They'll be able to wear them again.

I made the chief bridesmaids their outfits yesterday. They are not allowed to wear them out of the house because there is mud everywhere at the moment. That said Basil has got his on and I don't know where he is. Probably lying contentedly in a puddle somewhere.





Albie doesn't know how to hold still. This is as unblurry as I can make him.

I can't look at these for too long, my stomach incisions hurt when I laugh.

Operation! (Bzzzt!)

On Friday I had surgery. It was just about as much fun as you might expect. I was instructed to present myself at the Mercy at 6.30 in the morning and did so, but then had to sit and twiddle my thumbs for three hours in a chair facing a television showing morning television shows. The form-filling-out preliminaries took about ten minutes and then I just sat and waited. There was no visible queue which somehow made it more annoying. Have you ever tried to read a review of three monographs on the Nazi film industry while Spongebob Squarepants is squealing in your ear? By 9.30 the operation was a welcome interruption to Mel & Kochie induced irritated boredom.

I must have looked terrified when I went into the lying-down-on-table room, though, because the three people there to get me ready all immediately began making soothing clucking sounds while putting in the drip-thing, squishing something cold through the tube into the back of my hand etc. I was lying there sleepily looking at the double doors to the operating room and then I was waking up, still on the table but in another room, looking at a clock that said 12.30.

A nurse was asking me what my heart rate was normally. I tried to say that I didn't know (but was it just that I didn't understand the question? If she had asked me what my normal blood pressure was I would have known, but anyway.) Another nurse came and asked me if I did a lot of exercise and I seemed to say yes to this and this appeared to have satisfied them both. Now Nurse #1 was flipping through the pages of forms I'd filled out.
You're a uni lecturer, she told me.
mmm
Good hours. You only come in to work about four hours a day.
mm nn no

After the heart rate conversation I felt it would be a good idea if I tried to not go back to sleep in case my heart slowed down any more but I don't think I succeeded. After a bit I was wheeled into another room and lay there, sleepy, curious, and bored while various things happened. My stomach began to hurt and I was given a ‘morphine-like’ pill. I became confused and wished I had brought Voss to the hospital so I could read it while on morphine-like drugs. One of the surgeons who (apparently) did the operation came and showed me two sheets of A4 each with eight full-colour photographs of my ovaries and uterus on them. She pointed out some of the highlights to which I paid less attention than I now wish I had paid, and I think she said I would get the pictures to take to my gynaecologist, although perhaps not because I don't have them now. Or perhaps she knew I would just post them on my blog and so she didn't give them to me. Everyone else in there was wearing blue scrubs, but she had on a really strange dress which was like a normal fitted bodice to the waist, with a scoop neck and cap sleeves, but the skirt was like a full bell with deep pleats folded like the noses of paper aeroplanes, and it was short and pouffy. It also appeared to have a small brass plaque (exactly like a doctor's nameplate next to the door) affixed to the back just below the neckline.

A nurse placed a round of corned beef sandwiches in front of me and another nurse took them away because it was too soon. A bit later the first nurse brought them back again. It was very still and there were few other patients. Someone I couldn't see was quietly sobbing. The nurses and doctors were talking about a caesar, and after a bit I heard a newborn baby exercising its lungs. I could not get comfortable on the trolley because my arms wanted to flop off the sides. I thought about the thing a yoga teacher said to me eight years ago – you have got unusually long arms, Laura - which I have probably thought about more than anything else anyone has ever said to me in my whole life. Based on nothing at all that I could observe, a nurse told me to put my clothes on and go to the toilet. 'When you get up you will see there's a surfboard between your legs' she said. A surfboard? I was very curious about what it could be and was disappointed to discover it was only a big lump of cotton wool. But was I supposed to leave it there? It wasn't attached to anything. I tried putting my undies on over it and the result was ludicrous enough to pierce the morphine-like brainfog. So I left my surfboard on the trolley and went away.

Dorian was there to meet me when I came out of the toilet but I had to wait a bit longer before being told to go home. I have four small cuts in my belly, which is grotesquely distended because they inflate the abdomen with gas: one cut on the navel, one above the hairline, and one at each side of the curve. It's really damn peculiar to think of total strangers fiddling about inside my stomach without my being there while they did it. I only have the cuts to show anyone was ever in there. They have got sticky tape over them. The belly button sticky tape panel goes over the entire belly button, which is gross. I didn't have a shower until early Saturday afternoon, and while I was wiping away the yellow rinse that had been swabbed across my stomach I discovered several creepy dried drips of blood running horizontally across my hips from front to back.

Not looking forward to picking off the sticky tape. That's got to hurt.

Sarsaparilla Lite, and Twitter

You might've noticed that Sarsaparilla is broken - it has been for quite some time, in fact. This is entirely my fault for setting the thing up somewhat shonkily initially and then failing to engage in all the somewhat strenuous maintenance involved in running a wordpress blog. But it's on the road to recovery, and meanwhile there's a temporary Sars, here. Please add it to your bookmarks or feedreader.



Also, I have gone on Twitter, as lucytartan. Another internetty thing to neglect, hooray!

While I'm here I may as well say that the O-week lady is in my first year tutorial.

?

oh my god! Was there just an earthquake in Melbourne? The house was quivering. the cats seem freaked out too.

You're doing it wrong!!!!

Last week I staffed the English information table at some sort of O-week session for Arts students. It was fairly monotonous, in the main, if eye opening; all the questions were variations on the same theme, namely, what are the books for the subject I'm doing? Which is interesting inasmuch as it implies that a lot of enrolling first-years (and it's the motivated ones who show up to o-week things) don't read even as far as the second paragraph of the course description. And that makes me wonder how they decide what subject they're going to do? Not a completely idle wondering since one of the two sem 1 subjects has drastically more students enrolled than does the other, for no good reason that i can deduce. (The names are very similar, so that's probably not it.)

Anyway, after a while along came a student with a different sort of question. And now I will just say that you know I never write about the things individual students do and say, positive or negative, but in this case I feel the making of an exception is appropriate.
The student wanted to know how we break down assignment marks - what percentage goes on expression, what percentage on research, on ideas, argument etc. We don't do it that way and I told her so.

What?!? Huh? Why don't you. You should. Other departments do.

Well, we don't think you can separate 'expression' from 'ideas' in that way. That's kind of what we're about. Form and content depend on each other.

You can separate them, of course you can, and I can't believe what I'm hearing. Ridiculous. So how am I supposed to know what I did wrong?

Well, it's not ridiculous. And (beginning to get a bit warm now) even if you could separate them, why would assigning a separate number for each hypothetical category make a more meaningful grade than one overall number, plus the very detailed comments you will get on each essay? The comments will tell you what you did well and suggest ways to improve.

It's not scientific.

I agree with you. English isn't all that scientific.

(pause)

Then it's all arbitrary, is that what you're telling me? And are the essays anonymised? Does the marker know the name of the writer?

It is NOT all arbitrary, we are very experienced at this, we use criteria that everyone is told about, and we cross-check with other markers in the department. Why do you think breaking it down into sets of numbers would be any less arbitrary?

Are they anonymised?

No.

So it's the person who gets marked, not the essay?

No, it's the essay.

We need to know the writer personally so we can judge whether the essay might be plagiarised.

I don't see how that would help you see if it was plagiarised.

It's the only way to get an idea of what the writer is capable of.

I still don't see how it would help. And I can't believe you don't break down the marks. That's incredible and bizarre.

Well, you are very welcome to take it up with your course co-ordinator.

Oh, I'll be doing that at the first opportunity.

And that was the end of the conversation. As she left, the semicircle of students waiting behind her rolled their eyes and made various other grimaces of extreme irritation. The two girls next to the table explained how much they hated that sort of behaviour, assured me that they grasped the concept of different sorts of assessment in different subjects, and expressed their strong desire to never be in a tutorial with someone who didn't know when to shut up.

Actually, I don't mind being pressed to explain the logic behind institutional processes (though it's never fun trying to negotiate how to do that when the process in question actually IS a bunch of ill-thought-out rubbish) and so what I said to these girls was something to the effect of 'it's all good, airing that sort of challenge is a big part of what going to university is about.' But thinking it over, actually, no. Another at least equally big part of going to university is about holding your tongue long enough for the new information to make its way into your brain. If only in the interests of not shitting fellow students to tears. There's actually no student behaviour I loathe more, not even plagiarism, than when they display their irritation/boredom with one another's tutorial performances. Nobody ever comes out looking good from that sort of scenario.

While we're on the topic of epic fails, there is another reason the o-week questioner should have listened to my answers and here it is:



Yes, I am apparently a La Trobe Lecturer of the Year finalist, and all I've got to show for it is this certificate with its spectacularly grating example of the illiteracy I hate most, i.e. deployment of 'singular they' when the subject's identity and gender are not only known, but are actually identified in the very same sentence.

The other La Trobe certificate-recepient I know of was a person in Philosophy who the students call 'groovy Jack'. It was apparently some sort of student-voting popularity contest organised by a higher ed job recruitment firm, and I didn't know about it until it was all over, obviously, or I'd have told my classes to vote for me. The winner, someone in Queensland, got a trip to Fiji.

Basil report

Here's a picture of that elegant young gentleman Basil.



It was taken in early January which is why the grass is still green. In an effort to preserve the life of the lawn over summer I did all of the following: bucketed water from the washing machine, when it could be spared from other parts of the garden; covered it in old sheets and doona covers when 35 degree days were predicted; and, finally, mulched it with pea straw. Consequently, there are still a few minute green spots remaining here and there amid the brown. The beautiful and strange rain that has been falling over the past few days might bring the grass back to life. I hope so since I don't want to get married standing on a claypan covered in a load of shrivelled hard dead leaves (cue confused Bridezilla-like roaring and sounds of smashing glass). But even less do I want to get married in my back yard with a hundred friends and relatives standing about getting rained upon. So in summary I would like it to rain a lot over the next three weeks and then stop. Are you listening, Ceiling Cat?

Back to Basil report, though: while he looks really charming and cuddly and sweet in that photo, Basil is actually growing increasingly snappish and cranky with age. Sometimes, in the evenings, when he comes and sits on the couch with D & me, he falls into such an ecstasy of blissed-out happiness that you can hear the purring from the other end of the house. But most of the time, cheerfulness gives way very easily to irritation, which is expressed by biting and/or fisticuffs. It's what lies ahead for us all I suppose.

Don't say I never give you anything.