with your feet in the air and your head on the ground
It's been a weird kind of day. The campus is blissfully quiet in the middle of the vac, haunted only by vague gaggles of students in the middle distance, blowing vuvuzelas contemplatively as they wait for buses to various games. I saw no-one yesterday; today I had an equally empty day except for an odd little surge at around 11.30, when five students arrived for advice at approximately the same time and hung around in a micro-queue outside my door, where they talked and laughed and made rude but supportive comments about Bafana Bafana while I dealt with their various angsts in series. Other than that, I've been reading the back issues of Wil Wheaton's blog: as a sort of side-effect of all this STNG-watching, I've become fascinated with the Wesley Crusher phenomenon and the effect all that hatred had on a teen actor. SF Fandom is apparently lovely and intimate and invested and supportive up until the moment it can't separate text from reality and actually damages you.
At 1.30 I dashed madly into town to submit my visa application for this conference trip. I haven't driven the new intersection at Hospital Bend in that direction before: there's this deeply Zen moment when you leave the freeway only in order to join exactly the same freeway again 100m later from the other side. Apparently you can cross the same freeway twice. Or can't cross it once. Or something. What is the sound of one car not changing lanes?
The British visa application people are efficient like whoa and dammit: they have this whole system of online appointments and form submissions, festooned with shiny jack-booted warnings about arriving ON TIME for your appointment, with EXACTLY THESE DOCUMENTS plus any others you think might help, entirely up to you, and I had to restrain an impulse to include testimonials from my cats and a photograph of my favourite tomato plant, just to be lateral. Their whole system is automated with number-issuing machines and displays when your number is up, in addition to the extremely crisp and perfectly clear announcements over the public address system - it's kind of the Platonic ideal of the Groote Schuur process, only well thought out and not actually clogged by all these inconvenient poor people. (I seem to be all socialist again. I blame China Miéville). It also all seemed a bit futile, since there were precisely three of us there. I arrived five minutes early, went straight through to two counters without waiting, and left ten minutes later, feeling slightly stunned. The visa is granted within four working days. I was worrying that I only have six weeks until I leave. Silly, pilly me.
The drive home after work was even more surreal. There's a SA/France game on, apparently. Apparently this causes nine-tenths of the population of the city to be dragged willy-nilly to their TV sets by magnetic lines of force, there to sit helplessly while rush hour fails to happen without them. The streets were deserted. Under the freeway overpass coming off campus, there was a life-sized cardboard cutout tied to a signpost, depicting a person standing next to an old-fashioned bicycle, beautifully drawn in black and white. The basket was full of logs, in the sense that it was an actual basket filled with actual three-dimensional logs. No poster or inscription in any way explained this phenomenon. Twenty metres later a youngish coloured dude stood by the side of the road, head tilted to the sky, mouth wide open as though screaming, or possibly singing opera, although no actual sound emerged. In my rear-view mirror I saw him stagger out into the road behind me, head still raised, narrowly missing an oncoming car which forced him to dash back to the curb, arms flailing in a sort of scarecrow shamble. The bicycle-image plus the oddness of the man felt uncannily like some kind of inscrutable performance art; it went very well with the empty streets. It's also entirely possible I hallucinated the whole thing.
Plan for tonight: actually sleep through the night, avoiding both the usual 2am wake-up, and the increasingly trippy series of sleep-walking dreams in which I've forgotten to do something terribly important to the incomprehensible grid of squares on my bedside table, and thus wake up repeatedly trying desperately to sort it out before the waves of zombies get me. I think they're zombies. Occasionally they're amorous wood-elves. It's all a bit weird.
At 1.30 I dashed madly into town to submit my visa application for this conference trip. I haven't driven the new intersection at Hospital Bend in that direction before: there's this deeply Zen moment when you leave the freeway only in order to join exactly the same freeway again 100m later from the other side. Apparently you can cross the same freeway twice. Or can't cross it once. Or something. What is the sound of one car not changing lanes?
The British visa application people are efficient like whoa and dammit: they have this whole system of online appointments and form submissions, festooned with shiny jack-booted warnings about arriving ON TIME for your appointment, with EXACTLY THESE DOCUMENTS plus any others you think might help, entirely up to you, and I had to restrain an impulse to include testimonials from my cats and a photograph of my favourite tomato plant, just to be lateral. Their whole system is automated with number-issuing machines and displays when your number is up, in addition to the extremely crisp and perfectly clear announcements over the public address system - it's kind of the Platonic ideal of the Groote Schuur process, only well thought out and not actually clogged by all these inconvenient poor people. (I seem to be all socialist again. I blame China Miéville). It also all seemed a bit futile, since there were precisely three of us there. I arrived five minutes early, went straight through to two counters without waiting, and left ten minutes later, feeling slightly stunned. The visa is granted within four working days. I was worrying that I only have six weeks until I leave. Silly, pilly me.
The drive home after work was even more surreal. There's a SA/France game on, apparently. Apparently this causes nine-tenths of the population of the city to be dragged willy-nilly to their TV sets by magnetic lines of force, there to sit helplessly while rush hour fails to happen without them. The streets were deserted. Under the freeway overpass coming off campus, there was a life-sized cardboard cutout tied to a signpost, depicting a person standing next to an old-fashioned bicycle, beautifully drawn in black and white. The basket was full of logs, in the sense that it was an actual basket filled with actual three-dimensional logs. No poster or inscription in any way explained this phenomenon. Twenty metres later a youngish coloured dude stood by the side of the road, head tilted to the sky, mouth wide open as though screaming, or possibly singing opera, although no actual sound emerged. In my rear-view mirror I saw him stagger out into the road behind me, head still raised, narrowly missing an oncoming car which forced him to dash back to the curb, arms flailing in a sort of scarecrow shamble. The bicycle-image plus the oddness of the man felt uncannily like some kind of inscrutable performance art; it went very well with the empty streets. It's also entirely possible I hallucinated the whole thing.
Plan for tonight: actually sleep through the night, avoiding both the usual 2am wake-up, and the increasingly trippy series of sleep-walking dreams in which I've forgotten to do something terribly important to the incomprehensible grid of squares on my bedside table, and thus wake up repeatedly trying desperately to sort it out before the waves of zombies get me. I think they're zombies. Occasionally they're amorous wood-elves. It's all a bit weird.