Katherine Dunn
Students always in transit
At least I have skype
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about saying goodbye. I get a lot of practice, so I’m pretty good at it.
I’m good at giving long hugs, hosting goodbye dinners, and promising to call and email. I’m good at packing, at putting clothes and books into storage, and I’m even good at shedding a few discreet tears during takeoff.
Like many students, I have to be. I say a big round of goodbyes in both April and August, and while the first days in a different city are often jarring, my daily routines fall quickly into place. Soon, those people whose physical presence was so warm and constant just days before are reduced to a voice on a telephone or a face on a fuzzy video screen.
In 2010, I’ll say more goodbyes than usual. Because I’ll spend the winter semester in Denmark, I’ll divide the year between three different cities, all of them thousands of kilometres apart.
But I don’t mind too much – after all, “goodbye” isn’t what it used to be. It can still mean goodbye forever, or at least until that high school reunion, but more often it means goodbye until the next time we Skype, or email, or text. Because I’m Facebook friends with at least half of my grade five class, all of whom I can contact or creep at my leisure, goodbye doesn’t have to mean goodbye at all (even when I wish it did.)
And for me, like many people I know, I expect these constant, half versions of goodbye will be a regular part of my life for years to come.
I’ve met people who are planning to stay in Ottawa after they graduate – after all, they have a boyfriend and a nice place and a cat – but not very many.
Many instead see themselves in permanent transit, hopping from city to city – or from country to country – in pursuit of travel and adventure, or just grad school and a job.
Half-burnt
Three years in, I’m starting to think the library isn’t how I want to learn about the world
I was walking to my friend Hannah’s house last night, eating my dinner – a pear in one hand and a samosa in the other. My bag – full of notebooks and texts and power cords – was thudding heavily against my back, but I barely noticed.
My attitude towards hygiene has gotten pretty defeatist (“I’m just going to smell again tomorrow anyways”), my exercise now consists of running for the bus, and I no longer have even the contents for a modest grilled cheese in my fridge.
Sounds like another November, when students everywhere start churning out assignments at a frantic rate, all while gearing up for exams. They have a name for this combination in the spring – “March Madness” – but I’m not sure what they call it in the winter, when we collectively descend into a long, chilly Ottawa winter and a bout of Seasonal Anxiety Disorder.
Nasty November would probably be a good one. Nauseating November. Or how about we just call it what it is – Extremely Crappy and Seemingly Endless November.
Other years, I’ve marked up my agenda and gotten down to work. This year, however, it seems like my head is perpetually somewhere else.
I thought this might have to do with a lack of time management, disorganization, or even just laziness. And I don’t dispute those are probably part of the problem. But I also thought this lack of concentration was unique to me.
But after some really solid whining, I started to hear from a lot of friends – bright, well adjusted kids with well oiled work ethics – that third year was getting to them, too.
A large number of them have dropped a class, conceding that four is just more manageable. One friend told me he’s taking next semester off. Another says he wishes he was. Others are going on co-op, opting for a lighter course load, going on exchange (including me), or just plain dragging their feet.
We developed a couple theories about why this might be. The obvious one is – third year is just harder. Like every year of university, the standards go up – the papers are longer, the readings heavier, the topics more challenging. Naturally, there are some growing pains.
But there might be something else. Call it the half done burnout, if you want. But you can trace it to people like me who, for the first time, are realizing all they’ve seen is school – and are thinking that might not be a good thing.
I went from high school straight into university, and when I moved across the country, like many first years, I was just seventeen.
I had done nothing. My work experience consisted of making lattes, my writing experience was basically a couple book reports. I had good teachers and I worked hard – I had to, to get into university – but I had never stayed in on a weekend night to do school work.
My life experience was even thinner. I had travelled with my family, but I had never been further then summer camp on my own. I had never cooked for myself, nor had a serious boyfriend. And as my first lonely semester proved, I didn’t really know how to make friends.
Going to university was what I wanted, and I don’t think I would have been happy otherwise. I think the idea of working or travelling – veering away from a path which might be stressful, but was at least well marked – scared me more than school ever did.
I have a lot of friends who didn’t go to school immediately. And I have to admit, I thought if they didn’t go right away, they might never go.
Two years later, most of those people have proved me wrong. Many of them are now in school, and unlike a lot of restless 17-year-olds, they actually want to be there. All of them have travelled around the world, they’ve worked and moved out and grown up.
I love school, and I think it’s where I belong at this point in my life. But sometimes I feel like what I’ve seen the most is the commute from my apartment to the library and back. And there’s only so much you can learn from that.
And when I apply for internship after internship, anxiously poring over my transcript or resume and agonizing over my post-grad potential for grad school or even just a journalism job, lately I`ve been one to stop and take a deep breath. I look up from my computer and out of my dining room window, where the late afternoon sunshine is drifting along the weathered bricks of the lovely old houses that line my street. And I think:
What’s the big hurry?
Junior high is over – and my angst should be, too.
Third year is stressful – but nothing beats age thirteen for sheer madness
I was feeling pretty sorry for myself the other day.
I had come home from an eight hour burst of editing for TV class, and all I could think about was making dinner and going to bed, even while a long list of upcoming assignments was forming in my head. I’m being robbed of my youth, I thought angrily. I should have free time! Time to go for languid bike rides, make that recipe for couscous filled grilled peppers, browse antiquarian book shops for travel novels from the ’50s . . .
Of course, how I really spend my free time is a little different (eating pop tarts on the couch at the student paper office, checking out grad students in the campus pub, forgetting to do my dishes). And I really had no reason to pity myself.
I didn’t come to this conclusion because I recalled that I have healthy friends and family, and I get to live in a nice country and go to university. No, I reached this epiphany because I remembered one thing:
I am no longer in junior high.
No matter how long any day gets – no matter how many times I feel mildly sleepy or stressed, or feel like attending Canadian Foreign Policy lecture is really an inconvenience when I would rather be at home reading Esquire, I don’t think it will ever be as bad as a single day from grades seven to nine.
My high school guidance counsellor once told me that those years can be cruel at the best of times. Who knows what an honest junior high guidance counsellor would have said. Probably that junior high is essentially adolescent hell.
I’m not sure how your junior high years were. I got off pretty lightly myself. I was gangly, had a sweating problem, refused to participate in gym, didn’t like showering, and generally wore a scowl that seemed to express deep and profound revulsion with everyone and everything around me.
I also spent most of my time obsessing over the alarming pop spawn of the British group S Club 7, a clutch of over-managed pre-pubescents called (imaginatively) S Club 8. I knew all of their songs, and once – outside a Roger’s Video and overtaken by an unexplainable bout of hormonal emotion – sang almost their entire debut album in a broken falsetto through lurching sobs.
“She’s horrible, Mum. When is she going to stop?” my sister, Laura, asked from the back seat.
I remember my Mother looking pained. “She’s almost finished, I think. She just needs to get it all out . . .”
At thirteen, I was emotional, delusional, boy crazy, furious, and so lacking a sense of direction I once got lost in my own neighbourhood. Worst of all, everyone else was almost as bad.
Very few people I know had a super time in junior high school. For the most part they all had bowl cuts, were a bit smelly, and were once told over MSN chat that “nobody liked them” by girls who probably went on to become criminals or dental hygienists. Few other careers are really possible for children who succeed socially in junior high.
Life in university isn’t so bad, in comparison. No one makes fun of my clothes, I don’t have to take math, and it’s full of other people who were dorky at thirteen. People hold the door for you, and birthday party invitations aren’t as controversial as they once were.
Since then I’ve been feeling pretty good. Yup, it’s that time of year – everyone is starting to get a little sleep and shower deprived, and I seem to spend at least ten minutes daily walking in panicked circles, flipping frantically through my agenda, and moaning loudly.
But I’ll still take third year over age thirteen any day of the week.
A Very Calgarian Thanksiving
We ended up where our parents started, but we can’t forget where we came from.
Even if I wanted to, I could never be “from” Ottawa. I’ve tried telling people before, new acquaintances who wouldn’t be able to call my bluff. But I always feel too guilty. It’s simply not the truth – I’m from Calgary, and there’s nothing I can do to forget it.
I’m reminded of this because Thanksgiving weekend is arguably the time of year when my “school” life and my “home” life mingle most aggressively. It’s only a few days break, after all, so it’s a slap-and-dash alternate universe switcheroo – different family members, different friends, different city.
While I’ve been home for the break in the past, this year however we all acknowledged that it’s a little too far to go. So I’ll have my first University Thanksgiving – and all the messy attempts at stuffing and cranberry sauce that implies. But since I can’t have my family here, I’ll be graced with visits from close childhood friends now living in Toronto and Montreal, and we’ll remind each other exactly where we came from.
They’re in much the same situation as me. As opposed to Ontario, where students seem to move only hours from home, the post-graduation exodus to schools “back East” is pretty standard in Calgary. At least one parent is often from Ontario or Quebec, and sending us out here for school is, in a way, like sending us back home. We may be far from them, but we usually fall right into the warm laps of grandparents, aunts and uncles.
Add to that the limited number of universities in the West, especially if you’re not so keen on the engineering deal, and a huge chunk of my friends ended up where their parents started. Some even took it further – not only did they return to their parent’s home province, they returned to their alma mater, their old neighbourhood, and – in one case – their old apartment building.
Montreal is an especially strong example. It often seems that half the kids from home moved to Montreal. They go to school together, live together, hang out together. If a band from Calgary tours there, guess who makes up the crowd? I could go to whole parties in Montreal, probably without meeting a single person who isn’t from Calgary. There’s even a neighbourhood nicknamed “Little Calgary,” according to my friend Guillaume, that resembles some sort of ex-pat community.
Of the kids I grew up with, if our parents are from Canada at all (and a good chunk aren’t), they usually came to Calgary in the eighties to get work. A lot of these parents, for obvious reasons, are engineers. (There are a disproportionate numbers of engineers in Calgary, which I think says an awful lot about the city itself. And because engineers are convinced that it is the best profession in existence, every math-deficient kid in the city has some joke about how their parents put them in science camps at age five and keep asking when they’re going to give up those philosophy classes and start taking calculus.)
My Mum is an English Montrealer, and my Dad grew up in Windsor, but was born near Edinburgh. So I, like many of my friends, am a first generation Calgarian. The things we associate with being “truly” Calgarian – Vietnamese subs, for example, or going to illegal parties in Riley Park – weren’t even around when they moved to the city, and certainly not back in the days of the original oil barons. My parents made the city their own (they even wear cowboy boots now), but it defined me from the beginning.
So my childhood friends Guillaume, who goes to Concordia, and Scott, who goes to McGill, are coming to stay with me this weekend, along with Rebecca, who’s at York. And regardless of historical connections to our school-year cities, all attempts to pass for “Montrealers”, “Ottawans” and “Torontonians” will immediately go out the window. Who are we fooling, after all? We may be following our parents back where they came from, but in the end, we’re Calgarians through and through.
I cook, I clean, I… just grew up?
I’m not quite sure what happened, but I appear to be growing up. No, no, it’s not one of those tearful milestone moments – I don’t have a graduation cap in hand, I haven’t received any prestigious awards, and I still don’t have a job. In fact, the growing up I’ve been doing appears to [...]
I’m not quite sure what happened, but I appear to be growing up.
No, no, it’s not one of those tearful milestone moments – I don’t have a graduation cap in hand, I haven’t received any prestigious awards, and I still don’t have a job.
In fact, the growing up I’ve been doing appears to be rather mundane. It’s the day to day things, the little efforts that are changing. I’ve finally been applying some of the lessons I picked up from reading that O magazine that’s always on the coffee table at home. Eat well! Look great! Feel happy! In fact, according to Oprah, all I need now is a jewel-toned twin set to achieve whatever is at the end of her aspirational rainbow.
Big change number one: I now own a hairbrush (not just one, but two brushes – these things come in spurts, apparently), so I’m looking slightly tidier.
I also bought a bike, so I suddenly get regular and vigorous exercise riding along Ottawa’s beautiful canal, which allows me to lower my cholesterol levels and get in touch with nature. And although I ride at a very leisurely pace (I have no other), I still spend the rest of the day trying to air myself out underneath the hand dryer, which allows others to notice how much exercise I’m getting, too.
Since my little adventure with cooking began, I’ve begun returning home from the grocery store overwhelmed with yuppie staples like fresh mozzarella, yellow zucchini, and Tuscan sausage, whipping up semi-elaborate meals with a total lack of modesty.
I didn’t even see that movie Julie & Julia, but it seems to have unleashed some sort of long-buried desire to revel in the sensory pleasures of anything with an expiration date.
I even clean things now. Last year I did not clean things – ever. My roommate will attest to this. But I swept the floor three days ago. And I put my shoes on the shoe rack last week (I am still working out the details of what else needs to be cleaned.)
The best part of “getting my act together” (as certain individuals have put it), is the ability to shock and amaze with skills that others would consider standard. It has been a long time since I have impressed anyone with my more prodigious skills – reading very bad novels very quickly, for example, or making up lewd limericks for people on their birthdays.
Still, lest I become the inspiration for another Margaret Wente column on spoiled, incompetent young people, let me attest that lots of third year students have long mastered basic domestic tasks, and are busy living smooth and successful daily lives.
My friend Rebecca, who is a music student at York, makes her own pasta sauce from scratch. I’m pretty sure she even had an herb garden at one point. Ivy, a forestry student at UBC, eats a lot of strange vegan-type grains, and does the stairs to Wreck Beach as a morning workout (for anyone who has not trudged up them before, these stairs appear to number around one billion.) Last year, Jess, the roommate, cooked a whole ham. A ham. It wasn’t Easter, and I don’t even think it was Sunday. She just felt like cooking up an enormous pig flank, I suppose.
Continual disarray is certainly not the rule for university students, although the road to fresh vegetables and well laundered sheets can be long and arduous, the road to adulthood even more so. However, the struggle is beautiful (or at least appreciated my roommates and Mums), and possibly inevitable.
After all, I resisted for years, and it seems to finally be catching up with me.
Mango Curry Shrimp Dip (An Idiot-Proof Recipe)
Free time will be a hot commodity in a few weeks, so my biggest piece of advice at this point is: enjoy it! Or, you can use it to catch up on a couple life skills that are in major disrepair. This attitude explains my recent enthusiasm for cooking. Or what I consider cooking, anyways, which [...]
Free time will be a hot commodity in a few weeks, so my biggest piece of advice at this point is: enjoy it! Or, you can use it to catch up on a couple life skills that are in major disrepair.
This attitude explains my recent enthusiasm for cooking. Or what I consider cooking, anyways, which is really more like… mixing. And occasionally pan frying. Very occasionally.
Last night, I re-created the most adventurous and possibly the most labour intensive recipe I have ever attempted. And I totally screwed it up! (I tried to halve the recipe, but forgot halfway through.) Even still, it was extremely delicious, and therefore it makes a fancy looking, yet risk-free, meal for any student just striking out on their own.
It’s called ‘Shrimp Mango Curry Dip.’ It was passed along on a photocopied sheet from an unknown cookbook, but I figure it has been altered to meet the needs of each passing cook. For example, I can never find mango chutney, so I just use peach or apricot jam. Still delicious. And while it’s divine on crackers, you can warm it up and use it as a sauce for penne, or served on a bed of rice. Extremely delicious.
Ingredients:
4 oz. Cream cheese
½ cup sour cream
1/3 jar mango/peach/apricot jam or chutney.
1 tsp. curry powder
Shrimp – however many you want! (I buy them frozen and cooked, heat them up in a pan, and then cut them in halves)
¼ cup onions (again, how much do you like onions?)
2 green onions (I use a handful of red pepper chunks instead. It looks prettier.)
salt and pepper to taste.
Mix it all together until smooth. It should be a creamy shade of vivid orange.
While the portions might not look huge in the bowl, this makes quite a big batch, and paired with rice or pasta, it’s very filling. If you don’t want to eat it for three days, save it for a dinner party (it should serve atleast 3 or 4) or bring it to a potluck as a dip. I guarantee you will be extremely popular.
Cooking: for useless and impatient slobs
If you can put it in a sandwich, you can put it on these pizzas – and impress your friends, too
I am on a bit of a culinary kick at the moment.
This would surprise almost anyone who knows me well, as I am not known for my enthusiasm in the kitchen. If anything, I invite friends over for dinner and then learn how to cook the chicken. Gives it a sense of urgency, I find.
Because of this, I’ve received an endless number of cook books for Christmases and birthdays – “Easy Chicken”, “Rookie Cooking”, “Cooking for Useless and Impatient Slobs”, etc. None of these have enticed me. I open them, I look at the pictures, but something stops me from re-creating the meal.
Namely, there are too many ingredients involved. Really – when am I going to need oregano again? Let alone capers.
So I am providing here a series of impromptu recipes. I say recipes loosely, because to qualify for my approval, they have to be too simple to appear in any genuine cook book. So simple they would shame any genuine cookbook. So simple they can be made in about ten minutes, while reading the paper, washing the dishes, and talking on the phone.
The first recipe is my Mum’s, and it has been my saving grace at endless dinner parties. It is called the “gourmet pizza.”
The “gourmet pizza” is only gourmet because it looks more attractive than the average pizza.
Use a pita of any size or disposition, layer on what you want, put in the oven on broil, and take out when it looks crispy. The only key is good, colourful ingredients (this we have learned from the Italians.) Here are my favourite combinations:
The Italian Pizza: Pesto sauce with fresh mozzarella, a combination of green and red peppers, onions and zucchini, plus shrimp or prosciutto.
The Cowboy Pizza: Barbeque or chipotle sauce, Monterey jack or cheddar, with caramelized onions, red peppers, and roast chicken (you can always use a full, cooked chicken from the grocery store for this one.)
The Asian Pizza: Peanut sauce, plus mozzarella, red peppers, cilantro and shredded carrots, roast chicken or shrimp.
I’ve also tried sausages, bacon, feta cheese, cucumber, goat cheese, asparagus, and a particular favourite – slices of avocado. I rarely use actual tomato sauce. A good rule of thumb is: if you have it in your fridge, you can put it in a sandwich, and if you can put it in a sandwich, you can put it on a pizza and serve it to friends.
If you’re entertaining for many, supply the pitas and the spreads, and get everyone to bring a different topping. Everyone picks what they want, and the combinations get a little more exciting than your average pepperoni.
For other lazy, sloppy and generally unwilling student cooks, I’ll be including a series of super short and easy “recipes” from time to time, suggested by competent and creative friends across the country (and one in Australia.)
Soon to come are tips for making Mexican salsa burgers (with sweet potato fries and fresh guacamole), and the world’s easiest salad wraps.
Facebook as a family affair
Untag all those photos, because my Dad is now on Facebook
When my Dad answered the phone on Monday, he had exciting news. “I joined Facebook,” he said casually. I froze, shocked. I had long feared this moment, but had imagined the danger had passed until now.
He was already updating his profile, adding friends, and uploading pictures. In short, he had already gotten the hang of things.
He informed me he already had several ‘friends’ – Uncle Yves, Uncle Burton, and Cousin Fay. It was a short, but powerful, line-up of family and friends who I had been alarmed to see entering the social media bubble. My fourteen-year-old brother, unsurprisingly, seemed reluctant to accept his friend request.
My Mum seemed slightly amused by this development. “Your sister and I went to the mountains yesterday, but your Dad stayed at home,” she whispered on the phone in the kitchen, anxious not to be overheard in the living room, where he was tagging photos of a fly fishing trip. “He’s been on Facebook all weekend!”
We shouldn’t be surprised. My Dad is an old hand with the Blackberry – we regard it as significantly more important than his second kidney. He doesn’t just use it for e-mail, either. Way back when, he introduced me to the first Arctic Monkeys album by bringing up a BBC article on them during a family dinner.
But long after he had signed up for a YouTube account so he could save all those videos of shark attacks, he didn’t seem to have an interest in Facebook. I thought he saw it as a bastion of poor grammar, but perhaps it just flew below his radar.
Not so for many parents these days. Although Facebook used to be for kids-only (or at least those under 25), a haven for party photos and un-censored rambling, it’s slowly being sanitized. As parents enter the fray, photos are rapidly being un-tagged, language quickly cleaned up, and ‘girls of the world’ applications surreptitiously removed.
Students have been cautioned for years to remember that the internet is a public space. But the disdain of a future potential employer is no kind of motivation to be careful, compared to the more current, and more horrifying, prospect of my Dad browsing photos of me at “Beerjing 2008.”
Some parents are on Facebook to be snoops, it’s true, but most of the parents I have seen seem to just want to keep up with their kid’s lives, and maybe some of their own friends, too.
They leave messages commenting on profile pictures, telling their children they miss them, and occasionally finishing with an ‘xoxo.’
Now, my own Dad has a chance to do the same. Although I tried to talk myself out of the idea, eventually I did a light purge of my own profile, and sent him a friend request.
I knew I might have to be a little more careful in future, but I figured it would probably be a good thing, for my privacy and my career prospects.
He just accepted my request, and I’m looking forward to posting links to articles I know we’ll disagree on, and maybe some new music I think he’ll like. The best part is getting a peak at his newest photos long before Christmas rolls around. There’s four albums already, and it’s almost possible that he has better things to do than “creep” my profile.
And now, I’ve received another friend request. It’s from my Aunt. ‘Friend suggestions’ are popping up, flashing the faces of my Uncle, cousins, and family friends. And I’m not quite sure what I’ve unleashed.
First step: Learn to use the library
Ten tips for the common sense student
Lest we forget, going to university actually includes doing some homework. And as Todd Pettigrew pointed out, high school doesn’t always leave you prepared for what awaits when the mid-terms start popping up in October.
The work will be more difficult, generally, but first and foremost it will be different. The way classes are structured, the papers you are expected to turn in, and the marking schemes probably won’t be what you’re used to. And in order to avoid that reality-check (slash soul crushing) grade on the first assignment, there are a few basics tips I think can help you get prepared.
Now, these won’t ensure you pass your exams, nor will they even tell you how to write one. They’re just tips to cover your basics in the first couple weeks (particularly if you’re in arts), and they will seem like common sense – but it’s the kind of common sense I wish had occurred to me a bit earlier in my first year!
Step 1: Learn to use the library.
Unless your parents are librarians and you were reared on the Dewey decimal system, you will probably take a little while to get used to your school library. The trick is to do this early, not the day before your first paper is due.
You can get an upper-year student to show you how the library works, or you can ask a librarian (but be wary, the kindliness of university librarians is never a guarantee!) However, in many cases, you will just have to wander around for a while becoming steadily more impatient, frustrated and possibly sweaty, until the little numbers on the books mean something to you.
This means practice. Pick some books you actually want to read, and go find them. (Trust me, this will save you much first paper anguish.)
Step 2: Learn to use online journal databases.
This is just as important as the library these days. If your professor or the library holds an information session on how to find journals, or provides hand outs, pay attention. If you’re on your own, it’s time to ask around and do some digging on the library’s website (usually links are well marked or under FAQs.)
Unfortunately, if you go to say, Guelph, I can’t tell you where to look. I can just tell you it’s important that you find out.
Once you’re in to the journal database, try sites like JSTOR to help you find articles in multiple journals at once.
Step 3: Learn how to source your research.
This is a big one in university, and not only do you have to keep meticulous records of where ALL your research comes from you have to be able to reference them properly.
The two sourcing methods are APA and MLA. Before you ever write a paper, buy a basic book on essay writing, or print guides off the internet. For each essay, find out which one your prof prefers, and stick to it!
Here’s one to know before your prof tells you: never, ever use Wikipedia as a source!
Step 4: Go to every class. Sit near the front.
Technically, your professors are not taking a record of your attendance. That’s because you are the only one who will suffer if you don’t go. You may be tired, sick, or hung-over – but you’ll learn more just being there, even if you’re half asleep and drooling, then you will from the power point slides or some other kid’s notes. Because most of the time these won’t be legible, or will be full of unexplained graphs.
Starting university – it’s just like summer camp!
Six tips to start your year off right
My mum asked me today if I was ready to go back to school, as I will be hopping on a plane in two weeks to the day. I shrugged.
“Yeah, of course I’m ready.”
She looked unconvinced. I am rarely, if ever, prepared for anything.
“But you’ve got two weeks, and you’ll be in Vancouver this week… don’t you have a lot you need to do?”
“No. Mum, it’s a bit like having your third baby,” I said, about to inform her on the complexities of something she, after all, has experienced, and I have not. I haven’t even had one baby, let alone three.
“By this point, I pretty well know how it goes. All I have to do is pick up a bag of diapers and drag the crib out of the garage.”
I had stolen this anecdote from a couple I used to babysit for, so it has some credibility, but my Mum still rolled her eyes.
Regardless, the moment reminded me that it hasn’t always been this simple. Now, I know exactly what I’ll do the moment I get to Ottawa, but two years ago, the city was a blank slate – on which I was actively projecting my most fantastic, but also most terrifying, notions of university life.
So I have utmost sympathy and compassion if you are a first-year university student, especially if you’re throwing up right now. I threw up too. It’s okay!
If you’re like me, the most terrifying part is probably not knowing what to expect once you get to school. I’m not the best person to inform you – I had approximately two friends for most of the year, and probably went to the grand total of one party (not a success story, per se).
But, especially if you’re going into residence, I hope I can provide a few pointers, or at least points of comfort, to start you off:
1. Think of it like high-contact summer camp.
The first few days of school can be a bit mad-cap, so it’s important to get off to a good start. If you’re like me, and find socializing with people your own age nerve-wracking, this is an important time to scrounge up all your courage and be at your most social. Friend groups (initial ones, anyways) are often made within the first day or two, so that’s game time. And, uh, it’s supposed to be fun.
2. Put yourself out there. Shamelessly, if required.
First of all, introduce yourself. No, really, it’s not that dorky. Almost everyone will be feeling awkward, and sometimes you have to make the first move. After all, introductions are a tried and tested way to meet people. Don’t be afraid to go to events alone, and don’t turn down invitations because you want to write your best friend or call your mum. You have the rest of the year to be homesick.
3. Don’t limit yourself to a friend group immediately.
You want to meet people quickly, but you don’t have to commit to them. It’s easy, and in fact quite natural, to find that mid-October, you’re eating lunch with people you met during frosh week, simply because they were the first people you met, not because you actually like them. And it’s also common to be eating lunch with a different group of people by mid-October, with those frosh-friends only a distant memory.
4. Don’t hook up with anyone on your floor in the first week.
Uh, yeah. It may be tempting, but it will probably haunt you for the rest of the year.
5. Find yourself a mentor.
This is an important one. You will find plenty of people to party with, but it can be a real life saver to have an upper year to show you around and give you advice. They are often especially helpful if they’re in your program or from your home town.
Mentors are not hard to find. But they will usually require you to leave your residence room, and the other first years. Program societies often have mentorship programs. At Carleton journalism, you can sign up for one – mine took me for coffee and edited my articles when I was having panic attacks.
Even if there isn’t a program, you can get a mentor just by hanging around and looking really lost. Some of these will become your closest friends (hey there, Laura Baziuk!)
Stock up on extracurriculars (I’ll elaborate on these another time.) I may be biased – but if you like writing, join your student paper. I was an editor last year, as was Jenn Pagliaro, and we were always keen to have new students to take under our wings. In fact, it was part of what we were paid to do. So don’t be shy!
6. Get started now
Like my Mum would say, sometimes a little preparation goes a long way. You may wonder how you can get started on any of this when you’re just sitting at home agonizing. But you can get yourself in the social mindset – start talking to people at the bus stop or in the grocery store to warm up. And if you know of someone who goes to your school already, meet up with them for a coffee, and ask if they can show you around once the year starts.
Of course, if you’re heading to Carleton this fall, I would be more than happy to show you around. And stay tuned, for in the coming days I plan to extoll not just my mother’s advice on leaving for university, but my father’s as well (spoiler: it involves salmon!)
Nostalgia is for dummies
I’m trying to keep in mind all the nasty things childhood entails.
It’s August, and in Calgary that means a long slow spiral towards a wintry September. The strangeness of the city is that by the 1st, the summer seems to have run its course, and the air starts to smell like sharpened pencils and mulch.
Generally, nothing quite gets me like that back-to-school feeling. Even in elementary, when going back to school meant standing on our porch being photographed in a dress designed by the Amish, followed by ten months of “Math Minutes”, I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were about to happen.
During a university summer, going back to school means four months of working are mercifully over, and as I wistfully examine my timetable, I see a long happy year ahead of “Hindu Aesthetics and Imagery” and “Canadian Foreign Policy Since 1945.” Good, practical pursuits that don’t require me to master a vacuum cleaner or remember how to calculate GST.
But this year, I still can’t help but feel a little short-changed. Where was my summer? Where were all the camp songs around the fire, the feeling of the wind off the lake, the smell of Stampede sausages roasting on a grill?
Upon closer reflection, the majority of these nostalgic longings seem to be several years stale. To locate their source, I have to look back a little further than last summer, or tenth grade. In fact, I’m not sure they’ve been in fine form since puberty hit. And even then, things weren’t quite as peachy as I remember.
Summer camp, for example, often entailed living in a cabin with a bunch of sociopathic pre-teen girls, all more developed and much scarier than I, and hell bent on getting a boyfriend by mid-week.
Any lake was forbidding, as it meant the wearing of a bathing suit was imminent. This was something I avoided with an intensity bordering on the obsessive. Convinced that my legs were the size and texture of Godzilla’s, I would have preferred to enter the water wearing a sheet.
And I shouldn’t even start on Stampede. It was marked with pancake breakfasts at ungodly hours, every day for at least a week, where my entire family wore matching bandanas and dorky pins of cartoon cows, and I would get kicked in the face by kid-sized spurs while in the bouncy tent.
So I try to keep in mind the nasty things childhood entails as I lurch grudgingly towards adulthood. Playing dodgeball. Getting lice. Wearing floral stretch pants.
I try to remember these things, while August has already given itself over to autumn rain, and friends are slowly heading back to the cities they increasingly call home.
But I’m still trying to make a few last childhood memories, flawed though they might be.
How to spot a Canadian
Canadians are the only nationality who, en masse, wear folk music festival T-shirts
It’s folk fest weekend here in Calgary.
I know that music festivals are a source of some excitement in many cities – particularly ones where the summer is made up of one month (July), in which you serve as a roaming buffet for all sorts of insect life, enthusiastically encase your pale, fleshy legs in very small shorts, and get a very bad sunburn. August, it goes without saying, is spent peeling off burnt skin, and glumly emoting that the whole month feels like a Tuesday in September.
So, for this one weekend, it’s no surprise that Calgary gets all astir. My friends in Ottawa tell me that Bluesfest feeds much the same excitement, and a friend from Guelph speaks enthusiastically of Hillside all year. It seems that folk music festivals (and their ilk) are very much a Canadian enthusiasm, and evidence of this can be seen all over the world.
We discovered this through a popular Dunn-family game while travelling. Not the one where we make up rude translations for the French news using bad accents, or the one where we add inappropriate embellishment to the cricket commentary on the radio. The one where we stereotype families and try to guess their nationality!
While visiting tourist-ridden central Italy last summer, this game became especially entertaining. After large, sleep-inducing pizzas, too tired to brave the sun, we would sit on the corner of a piazza and look out at the crowds. After spending so much time around the Italians, we had no difficulties spotting them – often wearing small white shorts, tan, and enormously fond of gold sequins, they positively glittered in the afternoon sun. The French were noticeable, I claimed, because they wore very stylish shoes, tossed their sweaters over their shoulders, and had precocious, tidy looking children. The Germans and Scandinavians both looked very blonde, their attire extremely practical, and the Brits were vigorously freckled.
My father often travels to the states, especially Texas, so he had a keen eye for spotting the Americans. He would immediately point out a gentleman – wearing a pastel coloured polo shirt, tucked into khaki shorts, with a belt. The belt, he said, was key – without this feature, the fellow could just as well be Dutch. My sister and I had no trouble spotting their daughters, for our part. In 35 degree heat, they were the only girls wearing a mini skirts and tank tops – with Ugg boots and wool Burberry scarves.
Now, a European eye might assume that there is little to distinguish the Canadian and the American families based on attire alone. However, my father never wears a belt with shorts, and our summer is much too short for us to wear wool in July. And, as we looked, our theory was proven correct. A Canadian family suddenly came into view, looking. . . very much like us.
Number One Household Hazard
I don’t understand basic household appliances, and I feel at odds with the common hair brush
Yesterday I lit a plastic jar of peanut butter on fire. By putting it in the microwave.
I tell you this, because my intention with this blog is to channel your average, albeit rather hapless, university student. You know – the trials and tribulations of semi-adult life – living on your own (at least from September to May), but entirely sustained on bucket-o-wings at Quinn’s Pub and the ingenious discovery that you can wash underwear in the sink when a whole load would just take too much effort. But I’m thinking the peanut butter incident (I just thought it could use a little… softening up) is not your average degree of idiocy. As my mother would say, I’ve outdone myself this time!
No one was hurt, as it was. There was a brief but exhilarating burst of flame (shooting theatrically out of the top of the jar), but it was quickly extricated with the contents still unspreadable. And I knew my fourteen-year-old brother and I were thinking much the same – can we put it in again?
My mother and father worry about me, much the way yours likely worry about you. They probably worry about your diet – when you inhale a cheeseburger faster than the ninth grade boys in the back seat, yet seem to have worrying little familiarity with the protocol for cutting up an onion. Personally, when I learned how to cut up an onion, it was a proud moment – here was one vegetable I finally, at long last, knew what to do with – put it in butter chicken!
Maybe when you insist on your right to a night on the town, yet lose your key at the bar (you thought it was tucked snugly into your bra, which elicits an extended bout of awkward fondling), and end up throwing personal items at your sister’s window to wake her up, a little drunk, at four in the morning.
And they might even feel some concern when you spend much of your time wearing saggy jeans with awkward brown stains on the back pocket (what? I sat on a chocolate muffin!), and no longer see the use in brushing your hair, let alone subjecting it to the typical array of sprays, gels and irons.
The reason I know my mother and father worry about me is because, today in the car, my father looked over and said delicately, “Your mother and I worry about you. You appear to have… no domestic IQ.”
Thankfully, I have at least a few more years of university nailed down. This is as full a strategy as I, and the majority of my friends, can think of for keeping adulthood at bay. While the realities of jobs and tuition and “real” relationships still exist, papers and articles and karaoke nights provide at least a blissful distraction.
I am grateful every single day that I’m in university.
