beesknees

Earlier this week I was unexpectedly dialed into a Teams call while eating a very messy homemade burrito in my right hand. I, a dumbass, instantly decided the right course of action was to accept it as a video call because then I could gesture for patience while smoothly putting on my gaming headphones one-handed.

Readers, I did not smoothly put them on one-handed. I dropped them. Twice. And almost splattered myself with burrito innards...more than twice. It was a solid 45 seconds of Buster Keaton webcam action before I finally clomped the dang things over my ears.

At least I made a colleague laugh like a drain. And didn't drop my burrito. Go me!

Campus beauty shot, taken from the Henriette Raphael walkway.

Managed to get my butt on the bike to drop off a covid study test before work, on the logic that the roads were at least mostly dry; it was still maybe 27 degrees, and I haven't really shaken off the chill all day. Should have worn an extra layer on my legs!

Been a weird week; too many people too busy to get back to me with input or sign-off on my ongoing projects, so I picked up some extra wee projects, worked ahead as much as I could, and fielded bursts of last-minute panicked requests. Just before I signed off, a central colleague circulated a multi-position recruitment opp - for more direct student support, a grade up from my current level, and one of the positions would be supporting my current faculty. It'd have a lot of the pastoral elements I miss from my first academia job...hmmm.

Definitely going to throw my hat in the ring for this one. 'Course, that means I have to consult with my manager for approval (which is awkward but she'll give it), and then, ugh, update my cv for the last year, and start writing the ridiculously long and detailed personal statement required, and work myself into the anxious wreck I always turn into around job hunting...still. Worth a shot, anyway.

Six years on, it’s less workable to share an email address. At least while both of us are jobsearching and every agency demands a unique address. And I still have the old fivecups one, but it’s spam central after ten years (which, hells bells, a decade?) and I hate hotmail a whole bunch, so tonight I have spent a solid twenty minutes first trying to come up a with a professional-sounding gmail username not already taken, and then any name at all not already taken. Why are there so many people with my exact name? And they all use gmail? We should have conventions!

Btw, commonpeople, thanks for the reccy – I had a nice chat with one of that agency’s reps on Friday and am coming in to see them later this week. Crossing fingers.

Had a big two days’ work this week, which were productive in that they confirmed that I do not want anything to do with medical admin work ever again, thank ya kindly. Because we are responsible people with bills to pay, that entire paycheck has already been eaten up by an order of beer kits and dinner out with awesome friends-of-friends. Woo hoo!

Along with more fruitless applications than I’d prefer, it has been a week of reading library books and watching (mostly B-, C-, and D-grade) films, since we took an anti-Tesco stand and switched our dvd service to Lovefilm. I love it when political grandstanding comes with streaming video! So this week we’ve revisited the nightmare-inducing traumas of our childhoods (Return of the Living Dead and The Blob, respectively), discovering that one of them holds up surprisingly well, and one of us was a very, very silly 10 year-old for sleeping between her mattresses so the heavy metal zombies couldn’t find her.

About the time I got that hotmail address, a goth-king lent me his copy of the first Transmetropolitan, insisting it would change my life. Unfortunately, I was moving, and also very careless in general, and it probably got mixed in with my goth-princeling boyfriend’s comics, never to be found or returned. The husband found it in the library and brought it home to me last week…left me wishing I’d read it that first time, or ten years before that. His intro story I actually really liked; it captured the whole point of the 90s anti-hero: the world is horrible, and only someone even more horrible can navigate it to find the potential for decency that the less corrupt could save and nurture. Y’know, the trope the Operative is riffing on…he (and it’s nearly always gendered he) tries to bring about the better world he can have no part of.

Except I’m old, and I’ve dated and been these guys, and they want the horrible, horrible world they see to stay just the way it is, to keep their oddly privileged place in it secure, and thus I was annoyed by the rest of the comic where Spider Jerusalem mostly got high and watched tv and had bodily functions on bystanders. Oh, to have read this at 13 rather than 33…would have been the only riotgrrl in Lanco.