Victorianitas

I have this thing with my eyes. It isn't very common, and it took a long time and a lot of doctors to get diagnosed as a child. This didn't bother me much back then, because being a medical curiosity with a non-painful, non-fatal condition is sort of fun when you're young, and it hasn't bothered me much since, because, well, these are my eyes and I'm used to them, but it's bothering me right now.

My eye condition is one of the disorders collectively known as congenital fibrosis of the extraocular muscles (CFEOM). The eye muscles are filled with useless fibrous tissue, and so eye movement is very limited. I had ptosis (extreme droopiness of an eyelid), hypertropia (a type of misalignment of the eyes that looks like this), lack of binocular vision, one eye that wouldn't move above the midline, and one eye that mostly wouldn't move at all; the hypertropia, ptosis and limited movement got fixed after diagnosis, but the 2D vision is here to stay. CFEOM was traditionally diagnosed as a muscle condition, but later research has found associated issues with one or two of the cranial nerves (usually the oculomotor nerve), and the general medical opinion is now that it's a neuromuscular condition where the muscle problems arise from a neurological defect.

Following that? Sort of? Doesn't really matter. If you even read that, you're currently doing a better job than my GP, who is uninterested in reading my medical notes beyond a single word.

As far as my GP's concerned, my sole medical problem was hypertropia - a kind of squint - which was operated on and fixed. It says so in the computer summary of my records, after all! And when he went to get the paper file, clearly pissed off with my insistence that no, really, there is an underlying condition that caused that squint, as diagnosed by a paediatric opthalmologist at one of the world's best children's hospitals, no really it will be in my file go and look, what he read out to me was 'operation for hypertropia caused by congenital fibrosis of the extraocular muscles'. Which I think proved my point, but which he was equally sure proved his point, and we were left with him saying 'I think this 'fibrosis' thing is just the way they described your squint, but at any rate, you do not have an existing eye condition,' and me and my single contact lens blinking at him in bewilderment.

I promise you, internet, I am not making this condition up. Nor did I diagnose it all by myself with the help of Dr Google. I'm used to trying (and failing) to explain this to people, doctors and opticians among them, and I have a lot of experience of being a Mac user phoning tech support ('Okay, just click on the 'Start' menu...') and being a person with a difficult-to-spell name, which all comes in handy in such situations ('no, I can't see through both eyes - no, not even if I try very hard'), but not quite to this point. It was a strange, strange moment.

Also, a very annoying one. But you got that.

And the point of this is, the reason I was talking to the GP in the first place is that my eyes have started doing some weird things over the past year or two. Suddenly, bright sunlight has gone from being a minor inconvenience to being painful. I've started getting migraines, which I never had before. And in my reasonable sensible way, I thought, hmm, existing rare eye condition which is partly neurological plus photophobia plus migraine, eh? Maybe that's worth speaking to a doctor about. (Which of course I didn't, because I'm useless, but I did end up mentioning it to my mother, and she shouted at me, so I ended up going to a doctor after all.)

But my GP will not refer me to a specialist, because there is 'nothing wrong' with my eyes.

Sigh.

- Although you wouldn't think it, weather like this:



is not the best kind of weather to have. Notice how few of those people are smiling. It rains at Hay; it always rains at Hay; it's supposed to rain at Hay, and blazing sunshine just feels wrong. Thus, the atmosphere was a lot cheerier the day after, when the world looked like this:



Much better.

Anyway, for someone who doesn't much like hearing authors talk about being authors, I had a really good time. And I rubbed shoulders with Jimmy Carter (if only because it was really crowded and he and his security people were squeezing past, and I didn't have any idea who he was until afterwards anyway, but still).

£42.78 is what it costs to get one copy of your PhD thesis (if it's exactly the same as my PhD thesis) printed on the right kind of paper and bound in the right kind of way. You could buy a lot of things for £42.78, and most of them will flitter before your eyes as you hear the cost, but at least you will have your thesis, bound in black with gold lettering, looking like it's a real book that you really wrote.. For a second, just a second, £42.78 will seem worth it.

And then you'll look again at that spine, with a vegetarian-spotting-chicken-on-the-pizza expression inching its way across your face.

And you'll say, Um.

And there'll be a brief conversation with the book-binding people, who will go and fetch more book-binding people, and there'll be some muttering and some whispering and some "well, when did you claim you sent this e-mail, exactly?", and some (quieter) "oh, that e-mail," and some apologies. Which will not help you very much, because there you are in a city that is not your city, tired, rain-soaked, fed up of your stupid PhD thesis and everything to do with it, and wondering what else you could spend £42.78 on. Now. Today. If you just walked out of here.

And you're also sort of hung over, but it's not exactly hung over, because while you were indeed drinking last night and while your first words this morning were indeed to tell your friend to change out of that bright pink t-shirt right now because there is a time and a place for verging-on-neon and this is very much Not It, you were fine four hours ago. You were fine four minutes ago. The hangover that kicked in just then has nothing to do with alcohol; this, my friend, is a PhD hangover.

And the book-binding people will say, reasonably enough, that they can have the whole thing done all over again for you inside two hours if you don't mind coming back then.

And what you'll think is not even that you're worried about your thesis, or that your PhD is resting on this being handed in on time, or that you have done so damn much for this thing over the years. No. What you'll think is: but it's raining.

And although you will eventually decide that, oh, all right, you might as well, and you will come back two hours later (even soggier, even grumpier), and you will pay that £42.78, you'll surprise even yourself by how close you came to giving up the whole degree at the last minute just because you'd had it with going out in the rain.

What I was going to say here at first was that there's a teenage couple at the next table, having one of those painfully civilised pre-breakup conversations. Bit lips and eyes staring at the table, turning sugar packets into little pellets of damp, gritty mush in their hands while they talk. And I was going to say that I'm not the only person who's glanced over at them, and that there's something comforting about the silent, sympathetic "ouch" that just rippled out across the leather sofas and arty photo prints on the walls.

And then as they kept talking, I realised that wasn't what was going on at all, so I was going to write about the teenagers at the table next to me who were planning a party, or something, of some sort, and how the girl didn't want somebody else to be there, and the boy was disappointed by this, and the girl was disappointed by having to tell him. Except the way they were talking, it sounded like the idea of this being bad news was some kind of pretense, and that neither of them was all that unhappy at all.

And then it turned out that that wasn't it, either. So I was going to write something about how the boy at the next table was thinking out loud about breaking up with his girlfriend, and that his friend sitting next to him was giving him the kind of advice that sounds like it's helpful and platonic and objective, if that's what you want to hear, but isn't necessarily any of those things.

And then she hugged him and said "You should so ask Stacey out! She'd love that!" And he grunted that he didn't want to talk about Stacey.

So I have no idea what's going on at the next table, but God I miss being seventeen.

Dear Miss Not-A-Doctor-Yet,-Maggot:

Congratulations! Academic Council has decreed that you do, indeed, deserve the status of Doctor of Philosophy. As such, you are hereby invited to attend your graduation ceremony on [a weekday]. Please respond to this e-mail NO LATER THAN the end of the month, letting us know whether you'll be coming along or not. (And do bear in mind that if you don't, we'll still charge you a graduation fee, because we're just like that.)

In order to graduate, you will need to submit yet another copy of the thesis you never want to see again, bound and formatted in accordance with the following set of mutually contradictory instructions WHICH MUST BE FOLLOWED EXACTLY. If you fail to comply with these instructions, your thesis will not be accepted as fulfilment of your degree requirements, and we will send your phone number to every student you've ever marked down for poor presentation. The cost of a single hard-bound copy varies depending on who you get to do the binding, how quickly you need it done, how far you're prepared to travel and precisely how many fits you think you'll have when the quote comes in, but we can safely say that it's going to sting.

If you choose to attend graduation, you must either hire (if you have a lot of money to shell out) or buy (if you have a spare Jaguar to sell) your graduation gowns. Bear in mind that these colours, which confer the highest academic degree you have achieved, are the ones you are stuck with for the rest of your academic career, no matter where you go and no matter how much cooler everyone else's look. Nobody tells you to think about this when you're deciding on a university, do they?

Anyway, we just wanted to say congratulations again, from all of us at Registry! It's been a fun few years, hasn't it? You and us, together? We've laughed, we've cried (well, you've cried - we in Registry shed no tears), we've had lively, energetic debates about matters like whether or not we had the power to physically bar you from the campus - ah, good times. And now you're graduating! Wow, it seems like only yesterday that your whole year group came in to register for your PhDs. Remember that? How we managed to lose all your details and send you back and forth across campus in the pouring rain all morning as everyone involved denied any responsibility? Oh, your little faces!

Anyway, it's been a laugh. For us. Take care, now!

Hugs and kisses,
Registry.

(p.s. - we also have very strong views about what to wear under your graduation gowns. Oh, come, now - surely you have enough money to spring for another new outfit on top of the graduation fee, the binding fee, and the gown hire? God, you are such a cheapskate.)

I bought two more fish! Foolishly. Maybe. I'm counting this as a tick in the 'sensible' column, though, since despite all the cool marine fish and corals in the shop, I'm still sticking to freshwater. (But one day, one glorious day, they shall all be MINE.)

Anyway, the new fish are some variety of gourami. They were labelled as 'Sunset Honey Gourami', which I guessed meant they were a colour variant of the honey gourami (Colisa chuna), and this was good because it was honey gourami I wanted. I would tell you how long I've spent researching the best fish to put in the tank given its current inhabitants, but you would only point and mock. Let us just say it was enough for me to laugh knowingly and shake my head when the man at the fish shop told me that the dwarf gourami (Colisa lalia) would be just as sociable and easy to keep, and then draw a veil over my current fish-related geekiness.

However. The internet seems divided on precisely what species these are, with about 50% of fish sites and forums naming them a variant of Colisa chuna and the other half arguing that they're not Colisa chuna at all, with a subsection arguing to my consternation and distress that they're Colisa lalia. This is a problem - NO NO SHUT UP, hear me out, I'm serious - because some gourami species can be mean/prone to disease/mean AND prone to disease (Colisa lalia, the consensus of the internet's tropical fish communities is pointing its finger at you), and what if these end up killing everything else in the tank via direct attack or biological warfare? The worry!

They're sharing a tank with five neon tetra, collectively named the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (or some of it, at least) and an apple snail who was originally called Tennyson but turned out to have a rather un-Tennyson-like personality and is now known as J. Alfred Prufrock. I have not named the new fish yet. See, if I have to convince the fish place to take back these two mean gourami, that'll be painful enough, because they are such gorgeous fish, but if I have to convince the fish place to take back Gladstone and Disraeli? I just don't think I'll have the strength.

Ability to write article outside in the sunshine, courtesy of Apple; WiFi connection courtesy of university; photo upload connection thanks to Bluetooth on my mobile phone.

I love living in the future.

Let's recap.

I've passed the terrifying PhD initiation ritual. I've written eighty thousand words of passable academic prose in the guise of an Original Contribution To Research, which, in turn, met with the approval of my supervisor, the examiner from my own institution, and the examiner from somewhere else. I've passed the inquisition which calls itself a viva, even though I couldn't eat for about a week beforehand. I've fixed the fiddly little changes the examiners wanted me to fix. I've handed the final final copy and had it okayed by the relevant examiner.

And apparently, I've done all this to a sufficient standard that I can get an e-mail from Registry, this morning, inviting me to my graduation.

The last thing I want to do is annoy Registry, but damn it, Registry. When do I get to be called Doctor?

(I have a story to tell here about how I avoided deformity and blindness because somebody was an idiot about his title, but it'll wait for another day.)

That's the third person who's told me that my new flat's a great place 'for a single girl', and I've only been here a week. Well, thanks, I think. I've been trying to work out what this means without asking them to explain, because if I did that then they might say "to be honest, what we meant was that your new flat is so tiny it's a good thing that there's only one of you and you're five foot two," and this would be so much less interesting than the idea of certain spaces suiting certain people, which I'm not sure is true but which I'm determined to believe in regardless.

Especially with cities. Rural landscapes always feel like spaces in something more than a geographical sense, as if they have a self-ness, a kind of dormant consciousness, that might not affect you much but won't be relying on you to notice it anyway. Won't be relying on you at all, in fact. Rural landscapes have human histories, but it's not those histories that give them a sense of self; rather, their histories are histories of hundreds and thousands of years of humans interacting with what's already there.



The metal disc (not much of a sundial; more of a map) was put there in 2002. Whoever designed this must have set it out on a computer, and whoever picked the location must have frowned over an 1:25000 Ordnance Survey map, and whoever thought of it in the first place must have sat through at least one County Council meeting in a room with suits and overhead spotlights and long beech tables. And between them, they ended up thinking the same kind of thing that the Methodists who held open-air services here two hundred years before them were thinking when they picked this spot, and the same kind of thing that the Neolithic farmers were thinking when they built a massive burial chamber on the lower slopes of this hill, built to catch the equinox sunlight. The background of that picture is made up of rocks and vegetation and the winter sun in the same way that it's made up of pixels: both are true, but neither quite describe it.

Cities aren't that way. The history of cities is entirely human. No less beautiful, maybe, no less powerful, and with no less meaning, but... artificial, all the same. Something that exists because we want to remember it.




This is Kendals, a beautiful Art Deco department store building in Manchester, as seen from the Waterstone's over the road. I love how this picture turned out, how you can't quite tell what's mirroring what and how the foreground dissolves into a vanishing point behind the backdrop, but that's all tricks and reflected illusions, not the city itself. It's not that Manchester doesn't have an important history; it's just that a history is something a place is given, not something it's already got.

That's what I used to think, anyway. I didn't like cities much then either. Now, I'm reconsidering.

My new flat is a small, one-bedroom place two floors up, on a street that was built, or at least rebuilt, by a series of nineteenth-century merchants back when the old city's wealth started to spill over and run down the hill. It's changed since - shops grow and split and merge again, and change hands on what seems like a weekly basis, and grand old spacious townhouses don't last long as they are in student towns - but above street level, the buildings look the same as they always did. And below that, there are crowds of people, and buskers playing slightly out-of-tune acoustic guitars, and small gaggles of tourists clustering around the landmarks.

This time last week, all that was a vaguely interesting thing to notice when glancing out of the living-room window. Now, I've stopped drawing that curtain when it gets dark. And I'm falling in love with things written about cities, and with music about cities, and with poetry about cities, although more in the abstract than the concrete because I can't find any poetry about cities that I like, but damn it there has to be some out there.

Which isn't to say that I can find anything particularly single or girl about my new flat, either with or without my belongings moved into it. But maybe that's not the point, after all.

Anyway, it's a neatly-written article with some great turns of phrase - "the modern frenzy of political cross-dressing," "the Bono school of messianic non-politics," and Paul Weller referring to Boris Johnson as "that div who's running for mayor" - although I wish John Harris hadn't swatted the Morrissey issue that soon. "When it comes to Cameron's supposedly beloved Smiths," he says, "younger readers might want to factor out Morrissey's recent strange views about immigration and his all-round post-Smiths embrace of a crabby kind of small-C conservatism, and think instead about the themes [...] that implicitly put the Smiths at 90 degrees to their time." And you think, well, all right, but we Younger Readers don't have an image of the Morrissey of twenty years ago shining bright enough to blot that out, do we?

Not that I disagree, entirely. It's easy enough to see why the Smiths deserved their reputation in the 80s. But it's a little trickier to work out why we're meant to keep on claiming a man as a hero of the left after he wrapped himself in a Union Jack onstage at Finsbury Park, used the word 'flooded' in reference to immigration, and claimed that England had been 'thrown away' as a result. And if you weren't there for the 80s - or if you were there, but you didn't get out of single digits until the end of the decade - it's difficult to appreciate just how he could have mattered enough to make whatever he says now irrelevant, let alone mattered enough to have legions of not-yet-disaffected-enough fans leaping to support him in the latest war with NME, shouting "Out of context!" and "He wouldn't have said that!" louder than the man himself. (I read the interview, and not only did he indeed say that, but the only conceivable context in which it would have been excusable is an unquoted interviewer saying "Morrissey, I will give you this biscuit in return for your best Enoch Powell impression." David Cameron can have him for all I care.)

But then, our heroes wouldn't be our heroes if we let them disappoint us. And they'd never make it onto that pedestal without a younger generation that Just Doesn't Get It, either. Those of us whose teenage years were measured out in apolitical Britpop might be immune from the soul-gnawing feeling of watching Morrissey degenerate into a talking version of the Daily Mail, but hey, at least they had him back when he was good enough to make whatever he said later into something they could 'factor out'. Who did we have, Oasis?

Still, I don't think David Cameron et al's claims to love the anti-Thatcher music of the 80s ('well, I just liked the tune!') have anything to do with forces so pure as nostalgic hero-worship, or indeed the kind of musical cluelessness that John Harris suggests (albeit in the tone of a confused shrug) in the Guardian piece. Just a wild stab in the dark here, but I suspect the Tories are claiming such things as part of a wider effort to grab the massive disaffected-former-idealist voting bloc. Still feel the odd twinge of loyalty to your younger self, even though your Clash LPs are gathering dust in the attic and the Telegraph seems to make so much sense these days? It's okay! David Cameron's just like you! And so's Morrissey, so don't feel guilty!

But anyway, the reason I'm writing about all this a month later is because of (the excellent) Johann Hari's interview with (the still un-jaded) Billy Bragg, who summed up the whole thing in the best way possible:

As an earnest man, Bragg has a twitching nose for phoniness. That morning, he appeared on Andrew Marr’s morning programme, and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne told him he loved his music. “Him and Cameron claim they loved the Jam and the Clash,” he says. “It’s all lies. I can spot a Tears For Fears fan a mile off. I bet they spent the eighties singing along to ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World.’”

--
* - Speaking of which, is that true? I was sure it was someone else who sent their kids there and Shouldn't Have Done, but someone swore blind to me recently that it was Paul Weller. It wasn't, was it? Was it?

At one point in my search for a new place to live, I was standing in the middle of town trying to remember where the letting agents' office was. I'd already walked down the street where I remember it being five years ago, but it didn't seem to be there, and maybe they'd moved, and I only had an hour left before the second half of my split shift, and asking for directions is (naturally, always) an admission of defeat, so I solved the problem by - get this - finding a WiFi hotspot and Googling their name on my iPod Touch. It's one short step from this to tricorders and hyperspace travel.

Anyway, I found the letting agents and got a new place and moved into it this weekend, nearly killing my brother in the process (I don't think I've seen him too exhausted to move or speak since he was a toddler, seriously). I'm now in the coffee place across the street, taking advantage of their free WiFi and easy-listening indie-light acoustic background music with my new laptop and drinking a caramel latte.

Finding the letting agents via nifty technology felt like I was living in the future. Drinking overpriced lattes while updating my blog in a coffee shop across the road from my little urban flat feels like I'm living in my future. And it's not so bad.

In expectation of having a few Internet-less weeks at my new place (but at least the cafe across the street has free WiFi!), I've been trying to download some things to watch on my laptop while I'm waiting. However:

"Estimated Download Time: 193d, 13h."

By the time I get to watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the machines will not only have actually risen, but will have set up a basic social democratic society with a complicated income tax system, instituted a series of controversial immigration laws, gone into several intense yet inexplicable national crazes over ultimately insignificant pop culture icons, allowed the housing market to reach idiotic levels of mortgage inflation, turned on each other during the ensuing credit crunch and recession, sent all the toasters off to Siberia, turned most inhabitable parts of the earth into a war zone, calmed down, made truces, and gone back to watching TV and grumbling about how much they'd cared about stuff Back In The Old Days.

List of things that are not working this Sunday morning:

• Student e-mail servers
• WebCT
• Intranet anything
• On-campus internet access (which has, luckily for my sanity, now been restored)
• Library catalogues
• Library systems
• Printing systems
• Photocopying systems
• All the tills and systems at the sports facilities, apparently; it's difficult to tell from all the distressed wailing, but they're certainly Not Happy about something over there
• The big flat-screen monitors that give students various bright-coloured and blinky bits of information
• The 'systems currently having problems' status page. (Helpful.)

And because it's a Sunday morning, the campus is not exactly crawling with technicians or helpful-looking senior people or indeed anybody who knows what the hell's going on. Reducing weekend mornings to a skeleton staff probably looked like a great decision from a budgeting perspective for a university anxious to set up various new projects for attracting new students; the reality, it turns out, is a constant stream of the students we've already got winding their way into the library, to be greeted by a staff of underpaid, disaffected minions whose best guess on the whole matter is "I dunno. EMP grenade?"

If you haven't yet read what Sisyphus has to say on the subject of how undergrads' education is affected when they're taught by those of us with eighteen jobs, no money, and a complete absence of job security in whatever teaching position(s) we've got, then you should. A sample:

Students don’t want rigor or quality even if they know that’s what they should want. It takes not only time and effort and experience as a teacher to push them to what they really can achieve rather than what they want to get away with ---- not only these qualities but also a certain sense of security, a willingness to be tough, to be respected rather than loved. And that’s not going to happen if next quarter’s employment rests on getting great evaluations and next year’s rests on getting out another article and 50 more applications out this month.

She's right, and it's something I've been thinking about a bit recently, trying to shuffle my teaching and my various other jobs around so that all of them get done to a passable standard. And 'passable' would be the word. I'm not saying that my students are getting completely screwed over, but they're not getting the same kind of deal that they used to, either. And there is nothing like working alongside this year's new TAs to have this brought home to you, believe me.

(Here, I'll go a little way towards defending myself by pointing out that some teaching-related corners could do with cutting once in a while. There's definitely a law of diminishing returns when it comes to teaching prep, and after a certain point, spending even more time preparing for your class can actually work against you; I know I've fallen into the 'damn it, I spent ages reading all this vaguely relevant secondary material, and if you eighteen-year-old first-years aren't going to come up with the same insights all by yourselves, you'll just have to sit here and listen while I lecture at you for three-quarters of a discussion class!' trap, back in the past. There's a happy medium. As for whether I'm currently hitting that medium, though, well... maybe. Possibly. No.)

But at least my teaching's getting done, to a point that's definitely a lot more... pointy... than some of my other stuff. If I cut too many corners on teaching, it'll have an immediate effect on my students; if I cut too many corners on job applications or working on publications or getting my damn PhD thesis hardbound and handed over to Registry, then that only affects me, and the effects won't become visible for a while. And it's the same way with the rewards: teaching can pay off instantly with a good, talkative class, and lets me actually feel like I'm doing fairly well at some part of academia; applying for jobs and working on publications and looking at my PhD ever ever again, on the other hand, is just misery-inducing. So when I do have spare time, it's... not exactly going towards advancing my research profile, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, I seem to have got off-track. Where I wanted to go with this is a conversation I had a few weeks ago with one of my friends, a TA who's nearly finished her PhD. Because there are some weighty staff shortages in her department, and because she's really good at (and enthusiastic about) teaching a particular part of her field that's notoriously difficult for students to get a grip on - let's say, French theory, although it's not - my friend's ended up with quite the teaching load. Quite the teaching load. Lectures, classes and sciencey-related lab things in large number. She's been happy with this so far, but now that she's close to done with her thesis - and now that her funding's close to gone - she's thinking about some other plans.

So, my friend speaks to her head of department, after he e-mails to let her know that she'll be given the same teaching load for the next academic year too. Says, well, you know I love teaching, but my funding's running out, and this won't cover my rent. So, here's an idea. You were vaguely talking about hiring a teaching fellow for next year if I left, right? Why don't you hire me at pro-rata teaching fellow pay for, well, let's call this part-time?

Splutters, worried-looking frowns, &c. Listen, he says, I know you're a great teacher, and I agree with you - the workload you've got here is easily what I'd class as 0.5 part-time for a teaching fellow. But I really don't think we can afford that at the moment. The students love you, though, and we don't have anybody who can teach the [French theory] stuff, definitely not as well as you can... how about you stay on your current pay for next semester, and we'll maybe think again the semester after that?

No deal, she says. Sorry, and you know I do love teaching, but on that workload I can't fit in enough hours elsewhere to get paid enough to live off when it's all added up.

Please, he says.

Sorry, she says.

An aggrieved sigh. Think about your students, he says.

No, she says. Your students.

She's my current TA hero for saying it, but it's a bleak, bleak world where such is the case.

My mobile phone is dead. The unopened bottle of Diet Coke it was sharing a bag with developed a crack the length of half my little finger, and emptied its whole contents into the keypad of my thankfully-cheap phone. It's drying out at the moment, but I don't have high hopes for the fried-looking SIM card.

Meanwhile, a much more impressive crack has appeared in the plaster ceiling of my bedroom, spreading through a wall from the smaller-but-no-less-worrying crack that my landlord dealt with by Polyfilla-ing over a couple of weeks ago. It spreads from one side of the room to the other, branching out and twisting back in on itself like some evil mangrove tree of serious structural defects. My bed is right below it. I'm sleeping on the sofa.

But, whatever. At least if I am out of contact and squished flat, I won't have to finish marking these essays.