not moving out - kicked out

I've got a busy week coming up and so what I am doing? Planning a holiday I don't deserve. Done nothing this weekend towards eleviating the pressure that I'll be under tomorrow. MEt with the bossman on friday. He's quite sweet really, though he could not understand my longterm project at all ... when oh when will we get a head of school is from the same discipline? ... He was also pressuring me to publish from my phd thesis. Clearly he hasn't read it. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I have no interest in publishing in that entire field anymore ... at the end of the thesis I just felt the whole theory thing was a game. A very interesting game but just a game the goal of the game make up new rules of the game. I now that was just phd fatigue but more applied and contextual research is of greater interest to me now (obviously). Still, I shut him up with all my project deadlines over the next three months (which I am avoiding working on right here) ... then he dropped the bombshell that they are requisitioning my office ... for that rare species the visiting scholar ... but I love my office ... it is big and private ... and has a corner ... and a window .... they are moving me to one with dimensions akin to a laundry chute. The sweetner? Oh we can get someone to move your stuff for me...

dob dob dob dob we cubscouts chanted ... apparently it means 'do our best' ... still think old Baden Powell was kinda creepy

Have got the big yearly appraisal thing tomorrow with the bossman. He got here while I was away, and I have talked to him twice since I got back. So he has a whole month's worth of work to appraise me on. I am tossing up whether to remind him he slept in my bed for 2 months.

we taste like pig

Because I am feeling kinda chicken shit and don't want to say something too contentious on another person's blog I just thought I would make a comment about cannabalism. Now, I have just been living among people who are the second third and fourth generation descendents of cannabals, never thought I'd write a sentence like that! In fact the last recorded case was in the early 1970s on the island. My village father showed me where the human earth oven was in his garden... you were not permitted to cook people in the village or in the same fire as other food... there were bones scattered everywhere. Contemporary culture on the island does not condone cannabalism but at the same time are not ashamed of the actions of their forebears, these things were habits of the night i.e, the premissionary period. They now have adopted and adapted christianity and the moral codes that entails, but they have not moralised on the actions produced by the radically different social system of their ancestors. Elsewhere in the Pacific for example this same were we or weren't we debate goes on. Fijians for example dispute the cannabalistic tendencies of precontact time inhabitants of those islands. What troubles me about the report on Carib cannabalism is that the chief is supressing the views of other Caribs and implying they are in it for the money. While I know nothing about Carib/Arawak history I know enough about post-contact Pacific to know that many peoples have reconfigured their history of before and after the encounter for various ends. Equally important is the realisation that power in small societies is still power, and elites in small societies present history in a way that advantages them and secures their hold on power. Sound familiar? I am not saying this is the case with this Carib chief, but we don't know for sure, because very little information about other Carib views are being circulated. I also know that this is only part of the problem of the Pirates of the ... 2 premise ...

On a completely different note, you know how in movies people often find themselves locked out of their hotel rooms? This morning I acted that out in real life for a whole bunch of school children visiting our capital city. What really annoyed me though was that I had put a shoe in the door but forgot the power of the wind in that city so both me and the shoe were in the wrong side of the door.... As I was going down the lift in my towel and singlet, a woman said to me 'locked out eh? 'yep' I said. And won't the buggers let you back in?
Hang on, if there were others in the room, doncha think I would bang on the door sream bloody murder till they let me in?

is the universe trying to tell me something or just my computer

So I spent the weekend marking the assignments ... and cleaning ... eventually. I also lovingly prepared special guest star lecture with slide show and everything. I finished late Sunday night and celebrated by watching a celebrity ball room dancing reality show (naturally), which of course starred our Georgina, the world's first (apparently, there might have been some who who passed) transexual mayor of small rural town who went on to become a member of parliament... having a small country self consciousness, we spend a lot of time working out world firsts to claim, or tricky ways of claiming world firsters from other countries as actual new zealanders .... russell crowe for example.... who tried to camouflage poor dancing skills, (well poor for someone who 'did cabaret' which I am sure is a euphemism for a more complex way of making money) ... only to discover that my computer at home which has become jealous, it knows I am seeing another computers at work... tricked me into beliving that it had transferred my presentation onto a disk when it had only transfered some summary page that it generated myself. The timing of this discovery? Oh 1 hr 20 mins before estimated time of delivery. So being the closet superhero that I am, I borrow a colleague's pushbike... that's right saving the planet and my ass all at the same time... cycle furiously (for a reasonably heavy smoker) oh no I just outed myself as a smoker .... make it back to the house in record time only to fall off the bike due to failure to release foot form pedal cage thingies, scrape hand... blood and everything and get bike grease over favourite pants previously thought of as lucky pants. Curse loudly in front of elderly non-plussed neighbour. Get inside curse computer, tell it it's over between us and transfer files properly.

Cycle back to uni (without falling) with plenty of time to spare... except then give the presentation in angry flustered way.... Lecture not in English, so anger probably masked, but not flusteredness.

Then look after visiting scholar for an hour or two before she gives her very entertaining super special guest lecture, then look after her again for a couple of hours, at the beginning of which she looks at me blankly and asks me what department I work in... um hello are you mental?

update on the overly long email thingy

So I get the admin bullshit done and am only 1/2 day late. It turned out to be a wrkload assessment formula. Now since I was away for about oh the first four months of this year I decided that last year's extremely heavy workload spread over 2 action packed semesters might be a better 'snapshot' of my workload. Had it returned, didn't I. All assessment of workloads shall be based on the 05 numbers. Well of course they are! So I am officially lazy since I did no teaching in the first semester, nor did I write any major studyguides. No doubt my school will be officially cautioned by the creepy head of humanities for having such lightweights draining the school of resources or shall be loaded up with courses to teach to make up for my 2005 laurel resting... Perhaps back up to the dizzy heights of 9 double semester and single semester courses like the last 3 years. Academia, I'm loving it. I think I need a kava and a lie down under a palm tree...

what I've really enjoyed about this weekend so far

Okay so I am back into the (down) swing of things despite feeling surprisingly homesick for my village.... got up this morning thinking today I shall be virtuous I shall clean the house... I shall mark a thousand essays .... my mind and pencil shall never tire. I will think of important points to scribble in the margin and they will be legible and instructive. I shall think of three things I really liked about each student's effort. I shall diligently note for oh about 85% of them the difference between references and bibliographies ... then I actually got out of bed to discover that the electricity had evaporated or disappated or whatever the hell electricity does. I immediately justified a postponement of cleaning. I mean who could possibly clean without electricity I ask you. I have polished wooden floor boards (get me!) so no need to vacuum... the hot water is gas so I could have mopped, done dishes all that stuff, never mind the volume of simple repatriation of objects to their rightful places that could have taken a good hour or so of the morning.... but without music, this is not possible at all. No, I cancelled the lot, and went out in search of good coffee; a hit and miss affair in this town. Went to get a DVD to watch. I have given up making on the spot decisions vis a vis dvds videos and the like since the time taken to shuffle through the shelves is roughly equivalent to the time it takes to watch final choice... So the one preplanned vid of course is unavailable... I almost choose Roustabout for a high old time of Elvis schlock but since this was not preplanned I felt a little uncomfortable.... ditto at the library when the new J. Marias was out but did manage to come away with some random titles or other.

Returned home to discover electricity had been restored, but since cleaning had been cancelled have failed to sweep mop launder even though this can all happen with appropriate soundtrack (Herbert at the moment). Picked up a few essays to mark to discover the top of the pile was a charming tale of misadventures in postgraduate research. To be fair this is most of these students' first go at postgrad fun and games or my particular subject matter but honestly what do you do with this....

I read somewhere a really great quote about the role of xx in the xxxx but
I can't find it again to give you the exact wording but they said something
along the lines of yyyyy....

I kid you not.