Birthday and wranglings

Today it is my birthday and I am thirty-six. I don’t take much notice of birthdays these days – but still, one can’t help but realise it upon awakening. Last year I spent it mostly alone in a flat in Rehobot, Israel. I watched Andy Murray lose in the Australian Open Final and had several naps and then went late night hitch-hiking down to Beersheba. This year, so far, I’ve been presented with a date slice, a hand-drawn Frank Sidebottom birthday card, and an incredible bicycle pump, which is something I’ve long dreamed of owning. Probably I’ll spend the morning blogging, then I’ve got a seminar, and then my dad’s taking Nicky and I to Pizza Express. That’s a pretty full birthday for me.

My birthday also generally marks the end of the period of taking stock of time sparked by Christmas and New Year. Those three things tend to combine to produce one long phase of looking back at what I’ve done and thinking about the doings to come. This year saw a particularly pronounced phase – as eagle-eyed readers may have picked up on. Probably cleared out some major psychic debris: don’t feel a thing about it now, and haven’t done for weeks. The last major shock came when I realised my ex-girlfriend is going to be twenty-seven this year. Twenty-seven! She was twenty-one when we met, which feels like not very long ago – I don’t seem to have done or changed much since then – and now she’s almost thirty. I don’t know where all the time goes.

Still, one thing that seems to have helped me through all this is that, the last five or six weeks, when asked, I’ve been accidentally telling people I was thirty-six. Not only did it nullify any shock of actually getting that whole year older, it also provided me with the bonus of feeling younger when I eventually realised my mistake and the time was returned to me. A bit like when I experienced the whole trauma of turning thirty a whole year ahead of time and so actually doing it was no trauma at all.

In any case, today it is my birthday and I am thirty-six, which is something to muse on. Something and nothing. To some that’ll seem ancient and to others merely spring chicken. Fact o’ the matter is, I’m still daft as a brush, living the dream student life of few classes and little work, playing four or five games of squash a week, and fit enough to do that and then have a weekend of four games of football (three reffed, one played). My girlfriend is twenty-six, which is the same age my girlfriend was when I was twenty, when this whole adventure began, and even though forty’s just around the corner I’ve more than realised that forty now isn’t the same as forty when I was growing up in an eighties Yorkshire coal-mining village. My poor old granddad was practically an invalid before he reached sixty; but my girlfriend’s dad, at fifty-nine, goes mountain biking and can seriously kick my ass on the squash court. No reason why Super Rory won’t be doing similar things for many years to come.

Now, to the week: a week full of sport; of thought; and of long talks with the girlfriend. Interesting talks. Exciting talks. Dissecting the nature of relationship and expectation. Saying it how it is. Being completely honest and open and accepting and understanding. She says she doesn’t know how I feel about certain things and I say she never asked. She asks. I tell. I say, I don’t know about love and stuff and what I’ve come to realise is it’s not even important to me: it’s more important to me that you’re happy and that you feel good in yourself and with me. What point love if you don’t feel good? What point those words if not harmony and joyfulness?

She takes it all like no one I ever met. Laughs and says her friends would say she was mad if they knew she was living with a guy who says he’s not sure whether he loves her or not. Friends who are in relationships both she and I don’t envy one bit. She says she feels like my writing and my reffing are more important to me than she is; I agree, they are. She’s important to me – but, right now, they’re more important. They are me – and shouldn’t we, ourselves, be the most important things in our lives? Everything else could leave us in a second, but we ourselves remain. That’s how I’d want it for her. But still, I feel grateful, for the freedom to express that and be understood.

We looked at expectations. We looked at the relationships of others. We looked at our own natures and the relationships those natures are naturally going to generate. And at where our ideas of relationships come from, which is mostly Hollywood and perhaps the one in a thousand rare shining light of the couple who have found each other and adore each other and seem to worship the ground the other walks on. But that’s the exception to the rule, and shouldn’t be the expectation for the all of us. Lucky them – some people win the lottery too. But not many.

Funny thing was, in taking it all apart and putting everything out there – which includes my reticence, my reluctance and hesitations – it actually brought us closer together. The cards are on the table and the players decide whether they represent a hand they want to pick up. No false ideas. Everybody knows where they stand. And being adult and mature – she’s head and shoulders above any other girl I’ve ever known in this regard – we take what we’ve got and make our choices and work with it. No drama. Just goodness.

Two key points came out of one certain discussion: that in relationship, and in life, one must: a) see things clearly; and b) take responsibility. I can’t articulate or illustrate them right now. Just that during a certain talk everything seemed to swirl back around to this. You need all the information. And you need to be seeing that information as it actually is – not, for example, saying “you always do this” when it might be something that only happens one percent of the time. And then taking responsibility for it. For everything. There is not a thing in our lives that we are not responsible for. It’s all our choices. Even the things that appear to be done to us are things we choose to let be done to us. Taking responsibility gives us power, shows us that we are in charge. No more victims, no more blame. All our own doing. And all, therefore, within our control to create as we would like.

Heavy and big stuff – but in the reality of it, no heaviness at all. Funny how the biggest things are only a problem when they’re kept within. But in the sharing and the expressing of them they seem to vanish in a puff of air.

Two weeks of mulling and furrowed brow vanquished sometimes with a mere two sentences. And two weeks later you can’t even remember what the problem was.

That’s magic.

What else this week? Uni. Uni work. Only got two classes this semester – the rest of this degree, in fact – and given that the second one hasn’t started yet, and the first is being a pain in the arse, I can’t say it’s a great start to the year. Rory versus academia. Here we go again…

Woman course leader says, write a proposal about a project you’d like to do – six thousand words total, due in May – and then we’ll assign you a personal tutor and we’ll get on with it. All well and good: I decide I’ll take a look at the major beat and hippy writers – at an idea I have that there’s sort of an unbroken lineage that stretches right back to eighteenth century bohemians but where is it now? – and I sketch it out. The proposal form we’ve been given asks for prior reading and stuff like that and I think I’ve filled it in okay. It also asks for a ‘working title’ – but I figure titles generally come at the end so I’ll say that and trust that’s fine. Proposal form is also riddled with mistakes – “what reading has you already done?” for example – so I hardly think it a proper major affair. But apparently it is: for no matter what I do, this pain-in-the-ass course leader just won’t accept what I give her.

Number one, even though the deadline’s four months away, she wants me to get pretty damn specific about what I’m intending to do. But this is Rory we’re talking about here. In general, I write my essays on the day they’re due in – and sometimes I don’t even start to study the topic until the day they’re due in. Hell, there were times in my BA when I didn’t study the topic at all, just wrote the essay and figured if it sounded literary and academic enough, and I threw in a few random quotes, and presented it well and free of error that’d probably do the job and it always did. Pretty much always score sixty-eight and above – even got a seventy-four for some highfaluting treatise on an obscure Islamic scholar’s theologies which I know at the time I had no idea what I was writing. It bamboozled me even as the sentences were coming out. But it worked. I like to joke to people that I write my essays by sending my mind into the future and copying the one that’s already there – and in cases like that I have to wonder if I’m not hitting on some truth. Point is, four months is a ridiculous amount of time and one I have no concept of being able to plan for – nor desire. She keeps stressing that it’s a short course and we need to get a move on. And seems to believe it too. But I don’t think there’s a subject on Earth I couldn’t write a kick-ass essay about in four days. So what to do with that?

Other problems: no working title no good for her. She says it’ll help you focus. I think, no, that’s how you work, I won’t even be thinking about this until April. But, fine, I pull one out me ass – “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” – and hope that satisfies her. It does. In that regard, at least.

Reading. “What prior reading has you done?” I list Kerouac and Ginsberg and, blah-de-blah-de, all those chaps, and she says, no, you have to present it Harvard style. For what? For what purpose? What benefit me internetting and adding publishing companies and dates? On a proposal that no one’s gonna read. On a proposal that exists for the sole purpose of assigning a correctly-matched tutor. No benefit I can see; surely authors and titles is enough? But, no, she wants them companies and dates, justifies it with some other reference to how that’s how it’s got to be in May so we might as well do it now. Well, duh, of course I’m gonna do it in May. But now? No reason.

Although here’s an idea, Mrs Course Leader: if you want Harvard referencing why not mention that before the proposal’s got to be written and submitted? Why not write it on your poorly-typed proposal form in the first place? And why not make this proposal worth something marks-wise, ‘cos anything ungraded don’t mean a damn thing to me.

Just a suggestion.

And it don’t even end there.

Seriously, it’s been a real thorn in my damn head and back and side. Three times I’ve given her this proposal form and three times she’s come back at me with empty-headed academic speak and things that don’t matter a jot to me. In the beginning I had enthusiasm for this project – I conceived four angles to attack the subject from: an essay; a lecture; a short story whose characters would embody the entire lineage; and an epic poem, tracing the lineage right from the beginning of the universe – but her insistence that I choose one now has knocked the stuffing out of all of them. I whittled it down to an essay or a lecture – basically the same thing – but even that wasn’t good enough. Fine. So I won’t do anything creative: I won’t attempt epic poem or embodiment of concepts into characters; nor even the challenge of a lecture – just another plain old boring essay that won’t say anything new, or challenge me in any way, but’ll get the grades. The class is less than two weeks old and already I don’t give a fuck.

I’ve even half a mind to write the entire essay next week and say, there, I’m done – now leave me alone until May so I can get back to doing the things I care about.

Of course, there’s more to it than all that: plenty more. Number one, just ‘cos I get backed into a corner now there’s no reason why I can’t change my mind and whip out my epic poem or lecture a bit closer to deadline day – which is another reason to be rankled into making a definite choice now. I understand that she needs to figure out the right tutor for each student – but given that my subject’s the same for each choice I don’t quite get her insistence.

Second, it’s pretty humorous ‘cos she’s a product of a hippy university and likes to hark back to those days with a self-satisfied smile hinting at the madness and freedom of it all, people whackily-dressed doing whacky things – and here she is forty years on being boring and rigid and explicitly insisting on adherence to the system or else.

And, thirdly, there’s the issue of the struggle, and the question of why I let it get to me. Why, for example, don’t I just spend half an hour and cut and paste some publishing companies and dates into my proposal and give her what she wants? No real skin off my nose. Not like I haven’t got the time. Sure, it feels like a drag – but then so does being involved in this pointless tussle squabbling over academic meaninglessnesses.

You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of a time with my mum when I was about nine or ten and I’d forgot to take the plug out after having a bath. My mum shouts me from the upstairs bathroom and says, you forgot to take the plug out, come and do it now, and I say, but you’re stood right next to it, why don’t you do it? She says – well, you can imagine what she says, and we get into some pointless debate and neither of us wants to budge. It leads to me being in the bathroom – I guess she must have dragged me there – but I still refuse to take the plug out. She grabs my hands and forces them into the water. I won’t do it.

You take it out, I says, you were right here.

No you take it out, she says, it was your bath.

And there we sit for maybe three or four hours, her behind me holding my hands in a bathtub of cold, soapy water arguing about who’s going to take the plug out.

A battle of wills. Neither of us willing to give in.

If I was ten, my mum would’ve been about twenty-seven.

In the end – and we’re getting late into the night here – I started to get cold and escalated that into some violent shivering which I entirely faked. That scared her, I guess, and she let me off, took me down stairs and sat me in front of the fire with a towel wrapped around me while I continued to pretend and shiver.

And she, of course, took the plug out.

I’ve never forgotten that: it highlights so much of the nature of the relationship between my mother and I, and of our own stubborn individual natures too. And right there in the middle of last week, while I was receiving yet another annoying email from this woman, I thought of it again, and questions arose.

Here I am, arguing with some woman over things that don’t matter one bit. She wants me to become more like her – academic, highfaluting, talking in a pointless language that means nothing to me – and I want to stand my ground and say things like, but I don’t plan ahead, and, I don’t need to do that now. To become like her, I would have to pretend – a little bit ironic, perhaps – because I really don’t get that academic lingo (I long for the day when it’s as ridiculed and seen-through as ‘management speak’ has become) and there’s not a bone in my body that would know how to apply it to this essay project anyway. Referencing my prior reading in this stupid Harvard style they’re all so insistent on, however, I could do quite easily, and perhaps the battle would be ended. But all that means me giving in. So…

Should I give in? For the sake of an easy life acquiesce to this woman and her pointless demands, and put a few hours work in, and then forget about it till May? Should I take the higher ground and say, okay, you’re being mental but for my own peace of mind I’ll do as you want – bizarre though it seems – and then we can get on with it? Or should I stand for what I think is right, and say, Jesus Christ, woman, once you walked barefoot and trumpeted at your lecturers and now you’ve become chief cog in a machine you youthfully reviled, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Can’t you see you don’t need this student to cut and paste some company names and dates? Can’t you just appreciate that some people don’t need to plan things four months in advance and let them work in their own way? Encouragement, Goddamnit – already you’ve knocked the stuffing out of three of my ideas with your nit-picking and pointless suggestions – oh, I see how smart and puffed-up those suggestions make you feel – and now you’re starting to turn me against the whole damn thing. “What do you want to learn from this module?” you ask me. But the only true answer is the one I shouldn’t think I’d be wise to give. Nothing. I seek to learn nothing. I’m quite happy learning in my own time, and I do a lot of it too. But as far as this module goes, it’s all about the marks and the letters after my name. I’m here because you paid for me to come, and because it’s the right thing for my life and my path. But that’s all: I have no academic ambitions. And the more I get into this, the less ambition I have to write too.

I did have the idea, however, that instead of what I said I was going to do, I could make this whole project about our battle. Hell, perhaps we’ll never even get past the proposal stage: just sit with our hands in the bathtub going back and forth and investigating all the reasons why we’re doing it. That could be a fun project. Very gonzo indeed.

Ultimate question, I suppose, is should I remove the plug? Should I be something more than a ten-year-old boy arguing with a woman who should know better? Should I be the son who looks upon his mother’s face and says, she knows not what she does; she’s acting out of her own nature; she’s doing what she thinks is right, given her limits and upbringing, and it’s for me to walk the higher ground. Smile on your mother, boy: understand that you have succeeded her. Humble yourself and reach down for that plug. Say, okay mother, there’s more to life than winning petty battles over pointless matters.

But will your soul forgive you for giving in to these women’s foolish egos? Or is it all your own foolish ego anyway?

See things clearly. Take responsibility.

Okay.

Yes, I choose to be here. No one keeps me at this university and forces me to play by their rules. I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to. But I do want to. I want the letters and I want the completion of my formal education. High school – BA – MA – done. I do want that. And so I choose it.

See things clearly. Interesting that this situation should remind me of my bathroom wranglings with my mother. Perhaps further scope for investigation – I mean, I really am always fascinated with investigating any possibility of mother issues – and so perhaps a chance to delve deeper into that. Perhaps great scope for learnings there.

It suddenly seems so pointless to refuse to Harvardise my prior reading. And yet something deep inside says I shouldn’t have to. No one else did. No one was told to do so until afterwards. And it really, really doesn’t matter.

Isn’t there some quote about choosing wisely the battles that we fight, though? Is it really worthwhile to take on pointless academia in this instance? Or am I just making a rod for my own back, rankling once again an authority that could actually serve me?

Interesting, interesting…

I guess we shall see what develops.

Was that my week? I pretty much think it was. Now, I suppose, to refill the teapot and write the refereeing blog. To muse upon my own writing – the writing I really care about – but which I once again this week didn’t do. To enjoy my day of rest and shuffle along slowly to a hopefully not annoying seminar. To eat pizza with my rapidly improving dad, who gets more and more philosophical and mellow and good with every passing year, the violent thug and asshole and scruff he was ten and twenty years ago almost as past a life as my own –

– which reminds me: Saturday I reffed over in Roundhay Park and on the way passed through Chapel Allerton where I lived aged eighteen to twenty. I had time to kill and I stopped a while on the little parade of shops where I used to daily visit to buy four-packs and chocolate all those years ago. Sixteen years ago, in fact. Right up to the point where my book begins – and still, therefore, somewhat fresh in my conscious. That first sad chapter detailing my depressed youth. Unemployed. Drinking beer. Watching Eastenders. Arguments with the girlfriend. The four-bedroom end terrace we lived in – her and I and her daughter, now maybe nineteen – still standing and that same old road I tromped and even drove down sometimes three or four hundred metres to the shops for my Cadbury’s and Stella. Such was my life back then. So strange that the buildings still stand and everything’s more or less the way it was and there I am again, with all that time and experience and travel in between the sad days of my youth and now.

It amuses me. What a funny old life it’s been.

And, yes, more time-passing maudlin thoughts, perhaps – but am I the only one? Or is it because I like to write so much, and because my main subject is myself, that I seem to always reflect on my life and wonder?

Everything is good. I lie in bed in my pink dressing down and smile. I feel a real fondness for my imaginary audience – and for E and L and E who I believe will be actually reading these words – and for the angels, too, who smile down and enjoy everything anyway. And remembering, also, that all is projection and what all that means is that I’m enjoying myself and the things I’m doing and that that’s a good thing.

Typing my words almost always feels worthwhile. And that’s guide enough as to whether to do something or not.

But writing Harvardly referenced lists of books, when not necessary? No, not really.

And wrangling with university professors over pointless issues? Why, yes, actually, it does (he winks).

Something to learn in that wrangling – and nothing to learn, I feel, by acquiescing.

So wrangle we will. And document it here. And see who wins this time.

Gonzo it?

Sure: there are possibilities there.