One Day Holiday - Have One On Newsom
* One Day Holiday is an unscheduled, published-whenever-I-feel-like-it column for Hafeez, a resident blogger for this blog. This column is centered mostly around music and random stuff that ranges from the coherent to the absolutely absurd.
So, today all of a sudden I am 'awashed' with self realization (thanks to a complain coming from a concerned parent) that all the works (Read: all administrative works) that I have been doing around this college has been absolute rubbish. Which then solidify my status as someone who is completely unfit to do administrative work - I just suck at it major fucking all of the time. Let me explain...
You would have imagined that to work as a lecturer, your job really would be quite simple: prepare notes and exercises for class, and that's it. You imagine that you will be doing academic job all of the time but as it turns out, it is not. Because as real life turns out to be, you will have to do administrative job as well. Which includes: keeping track of your students' attendance (which is Hell-ish when you have a mind-numbing total of 150 students under your tutelage), issuing warning letters to those who deserve it (which is Hell-ish when you have a mind-numbing total of 150 students under your tutelage)... In fact, my biggest peeve is with the warning letter issuing thing because as far as I can work it out, it should be the task for the administrative staff. Why the Hell make us keep track of the students attendance for the sake of the Academic office, and then make us write the warning letter on behalf of the Academic office as well? Even more frustrating when you consider that the only work that the Academic office staff will have to do, in the matter of issuing warning letter, is just sending it to the students' parents. That's it. In fact, we are the ones who have to find the address to the student's parents house. The Academic office, where all the data and information about the student is kept, cannot do even that - finding address. I could be working at a post office.
So then the problem that arose from the 'warning letter issuing' squabble is that I may have made quite a bit of a hash out of it. Keep in mind, since I have to track 150 students' attendance, and the attendance list was never in alphabetical order, I might have issued one warning letter to a wrong person, whose attendance actually has been pretty spotless barring one class. Then I issued another two warning letter to two male students for dates which they have given me the MC. So, noticeably some of the students are not quite happy. With me.
So, a frustrating job then. And one that you cannot quite please everyone. Like all of Joanna Newsom's release to date. Over the course of three (or four, I can't quite remember) albums, this harp wielding songstress has always been quite of a handful. There is always something infinitely odd about her - whether it's her wry (and I think, cryptic) lyrics, or her impossibly long songs, or her crackling voice, or the very challenging combination of all three, and then some more. It's like one of those abomination that was given birth to by uh, that woman in David Lynch's Eraserhead. It's a complete horror upon discovery, but one that you don't really have a heart to throw it away or disown it. You don't want it, but you still going to have it. And irregardless of how Ms. Newsom (from what I perceive) tried to make her subsequent releases more accessible than the last one, you will still at the end of the day end up as the loser because her songs are just completely inaccessible, and to some extent, completely ridiculous.
You feel like you are going to hate it, that the stereo on which Newsom's CD is playing is going to spontaneously combusted and bursts into flames, that the leaflet cover is going to melt away like a failed Salvador Dali's painting, that the whole of humanity will fail completely in three months' time. But you thought wrong. Try as you might but, like I said, it's a frustrating thing and one that will not please everyone at any given time. It will probably never please you in any conceivable way but you'll never hate it. And it's frustrating because irregardless of how much you're going to not like it, Joanna Newsom, you will sense it in yourself quietly, might be some kind of a genius after all.
Labels: joanna newsom
