Well, that was pretty awful. The older I get, the worse I handle late nights (and, it has to be said, the Demon Drink). Becoming horizontal at about 11pm after a particularly vociferous closing session to Neil's game (we won!), I thereafter spent several frustrating hours pursuing a small, blinking, bi-coloured light around the walls of my room at about head-height. Then, as hypnagogic hallucination gave way to actual dream, I sat through a dreary and interminable faculty selection committee where, despite the fact that I was actually one of the candidates, I had to watch all the rest being interviewed. No-one on the committee would explain why this was necessary, merely looking knowing and making off-hand remarks about how the candidates weren't actually the candidates, anyway. In the middle of it all the Dean's secretary, prompted by an incomprehensible crisis of some sort and acting on a direct instruction from the Dean, hustled me off to catch a plane to Bombay. I still don't know why. I am, however, once more a little frayed.

In an effort to inject some slightly more positive energy into the day, herewith a list of Things I Have Recently Enjoyed.

• The new Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals. I spent Monday evening ensconced on the sofa with the Hobbit, chortling at intervals. Terry Pratchett is still very much Terry Pratchett, although I found the book a little scattered and over-busy in its themes and sub-plots: I suspect we're seeing actually a very good writer coming up against the slightly over-simplified limitations of his genre, and being driven to complicate them. The result is a bit cluttered, but the characters are as always warmly human, the digs at both football and academia are very happy-making, and the issues being explored (prejudice, mostly) are real and sharply pointed.
  
• Supernatural. About halfway through the first season: I am somewhat charmed by this series even though its monster-of-the-weekishness is not the only thing it's ripped off from the X-Files. (I swear you could do a direct episode correlation chart). Like the X-Files, it works because of the dynamic between its central characters, who are rather nicely-drawn brothers with a fairly realistic array of tensions, affections and differences. Also, extended road-trip. The actual working-out of the Supernatural Dingus Du Jour is not about reality at all, and I get a bit miffed about lack of consequences such as arrest, but it's a reasonably endearing watch.
  
• Buffy Season 9, i.e. the comics. Joss lets loose without budget constraints, leading to Giant!Dawn, Fray crossovers and whole episodes inside someone's supernatural head. I'm finding the artwork a bit variable - love some versions of the characters, hate others - but the plots are interesting and compelling, and it's a lot of fun to watch the characters develop post-Sunnydale. Buffy is considerably less annoying, too.
  
• smoczek's fajitas. Yum.

Today is a random, disconnected list, because I'm feeling a bit random and disconnected. I attribute this solely to the fact that I've run out of chocolate biscuits.

1. Gawsh. Last night I dreamed I was living in a holiday house in the woods somewhere, across the dirt track from Nathan Fillion. He was a dreadful cook, but later there was snuggling, so it's all good.
   
   
2. It's still raining, a bit, more sort of drizzly, so I'm still happy. Cape Town's delusions of continuing winter keep me sane. Today there's a wild, slightly snide wind growling around and tossing the trees petulantly; I want to pet it and smooth its ruffled fur.
   
   
3. The wretched carved pumpkin on the LJ Halloween header is clearly leering at me. I find this disconcerting in a cucurbitous vegetable. As a result of some bizarrely disconnected series of associations it's also inspiring me to go out and buy the new Terry Pratchett this evening. On mature reflection, leering pumpkins clearly have their own odd utility.
   
   
4. I really like this poster: it's witty, and atmospheric, and kind of tongue-in-cheek, ironic-winking Victorian. I am continually astonished by the absolute lack of conflict caused by my awareness that this Sherlock Holmes film is going to do madcap, iconoclastic, modern, playful, totally inappropriate things to the canon, and I'm going to love every minute of it. I blame too much fanfic. Also, not only is RDJ rather cute in this pose, but I'm really enjoying the way the Watson role is making Jude Law look significantly less like a total skank.
   
   
   
   We don't talk about the "Holmes for the holiday" tagline. It's just lame.
   

I do not believe that I just drove past a Daily Voice billboard imploring "CHICKEN! SAVE US FROM EVIL!" I must surely have misread it, as a result of having no brain. Not even the Daily Voice could be that weird. Screaming headlines about the dubious gender of the most recent World Record athlete notwithstanding.

The no brain is probably attributable to the rather disturbed night I had, on account of ongoing dreams that there was a spider on my headboard. A fat, fluffy spider rather like a pompom with legs. The size of my palm. Bright red.¹ Glaring at me and shooting me at intervals with its zappy laser eyes. It is not conducive to rest to be continually wriggling somnambulistically to dodge arachnoid-oculo-laser bolts, or bumbling vaguely around the bedroom in search of something to squash it with. I feel a bit frayed.

In other weird news, I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Century of the Fruitbat. I have a new cellphone, enabling me to discover that my touching belief in the poor cellphone reception in my office is in fact erroneous: it's perfectly fine with the new phone. Clearly the old phone was given to reluctance and dilettante fainting fits. The recent airtime fail caused me to grit my teeth and sign up for the cheapest possible contract, which still gives me twice as much airtime as I'll use, and a phone which can actually receive pictures, fancy-schmancy SMS formats and, possibly, radio waves from Mars. The era of blank SMS messages is over! It also has a camera, which I'll try out as soon as I work out which way to point it, and ring tones capable of soothing chimes rather than plangent beeping. I'm a bit scared of it, frankly.

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¹ In retrospect, I think it may have been a Chuzzle.

I seem to have spent a lot of last night arguing with the head of department while trying to sign up for the correct Psychology courses to complete my major, with the intention of doing Honours and actually becoming a psychologist. The outstanding courses involve a lot of stats, so it's probably fortunate that at this point the unspecified saboteurs did their evil stuff and tinkered with the giant baroque fountain to connect it with the volcanic subterranean river so it spewed an enormous geyser of boiling water about a kilometre into the air, showering Cape Town with hot rain. I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something about my job. Also, I blame the comparative tameness of the imagery on the fact that I didn't actually get to see the Harry Potter film yesterday, since my mother was involved in baby-sitting duties and she wants to see it too. Maybe tonight.

I was for some reason in a very good mood for most of yesterday, as evinced by my tendency to wander around the faculty singing Belle and Sebastian to myself, while students and admin gave me funny looks. Today I'm wrestling with the labyrinthine improbabilities of Music degrees and am monumentally grumpy. On the upside, Sven&Tanya gave me an amazing giant book of chocolate recipes for my birthday, and I finally stopped vacillating between the 14 different versions of chocolate brownies sufficiently to actually try one out over the weekend. Music degree hair-tearing thus nicely leavened by copious application of Earl Grey and occasional interludes of chocolatey goodness (lovely recipe, but I have to learn the precise skill of undercooking brownies to leave them all moist in the middle. More practice clearly indicated.). Next up: the chocolate torte with swirled cream cheese topping, and the brownie recipe with bits of embedded nougat. Damn.

Hooray, my dreams are back! not sure why, but I've apparently got the stress under control, or at least come to terms with it, to the extent that I'm sleeping properly and being properly active of a night. The night before last featured a dark, desolate, Mordorish landscape filled with dank lakes, in the middle of which a ruined castle on an island suddenly burgeoned madly into a sort of insanely excessive edifice bristling with Disneyesque glass towers in various shades of gold and peach. Last night I apparently re-enacted the "Snow White and Rose Red" fairy tale, except both Snow White and I were rather kick-butt girl pirates aboard a ship, each with an entourage of rough pirate side-kicks, jockeying for the attentions of Johnny Depp instead of a bear. I await with some interest tonight's contributions, given that I plan to go and see the new Harry Potter this evening, finally, as a reward for surviving Hellweek. All that adolescent angst has to feed the subconscious the psychic equivalent of so much cheese.

In other, even better news, I'd completely failed to register the fact that Monday is a public holiday and had taken Friday off as an other Reward For Surviving Hellweek. Sudden four-day weekend to the side of the head! In a good way. I plan to do nothing much, with concentrated energy and verve.

Today's subject line, incidentally, courtesy of a delirious little flyer brought to me by my MA student, who has a nice taste in the weird. "Professor Adams: The Great Clinic" promises not only to cure the usual range of sexual ills, including using "Mexino herbs" to produce penis sizes from M and L through to XXXL and Tall, but to remove evil spirits, win court cases and the Lotto and call your loved one back. He's a lovely example of random capitalisation, too, as evinced in the "Women's Vagina Special, Lovely ever wet & Sweet." (To which I add: aargh). Also, it's lucky my mother's staying with me at the moment, her school nanny software would curl up its toes and faint at this post.

One of the most difficult parts of this job for me is having to tell students that they've been excluded from the faculty on academic grounds - i.e. they're not passing enough courses to be allowed to continue. This week I've seen several students who were excluded at the end of last year, have successfully appealed for readmission, but have had a disastrous first semester and have thus fallen foul of the provisional re-admission probation period. They are now outy out out, no further appeals; two of them hadn't seen the letter which informed them of this fact, and enlivened the day by bursting into tears at my desk when I enlightened them.

I hate this. My fundamental impulse, and the fundamental rationale behind this job, is to make students happy. But we run into the problem where undergrads have a wistful, naive, utopian belief, in blatant disregard of the evidence, that they can pass these courses, because it's so important for them to do so. They can't believe that it might be in their own best interests for the faculty to step in and prevent them from repeatedly beating their heads against an academic brick wall that they have only the most fractional chance of scaling. You tell a student "You're extremely likely to fail, we're saving you the time and money", and s/he retaliates with "But I know I can pass" and "You won't even give me the chance!" Um, no, you won't, and we won't. Statistics say we're not doing you any favours by doing so.

Statistics, unfortunately, are distant and unreal compared to the urgent emotional demands of the individual case. And while to many of them a university degree is talismanic, the magical bit of paper which will miraculously elevate them from, in many cases, considerable poverty and disadvantage, there's a grain of truth to the symbol. Their lives would be immeasurably better if they could pull off a degree - in many cases, they would be ratcheting themselves into the middle class more or less with their bare hands. This is their last chance at this high-status institution, and a particular door is closing in their face, leaving them confronting the notice that says, bleakly, in subtext, "YOU WEREN'T GOOD ENOUGH". However legitimate the exclusion, I hate to feel as though I'm the one closing it.

This kind of thing adds a certain emotional drain to Hellweek, which is exhausting enough that I'm a bit miffed to discover the new update on the swine 'flu scare. The infected student wasn't actually one of the ones I saw, she saw another advisor, who has been booked off work for the rest of the week as a result. Frankly, I'm jealous, a few days in bed sounds heavenly. I'm exhausted. Additionally so because I spent a slightly demented night climbing through the windows of a giant castle-like structure which was owned either by Neil Gaiman or Stephen King, while dodging (for some reason) pirates, and what I think may have been a possessed tea-chest, while also trying to entertain hordes of LARPers who kept wandering in to visit. As a symbolic dream-encapsulation of my life this week it ain't far wrong.

P.S. and if anyone actually works out the labyrinthine connections in my subject line, first go and without recourse to google, mad props. Occasionally intertextuality gets the better of me.

Good lord, my subconscious has suddenly caught on to the fact that I'm all wistful about the comparative dream-lack in my recent life. Last night it presented me with the following:

1. An extremely high-speed motorbike ride to Jo'burg with my friend Michelle, racing each other on separate bikes. (I think she won).
2. My desperate attempts to photograph a medieval church which was projecting a mirage image shaped like a gigantic, glowing white elephant.
3. Hanging around with my mother and Obama in the latter's private airport. (Not aircraft, airport. Grimy, and full of middle-class families with screaming kids).
4. Some kind of military scenario aboard a battleship in which the captain was deliberately sabotaging things by flipping strategic switches on enormous switchboards. We later sank.

I am somewhat unsurprised to have woken up rather tired, and with a sore neck. Also, this mutant glowing red eye is becoming more mutant and painful by the hour. Hopefully the judicious application, to a complicated schedule imposed by the Nice Replacement Doctor (mine's on leave, the slacker), of two different sorts of eyedrops will somewhat lessen the sensation of having been plugged in the eye by a red-hot curried baseball bat.

Random Ginormous Epic Fantasy Series Month continues! And, in the Department of Multi-Volume Fantasies I Inflicted On My Hapless Masters Supervisor, Patricia McKillip! More exactly, McKillip's Riddlemaster of Hed series, which squeaks in under the wire as a Ginormous Fantasy Epic only because it was published in three slim vol.s rather than one fat one. It is, however, one of my favourites. McKillip writes dense, evocative, luminous, sometimes difficult prose which makes you both work for your meaning, and damned well enjoy it. Her world is small-scale, slightly domestic, filled with wonderful eccentrics and landscapes through which her heroes, Morgan and Radaerle, wander with a vague and slightly bloody-minded determination. The plot, world, quest all revolve around riddles, presented ritualistically, their posing and answers central to identity, destiny and history. More importantly for my bunny-hugging Masters purposes, rulers of the various realms in the story have a land-sense, a magical connection with their demesne which both underlines and permits their stewardship of it. It makes my little ecological heart go pit-a-pat.

In a nutshell: riddles, arguments, quests, travels, love stories, the cussedness of kings, bonus shapeshifters and incredibly beautiful descriptions of same, harps and harpists, storms, lost children, ruined cities, these were pearls that were his eyes. Occasional moments of blank incomprehension owing to having been socked between the eyes by an indecently good turn of phrase. Too short.

Hah! knew it. Administration is clearly bad for the dream-life, I need another job, stat. Not even a full week of leave, and last night I dreamed I was cuddling one of the young Arnold Schwarzenegger's musclebound gun-toting characters on a mattress on the floor of a hotel room in the French Riviera. (Which is odd, as I seriously don't like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Possibly because I can't spell him). Later I stopped off at the run-down petrol station in the middle of nowhere in order to fill up my scooter with milk and also to decline, definitively, to make an emergency bridge fourth for a tournament. Even in the dreamscape my absolute hatred of bridge and all its ilk shone forth very clearly.

I have been listening to the Magnetic Fields for the last week or so, the three new albums I've just acquired - Get Lost, Holiday and The Charm of the Highway Strip. This is earlier Fields, the few before I, which is the one before 69 Love Songs. I was all ready to be all "meh" about them - they aren't doing to me what 69 Love Songs did, which was to charm me utterly and instantly with a sort of wicked, louche genre-bending (and man, am I ever a slut for genre) and insane levels of tunefulness and zan (which is the noun for "zany" I just made up). All three of these earlier albums lack the vibrate-your-teeth catchiness of 69 Love Songs, but after the third listen or so I've realised that in fact they've been sneakily climbing up my spine while I wasn't looking to coil affectionately around my cerebellum. I have a sort of vague impression that the songs are all boring and uniform - possibly as much because of Stephin Merritt's mournful baritone as anything else - but I realise that any particular song I happen to be listening to at a given moment is neither boring nor uniform, but quirky, recognisable and subtly catchy. 69 Love Songs is almost an intensification of the qualities of the earlier albums, but its roots are definitely here, and digging deeper into my consciousness by the minute. Magnetic Fields, voted Band Most Likely To Turn Out To Be An Alien Brain Parasite. Fact.

I've been devastated to note, lately, that I don't remember as many of my dreams as I used to, and when I do they're not the over-the-top weirdnesses of symbols which used to haunt my nights to my very great enjoyment. I don't know if this is because I'm stressed, and therefore tired enough that I sleep deeply, or if curriculum advice is not productive of the same level of strangeness as is teaching science fiction and fairy tale. Either way, I am impoverished by the lack. Except last night seems to have been a return to form, possibly prompted by re-watching the first half of The Lost Room with jo&stv and the Evil Landlord, in company with a mad new experimental recipe for cidered lamb with dumplings. (Adjudged a howling success, now with added howling).

(Quick digression: man, I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed The Lost Room. It's a beautifully elegant concept, pursued intelligently through intelligent scripting with (and I cannot sufficiently stress how orgasmically happy this makes us) intelligent characters. The consensus last night was that the characters, particularly Detective Miller, operate like an experienced, thoughtful role-playing party¹: they assess, experiment, connect information, make leaps of intuition. Miller himself plans, anticipates, thinks - you don't doubt for an instant his commitment to getting his daughter back, but the emotion doesn't cloud his analytic ability. Many of his opponents are also quick to understand ("they're upstairs", said with world-weary certainty), and intelligently ruthless in pursuing their ends. The series is tense, surreal but above all logical, and the central concept, which really could have been screwed up by the usual Hollywoodoid hamfistedness, is actually well executed. It all makes you realise quite how low a level of intelligence we're used to in our movies and TV. Alas).

Anyway, I slept really badly last night - woke up every hour on the hour, pretty much, until about 3am. The second waking was bizarre. I drifted to the surface to realise that there was a man sitting next to my bed, behind a giant console or computer or control board of some sort. He was using it to do somethingorother to me, and to my bedroom, which bathed the whole room in a slightly baleful red light. I did a huge double-take as I realised he was there and catapulted myself to the upright position, shaking and gibbering, whereupon of course I realised, slowly and reluctantly, that I was dreaming and there was no-one there at all. Hello hypnogogic hallucinations, had forgotten all about you...

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¹ i.e. not like ours at all. Or at least without the bickering.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the live-action film version of Where The Wild Things Are (trailer here, I'd be interest to know what you Sendak-fan witterers think). Possible pros: it's live-action rather than CGI, it's not being directed by Stephen Spielberg, the trailer features my favourite Arcade Fire song, it's Spike Jonze. Possible cons: they're making a film of a beloved book, which by all the rules is doomed; I'm not sure it'll survive independently of Maurice Sendak's incredible artwork; the Wild Things talk; it's Spike Jonze. I shall content myself with the mantra Alan Moore occasionally mouths (post James Cain) but never quite got behind: Even If The Film Turns Out Crap The Book's Still On My Shelf.

In other news, Elizabeth Bear's cat talks in alliterative skaldic verse. Apparently. And, appropos of nothing, tonight I initiate jo&stv into the mysteries of lasagne-construction. They have to swear an oath, and get the tattoo, and everything. Also, we're going to watch Wanted.

Last Night I Dreamed: a confused journey to Mars, which was unexpectedly terraformed and growing forests and vast fields of vegetables. I think Venus may have been as well, only the fields were all on raised platforms held up by giant pillars, so the excessive moisture could drain out of the soil. Much of the dream was taken up with preventing atmospheric sabotage, and with the whinging of the spaceships full of farm workers who didn't like the long commute.