Articles in “Life, the Universe, and Everything”

For some reason, I’ve made myself thoroughly melancholic recently—which is ironic, really, because I’m compulsively unable to spell “melancholic” and usually default to “meloncholic”—which I assume is the technical term for something like Midori.

I’m not actually a melancholic person; I have no reason to be.

I suspect this originates in my post-submission exhaustion.

However, I probably haven’t helped it along by watching Green Wing, reading Five Little Pigs, writing depressing blog posts, and listening compulsively to Nick Cave, Elvis Costello’s Spike—“Veronica” and “Let Him Dangle” are fabulous songs, guaranteed to make me want to weep—and The Crow soundtrack.

So I really only have myself to blame.

What I suspect I need is to put on some cheerful music—which means not letting Nick have a choice of CDs—and actually finish cleaning out the study. Who knows, I may find more books that I’d completely forgotten.

No proper entry, because this is one of those days when everything goes haywire.

I have an enormous pile of marking still to get through tonight (a one-week turn around on this piece, so it has to be done for tomorrow) and a lecture to finish prepping.

I seem to have let the work get slightly on top of me, probably thanks to my unseasonable period of laziness (three days) after submitting the Ph.D.

And yet I still feel as though I need a holiday.

I love my job—there can be no better job than teaching young adults—but, damn, it’s tiring in the early weeks.

But!

I have a glass of wine, and my computer, and a sofa.

And at least I’m having a better day than the attendant at the refectory, with whom I had the following conversation:

HIM: How are you?
ME: Good. How are you?
HIM: I’m about to fucking beat someone up.
ME: Not me?

You can’t make this stuff up.

Give me half an hour—I’ll be fine.

UPDATE:
The day just keeps getting better and better.

I had my glass of wine, but then got a very upset e-mail from someone who is legitimately upset over a problem that, although sympathetic, I cannot actually fix. Depending on a third party is beyond frustrating.

Nick then tipped a not-quite-empty container of curry on the carpet, and we both just stared at it in unmoving horror for about five minutes before shrieking “PICK IT UP!”

And I’ve just spotted Nick opening a kilogram packet of ground coffee while balancing it on the back of the sofa because “there’s more room there.”

I would say “roll on tomorrow,” but I still haven’t finished my marking.

(As a side note, this entry is an exercise in writing a blog entry without mentioning personal names. Tricky.)

A old school-friend of mine is having her first child. Now.

She will have gone in to hospital half an hour ago.

I find this both marvellous and frightening: not frightening for the child—who will have two brilliant, devoted, creative, and fascinating parents—but a shock from my childless, still-sixteen-in-my-head perspective.

My best friend has two children, and I find that strange enough. Again, it’s not a bad kind of strange; I adore my friend and my two nephews, especially (solipsistically) now that the elder of the two is starting to realise how cool his Auntie Treena is, and brightened my last Christmas by insisting “Auntie Treena, come outside! Auntie Treena, sit here! Auntie Treena, touch that—I think it’s hot.”

But when you’ve known someone for twenty-six years and yet live 1000 kilometres away from them, their motherhood is something that comes as a surprise. Perhaps if I’d lived round the corner from her, I wouldn’t have felt that she’s suddenly leveled up while I wasn’t looking.

It’s not so much of a shock with this friend. We were part of a very close group of girlfriends at school—a group I cherished, who made high-school life—in a fascistic, agricultural high school where we were expected to pregnancy-test cows (honestly, do you know what that entails?) and dissect sheep—more than bearable. In fact, they created a joy in life and in the life of the imagination on which I’m still drawing now.

But then I lost touch, when I moved to Brisbane for graduate work.

My fault entirely.

And when things went a little wonky up here, I became more and more uncertain about reinitiating contact—something that stemmed from my own feelings of failure, not from any awareness of how they would react.

Enter Facebook, where one of these friends found me—and it all fell into place again.

I met up with many of them over Christmas for the first time in years. And most people who heard this asked, “Wasn’t it a bit strange?” But, it wasn’t. Because there’d been no falling out or hurt feelings. We’d been close and we’d drifted apart, so the re-meeting was just good fun (and that includes a separate meeting with another friend and her gorgeous children—hearing a friend you still think of as eighteen say to her six-year-old child “Catriona was Mummy’s friend at big school” is a shock and half, especially when said child was a foot long last time you saw him.)

And now one of these friends is having her first child.

She’ll be a wonderful mother—she always had a unique outlook on life.

And her husband will be a besotted father.

Their child is lucky, and I wish all good speed for its arrival.

Best of good luck, friend: best of good luck.

Driving home from a lovely, celebratory lunch this afternoon, Nick and I realised that there was going to be a power struggle for toilet access once we got home.

So, like any other stable couple, we decided to play Rock, Paper, Scissors.

The only problem was we kept choosing the same item, over and over again.

On the fifth or sixth attempt, I finally managed to crush Nick’s scissors with my rock, but it was a little weird there for a while.

I’m tempted to try a coin toss to see how many times it comes down heads—then I know whether or not to accept any unexpected offers of a trip to England that might come from old university friends.

This afternoon, we decided to clean out the study a bit. The aim, eventually, is to move one of the bookcases into the spare room—which will soon be a labyrinth of shelving with a bed in the middle—but it didn’t quite work out that way.

(On the other hand, much progress was made. Nick’s just wandered through to ask if I’m blogging about how awesome he is for cleaning everything out, so I told him I am. In a manner of speaking.)

The problem is that I’m reluctant to throw out any work-related material—while regularly throwing out letters from the council and from the bank without opening them first—while Nick won’t throw out anything at all. In fact, I have a box in my spare-room wardrobe containing nothing but his calendars from the 1980s. So the study regularly devolves into a series of teetering piles of paper. And all of those have to be moved before we can even get to the bookcases.

(In fact, this is why Nick claims he needs praise—he decided, once we’d cleaned all the papers off his desk—that he needed to clean out his filing cabinet, which hasn’t been done in about six years. It’s now almost empty.)

At one point, we managed to carve a path to the corner shelving unit where Nick keeps his games—which is a story in itself, since when we bought it from K-Mart it arrived minus the struts that keep it stable, and I was too lazy to go back in and get them, so it’s now kept upright thanks to a blue plastic wine rack that inexplicably fell down behind it one day.

The top of this unit contains boxes full of our art equipment—and oddly, one that contained nothing but unopened, ten-year-old bank statements—and piles of sketchbooks.

It was these boxes that led to my downfall, because I decided to clean them out.

A reasonable ambition, I would have thought, but it ended up with me stuck behind a pile of ancient bank statements and drenched in linseed oil up to the elbows.

I probably should have seen that coming.

But, in a sit-com, the end result would have been humourous, salacious, or both.

The only end result for me was that I had to dig myself out from behind a pile of paper, getting increasingly dusty and sticking to everything I touched.

And even that wasn’t presented as a montage.

Having washed my hands, though, I’m quite pleased that life isn’t a sit-com. (And that relief doesn’t even take into account the fact that my most recent comedy has been Green Wing, and while it’s the most hilarious thing I’ve seen since Spaced and I am definitively addicted, I do not want to live in that world.)

Frankly, the real world has fewer plot holes and significantly better gender roles than the average sit-com.

I might make an exception if I could holiday in Futurama, though.

I am an appalling housekeeper.

I’m good at a number of things, I think. I seem to be an effective teacher; at least, my students mostly pass and, as far as I can tell, don’t actively hate me at the end of the semester. I’m an efficient researcher, as well. I’m also good at remembering where other people have left their glasses although not, alas, at remembering where I have put my own.

But housekeeping? No. We don’t live in actual squalor, mind: not the kind of squalor that includes dead animals or human waste (okay, there was that one possum, but he was in the downpipe, not the living room. And I do occasionally have to chase out water dragons seeking fresh fruit and bush turkeys hoping for a dry nesting place. But those are temporary).

But we generate a lot of paper: books, notebooks, draft chapters, sketchpads, notes, stray Post-its. And, somehow, I’m starting to think that having everything in piles doesn’t really qualify as being tidy.

The study is causing me particular concerns.

I love my study; since moving out of home, I’ve been longing for a house where my desk wasn’t in the corner of my bedroom, and this little, white, wooden house is the first place where I’ve managed that.

So I love my study.

I love the window, even though it opens on to next door’s unpainted, corrugated-iron roof, and the sun’s unbearable in the afternoon (don’t blame me for the chintz curtains—they came with the house).

I love my James Jean prints, even though the one of Hansel drowning two witches as an interrogation method (from Fables) does seem a little creepy, now I look at it.

And I love my books.

But that’s where the problem starts. And ends, really. Because books are never a waste of space, but they take up so much space. And technically, I only have half a study, since Nick occupies the other corner.

So what this picture doesn’t really show is that the shelves are essentially triple-packed: books, with books on top of them, then more books in front. Trying to find anything is a nightmare, and I’m getting to the point where I’ve forgotten what I’ve already bought.

There are also books on the floor, although that did cause amusement when the temporary kitten wouldn’t believe me when I told her that the piles weren’t stable and then had to go and hide behind the swan table until she calmed down.

What I find particularly odd is the tendency of the study to attract wasps, so that you hear them buzzing somewhere and next thing you know they’ve built a succession of nests down the back of your hardback of Leslie Stephens’s Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, which you don’t discover for months, because, really, who reads Leslie Stephens on a regular basis?

So I’m hoping now for a bigger study. One where I can have bookshelves lining the walls. Shallow bookshelves, so I can’t triple stack even if I’m tempted.

I could just stop buying books, but that doesn’t seem like a viable option. It would take a heart of stone to go to the Lifeline BookFest and walk past a facsimile reprint of late Wizard of Oz books, or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, or the complete poems of Keats in a puffy orange suede jacket.

Even if they do end up sitting in a pile on the floor until you’ve temporarily forgotten about them.

. . . that weren’t immediately noticeable.

• I haven’t typed my library password into the website in four years, and I’ve now forgotten it. This makes accessing databases and electronic journals impossible, and is highly irritating.
• all my lovely PopCap games are gone: Alchemy I hadn’t played in a while, but the loss of my beautiful Bejeweled 2 is a tragedy.
• ditto Solitaire Till Dawn, hands-down the best Solitaire games for the Mac anywhere. How will I procrastinate now?
• I really don’t want to spend an hour with my online banking system recreating the spreadsheet tracking repayment of my parents’ loan for the car.
• I’ve only just now realised that my electronic Bookmarks are gone. Bugger.
• grateful as I am for Nick’s computer, his keyboard really sucks. Yes, that modifier was necessary.
• I’m becoming unreasonably annoyed by having to log back into my e-mail programme every ten minutes.
• on that note, the online Exchange programme has stored all of my received e-mails, but none of my sent ones, which I suspect will cause increasing problems in the future.
• I miss my James Jean desktop image.

None of these are as major as the complete and utter loss of one of my appendices—it would have to be the one that includes my primary source material, wouldn’t it?—but they’re frustrating nonetheless.

R. I. P., little iBook. I’m going to stop whinging about you now.

I’m in no fit state to update properly, having spent the morning being told that my computer is irretrievably dead (thirteen days out! Why?)

It could be worse; I’ll never grumble again about Nick’s insistence on doing everything image-related himself, since that’s the main reason there was a very recent copy of the full draft on his machine. But I have entirely lost one appendix. Not terrible, but worse than I needed at this stage of events.

But I shouldn’t grumble.

I do, however, have one reasonable request.

If The Doctor is anywhere near Earth at the moment—I realise I’m not allowed to travel back on my own timeline. But, do you think you could nip back to yesterday morning and warn me to back everything up?

That’d be great, ta.

I had a post planned out for today, in honour of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. In other words, I was going to write a list, of the strangest things I’d discovered while editing my thesis. (For the record, it would have been really interesting. You can tell by the way I just had to use a weak modifier to describe it.)

But then my computer died. Not just died. Completely and utterly refused to do anything but make heart-rending screaming noises.

And I realised that, while I had my appendices backed up, I hadn’t saved a back-up of my thesis itself since early December.

That wasn’t the best revelation I’ve ever had.

But if the Internet has taught me anything, it’s that the untimely death of one’s computer two weeks before you’re due to submit a Ph.D. that, as it turns out, you haven’t been backing up properly can only be dealt with through the awesome power of bad haikus.

Alas, iBook is dead.
The hard drive unmounted.
The thesis unsaved.

Packrat during work.
I just needed a panda—
Is that so wrong, now?

The panda stolen
And then the grey screen of death.
My lesson learned.