In which Default Academics haunt my waking thoughts

I met up with my thesis supervisor for the first time today. The honours thesis has supervisors more-or-less randomly assigned from the department, and I'd never had him for lectures or anything before. So I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

My biggest fear was that he'd turn out to be what I might term my imagination's Default Academic: an old, bearded, humourless professor who'd listen to my fumbling explanation of werewolves in contemporary fiction, raise one bushy eyebrow and say, "What on earth for?". Implicit in that, of course, being an admonishing horror that I would dare sully the doorstep of a Serious Scholar with fantastical imaginary creatures and other escapist rubbish.

(If he had done that, I don't I could've trusted myself to speak. I have only once come up against someone so against fantasy and all it stands for that they dismissed any discussion of theory out of hand, and it was all I could do not to throttle him. I settled for smiling too broadly.
But I digress.)

My supervisor turned out to be old, yes - well, balding with grey hair - but sprightly and interested and curious and all the things a nice supervisor should be. I don't know why I'd worried about it. None of the people in the cultural studies department are normal, and they're certainly not humourless academics. If there was any trait common to them, it might be a higher likelihood of earrings, tattoos and interesting hair.

So it all went well. Now back to Anita Blake.