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Friday 30 November 2001
p.s. to yesterday's whine: I probably wouldn't be quite so exhausted if I took even minimal care of life's physical side. Yesterday I'd neglected to bring anything for lunch and didn't have time to go out of the building and get anything, so I ended up putting the students on hold for five minutes while I raced down to the vending machines for a carton of chocolate milk and a bag of corn chips. Which does not constitute a nutritious healthy meal, I know. I should at least try to remember to take my vitamins once in a while. Two food items that should never be sold in vending machines: (a) omelets; (b) pancakes. Both of which are actually in the vending machine in my building. Scary. Made a change which I hope takes care of the ooogly thick-divider-line problem this page suffered when viewed in Netscape 4.x. Still haven't tackled the right-margin problem. I installed a tracker on this page recently to try to figure out what kind of browsers people were using to come here, and was surprised by how many are still in Netscape 4. The Web Standards Project folks have a good page about the advantages of upgrading.
Thursday 29 November 2001
Ohhh, fuck, exhausted. Students students students, at my door, on the phone, on e-mail, from the moment I walk into the building until the moment I stagger out eight hours later. We're in the thick of spring registration and everyone has a question, everyone has a problem, everyone is confused and needs attention and support and a sympathetic ear. It's not giving them these things that's exhausting in and of itself; it's rather that every single one of them is in a different place, developmentally, emotionally. Some are organized and motivated and resent like hell that they have constraints on their course selections, and so with them I have to constantly intuit how safe it is to let them bend the rules, how much free rein I can give them without letting them careen headlong into academic disaster. And others are overwhelmed by their choices, have no idea where they're headed, and just want me to tell them what they should do, so with them I have to constantly intuit when directiveness is helpful, and when I need to pull back and let them flounder along on their own. And I get about three seconds to do all these whiplash-inducing mental adjustments, as one student exits and the next one barrels in. I feel responsible -- not for their success, not for making them do the right thing (whatever that would be), but rather for being there with them, wherever they are, and for getting it. Knowing what's too much or too little or just right, knowing who needs to be handheld and who needs a push, knowing when "It's a bad week" means "I got a C on my bio quiz" and when it means "I'm thinking about suicide." And of course responsible for always having the correct information, about the 100+ different majors, and the three different physics sequences, and the correct math prereqs for nursing vs. pharmacy vs. wildlife management, and the nuances of the second-language requirement, because if I get any bit of it wrong, I could mess someone up for a year or two to come. And for getting all of it done, all their questions answered and their snarls untangled, in no more than 30 minutes, because the next student is hanging out in the hallway, simmering. I do a good job, for the most part. I mean, I fuck up my paperwork all the time, my files are a mess, but no one goes out of my office confused or unheard or uncared-for, and they know that if they really need someone to go over to the Registrar's office and pound on desks and holler on their behalf, or walk them over to the mental health clinic and help get their meds straightened out, or call up their parents and politely tell them to back off, I'm good to go. And I'm really lucky to have this job; my co-workers, my boss, they're gold, no one could ask for a better crew, and I get to do something that means something. But exhausting it is. I stagger home through the slush, I fill a snifter with Jameson (and lift a toast in Deb's direction <g>), I watch a couple of hours of Buffy reruns, and then it's 7 p.m. and I'm no more able to sit down and start writing than I would be to get up and do the freakin' Ironman Triathlon. Soon, soon, I tell myself, semester break, soon, and my boss, god love him, has wangled us all lots of flex time for the break, and I'll be able to get my brain back. I hope. But in the interim -- as many things as I'd like to say here about Smallville and Buffy and fandom and all kinds of things -- well, they'll just have to wait. Because I am really very very tired.
Tuesday 27 November 2001
blink. blink. I have but one word for this week's Buffy, and that word, courtesy of MBTV, is anvilicious. OK, well, my shallow side also pipes up to say that Alyson Hannigan really does do a nice turn on "depraved." And anent Smallville, I'll just say that (a) the XF ripoffs proceed apace, but at least they're forthright about it and call a spade a fat-sucking vampire; and (b) is it bad of me that all I could think about during the whole episode were those extended warning statements you used to see about the side-effects of Olestra? Oh, and again with the shallow, Lex did put a very nice filagree on that "And I'll be seeing you later," as he sashayed out of Chloe's Den o' Weird. Plus whoever dresses him gets a thumbs-up from me. Sunday 25 November 2001
Moved the furniture and redecorated again, and once again this is kind of an interim kludgy design. I had some vague thoughts of actually introducing color into the scheme this time, but am apparently inextricably wedded to the monochrome. Current puzzlement is why the right margin in the links column intermittently futzes when the page is viewed in Netscape 4.x. Ah, the glorious pain-in-the-ass mysteries of cross-browser incompatibility. Today's Deep Thought: I need more four-day weekends. God, it's been nice to have a coherent block of downtime. Saturday got a bit chewed up, with the belated family Thanksgiving get-together, but that was just my brothers and their SOs and we all get along well in a low-key way, so -- not too stressful. Other than that, I've simply been messing around with the story, idling about the web, not answering the phone, and generally getting down with my bad introvert self. I should at least go out sometime today for a walk and enjoy the last bare-ground day we're likely to have for four months; a winter storm is headed our way, and the current forecast is for six to eight inches of snow by Tuesday. Thus endeth Minnesota's brief November sojourn in meteorological la-la land. It feels like a day of impending snow out there -- heavy grey sky, cold still air, trees bare and black, and flocks of crows circling restlessly and cawing. I've dug out the snowshovel and my boots, and put away my bike for the season, so I'm probably about as prepared as I'll get. From now on everyday life just gets a little more difficult until April. I continue to watch with bemusement as the Smallville juggernaut sweeps across the landscape of slash. I still, personally, don't really get it, though I'm delighted for those who are revelling in that fine first flush of fannish infatuation. (Say that fast five times...) What distances me, I think, is not just the overpowering WB-ness of the show's look/feel, but rather a quality that I think constitutes a big part of the allure for some slash fans -- the central theme of Innocence vs. Experience. Thamiris has a nice take on this in her LiveJournal entry of Nov. 23 -- Clark as the ripe apple, Lex as the serpent. And a lot of the Smallville fiction I've come across seems to enjoy playing out Clark's innocence, his naivete, his virginal ingenue purity. Of course, innocence, and the corruption thereof, is a time-honored pervasive trope in romantic and erotic fiction. (I wonder if its power may be one reason for the enduring popularity of The First-Time Story in slash -- that moment when innocence topples over into experience, when the serpent of sexuality, the knowledge of sexual desire, transforms the Edenic purity of male friendship...) It's just not a theme that interests me much, personally. I greatly prefer to contemplate characters after they've taken the fall, when they have some knowledge of their own dark zones and failures and betrayals, and are trying to muddle their way onward in the shadows. This isn't to say that every character has to be all bleak and embittered and middle-aged and angsty; I really do like some of the things they're doing with Lex in the show -- the sense that he's somehow balanced at a tipping point between good and bad, that what drives him is a burning desire to achieve, to do great things, but that for all his air of jaded sophistication he doesn't apparently yet have a sense of what he might be capable of doing, in pursuit of that goal. In some way I can't quite articulate he reminds me a bit of early-current-season Willow: the cheerful hubris, the glorying in power without any sense of what the price tag is going to be. (And yeah, I guess that is innocence of a sort, and, yeah, I guess it contradicts what I said just above. So I contradict myself, very well, I contradict myself, blah blah. <g>) But Clark really is kind of a cipher still -- a bit like Fraser was in some of the less well-conceptualized early dS episodes, and I never found Fraser compelling until after Victoria's Secret. If Lex is indeed going to be Clark's Victoria, I wish he'd hurry up and get on with it.
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