embracing the inner geek

Tonight against all sound reasoning I went to a quizz night at a pub. We came a creditable fourth ... well creditable if you didn't know that we were academics. The star of the team was a historian whose specialty is the viking response to the plague. Unfortunately there were no questions about that.

back in the gin saddle

In the background someone is winning who wants to be a millionare and I should be marking essays. Instead I am reading about the lives of obscure Americans ... Just got back from a fantastic weekend in the Welibu. It seems an age I since the saw the sea. Sean's birthday was a festival of ginfizz and cheesy pop. Due to drunkeness the former was inariably pronounced jizz ... classy. Stayed singing heart of glass til 4am with Vaughan while Melanie and Sean slept on the couch. The birthday boy looked fetching in his new tool belt and it looks like they are going to need it as the ceiling of the new house has already crashed down into the lounge. The next day we went in search of food but all the cafes were full ... one entirely booked out with women in glitter wigs and biro scribbles on their cheeks .... We finally got eggs at a place where everyone got called doll ... then went to see a hangover movie, though we weren't hung over enough to enjoy it...

hurray for everything

Not a great day after a strange weekend.
I walked home today with a colleague and complained all the way. That's about 45 minutes of whining. The upshot of the whole thing to her was I put myself out there intellectually and psychologically - I think my role as a teacher is not so much to teach but inspire intellectual curiosity which seems to be a battle where there are only pyrrhic (sp?) victories - and some other -ly adverbs that I can't quite recall, and that oinvesting so much into the teaching will have a heavy price. She also said that I wouldn't be able to do it any other way because that is who I am. Though this is a pretty complimentary thing to say it leaves me exhausted, and I don't think I can continue with this teaching load and do the research as well. When I look at it through the clear eyes of depression I can't say that I am that ambitious and I resent the fact that I find the work unsatisfying and would have to put even more effort and use up more of my own time to make it more rewarding, and I can't be bothered.

I spent the weekend in the company of friends whose lives seem to be exactly what they want. Interesting jobs and cute babies and I just felt ... not on the edge ... not sad ... it was fun playing with the kids ... but just an overwhelming feeling of dissatisfaction with my aspects of my work and being exiled in Palmengrad.

I admitted to Fanje who I don't see so often and miss because she was my kick me in the butt friend that I had stopped thing about love and relationships because I can't see them coming my way. Is that another kind of lack of ambition? She said that it probably when it will come along. That's all very well as long as they don't mind that all I want to do is mope on the couch.

I'll think I'll open a beer and crawl under a rock now

argh or urgh

I am feeling blah ... or is it urrgh?
Spent all weekend at a conference as a sort of audience member got dragged into quite a bit of organisation stuff.. No is a one syllable word, Ludo, you might as well learn it. But it was in the big city of my youth ... and I got to see M and S's new house and even better got to see E + R B who are truly marvellous people. Needless to say stayed out late and got drunk all weekend which hasn't put me in the greatest of moods this week.

I had to shout at my students today for being low down lazy good for nothing bums who can't prepare a single thing for class despite the fact that they are scheduled to spend 12.5 hours a week on them. They look suitably chastened and I must say I did an excellent job in not carrying forward that feeling of wanting to kick them all in the puff into the next class which was 90% the same *smiling* faces. In fact in that class I was on fire ... the jokes ... I had them rolling in the aisles ...except there are no aisles ... okay so now it is time for a scintillating online tutorial

I bet you think I have not been procrastinating ... have I got news for you

So the weekends almost over and you haven't really heard from me. You've been thinking Oh that Ludo he must be polishing off the final version of his article - that's why he hasn't posted any reports on cleaning the kitchen.

Well, have I got news for you. I have and I haven't been working on the article. I ran into a serious issue on my analysis that will mean finding some more data. This can't be done in time for the deadline as I have to wait for a colleague to get back from her fieldwork and ask for her permission to use some of her data to work on. There now, I got some work done and then found an elaborate reason to slack off a bit. Though truth be known I kinda like the struggle of writing up research specially since I cannot truly think through an analysis until I am writing it. I mean we are expected in my discipline to work with data and test and analyse and come up with a result and then write it all up. But I actually have to start writing as if it is 'article ready' to come up with the ideas in the first place. I know this is not efficient especially when I have to start off with the introduction, and you cannot guess how many introductions I have to write to get to the final one. But to mangle Morrissey and don't you wish someone would there's more to life than efficiency but not much more...

In sad news, one of our nations great leftist prime ministers ... well as leftist as you can get in late modernity ... appears to be shuffling off this mortal coil. It was under his leadership that we declared our nation nuclear free and said good-bye to the Americans. Even more crucially our optingout of the formal ANZUS alliance sent us on a quite divergent path from our richer brasher cousins across the Tasman, whose government against the wishes of the large majority of sane Australians more and more have been seeking to lick Bush's butt, tried harder to persecute migrants and refugees and doubled their efforts to insult, malign, and degrade the few remaining aborginal cultures. It will be sad to see Lange go. Even those that don't agree with him and in many ways he was as contraversial as the hard right government of the seventies and early eighties he freed us from, would agree that he was a great and witty orator.

Came here to blog about something ... got fed up and left ....
damn the alzheimers

a great leap forward for ludo

I wrote 500 words of my article and drew a diagram ... and found out the deadline was 5 days earlier than I first thought. I am now thinking about maps. They often look pretty. My article will look pretty with nicely shaded maps.

I also went to the library to get out a book with a crucial piece of evidence. I was enraged that the someone had taken it out. I was ready to tell off one of my classes who I suspected might contain a bookreader (GASP!) . Note to educationalists, I am usually very encouraging of book reading but in this case I said they had to do their own analysis.

I returned to my office to discover in a forgotten fit of organisation I had already got the book out myself.

But still ... five hundred words and a diagram ladies and gentleman