Until last week I had never questioned why, several years ago, one February morning before 9 a.m., I was able to buy a warm, round, and crusty loaf of walnut-raisin bread in the University College foyer. A table had been set…
Work-Study or Volunteering: Working in a school lab
Anyone who's taken an intro-level science course at U of T is familiar with the undergrad science lab: it's big, it's hairy, it appears every other week in three-hour segments, and it leaves you feeling that while you've learned some…
What I call the Apocalypse U of T calls The Distinguished Lecturer Series: one way to deal with fear.
There's something about waking in the still-dark hours of the night that causes me to lapse into a temporary bout of intense anxiety, in which I worry about any of the following things: 1) whether or not I really am…
How To Get Peed On Twice In One Day
or U of T: the Field Trip Extravaganza Post Okay, so it wasn't me who got peed on twice in one day, but it was still fairly amazing: seventy-two hours into the fall term of '09, and I was standing…
The end that is no end at all
Oh, sweet summer. The cicadas droning from somewhere near a bone-dry tree, leaves clapping in the breeze. Blades of grass tickling the skin while lying prostrate in the park. That sleep-inducing late afternoon haze. It was only weeks ago that…
Volunteering: Boon or Bane?
2006. Holding butterfly nets in the Financial District. 5 a.m.: A flutter between my cupped hands, and a slight beating of feathered wings. In my hands I hold a little bird. It's a good thing my friend is so persuasive,…
Assigned Readings at U of T: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Up to last week, I believed that the r'aison d'être behind studying English is good communication. Boy, was I proved wrong: for a fourth year seminar, I was assigned an article, Animal Nomenclature: Facing Other Animals, by Richard Nash, English academic extraordinaire. First…
Replace my body with bits of metal: into the future
I am slowly becoming Darth Vader. It's not just that I knocked my teeth out in a bicycling accident and had to replace them with titanium implants. It's not the molar fillings, either. It's not even that both my tonsils and…
“Uh, so what did I learn from humanities?” Mary gets a rock for Christmas
"So really, what's the point?" This is the question that creeps into my consciousness with frightening regularity. Particularly now that I'm finishing university and graduating with a specialist in history, without any palpable skills other than supposedly being able to…
A picture (or two), a flighty student, and a thousand words
It's easy for me to think of myself as being a little flighty. You could shack me up alone on an wooded island for a week, plunk me down in the middle of Calcutta, or place me in the dusty…