• 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 ( Read more... )

• It is fortunate that this particular period of the year is characterised by holidays (Easter, Worker's Day, voting day) which means I just had three four-day work weeks and another next week, which is just as well as fatigue is kicking my butt. I am feeling on a more or less ongoing basis as though I'm coming down from a codeine hangover, which is ( Read more... )

I spent Sunday morning moderating an Honours paper for another university, which was entertaining, because it was a course on comics. Apparently any other institution in this country is more liberal than my Cherished Institution on the subject of what constitutes Literature Worthy Of Study. The bastards. Nice little course, except for the trifling ( Read more... )

Migraine auras are extremely weird. I had a random attack yesterday, which started out as strange patches in the middle of my vision, causing me to clean off my glasses umpteen times in increasing frustration before realising what was happening. The true aura came a bit later, in the form I always get, and have done since I was at school, I ( Read more... )

oh gods, there's a coup in Zimbabwe. The military, miffed at the recent Mugabe purge of ex-military politicians who might prevent that poisonous psychopath Grace from taking power, has intervened in force and is currently holding the national broadcaster and releasing far-from-reassuring statements that Mugabe and his family are all well, we ( Read more... )

Well, that was odd. I've just had the Protester Ringleader in my office again, to make the course drop we discussed a few weeks back. It was a weirdly cordial interchange, where he apologised for disrupting my lecture and assured me it was just politics, nothing personal. And that he does not in any way endorse the bus-burning and throwing-things- ( Read more... )

So, the SA government, bless its cotton socks, has announced, perfectly predictably after much backing and filling, that free tertiary education is not viable, and radical student movements are seething. We lost two days from last week with protesting crowds prowling the campus with sticks, and lectures have been suspended yesterday and today. The ( Read more... )

oh god, student protesters disrupted lectures this afternoon for the second time in two days, and it was a really large crowd of protesters, this time, causing me to close the security gate on our offices in the slightly irrational fear of over-enthusiastic mobs piling catastrophically through the glass doors. I wonder how they've drummed up ( Read more... )

I have just had my second English lecture shut down by student protesters, right in the middle of a particularly pithy bit about postcolonial readings of Frankenstein. We were deconstructing a white British nineteenth-century novel in terms of its representation of marginalised racial identities, what the hell more do the protesters want? I did a ( Read more... )

For some bizarre reason my morning Earl Grey tastes faintly of coffee. This seems both unlikely and a little unfair. I don't think there is actually any coffee in the house ( Read more... )