fact that an unduly venturesome wholewheat grain leaped out of a slice of toast about three days after the dentist's session and punctured a neat whole in the temporary filling, leaving it open to the elements. (I picture said psycho grain a bit like the revolving drill bits on the mole-creature machines in the end of The Incredibles, although this may be unduly paranoid). For the last few weeks the giant, gaping hole in the tooth has been slowly filling up with what I imagine to be the contents of a moderately successful grocery store. Fortunately the nerve is dead and the temporary filling included several litres of disinfectant stuff, so actual pain has not resulted; I've just been worried that whole civilisations may end up packed in there over time. They will inevitably rise and demand democracy and a chicken in every pot expensively in France or the UK, so I had them pre-emptively repressed. The nice dentist assuring me that (a) this wouldn't need local anasthetic, (b) oh, all right, just a little of the short-acting stuff and (c) gosh your face is all lopsided, and I've been drooling and slurring all afternoon, bunking one meeting and eventually going home early on the grounds that students were assuming I was drunk.

Once home, I rapturously re-made the acquaintance of the new couches, which once more I'd forgotten about, and spent the rest of the evening curled up reading knitting chicklit. (Which I've finished, wolverine_nun, you can have it back. It rocked). I am completely and utterly unrepentant. I'm not jeopardising my new filling by biting students, and bugger the Shelf Of Unread Reproach.

In other news, Ridiculous Complaints Made By Holiday Makers. Including the one in the subject line. Good lord.

Were some sadistic sod to toss me three melons, a dozen eggs, two bananas, an umbrella, a chainsaw and a live chicken, I feel as though I could proceed to juggle them with all the calm political certainty of the Patrician in Klatch. I have just booked my ticket to France in April, where I will rendezvous with my mother in order to pack up my dad and relocate him to South Africa, after a brief stop in the UK. This has entailed more complicated Venn diagrams to accommodate the following:

1. The university term structure, curriculum advice patterns and my teaching schedule.
   
2. My available leave, and how much of my overtime pay I'm going to have to strong-arm the faculty into giving me as extra leave.
   
3. Vi's wedding, presence at which is a fixed and non-negotiable certainty.
   
4. The due date of my boss's baby, since having both of us away at the same time is severely sub-optimal. (This one bought the dust. There was simply no way to avoid it. The faculty will have to make do.)
   
5. The two-week period during which my mother can legitimately escape from her hordes of grotty boys.
   
6. My visa, with attendant French bureaucracy, requirement of letters signed by the mayor of my dad's home village, and the need to book an appointment before they'll consider my application.
   
7. My dad's UK visa, with attendant and freshly enthusiastic British bureaucracy. If they'd delayed this new policy by about six months life would have been a lot easier. Fortunately I've travelled to the UK recently enough to have a stamp in my passport, which means I squeak in under the tape on the grace period.
   
8. My dad's state of health, which is not good, which means the Gers to Cape Town in one fell swoop, with anything up to five connections to make, is likely to be unfeasibly exhausting.
   
9. The fact that it's ridiculously expensive to fly through Paris.
   
10. The Easter weekend.

My head is going round and round. Now that I've finally booked the damned thing, possibly I can also stop wandering round and round my bedroom in my sleep every night - the cat's starting to look at me very oddly.

On the upside, I should land in London at about 10.30am on Tuesday 31st March, and will only be able to catch a connecting flight or train or camel or something to France first thing the next morning. Any of you UK denizens up for random socialising that evening, and/or incredibly flyby crash space?