Scribery Shenanigans!

First semester's dead and gone, and has taken my biggest source of income with it. I really enjoyed tutoring Civil Engineers, who (despite their tendency to malapropise - because 'compulsively' and 'compulsory' practically mean the same thing, right?) were generally a lovely bunch. While I'm always on call for the family business, and I do enjoy its rewards - a roof over my head and all that - the net income I get from it doesn't do much besides fund my chewing gum habit.

So I've applied for a job as a Ye Olde Scribe. I prefer this title, not only because it's got a nice antique-y vibe, and implies that I'm the only literate person in the kingdom; but also because it doesn't make me choose between 'transcriber' and 'transcriptionist', neither of which sounds right. Anyway, I had to go through an online English test where I was cast into such intense shadows of doubt about my knowledge of grammar and whether 'weather' is spelled 'wether' wither...? that I began to feel rather Modernist (that is, anxious and ambivalent and ambiguously annoying) about the whole (hole? whorl?) thing.

But to my surprise and delight, I passed the test, and they sent me a four-minute sample clip of stuff to transcribe. I listened to several different voices speak in varying UK accents about Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake's relationship. When I was about to start writing, I realised that none of the people talking had names. Bugger! There must have been about fifteen different voices, some coming back throughout the clip, others just appearing once.

So what was I supposed to do? Give them names of my own? John, Mary, Sheldor the Conqueror, Squirtle? Or differentiate them as best I can: Posh-sounding British Man, Scottish (Probably) Man, Not-So-Posh-Sounding-But-Still-British Man, Lisping Woman, Funny-Sounding Man, Annoying Woman Who Speaks Too Fast To Transcribe Properly Damnit, Man At End Of Clip?

In the end, I just added a note saying "Yeah, I don't know who's talking, but this is definitely what they said" and sent it off. Hopefully, it'll be enough to land me some part-time work that doesn't involve pulling a 2010-themed rickshaw through Hillbrow or touching people's feet (fete? feat? pheet?!)

A girl can dream, can't she?

The *poof!* diet.

This may seem strange, but pants are very important to me. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I wear skirts and dresses most of the time, but pants hold a special place in my heart. In pants, you can go horse riding and rock climbing and generally feel manly. Thus, you can see how it would bum me out (excuse the pun) to realise that none of my pants fit me anymore. I cannot express the depth of my sorrow without resorting to a sad-face icon:

 Aaaw.

So, seeing as I'm too lazy (and averse to throwing up) to develop a slenderizing eating disorder, my only other option is to be sensible. So I've started being sensible, watching what I eat and exercising. The eating part always trips me up because, when I used to keep a food diary, it would generally creep people out.  Because obviously, if I have a food diary, then I must  have a diary of all my social interactions (à la TBBT's Sheldon Cooper) and in it I must write down all their flaws and how I will dispose of them once the Revolution comes. Any-hoo, I totally don't have one of those social interaction diaries [innocent whistle] and when the Revolution comes, I'm probably going to wing it when it comes to disposing of unnecessary acquaintances.

So the food diary isn't very practical, but I found a great site called FitDay where you can enter all your food for the day, and how much you've exercised, and it does all the finicky math for you! It's quite magical. It even does pie graphs. Mmm... pie...

Erm, anyway, as for working out, my favourite thing to do is the Turbo Jam DVD's. It's basically a dance-cardio thing, and isn't mind-numbingly boring. It also helps that you have an option of having the music drown out the lead trainer's incessant motivational banter. The trick is not to look at the girl in the third row on the right, because she's got this huge Joker-smile on her face for 45 straight minutes, and it's rather unnerving.

I'm not on any official diet, I'm just staying below a certain amount of daily calories. So the upside is that on the plan, I can have a doughnut. The downside is that I can't have 49 more doughnuts. But that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for the pants.

I'm not sure how long it'll take me to get back into the pants, but I figure if I keep this up long enough, in a week or two, tops, I'll be working out and there will be an epic *poof* sound and lots of glittery smoke, and I'll emerge looking like this:

(Minus the OMG-totally-kawaii!!!!!1!! star tattoo)
(And hopefully not upside-down.)

So that's my very sensible plan. Wish me luck!

I'm not dead! But if I was.... the orangutan did it.

I know this blog has gotten a bit dusty, but with exams and trying to maintain my 13-hour-a-day sleep schedule, bloggable events have been at a minimum. Shockingly, exams haven't eaten my soul this year like they usually do. Maybe it's because I'm postgrad now, and therefore have superpowers. It could also be that this year, I've actually read the books I'm writing on. You never know.

Right now (as I type) I'm studying, by osmosis, my Edgar Allan Poe stories. Besides the outside-class discussions (in which we came to the conclusion that Poe was the first emo mo-fo, yo) I have many helpful lecture notes, such as these important points:

- The detective stories offer absurd solutions
- Thus resolution is offered, but not comforting to the reader
- Life is random and depressing
- At any moment an orangutan could run into your house, strangle you and stuff you up the chimney.

PICTURED: Not as innocent as they look, a young orangutan plots yet another act of random violence.

I really don't get why Poe wasn't taken seriously as a writer back in his day. Who could have a fun, exciting, gothic murder-mystery without a couple of orangutans thrown in? Orangutans make every story better. I could probably have sat through The Notebook if there were orangutans. Or even Mariah Carey's Glitter. Just imagine: our darling, buxom heroine finally finds the mother who gave her up for adoption, and just as she walks gracefully across the street to confront the jazzy drunkard, an evil orangutan snatches her up, strangles her and stuffs her up a chimney!

Come on, I'd watch that.

3 things about SA that I'm well and truly OVER

Yes, we have sunshine and smiles and rainbow-coloured ponies over here in South Africa, but we also have things that make me want to rant like a... well, like a blogger who's putting off a lot of marking!

1 - World Cup propaganda. Endless soppy TV ads and cheesy billboards encouraging us to refrain from stoning foreign tourists; and reminding us that because some people kick a ball around, we're all homies and this country is incredibly amazing. I can't wait for the World Cup to be over, so we can all go back to being grumpy pessimists.

2 - Malema rage. Yes, he's an idiot. Yes, he's offensive. But every time you react to him, HE WINS. His personal and political agenda is to get as much attention as possible. I'd like to see the energy everyone puts into creating drama around this man be redirected into something constructive. Like throwing shoes at him. Or stuffing his pillows with something he's allergic to. Or just pushing him over so that he falls down.

3 - The new little TV's on buses. I guess this springs from the first point - wow, SA's so great! Sure, a bus may only come by once every four hours or so, and you're lucky if it's roadworthy, but look, it's got a tiny TV in the front! The thing is, the only thing they play is this creepy computer-animated kid's show about a rabbit who lives in some sort of communist fruit-based economy. I guess that's the only way to punish people for taking buses without infringing on their human rights.

Aah, it feels good to fulfill my hater-quota for the day.

White Noise: 310 pages of my life I'm never getting back

White Noise by Don DeLillo is doublepluspostmodern, and not in a good way.

The whole book is about this dude, Jack (why are 75% of all protagonists named Jack?) who's an annoying college professor, insufferable poser, babydaddy, and a guy who generally has too much time on his hands to ponder... wait for it... DEATH.

(DEATH is like so scary, that's why we have to write it in BIG LETTERS.)

Now, DEATH is hardly an overwritten subject, especially in postmodernism's heyday, right? But DeLillo brings it to a whole new level of Oh My God, My Eyes Are Bleeding badness. Basically, good ol' Jack can't stop thinking about DEATH because it's the only thing that freaks him out in his comfy consumer culture.

Poor Jack, DEATH upsets him. Don't you feel sorry for him and can totally relate to his character? No? You'd rather just chuck a portable DVD player at his head? Wow, me too! We should hang out.

DeLillo's description of the overly media-saturated world was probably a big whoop in the eighties, but writing "Leaded, Unleaded, Superleaded" in the middle of a love scene between Jack and his legwarmer-clad wife strikes me as less deep and meaningful and more 'I need three more words for this chapter or my publisher will yell at me again.'

I'm pretty sure that this book got on the Honours reading list, and into academic acclaim in general, through a very clever the-king-has-no-clothes approach: the individual fakes awe and a deep understanding of the book because that's what the collective is expressing. Nobody wants to be the idiot who says he didn't get it.

And after three hundred or so pages of Jack whingeing about DEATH, I was sincerely hoping he'd fall into a giant meat grinder and... wait for it... DIE! But the freakin' dude just keeps on trucking. Yes, it's postmodern. It's also a shitty ending.

The only good thing about this book is that (despite that fact that I found it really, really lame) I get it, so I'm going to write an essay on it this week and not have any more American Lit work until the exams.

Next week we're starting on Black Boy, by Richard Wright. I'll probably write more about it once I've finished it, but let me say now that it's fantastic. One of the best books I've ever read; I can't wait for classes to start so I can gush about it to a begrudging audience of eight.

The only thing is that it's pretty depressing, and brings me to tears almost as much as the first season of Glee. I don't know why I start crying when perfectly good-sounding people break into show tunes. Maybe because it makes me ponder the ceaseless void of DEATH.

In a world ruled by evil flying elves....

So the first quarter's over, which means I actually have to start submitting work. Dun dun DUN. (That was an impending-doom sound, for the record!)

Moby Dick's going to be out of my hair soon, I'm submitting tomorrow morning. Seeing as I only figured out a couple of hours ago what my argument actually is, I'm very relieved to find that it actually has some sort of internal logic. At least I don't have to start from scratch.

Writing an essay for me is kind of like making an abstract painting. You just keep throwing paint on the canvas, and only after you're done, long after you've forgotten what the hell you were doing with all that red and silver and why you rented that horse-drawn carriage in the first place... you look at it again and realise whether it's Jackson Pollock or just, like, total crap.

I'm also debating whether to take part in Script Frenzy next month. It's a challenge to write a hundred-page play /screenplay / graphic novel / basically, scripted stuff! in the month of April. I'm tempted, but I'm afraid it might get in the way of my lying-around time.

By the way, Script Frenzy's homepage has a hilarious little gizmo called The Plot Machine, which randomly generates the seeds of a plot. It's even funnier when you read it in a deep, manly movie-trailer narrator's voice: "In a world ruled by evil flying elves... the worse debate team ever... must smuggle druids across the border."

...Hey, I might just use that exact plot!

.

A spot of chicktea!

I really couldn't live with myself if I didn't post this picture:


From CuteOverload (Photo by Jerry Schexnayder)

I believe that sharing such fluffy cuteness is one of the noblest uses of the internet! True story. On the list of The Glories Of The Internet, "fluffy cuteness" is right below Engrish.com and right above My Immortal.

Speaking of chicks in teacups - well, not really, but anyway - the other day, I had an experience that made me realise the greatness of being a tutor. Not in the bestowing of knowledge, silly. See, since it's the end of the quarter, my tutlings had a test on how much (or rather, how little) they've read for their course. So on Wednesday I proceeded to sit in a room full of anxious people writing a tricky test... and I wasn't one of them.

I was almost giddy! Um, not in a sadistic way, but in a dodged-a-bullet kind of way. Like: HA! I don't have to worry and stress about this test! It's not my problem, woohoo! I'm above it all, I'm safe, I'm FREE!

Yeah... that probably means I'm not grown up enough to be a tutor. Oh well! At least I've got a really adorable pic of squishy cutey fluffy wuffy shnuggly chickies in-a-teacup! Aaaw!