I Will Survive

ryanontheroam.blogspot.com
Okay so I have quite a lot to go over. The last month has been a chaotic one with much excitement and hair pulling. I came back to Joondalup after the trip with the unpleasant realisation that I had a month of painful studies ahead of me. Let me go over a check list of all the things I needed to do; I had to finish a giant group research project for marketing intelligence, another giant group project for marketing communications, an assignment for Finance, finish my history paper, do an online quiz for Finance, and I had to study for my finals for all these classes. It must be noted that my Finance final was the one thing causing me the most stress. I had to complete an exam that was worth 60% of my grade and consisted of only five questions. So understandably I was a little on the stressed side.
I wish I could say that this all went swimmingly well without a hitch, but that would be a lie. But before I whinge some more about the torment of my academic existence, let me highlight some less stressful occurrences. The week after I got back I went and played open mic at Mojo’s, an eclectic music oriented bar. This went very well indeed. I played several Celtic folk songs and a Fruvous song which I sadly screwed up a fair bit. But all and all it went well. I was given praise and asked to come back. I was accompanied to this performance by my good friends Frances and Matt. Frances was kind enough to take photos and footage of me, for which I was extremely grateful. It was also that week that I decided to go to the east coast with Raney and Georg. I will digress for a moment only to mention that I have gained ecstatic enthusiasm for any and all drops of the US stock market. This might seem unpatriotic, but you must understand that every time our stock market falls our dollar becomes stronger and stronger. So when I bought my tickets for my trip I was pleased to find that I was paying a greatly discounted rate.
Now back to the whinging. I hate group projects. Group projects are a malicious move on the part of universities to add a social aspect to the learning process. This in actuality leads to the burden of dealing with brain-dead slackers of students who seem militantly intent on screwing up what should be a very simple project. I was given two such projects. Our first seemed easy enough. Originally it was just French George and me doing a research project on whether or not Australia would be receptive to American football. But alas the proverbial monkey wrench was thrown into our work in the form of Mike. Mike had the habit of taking on great amounts of responsibility and then not acting on any of it. We lessened his work load and yet he was still incapable of showing up to class, or submitting even the simplest of work. Eventually he vanished from the class altogether, and we were left with one third of the work to make up for. This was after he had failed to submit several important documents.
Now onto my other group project, this was my marketing communications project in which we were meant to create a detailed marketing plan for a business. My group consisted of me, Peter, and tweedle dee (Chris) and tweedle dum (Sara). Chris came up with the original concept of our project, which, at first, seemed good enough. He had taken the class last semester, and failed, but still had his project they had submitted. He suggested that we use that project a starting point and use it to create a new project based on that data. This was how Peter and I interpreted what he said. His actual wording was “Hey I’ve got this project from last semester that we got a 16 out of 25 on. We can just reword it and hand it in.” I will admit that is was ignorant for Peter and me to assume that he was exaggerating. Now enters the ever vacant Sara. Sara would never show up to class and was forced into our group by the instructor. Peter and I decided to give her and Chris the easiest portions of the project as they had progressively proven to us to be incompetent. Yes I know I sound like I am being insulting but as I will finish this story you will understand that I was not dealing with the shining beacons of hope for society’s future. Chris had taken to the habit of setting up his laptop during other student’s class presentations, and would work quite loudly on said computer whilst ranting insults at the screen. This was when he was not actively belittling his classmates and breaking almost every classroom taboo. As our project was not progressing past Chris’s concept of “rewording the old paper” I took it upon myself to create an outline from scratch for our project, and to write out some of the more important parts. Peter, as well started working diligently on the project. We told Chris and Sara their sections, gave them the outline, and sent them on their marry way.
Two days before it was due I received everyone’s sections. This was the night I had designated to finish the project. Now you must understand that I had at this point been near the point of collapse having spent the last week writing a 3,500 word essay for my history class, studying for my final in that class (which for some unexplained reason was two weeks before the exam period), and had to finish and present my research assignment, so I think that my reaction to what I received will seem understandable. I looked over Sara’s work and noticed that she had taken the creative direction of writing in extreme detail about things that had nothing to do with our project. Not only that, but the style of her writing was fluctuating in a wild manner that that caused me, being a wee bit suspicious, to check it out. I ran several paragraphs of her writing (not just sentences) into Google and found identical matches. The stupid thing was she was not that she was just stupid enough to plagiarize, but that she did it really really badly. She simply highlighted the “about us” pages of companies and copied them into the paper. So I had a small nervous breakdown, and the next morning we went into class, had an emergency meeting, in which she claimed that she didn’t plagiarize, and even if she did she deserved another chance, and really it was my fault because I should have told her she was doing it wrong. The upshot was that we received the instructor’s permission to remove her from the group and got an extension of four days to complete her section. This was annoying because I was meant to have the whole project done by that Friday so that I could have the week end to unwind.
My weekend had been planned out to a very precise level. I quite literally had no time to spare with the amount I had packed into this weekend. You see this was the weekend to celebrate the end of the semester. After this weekend we had a week of studying on our own, and then finals. So my weekend schedule went as follows; I spent Friday studying finance and that night at the end of semester party on campus, I went to sleep at 4 am and woke at 10:30, I met Heidi and went to Fremantle with her Christophe and Thomas. In Freo we went to the prison tour and spent the afternoon wondering aimlessly around the city, from there we went to the Mt. Lawley campus (where Thomas and Christophe reside), while there we picked up Roy (the Norwegian) and several token Germans. We then took a bus to Northbridge to go to the night clubs. This was the weekend of Halloween, and I must admit Australia tends to seriously half a** the moment. There was this feel (from the one in five people dressed up) that people really wanted to celebrate the holiday but could not bring themselves to fully embrace the event. The atmosphere felt like that moment when someone goes to clap at the end of a speech and realises that no one is joining him. We went to the Mustang club which had a surreal American theme. I have come to know how Australian’s in an Outback Steakhouse feel. And the place was far too overcrowded with a house band playing the most homogenous blend of top ten music imaginable. From there we went home, but because of the taxi service in Joondalup I did not get home until 4am. I then woke up at 10:30am to go to the Red Bull Air Race with Frances. At the train station a youth who looked to be 15 came up to me. “Hey mate, would yuh buy me some smokes?” “No” I replied. “I won’t dob on yuh,” he replied earnestly [dobbing is Aussie slang for tattling on]. I declined again and got on the train to Perth.
I met Frances in central Perth and we made our way to the races. We chose to watch the event from King’s Park, which is at the top of a seriously large hill. Really the word “hill” lends to the situation a level of insignificance that is undeserved. It was freaking massive. I normally would not have minded so much but at this point I was feeling just a little like a zombie. The air race was quite nice, though I commented that it would be much more interesting if the pile-ons were made of cement rather than paper. I am taking this opportunity to say that King’s Park is the most beautiful park I have ever been too. It is a surreal experience to step out of a busseling city right into a well kept forest. The juxtaposition was a bizarre one, and its beauty was not lost on me. This park has parks within parks. And at its highest point they built a DNA shaped tower to make you that much higher than everything else. This was the perfect vantage point to see planes flying directly over your head.
After walking several miles we made it from central Perth to UWA (France’s uni). I had lunch with her there and learned of the Melbourne Cup “The Race that stops a nation,” which several of my colleagues at uni attended that week. After lunch I went home. I got back at around 6pm and started to work on the marketing communications project, only to discover that Chris was quite serious in his intention of rewording the former paper and discarded all my work, but on top of that wrote on a level unfit for a fifth grader. I had another small nervous breakdown, as he had written ten pages in this manner. I got to work trying to fix his problems. Eventually I realised the futility of this task, and simply labelled everything that we all did by who wrote it so that we could be graded accordingly. But I still had to format the entire paper and fill in the big gaps (which included calculating an entire budget). Peter, it must be said, did a superb job. His work was well written and I only wish that the other two members had been of his calibre. I received four hours sleep that night. I spent the entire morning rushing around trying to finish the paper, as it was due at five o’clock. Eventually I got it to look something like a report and handed it in. This was not the end of my adventure though, quite the opposite in fact.
That night I had already scheduled, four weeks prior, to play at Mojo’s. And now I think is the perfect opportunity to say I was a zombie, not just a little bit, I did not just have a smidge of grogginess, no, at this point I was finding standing to be a challenging exercise in willpower. So this made the notion of playing in front of a bar full of strangers in a venue located an hour and a half from home at 10:30pm a little daunting, but I persevered. I had planned to do some more complex songs but by the time I got there I was spacing out so much that when I played my first song, Ghost Riders in the Sky, I could hardly get the chords right, so instead I played the simplest songs I knew, ones that I had played to death. This was an odd night. The crowd seemed to enjoy my playing, though a young woman did comment when she was complimenting me that I was allowed to smile. I sauntered on back to the train station (located outside) in a rainstorm. The place was full of police officers which made the next event that much more unusual. While I was waiting for my train (which had 40 minutes till arrival) a young man came up to me and offered me marijuana for train money. This seemed a tad bit ballsy, what with all the police being just a few meters from us, I politely declined. I took the train to Perth to catch the last train to Joondalup at 12:30am.
While waiting for the train to come I was approached by an aboriginal man. I will not lie, I was made uncomfortable. From what I had heard and witnessed about the nature of city dwelling Aborigines they were a poor lot who either wanted to beg for a dollar off of you or mug you. This is not me being at all racist, every single aborigine I had seen had been dressed in a homeless nature, and they begged quite frequently. I also had heard many stories about their violent nature. There seems to be a tragic self fulfilling prophecy about aborigines (particularly those of the city) that, while not PC, still seemed to have a certain amount of validity. But I really wanted to keep an open mind on Aborigines, and I quite honestly had a longing to have a proper conversation with one. But from what most of the white Australians had told me this was unlikely to happen.
So here I was in the middle of the night, alone in the train stations with a poorly dressed, grungy stranger of the aboriginal persuasion sidling up to me. “Whatchyah reading?” he said, referring to the book in my hand. The book in question was “The Third Policeman” by Flann O’Brien, a surrealist Irish tale of the exploits of a murderer. “The Third Policeman” I replied. “That’s a good one. I am reading this,” he said pulling out “The Shadow of the Sun” by Ryszard Kapuscinski, the real life story of a journalist in Africa. “Here just read the back he said,” proffering the book to me. I gave him my book and we both looked over the other's books together, waiting for the train. “Do you know what his other names actually mean?” he asked me referring to the pseudonyms of Flann O’Brien aka Brian O’Nolan. I was startled by this man’s knowledge of obscure Irish literature, that he would know that Brian O’Nolan used pseudonyms with meanings in Gaelic. I was now pleasantly intrigued by this man. He had successfully blown apart the stereotypes that had begun to ferment in my skull and seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature. Just his sheer upfront nature alone was almost hypnotic.
As we sat in the train he continued to read my book. He then did something odd. It is funny how we have social norms that we live with so thoroughly that when they are broken it feels as though someone has just thrown a brick threw our mind. He began to read, in a train full of people, “The Third Policeman” outloud and dramatically. He read the words with bristling enthusiasm. The words of Flann O’Brien, written in their very Irish rhythm, being read by an aborigine with a thick Australian accent at 1am in a train full of people was the second weirdest thing to happen to me that night. The first weirdest thing to happen was when he then stuck the book into my hands and said “okay now you read it.” Did I mention already that I was a zombie? Yes? Well now I was at the point where I decided to just go with it. I began to read. He sat in front of me on the ground with his arms around his knees as a child would and finagled the elderly gentleman next to him to do likewise. As I read he started giving me helpful advice on the lines of “NO! Not like that! Stick your arm out as you read it adds drama” and "pronounces your words more clearly.” After ten minutes of this, and him asking me to repeat several paragraphs over again because he enjoyed them, he introduced himself to me as “Eddie” and left the train at its next stop. That night I slept.
This would seem like a good dramatic place to stop but of course there has been more. I had two exams this week. And on Monday I have one more exam and I am done! Today I was visited by Frances and her father who came to say goodbye to me. They gave me a sweet letter, vegemite, and a money purse made of a kangaroo’s scrotum (these people know me pretty well). I was deeply touched, and I am forever indebted to them for their kindness and for teaching me so much of the Australian culture. I am now packing for my trip in seven days and feel unimaginably blessed.
Yours truly,
Ryan Messer