5 signs of a growth industry
- Today I Grew As A Person. My planned Grahamstown jaunt with jo&stv is happening, it transpires, on top of our mid-year exam committee process, and I won't be able to make a key meeting. This caused me, when I realised I'd misread my own calendar, about .0003 seconds of guilt, remorse and knee-jerk trip-cancellation response, after which I strangled the impulse at birth and wrote a quick note to the Dep Dean regretting my absence. He replied with a declaration of woe and inability to continue without me, to which I sent a calm, reasoned, implacable rebuttal gently pointing out that it's ridiculous in the extreme for the faculty to rely completely on me for this sort of thing, I am neither unique nor irreplaceable, and in fact a number of senior advisors can do pretty much what I do, only slower, and with more recourse to the rulebooks. And they'll never learn to do it faster if I'm always there to do it. Which, being fundamentally a lamb and a good dep dean, he acknowledged was a sensible insight. So I don't have to do FEC, calloo callay, and can proceed to Grahamstown as planned. Heh.
- We chose Grahamstown shows to book yesterday, by dint of comparing notes on the things we'd separately circled in the programme, and it gave me a beautiful re-enactment of Book Club Panic, that horrible sensation where I was always terrified everyone else would hate my selections and think they were terrible books. Which, in a display of Therapy Tools my ex-therapist would be proud of, I paused to acknowledge as a fear, patted kindly on the head, and thereafter ignored, succeeding by dint of considerable self-discipline to circle exactly what appealed to me without second-guessing myself in terror. And when we compared notes it was a lovely discussion and we had circled huge amounts in common, because apparently jo&stv and I, if not actually a hive mind at this point, really do spend a lot of time together in a way that is very much driven by common tastes. And now I'm all excited and really looking forward to this.
- We also watched the first three episodes of Good Omens last night, which was a delight, Neil Gaiman did really good there. I would say it was a sign of personal growth that i kept my comments about the slashy subtext to a minimum (honestly, Aziraphale and Crowley is a delightful 6000-year romance, too OMC for words) except that I think Jo beat me to most of the good ones, so maybe the personal growth is just the result of the pre-empting of temptation by displacement. Things I particularly adored, other than the ship: the opening credit sequence, the pitch-perfect casting, the embedded in-joke references, the tightening of the novel's slightly sprawley plot. The whole thing made me really happy.
- I can now report that I have been Officially Turned Down for my first job application for a New Zealand post, which is a sign of personal growth (or possibly the apocalypse) in that I applied at all. It's certainly further than I got with the career-change process. Apparently continuing in academia in a different country is fundamentally less terrifying to me on some level than trying to change careers in this one. Who knew. Now that the ice is broken I think it'll be easier to apply for others. Watch this space.
- I finally grew a spine enough to tackle my music collection, which has been an utter disaster for nearly two years owing to the fact that the ham-fisted technoprimates who installed my last new hard drive stuffed up copying over the files, so half the music files were empty. Since the vast bulk of it was ripped from CD, re-creating it was going to be a massive undertaking. Fortunately I discovered last week that I had apparently, at some stage, copied the majority of the collection onto my work hard drive, where it languished unlistened to since my current office confirmation means music is unduly audible to my co-workers. In the last week I have acquired two large flash drives, copied, rationalised, converted about half of it to MP3s, and backed it up in two separate places. Currently updating my car MP3 player to play something other than the same 10 artists I have cycled obsessively through for years. Definite personal growth.
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