I'll Do What You Tell Me

Since moving to the USA back in 1998 my writing efforts have taken a slide. Such a slide in fact that I haven't really done much at all in the past eight years aside from write a few scathing emails to coworkers and attempt to woo unknown women on Nerve.com. Well that's all changed.

Two weeks ago my 32nd birthday swung around and my girlfriend, the Great Organiser, decided that as a gift she'd invest in my personal betterment. She enrolled me in a creative non-fiction class at UC Berkeley.

Each minute of my days seems to be carefully measured, starting with my 6am wakeup routine and ending when I finally drop the landing gear and climb into bed sometime around 10pm. A class over in Berkeley was the last thing I needed. But I'm a dutiful boyfriend and despite The Great Organiser's offers to cancel the class and exchange the gift for something else I kept my holy crap, when will I ever find the time comments to myself, smiled and told her not to worry. I'd do it. Offers of that kind are never actually meant to be accepted. They're the cheques you're never supposed to cash, at least not unless you want to go home alone when the birthday party's done and wank over that oversized collection of porn you've downloaded over your 3Mb/s cable modem connection.

The issue at stake here is complacency. The holy crap reaction is precisely the kind of reaction that's been going on ad-infinitum ever since corporate America got a hold of me and beat out the spontaneous creative drive. All the best intentions were never going to overcome the signup fee and the commitment to drive back early from San Jose to San Francisco, quickly change, scoff some hastily-prepared food down my gullet, charge down 24th Street and then jump on a Richmond-bound BART train. If an external motivator comes in the form of a girlfriend with my personal development interests in mind then I'll take it. She's only looking out for me and in a way that I can't seem to do for myself.

The part about finding the room in which the class was held is not worthy detailed description but uncovering its whereabouts took a while and involved repeated trips back to the Union office where I was treated nicely but given just enough information to make a real cockup of each successive attempt to find the classroom. But I found it of course.

Wandering in with a nervous wave of my hand as if to absolve myself of my tardiness I quickly surveyed the room - lots of women, almost all women, and there's the instructor, presiding over the class from behind her desk. In an effort to reinforce her status amongst the hip she was wearing those 1950's grandma type glasses with the pointy cornered rims. They've got a proper name, I expect, but I'll be buggered if I know what it is. Spilling out around her shoulders was a frizzy mass of hair that might or might not have been set that way by design. In any case it matched her image and with that settled in my mind I sat down. Almost directly opposite me sat a man sporting the mulligrub beard, the kind of shirt sold to tourists too self-conscious to pick up the Red Bull t-shirt at a flea market somewhere in South East Asia and socks with closed-toe Birkenstock sandals. We're in for a beauty, I thought to myself.

It's introduction time and around the room the conch shell gets passed. There's the young Indian mother who wants to write a childrens book that explains Hinduism. She's got her four year old daughter in mind and the instruction, Heather, seems to think there might be a publishable buck or two in there somewhere. I'm inclinded to agree. Kids are suckers for multi-armed, elephant-headed, blue-skinned gods. The other ladies are an assortment of overly ambitious types, all seeking to set the world ablaze with their literary genius. "I know I'm gifted," yep, thanks for telling everyone here. If you were truly gifted you probably wouldn't be resorting to after-hours classes. Women struck with a starry-eyed sense of grandeur about themselves never seem to be in short supply at places like this. Pump a couple of undergraduate years worth of Simone de Beauvoir and Dostoyevsky up their arses and they come out the other side thinking they're the female Arthur Rimbaud. "I'm interested in genre-bending. I want to write an existentialist piece from a woman's perspective because I really like existentialism but it's never been done from a woman's point of view. I studied literature at college and I consider myself a feminist." Okay, so maybe she sees herself as more of the XX spin on Jean Paul Satre and I saw myself as running for the door. Full points must go to the instructor, Heather, who in the most polite yet excitable way possible told her that existentialism left the building with Maynard G. Krebbs.

Sitting last in the ring of soon-to-be-recognised creative non-fiction giants was a blonde-haired women, garishly dressed and fresh from a flight from Virginia. As her story was told - and yes, fist raised to the air, she's a feminist too - she recounted the tale of her aunt murdering her six year old niece (or nephew, I can't recall which). It was genuinely riveting stuff and Heather seemed to agree. "That's a book," she was told by Ms. FrizzyHairPointyGlasses. No shit. There'll be more about this basket-case of a family situation as the weeks unfold.

So the homework? Write about my birth. Some of that was done back in 1987 when I wrote my "autobiography" for Mr. McKinnon in year 9 English. It go me an A back then so I don't see why it can't stand for a friendly reconsitution some 18 years later. The other thing to do is get back into the discipline of writing, something that's been sorely lacking in my life for those afore mentioned eight years. Start writing a journal, I was told. Well, if you consider blogging a journal here it is.

I'll do what you tell me.