Those Men and Women Again!

photo by: worryworts

Was sitting next to two guys at a restaurant with a bunch of other grad students a few nights ago. Both lovely and smart and good times. One of them noticed that there were a few awkward dates surrounding us and so they began asking me for my analyses of the women's body language. Just so you know, I primarily examined the manner in which they ate. It didn't take too much thought, I've got to say.

• Using fork for food that could be handled, deliberate placement in mouth, bright, wide eyes and a receded chin as if man opposite is super interesting = tres keen, second date.

• Shoving pizza in with fingers, hunching top half of body, looking to side = not so keen, hoping he will lose interest.

• Eating slowly, sitting cross-legged under table, smiling demurely, facing straight on = more keen than want to show as very early days. Nice English girl.
  

This progressed to a more general discussion about how women tend to think - you know, the classics: community-minded, more likely than men to obsess about one negative instead of being content with the positives, etc, etc. Anyway, one of the guys brought up how you can manipulate that when picking up women, by making them feel insecure or unsure about your affection and interest.

It occurred to me that maybe this works quite well for a one-off encounter, shall we say (my grandmother reads this), with a certain type of gal. But I believe it's a highly unsound strategy long-term because you would then actually have to deal with that approval-seeking crazy who you selected for that quality. Imagine having to spend your romantic and then day-to-day life putting down your love object and/or assuring them all the time, say for instance when you're just trying to reach for the breakfast or watch a DVD or enjoy your time together. Dreadful.

Then the following evening, after dinner in hall, a guy in College mentioned how he looks forward to a future where he can come home after work each day to find his dinner ready for him courtesy of his wife. Wouldn't we all, champ? I would love a wife too. I need one now actually, as I sit amongst my own filth and clutter. But, as I said to him, you would pay up for it by having to have dull, passive conversations over that perfect meal. He grunted, only half-convinced. He then said he guessed it would be like being married to your housekeeper, but I suspect he still quite liked the idea.

Any one else got some recent man stroke women observations? No hateful ones please, just curious ones.

Woes of the Heart

photo by: .sw_in_shift

Two of my (30+) Aussie friends face the same woes of the heart - how to deal with residual romantic feelings for someone other than their current partners - and have asked me for some counsel. I don't really know what to advise. I suspect that most people experience this kind of chaos over the course of life, probably repeatedly, and it's just another thing that's kept from us as youngsters. This secrecy means that when we, as young adults, come to face these challenges we feel guilty and alone, which, amongst many other things, then serves to endow our illegal love object with an unhelpful aura of enhanced meaning.

I can already sense comments (either written or mental) along the lines of "true, adult love is about working hard at it and not being selfish." Yeah, well, they're kinda valid comments, thank you, but, in these cases, and I probably didn't make this clear enough, we're not just talking about that cheap sizzle of newness, but also crucially important variables: being a little older than twenty and therefore more certain of your relationship needs (but conversely more fearful of giving the new relationship roulette wheel another spin).

So (and this is stream of consciousness advice, competely unplugged, so I hope you are still onboard: toot-toot!), I think it really boils down to whether your absolute needs are being met in your current relationship. I think you have to have an honest look at your relationship as it stands, why you are with the person (fear of being alone should not be a top answer!), and whether you are compatible. I spotted this site called Relationship Gym a while back when I was supporting a friend going through a break-up. You should have a look at it. It's all about identifying the person you want to be with by examing your respective needs, values and goals. I imagine the guy who runs the site as Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia), but that says more about me because actually he seems very good at his job (his approach has an in-built bias towards the current relationship) and he not a hater of women. And no, I would definitely not tell illegal love object. That would just cause a lot of trouble for a lot of people, most especially for you. If you're going to leave your current relationship, you have to be able to do it without the safety net (which will end up being a sticky web) of a new relationship.

Finally though, I am not 100% resolved on the whole issue of "you've made a commitment (of some sort) when you were a teenager/young adult and therefore should grin and bear it until you die." Even knowing what I know about human history, I feel obliged to suggest (flippantly) that these challenges are a particular function of the capricious, diposable world we leave it etc, etc, but I don't believe that. Plus, I am not sure whether worthwhile ideals like not being entitled, reckless and wasteful mean that you have to stick at something that is in constant tension with your needs (presuming your needs aren't fanciful) especially when children are not involved.

What would you advise?

* * *

Meanwhile, over the past week, four of my guy friends (all post-grads) have asked me for reassurance that they're not "idiots", that they're capable of scholarly writing at this level, and that they did not peak too early in their academic careers...Sound familiar? Goes to show that, contrary to some findings in the academic literature, women are not necessarily more likely to vocalise the emotional consequences of their work. I have boy-men revealing all sorts of insecurities and crises about their academic lives to me. Admittedly their purges tend to be shorter than those of my lady friends (who also tend to be repeat clients). Maybe we need some more female researchers asking men about their emotional labour and its effects.

What's Going On

photo by: The Boy

Here is a lazy description of what's been going on:

1) It's been snowing. A lot.

2) There are a couple of Italian, male visiting scholars in our Department. One of them is fulfilling expectations: he is outgoing, cheeky and flirtatious. The other one has tattoos and a moustache.

3) I have been having some animated and fairly interesting conversations with women this week. We've covered topics like whether and on what basis: the media frames women in their thirties who have not married or had any children as products of the ills of Western society (we decided, essentially, that it's a luxury not to have to make those choices and that women should not have to bear that symbolic weight alone if at all); it is necessary to pretend that our theses have wider (non-academic) purposes and audiences in order to feel motivated and special; there is relationship between achievement and birth order; Sex and the City had any merit whatsover in terms of the questions it raised or whether its starting position (that women like to buy expensive shoes and bags) automatically negated its value; we can accept that highly ambitious, "save the world" men will probably also have overbearing egos and insecurities etc. (etc. = cheat)

4) I nearly suffered a palsy when my supervisor smacked an email on my desk, mid-paragraph, and said, "I am not going to comment" as she walked off. I thought the worst: that the Faculty had agreed that I was in danger of never submitting my thesis and had decided to let me go or that a colourful, carelessly-worded email of mine to a family member had accidentally been sent to my supervisor. It was, in fact, an email from a College pal, who is also the head of men's rowing, to my supervisor saying that she had to tell me she was going to "fail" me unless I coxed for them.

5) I am not coxing this term. I may never cox again.

6) A Canadian student with a deep voice who I met through a mutual friend came into my Department today and spotted me at my desk. She submitted in December and told me that she has already sorted an ESRC one year postdoc in London and was today being interviewed at my Department for a three year postdoc after that. Wowsers. Four years sorted. Good night. I wound up my shame-screen up even though she was just being frank and even sympathetic.

7) One of the College porters is enraged about a media conspiracy to sell the snowfall and the financial crisis as more serious than they really are.

8) I am pretty content with how my work is going. Still a long way to go and I can see my face drop and my eyes age by the day. I am also waking up frowning and buzzing. But, apart from all that (ahem), it's peachy times. I do feel lucky to be writing my thesis, and I have decided that I picked a good topic to develop my academic writing style, to make it more discursive and engaging.

College Burns Night

photos by: ccgd, g.naharro, mike138

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to give the reply to the toast to the lassies at the College Burns' Night that was held this week. Robert (or Rabbie) Burns, born 250 years ago, is a Scottish, Romantic poet and lyricist and national treasure, celebrated not least for being the "Ploughman Poet" and a womaniser. You might know him from the NYE song, Auld Lang Syne, but he also wrote some cracking poems, like A Man's A Man for A' That, Tam O'Shanter and Ae Fond kiss.

At the time I wasn't feeling too inspired by the idea, but I felt obliged to accept in part because my College paid for my trip to visit my mother in hospital late last year. Plus I figured I would probably like the attention when it came to it. The aim of the reply is to present in a playful, bawdy way some of the shortcomings of men using evidence from Burns' life and one's own experiences (and in response to the equally cheeky toast to the lassies).

I put the task aside until a couple of days before, but again, I wasn't feeling especially witty. So I emailed some of my family and friends to help me out. One of my sisters pointed out how men think that simply acknowledging that they are the father counts as sufficient contribution to the marathon that is parenthood. Another brother mentioned how one of our cousins uses the promise of ocean views to attract women to his apartment (it faces Redfern).

Apart from their substantive help (much of which made it in), it was the the accompanying e-chat that sparked me up, and in the process reminded me that coming from a big family and community has its massive ups. One of my brothers was mildly irritated by another whom he called a "tool" for not "replying all" with his suggestions as he had done. Then that brother emailed me to say that he would understand if I used another brother's suggestions verbatim "as pay back for [undergrad] University" (when I regularly assisted him with his essays and exam preparation). And then, in reference to the programme of the evening, there was a whole litany of remarks about how on earth I tolerate living in such a nerdy environment. One of my friends said, "We never had anything like this at North Sydney TAFE."

In the end, the 200+person supper was grand- the Scots language address to and frenzied knifing up of the haggis by a (Scottish) senior fellow was a highlight - and the toasts went down well. There was ceilidh afterwards - Celtic group dances (four couples in squares, or bigger groups in lines or rings) to a band and caller. This (shameful, but great) activity truly does make you feel as though you could end up engaged to someone on the basis that he or she can step, turn and swivel in time to a fiddle. I ended up with a bloody lip rather than a proposal - this guy in front of me in the tightly-packed ring dance (I am not sure those words should go together...) turned his partner the wrong way, that is, backwards and into my oncoming face.

Here is the final version of my toast: (Thanks team!)

Toast to Lassies - Reply

Good evening Ladies and Gentleman and thank you for allowing me to exercise the right of reply on behalf of the Lassies.

Robert Burns knew what every woman wants at the end of a hard day - a rollicking poem, some scotchy breath and most importantly, a firm ....caber.

A [College] man, like most men, is only capable of one of these things at a time. And by far and away most often, it's a scotchy breath.

Robbie knew this and therefore was not writing the Selkirk Grace for the Earl of Selkirk, but rather for the women in the room at the time. And for women down the ages.

I tried to imagine Rabbie as a [College] student today and I must say I can barely picture it. As a more senior lady, I have noticed over the years that [College] men tend to fall somewhere on the spectrum between:

Evil Genius Nerd who wouldn’t know how to flirt if it stole the spokey dokes of his favourite bike AND

Smart but simple Jock who wouldn’t know a poem if it stood up and slapped him on the arse with an oar.

From personal experience the evil genius nerd knows poetry, but his idea of flirting consists of shoulder charging you in the breast on the way to the bar, making a noise like “DER” at your failure to kick the hacky sack, or saying something offensive about your clothes or make-up, such as “you look like you’ve been punched in the eyes.”

The smart but simple jock will have flirted before, but his idea of poetry is sitting in the Common Room in a shiny tracksuit with his legs far open without any awareness of how startlingly unattractive it is or cultivating a form of facial hair that only two or three people on the planet can pull off and these include Wolverine, and Tom Selleck.

Perpendicular...or possibly parallel to this spectrum, leaning against the wall outside the Bar having a smoke is another set of men who can effectively combine poetry and flirting, but who toss their cabers to the other end of the field.

The other reason I became a little perplexed thinking about Rabbie or Robbo as he would be known in Straya, in [College] was that I figured he would probably be the only man actually having sex in [College] besides of course the one man who we know is having sex and in great detail courtesy of his lady friend.

So I did some further thinking about Robbo. I wondered what he would have done at the Freshers’ Fair. Certainly, despite his weakened constitution, aka man cold, he would have homed in on a few young beauties and here he had an ingenious card up his sleeve: bestowing the honour of muse.

Male artists, like Robbie, love talking about the importance of a muse, but, let’s face it once the seduction is done, the creative process actually happens at their desks leaning back on achair.

Indeed, Robbo said that he worked [Scottish accent] “in the solitary fireside of his study.”

You never hear about women and their muses, really, do you?

So basically, men don’t need a muse to do their art – some basic warmth, a chair and desk are fine. Essentially, I’ve figured out that the whole muse thing is a brilliant cover to have additional sex with young, beautiful women.

And you can just imagine the Jerry Maguire scene in the Haldane Room, the young woman, body a'trembling, saying to Robbie, you had me at [Scottish accent]:

The snowdrop and primrose.... our woodlands adorn,
and violets bath in the wet o’ the morn.

In any case, Robbo had a back-up plan: if you can’t get the beauty, go for the servant or less attractive friend.

Once the muse was selected, Robbo would have certainly bipassed the condoms on the Student Welfare desk. Much like the men of today Robbie considered contraception a woman’s issue, and in the era when the prophylactic earned its modern name, he clearly was not a fan of the animal tissue sheaths preferring instead to leave bulging bellies in his lusty wake.

If he were alive today, I’ve got to say with his enviable levels of fertility he could supplement his Arts and Humanities Research Council grants and modest royalties as a regular donor at fertility clinics.

But, be sure, [College] men, there is much to be learned from Robbo. The use of song and verse to seduce women, for instance. Despite our differences, we women are all after the same thing: a funny, sensitive, articulate man who’s great in bed.

Two hundred and fifty years ago it was our mate Robbie.

And, despite what I have said about [College] men, and about Rabbie….. we women certainly don’t want our men to be exactly the same as us.

We don’t want a man whose idea of flirting or poetry is brain dumping his daily struggles and childhood traumas to us over Facebook chat.

We want the Evil Genius Nerd and the Smart but Simple Jock. We even want the gay guys, they just don't want us. We want a man who could write the following:

Henpecked Husband by Robert Burns

Curs'd be the man, the poorest wretch in life,
The crouching vassal to a tyrant wife!
Who has no will but by her high permission,
Who has not sixpence but in her possession,
Who must to her his dear friend's secrets tell,
Who dreads a curtain lecture worse than hell.
Were such the wife had fallen to my part,
I'd break her spirit or I'd break her heart;
I'd charm her with the magic of a switch,
I'd kiss her maids, and kick the perverse bitch.

* * *

So for that we cheers the men of [College], we thank Rabbie Burns, and we give three cheers: to verse! to scotch! and to firm cabers!

To the lads!

Dr Moi

James Nash (aka Cirrus)

I am back in Oxford. I have successfully commenced my new work timetable that I devised while I was away as part of my self-imposed Get Real Challenge. In the likely case that you are more sophisticated than me and missed that allusion, Dr Phil put sad people on Get Real Challenges in the early noughties.

I don't like Dr Phil. I haven't watched him or Opes in ages. Actually, I don't watch much TV at all. I no longer have a TV. I watch Stephen Fry shows on BBC iPlayer, and sometimes I watch Strictly Come Dancing, that is until I recognise that it's the jingle in between each segment that is making me feel mildly anxious. I was into The Wire for a bit, now it's 30 Rock.

I have recently read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg. I was a bit late on The Kite Runner train - all the hype made me think it might be of the same texture as the Da Vinci Code: vomity. But it wasn't at all. It was epic, gripping and sentimental (if a little heavy-handed at times). I felt a little emotionally manipulated at the end, but I went with it, snot bubbles and all.

The Little Virtues is more my thing: eleven essays, part memoir, part fiction. It's imbued with (post-WW2) moralising and nostalgia, a wonderful self-deprecating wit and perfect, often prickly observations (especially about the English, which made me feel like her friend).

Here is some preaching:

And the story of human relationships never ceases for us; because little by little they become all too easy for us, all too natural and spontaneous - so spontaneous and so undemanding that there is no richness, discovery or choice about them; they are just habit and complacency, a kind of intoxicated naturalness. We believe that we can always return to that secret moment of ours, that we can draw on the right words; but it isn't true that we can always go back there, often our return there is false; we make our eyes glow with a false light, we pretend to be warm and caring towards our neighbour and we are in fact once more shrunken and hunchen up in the icy darkness of our heart. Human relationships had to be rediscovered and reinvented every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbour is a human action and so it is always good or evil, true or deceitful, kindness or a sin (Human Relationships).

And some funny:

The English rarely show surprise. If it happens that someone faints in the street, everything is provided for. In a few seconds a chair is found for him, a glass of water, a uniformed nurse (England: Eulogy and Lament).

I am trying to widen my range of extra-curricular material to include some more current affairs coverage. I realised again when I was hanging out with my brother who asked me for my opinion on multiple public issues just how very insulated and self-obsessed one (has to) become during the last phases of write-up (and maybe even during the whole damned thing, at least in Oxford). I read about the strife in Gaza and the current financial crisis, and I try to get my head around some of the range of issues, but as soon as I am finished, I simply click on another webpage or go back to the Old Bastard and my thoughts. I connect certain themes together, but I don't feel nearly as passionate or even concerned about the people or places involved as I would normally. I don't like that really.

But charity starts in the home (right internet?) and I had the rather unusual experience today of having two man pals seek my advice about Love. I have experienced emotional males before, just not two in one day and both in such self-conscious, advisor-advisee situations. One of them was gushy and needed assurance that his sentiments would be reciprocated, the other was teary and overwhelmed about possibly giving up an old relationship for a new one. I have noticed that at the beginning of every term here, there are heightened feelings; intense fearfulness about losing and gaining - people, things, achievements, careers, and places. I listened, validated, shared and made suggestions where appropriate, as I would with my lady friends.

I really do give out a lot of energy when people ask me for advice. I wish the Old Bastard were a real person stretched on a couch, simply listening to my wise words and appreciating my charm. He's not like that.

Moving House and Man Cold

So, I haven't written for a while. I have two excuses:

1) I have moved house.

2) I have a Man Cold.

We all know that moving house is akin to a funeral in terms of stress levels. I am sure there are some classic psychic reasons why having one's wordly possessions packed away or thrown out and one's home turned into a shell are profoundly disturbing. We like caves. But it was the timing of it this time that made it particularly anxiety-provoking.

I have had to move out of my College accommodation for the summer so that the College oldies can rent it out for even more obscene amounts to conference delegates. Summer-booting coincides with the end of the academic year here, when students - home and international - flee back to their homes, homelands, sometimes for holidays, often (now that one year Masters courses are all the rage, much to the frustration of the Admin) to start new jobs, new lives "without routine fire alarm checks", as one French student recently put it to me. Despite the promising, even cheerful weather, early July is the time of upheaval: multiple goodbyes (that become less sentimental as they go on), the rearrangement of alliances, seeking reassurance, facing the reality of solitude, even loneliness. Loneliness in the sunshine somehow feels worse than in the Winter. It's easier to shake off in the Summer, but there's none of the comfort that comes with the rain on the window pane, a menacing fire, a dark painting in the hall, looking at your own white hand. 

My brilliant cousin sent me a link to Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) which she said would make me giggle. Were it not this time of year, it would have. Watching it today made me smile sadly. It reminded me of just how wonderfully fortunate I am to have shared time, food, conversations and dance floors with so many students from all around the world. Of course, there are times when you wish that you were around your own people, where you don't have to explain yourself, where you don't have to conduct an autopsy on conversations because no one's cultural, or even personal, boundaries were crossed, where you're sure that you are loved. But most of time, for me, I have delighted in connecting or not with the motley crew that is the graduate community at Oxford (OK, I am sure someone could run a class analysis on the student composition and question its primarily middle class character). 

I love the fact that only last week I had dinner with a skinny German physicist who found my jokes confronting but laughed all the same, a gregarious Italian historian (who obligingly told me every Lygon street story he had) and a psychologist from San Francisco who is all about playing with language and says ridiculous but great things like "in cognitive linguistics the visual-spatial representations of height frequently indicate the positives, power, prominance and so on. Radiohead is expert in exploiting that format" or "this flourish of post-neural ideation, as it were, owes a good and especially grand deal to Nietzsche, to date the world's absolute best world-&-tempo craftsman of the EXALTED."

I love the fact that the other day someone knocked on my door and I asked from my desk 'who is it?' and this (older) woman replied 'C'est moi'. I said, 'You've got the wrong room, I'm sorry.' She said (in that dramatic, pouty French way): 'Pourquoi tu me parles en Anglais?' I said (coming closer to the door): 'I am not who you're looking for' (and thought of Ben's 'these are not the droids you are looking for...'). She frantically tried to open my door (I could see the handle jerking around) and wailed: "Qu'est-ce qu'il y a? Pourquoi? Pourquoi?' She was now crying. I am not sure whether it was the onset of my Man Cold, but I was by then too afraid to open the door. I was half sure that a gypsy woman would jump on me and suck the blood from my neck, so I said (in my best French): 'Je suis desolée madame, je ne parle pas Francais. Je suis Australienne. Vous n'avez pas la bonne chambre.' She sobbed, 'Oh, tu es la. Pourquoi tu n'ouvres pas la porte. Je voudrais te voir. S'il te plait...' She still thought I was her haughty daughter. I didn't open the door. I said (in my best wounded French tone): Laissez-moi tranquille!' (Leave me alone!). She quietly said 'OK' and crawled away. I continued putting my notes into new piles as part of my vow to sort out my desk.

It's the physical task of moving that distresses me the most (smooth segue!). I am one of those irritable and irritating shits who deeply detests ordering things neatly. I shove my clothes into my holiday suitcase, I push and scrunch my money into my wallet (a habit Oprah once said was evidence of someone destined never to be rich) and I certainly do not have my books in any functional order (criterion: what looks pretty). I seem to expend as much energy moving from half-done task to half-done pile as doing the actual scrubbing, compiling, packing or lifting. Music helps, but it also gives me an excuse to do some 80s moves (headslides, skip claps and shoulder shimmies). I was supposed to be out by midday. At 2pm one of the cleaning ladies yelled up to my room: 'You've got to be out of there. You're supposed to be out of there now!' I replied sulkily (as if it mattered): 'I am trying my best...gosh.'

I have moved to the pretty Oxfordshire countryside amongst the hedges, stone walls, sheep, horses, crops, hay and manicured English gardens. I will tell you all about the local villagers in a future post...

Until then, I want to tell you more about why I haven't written for a while - either my blog or much of my thesis. I have had a Man Cold! A Man Cold is a common cold that you decide people are going to know about, a lot of people, and for which you're going to receive some extra special care. You may even convince yourself that your hefty cough is borderline fatal, as you dramatically douse yourself in Vicks (with big circular motions across the chest) in front of the unsuspecting, elderly check-out attendant. You allow yourself lie-ins and longer breaks. The reason it's called a Man Cold is because when men have colds they tend to behave as though they have been struck down by a tropical disease from eighteenth century sea travel. Man Cold was superbly enacted in the Man Stroke Women series. I am not quite the man on the couch in this scenario, but I think with a little less thesis-guilt and child-of-unsympathetic-doctor-shame, I could very well be! "I said 'Laura', but you didn't come, so I dialled 999!" Genius.