The To-Do List

I’m going to leave Bilbao in a week. I’m sitting at my computer with the door to my balcony open and my washing drying outside and I’m not wearing a shirt. Outside the early summer morning is turning to afternoon and I can hear traffic and voices and the sounds of construction.

Writing something has been on my to-do list, somewhere near the bottom but occasionally rising to the middle, for at least six weeks. I was planning to sketch my reflections on Basque culture, examine how the complexities of the Spanish national identity are revealed annually when Athletic Bilbao play real Madrid and do another deep-dive into my feelings about moving on, once again.

Nope. I’ve only got a week and I have to buy new running shoes, organise couch-surfing for my trip to Portugal, arrange sending my guitar back to New Zealand, close my bank account, get a set of passport photos, get a haircut and, of course, write another damn email.

How did I get here? Well last time I wrote to you I was beleaguered by a job I disliked. I staggered to the end of term, grasping wildly at anything to stay upright and collapsed into the comfort and munificence of my parents’ visit.

I spent the two week holiday with them, first in France and then in Central Europe, which was mostly lovely though at times like being stuck in traffic, before flying back to Bilbao to begin the final term. I wrote things in my diary like this one, from the night before school restarted:

So I will get through tomorrow. Then I will be in my routine, moving forward, adjusted to my new diet and exercise and make the most of the time left. With the weather like this, it has to be good.

I finished writing in my diary just before nine, took a shit, meditated and went to bed.

That routine lasted three days. On Wednesday of my first week back one of the other teachers mentioned on their way past my desk that he had been at the office and they asked him to tell me to drop off a copy of my new ID card. Well.

Two months earlier on a rainy Monday morning I had walked with my flatmate John down to the Extranjeria on Gran Via to my appointment to extend my visa. After presenting our identification and going through the metal detector we found ourselves in front of a weary, somewhat harsh looking woman. John spoke in Spanish while I sat there pursing my lips, trying to look earnest and hopeful and law-abiding.

The woman, speaking in rapid Spanish, looked from him to me and shook her head dolefully. My type of visa, she explained, was unable to be renewed, despite the fact that I had a work contract. We tried everything. Well, we tried the only thing you can try in that situation, which is to ask the same question repeatedly in different words. Not surprisingly, the answer was the same. Her doleful head shaking was becoming more pugnacious with impatience, so we left.

But all was not lost. I gathered my sources together and interrogated them. There was, apparently, a twist: Your social security number stays valid for another three months after your identity number’s expiry, which would just about take me through until the end of term.

Because of this quirk and because I assumed that this is a Latin country where instead of working, people spend their time drinking coffee and talking fervently at sidewalk cafes and the government can’t be relied on to detect an over-stayer, I was satisfied that I could just smile at everyone reassuringly and be confident that I would be able to coast to the end of term without anybody noticing anything astray.

Apparently not. The day after I was asked for my ID card, I was called to an urgent meeting where I was told that, so long as my card was invalid I was unable to work. Three days later, after a desperate hail-mary attempt involving a different application and another meeting failed, I was told, not without sympathy, that my time working there was over.

It was a brilliant, sunny day when I came in a last time to drop off my final marks and say goodbye to my colleagues and the couple of senior classes that I had, against all odds, begun to feel close to. Then, with less sentimentality and nostalgia than I had ever left an institution with before, I walked down the narrow little road, surrounded on both sides by the high slender trees and birdsong, to wait for a bus on the corner to take me back to Bilbao.

When I first got the news I had thought that my finances were ruined. Fortunately though, the school that wasn’t willing to be cavalier with employment law was also generous, certainly more than they needed to be, with their severance packet. In the span of a week I went from a gritty determination to finish the term to searching for black market rates for spare organ donations and introductory courses to Nigerian email spamming to manic air-punching and boundless bliss.

So I’ve been unemployed, more or less, for the past two months, except for one private class. Everybody keeps saying how brown I am, a by-product of being able to go to the park most sunny afternoons to read. I’ve been improving my Spanish, going for walks and playing football with my Australian friend Seb.

However, just like Parkinson dictated, the work on my to-do list has expanded to fill the time available. Despite my leisure time my diary has still looked like this:

27/4: I will take care of as much on my to-do list as I can. But beyond that, which won’t take long, I have a long spell of empty space to play with.

9/5: I should be able to get a lot of what is on my to-do list done in a morning.

18/5: I thought about what I have to do today, and how I need to crunch my to-do list in order to enjoy this time. By the end of next week I ought to set myself the goal of finishing my list… My to-do list isn’t too extensive, but I really have to remove some things from it in order to not feel like I’m wasting my time.

5/6: I listened to podcasts and made a chilli con carne, left some for John, put it in the big mixing bowl to store in the fridge and then checked my to-do list. There wasn’t much left to do, so I decided to… [thing that I’m not going to tell you about but didn’t help with finishing my to-do list].

11/6: I need to finish everything on my to-do list, so I have these next three weeks properly free.

12/6: I’m leaving everything on my to-do list until tomorrow because I am so tired. Now I will… [same unhelpful thing, mentioned above]

14/6: I also don’t have too much on my to-do list really, and most of the things aren’t too stressful. I will knock a few of them off tomorrow.

One day, one day...

I remember, sweetly, how excited I was when I arrived here a little over a year ago. The European-ness of this little city, nestled in green hills by the sea, made me feel alive. I was living in the old town with pastry shops and washing hanging off of balconies and narrow cobble-stone alleyways that smelled like urine. I projected forward at a blank canvas of a year. At carving a little life for myself here of part-time work and going to football games and huddling against the winter as the nights drew in.

I did some of that of course. But I also took a long summer trip around Europe that depleted my savings. I took a full-time job that meant early mornings and early bed-times and kept me on a different schedule from my friends. The city became familiar and as the weeks blended into each other, a little entrapping. I didn’t like my job and I started to question why I was here.

But then I was fired, and things got pretty good again.

That’s where I find myself now, about to leave Bilbao, having made you read a long email about nothing much in particular. On Sunday I take a bus westward along the coast to Gijón, then onwards to Galicia and south through Portugal. I’ll be travelling for about six months, planning to wash up in New Zealand sometime in January. While I’m travelling I’ll book buses, organise couch-surfing, find time to read, meet people and, hopefully, somewhere in there I might even find time to finish that to-do list.