New Interesting Discovery: weddings are better if they're smaller. And if I know a fair number of the people. And if the bride asks me to do usher duties, thus giving me a cast-iron reason to actually talk to people and ply them with champagne. Also, if some of the guests are interesting grad students/artists who not only listen to me wittering on randomly on several glasses of champagne, but who engage me in spirited debate and take it in good part when I feel impelled to state that their argument is a load of bollocks. (I seem to get argumentative on champagne, not to mention determinedly polysyllabic).

Anyway, Robbie and Vi are now safely married, in a truly lovely ceremony and reception. Vi's parents have a home in Tokai with a particularly beautiful garden which, with true Germanic efficiency, they clearly planted about 15 years ago with the intention of allowing their daughter to be married under the shower of bridal-white bougainvillea which covers the pergola. You have to admire Germanic precision, it's the only wedding I've ever attended where the several clocks in the living room struck the half hour (Vi's dad is a clockmaker) and the bride proceeded to shimmy down the stairs precisely and absolutely on time. The guests were all present and seated, partially due to my ushering efforts, which took place to a schedule provided by the bride. I attribute my success entirely to my one-sixteenth German blood, of which I am modestly proud.

I am also modestly proud of the fact that the bride and groom were re-united a few years ago, having dated in school/undergrad and then separated to different continents for about fifteen years, by dint of me Googling on Vi's behalf to find Robbie's email address. The Fatal Communication which brought them together again was sent from my computer. All my own work, that was. Heh.

Now I am going to bed, on account of how I was madly dancing until almost midnight last night and my feet and calves celebrated by throwing themselves sharply into cramp at random intervals throughout the night. My body basically hates me and doesn't want me to have any fun. In revenge, I shall take it off to the dentist next week. That'll teach it.

It seems subtly unfair that I should growl my way through Monday's student stupidities with a pounding headache when we didn't, for once, undergo the usual jo&stv food-and-drinkfest last night, owing to their unaccountable commitment to large-scale musical frivolities. I went goodly to bed at 9pm entirely sober, and dreamed strange and fabulous dreams not entirely unconnected to Albion, balverine-bashing and my current happy gay relationship in Oakvale. The game is narking me off no end by insisting on referring to my dweeby little blonde boy partner as my "wife". Pshaw. On the upside, I've persuaded it to to allow me to have sex, twice. The secret is apparently to creatively mix up gifts and flirting in the immediate vicinity of a bed, and not to give the same gift twice in a short period. I am left a little staggered at the paucity of the game designers' romantic imagination. On the other hand it is a sad truth that my avatar is getting rather more action than I am at the moment, so what the hell do I know.

The Khoi-wife's very pleasant birthday thingy on Saturday put me in the immediate vicinity of first_fallen, among other good company, yet again reminding me of my current utter failure on the knitting front. I've been thinking wistfully of getting back to it for several months (I will knit lace! I will!), but am in that unpleasant beginner stage where it takes actual brain, concentration and energy to get a project going, and I am significantly lacking in all three just at the moment. The work hell should start improving from here on out, though, so I may yet prevail. In the interim, Wondermark does knitting cartoons, which I reproduce with respectful awe, having reached nowhere near this level of obsession yet:

It turns out I actually did make a New Year's resolution, despite intending not to - it seems to have sort of happened. Apparently I've resolved to keep on top of my work email instead of letting it build up to ridiculous unanswered piles of increasingly querulous queries dating back up to a month. There's this happy little row of orange answer arrows in my inbox, stretching back two weeks, interspersed with follow-up emails sprinkled with enthusiastic and validatory comments about my efficiency. I feel smug.

Huh. We'll see how long it lasts. Of course, it does mean I have to cut down on the random web browsing in favour of random email answering, but all is not lost. I still have time to stumble on truly amusing links such as this one, courtesy of Elizabeth Bear. Balloon animals having sex. N really SFW, in a lateral and rather endearing sort of way. It's a Durex ad that's probably old news to you mad overseas hordes, but it's new to me, so there.

It's also horribly apposite, in that I just sat through ninety minutes of orientation leader training in HIV/AIDs awareness, now with added giant floppy dildo and incredible lists of obscure and colourful phrases for even more obscure and colourful sex acts. I was forced to correct the presenter's spelling of both "abstinence" and "fellatio".

Now taking bets on how many witterers have this post blocked by nanny software. Sorry, mother.

I am reduced to Friday Random Linkery, because I've run out of brain. This week's theme appears to be Romance, i.e. that which any of I am not getting.

• Edward Gorey's The Deflowered Girl. Lateral, dodgy, louche. I unearthed this link within the last twenty minutes, but owing to lack of brain cannot remember from whence, and my browser history wots it not either. Maybe I hallucinated the whole thing. (Edited to add: no, wait! librsa sent it to me, clever man).
  
• Pride and Prejudice as Facebook updates. This has been around for a while, but I keep forgetting to post it. It is, in my far from humble opinion, much better than the Hamlet one.

Things I need to do in future posts: rave about Lee Child. Review the Doctor Who Christmas special (I liked it, perhaps Russell Davies may live after all). Unwrap for posterity the symbolic ramifications of the fact that I have lost my University Avenue parking, by my own, unaided choice, 24 hours after being granted it. Talk about turning into a lizard-creature (scaly, prone to shed skin and snap). Rant about Roswell. Apologise for neither knitting nor blogging about it. Fortunately, I have no brain for any of the above just at the moment, so shall go back to compiling lists of courses open to first years instead. Have a nice weekend.

Too weird. Cooking malva pudding is apparently a pervasive process, to the point where I can still smell it on my hair after two days. I am not sure if the effect of this is to mark me inescapably as a stay-at-home domestic type, or if it'll operate closer to David's well-known Vanilla Theory Of Seducing Women (men smelling of vanilla are comforting and safe and associated with kitchens, baking and nurture, therefore get rebuffed less). While he has never adequately demonstrated the validity of this theory to my scientific satisfaction, I possibly ought to go and stand hopefully in a well-ventilated area full of interesting men just in case.

I have emerged from the fog sufficiently to finish this batch of marking, which is something of a relief as I was becoming more than somewhat bored with dragging the pile fruitlessly between home and campus in order to studiously ignore it. Having marked the lot more or less by pretending not to, I have to conclude that students are odd. They had an option between a slightly tricky question on World of Warcraft and its potential for online eroticism, and an easy, wide-open one on the kinds of narrative gaps fanfic usually fills. I spent three lectures on fanfic and half a one on WoW. The WoW question answerers gave me some lovely essays, whereas the fanfic ones were uniformly blah. Memo to self: less information next time, the resulting panic seems to inspire students to actual intellectual activity.

Last Night I Dreamed: an epic dash through forests and into the cellars of houses to evade the golem armies staggering through the trees. I woke up abruptly with my heart pounding at the point where the traumatised girl in the white dress sat bolt upright on her bed and screamed because of the incredibly significant shapes of the ceramic jugs on the cellar wall.

Good grief.



That's ... disturbing. In a horribly excellent way. It comes from here, where there are some very bizarre and definitely non-excellent playgrounds.

The Billboard Poet of the Daily Voice is back:

RASTA'S PANGA ROL OVER ZOL.

Note the characteristic compression - "rasta" is a highly resonant stereotype conveying a world of assumptions, as does "panga", which has all the attachments of insane homicide. There's also nifty play with assonance (rasta, panga) and rhyme (rol, zol), and a sort of subliminal riff on "roll over". Actual meaning is, however, less obvious - what the hell is the significance of "rol" in this context? I can't find anything on Google, and am assuming it must be quite specific Cape slang. Even I, however, know what "zol" is.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was wrestling with an affectionate bobcat. This was strangely sexy, with an undercurrent of fear at the thought that I could get my head ripped off any second. In retrospect, it's probably a potent symbol for my general feelings about romantic relationships.

Ah, yes. LJ's toolbar is all over pink and hearts, and the price of roses has gone into orbit around what used to be Pluto. Mental torment! I can't work out if I loathe the merry commercial festival of Wellington's Day more or less than I loathe the merry commercial festival of Christmas.

Fortunately, help is at hand for the terminally romance-challenged. Anti-Valentines! Since her site allows you to send them, I'm hoping it falls under Fair Valentine's Use to blog a select few as a valentine to you witterers. They include useful sentiments such as



and

.

I like the site particularly because (a) it's rude, and (b) it explicitly objects both to the commercialisation of romance, and to the ingrained cultural assumption which constructs coupledom as the norm and singletude as some kind of failure. To which I say Tchah!, and also:

.

What's with the New Year? Two separate members of my Flist (no-one I know in person, she says, hastening to check the gossip-hounds) have reported the end of long-term romantic relationships in the last few weeks. Clearly the turn of the year is accompanied in many cases by the nervous twitch of new brooms. I retreat, as usual, into Dorothy Parker, who, in the character of Constant Reader, is charmed by a tome on Appendicitis which reports on "the love-life of poisonous bacteria. That, says the author, 'is very simple and consists merely of the bacterium dividing into two equal parts.' Think of it - no quarrels, no lies, no importunate telegrams, no unanswered letters..." Should my current long bout of celibacy pall (which I have to say, it hasn't yet), I shall definitely look into simple fission.

In other news, possibly deliriously happy, Scifi.com reports that George Clooney is developing a six-hour miniseries version of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, with Stephenson himself adapting. This is one of my favourite sf books EVAH, plugging straight into my Victorianist fixations, and I rather respect Clooney's artistic wossnames, so there is The Happy chez Extemporanea, I can tell you.

The Evil Landlord has been retrenched from his job, as a result of which he's (a) in the house all day, driving me crazy; (b) in the middle of about five carpentry projects simultaneously; and (c) celebrating. Celebratory braai last night, taking place squarely in the middle of (a) courtesy of the Usual Cape Town Cussedness, high winds and occasional burst of rain, and (b) courtesy of my defective physique, my second bout of gastric 'flu in a month, necessitating me being pale, withdrawn and pained all evening, and eating very little.

Memo to self: stop listening to wall-to-wall Belle & Sebastian. Their particular brand of gentle, whimsical, poignant, bittersweet, off-the-wall love songs with odd and unlikely lyrics is making me feel even more pale and very, very single, a state not materially assisted by the fact that I am currently re-watching the wonderful BBC Pride and Prejudice*, which means I am going to have to re-read the book again, it being one of my absolute favourites in the whole world evah, but horribly inclined towards Matters Of The Heart.

Memo to self: acquire more Belle & Sebastian.

* I didn't used to get the Colin Firth thing, but I think starmadeshadow has corrupted me.

Somewhat drunken fondue evening with the jo&stv last night, marred on my part only by two things: (1) onset of another bloody epic headache, and (2) several attacks of the hiccups. However, drugs more or less dampened the former, and my concerned and caring friends were standing by to cure the latter by scientific application of shocks, conversations going something like this:

Take One:
ME: *hic*
KIND FRIEND: "OK, you're married to ... Kevin Costner!"
ME: ! (sharp intake of breath, stops hiccuping in horror, since in my actorverse he's second only to Tom Cruise in loathesomeness).

Take Two:
ME: *hic*
KIND FRIEND: "OK, you're married to ... Keanu Reeves!"
ME: *goes cross-eyed as brain momentarily shuts down, torn between oh-my-god-he's-meat-between-the-ears and hmmm-but-he's-kinda-cute. Hiccups stop owing to cessation of brain activity*

Take Three:
ME: *hic*
KIND FRIEND: "OK, you're married to ... George W. Bush!... oops, somebody fetch a bucket, she's going to throw up!"

I have to admit, rising nausea stops hiccups quite effectively.