Daily Events
In case anyone is interested in my life, here are my daily accounts. Exciting, isn't it? No,it's not!!!! But something to read when you are bored........... These are actually e-mails I wrote to my friend Anthony since I arrived here in Montreal. Actually, e-mail excerpts.
I think this is Sunday:
As for me, I don’t have anyone to come with me tomorrow for my first day at McGill. Of course, it’s not a real school day; I’m just going to a psychology meeting to have advisors and such people look over my course schedule, make sure I chose the right ones, and tell me if I’m in the right place right now. But it’s still something that’s a pain in the ass to do, since I have to find a bus to take me to the university, locate the Stewart Biological Center, and get myself into the right room inside of it by 2:30 PM. Fortunately or unfortunately - only time will tell - my boyfriend has finally given me a call to say he is sort of moved into his residence situation, and would like to meet with me at some point tomorrow. I told him to get his ass over to my place and keep me company tonight, but he made up some bullshit about not having subway tickets, although I then informed him that you can buy the damn things at the station which is about twenty paces outside his front door. I guess I’m meeting him for lunch tomorrow anyway, so at least I will see one familiar face in this insane city.
I guess this is the first time in my new-found semi-adult life that I have faced even an iota of adversity, which is kind of a good thing, since it makes me a lot more conscious of things around me. I keep thinking of interesting things (interesting to me, anyway) while walking around the streets of Montreal. For example, that Quebecers in their characteristically self-involved way, really take advantage of a person’s moral sense of guilt. These Montrealers will walk across the busiest street in the middle of the downtown area, whether the pedestrian light is red or not, whether the car traffic light is red or not, or even if a truck the size of an African elephant is thundering towards them at a speed that is definitely not even close to the limit on that road, with a complete disregard for their lives. Inevitably, or at least usually, the motorist will screech to a stop about two inches away from the glaring twenty-year-old mother and her two toddlers, and these people get away with their righteous crap just because the poor old truck driver had a soft spot for human life. Honestly, laws were created for a reason, and I think people should be willing to face the consequences of breaking them. I often have the urge to run over people jaywalking across Montreal Road in Ottawa when cars are coming from both sides, but I resist because maybe they didn’t have the higher education offered in kindergarten to teach them to look both ways before crossing. And just think, Anthony, this is just one of the insanely mundane ideas that has run through my head since I have arrived here. I am obviously in dire need of social stimulation.
I bet you are thinking right now, What kind of adversity are you facing? Yes, I know it’s pretty hard to believe that a person living all by herself in a beautiful city with a three-bedroom apartment, two futons, a bed, a couch, an armchair, two dressers, and about three hundred nifty-looking lamps is facing adversity. Well, maybe not. But I’m all by myself with no one to share all of this with! I keep thinking about how cool it is to have set up this place a bit so that it looks nice, and wanting everyone I know to come over and have dinner with me and a chat over some red wine in the evening. So at least my loneliness leads to some difficulties, and I can say honestly that I am not living the high life at all.
This is Tuesday:
Dear Anthony,
I’m sorry I didn’t write you a letter yesterday; I don’t know if you’ve noticed this yet, since I haven’t checked my e-mail to see if you checked your e-mail yesterday or today and replied to my previous e-mail, or wrote me anything at all. I ended up taking an active part in the McGill social scene for the first time since I’ve arrived here. It’s nothing too special, actually. Well, I will tell you about my day yesterday, after which I may or may not be inspired to conclude with my emotions regarding the subject.
I was woken up yet again yesterday at eight in the morning because the phone was ringing. How lovely, it was my boyfriend, who had just got his phone installed in his room in residence. I informed him that it would be nice not to phone a person at eight in the morning just because you happen to be awake. However, we had planned to meet at 12:30 that day for lunch anyway, so it’s not like I would have slept much longer as it was. In addition, the worker man who installed all of my lights arrived for the second day in a row at 8:30AM in order to fix my leaking faucet in the kitchen. He also kindly agreed to install one final hanging lamp on the ceiling at the end of the hall where it meets the kitchen, but was unable to fix the faucet. He said he’d ask the landlord to give him a new one to put in for me, and that he’d return in a week. So I thought to myself, Well, I’ve been woken up for good now, might as well take a shower... When lo and behold, this man comes back five minutes later because he got the new faucet for my sink already! So now my sink doesn’t leak, but my shower still does and the constant noise is extremely irritating, so I believe I will speak to my landlord about this, as well as about giving that other underling fellow of his some proper English lessons.
Having showered and dressed relatively nicely, since I had to go out to a meeting on the subject of majoring in psychology at McGill, and wanted to make a pretty good impression in case I happened to meet anyone, I set off on the metro for downtown, as I had two metro tickets and did not realise I could also use them for the bus. I met Axel, who was all hell bent on meeting people and getting to know people and yadda yadda yadda, and we went to have lunch in this bistro place. I, in case you were wondering, am not too keen on meeting people, as I am always convinced that they will either hate me or think I’m weird or badly dressed, so I declined his invitation to eat lunch at this barbecue his residence was having. Axel seemed distressed by the fact that I, contrarily to him, seemed hell bent on isolating myself in this basement (which, by the way, still smells disgusting, and my mom said I have to go tell the landlord to do something about it). Anyway, at least he had brought me flowers, which is what I was hoping would happen since I had put a nice empty vase on the end of one table in the living room the night I organised placement of the lamps in my boredom and loneliness. Still, I fear for this relationship in this city... We are obviously going to have very different groups of friends, since I am not a party animal except when I’m with my best friends back in Ottawa.
After lunch, I wanted to shop, so we did that for a short while because Axel had to open a bank account and I had to go to my meeting for psychology at the Stewart Biological Sciences Centre. I don’t know if you are aware of the fact that Montreal is built on what is possibly the steepest incline of a fucking hill that exists, but I will let you know that the Stewart Biological Sciences Centre on the McGill campus is about halfway up this hill. So I walked up there, and discovered that going to class there will be more of a workout than any membership at the YMCA down the street will give me this year. The meeting was boring as hell and made more so by the fact that I didn’t know anybody at all. All in all, I was pretty depressed.
Then I went home and slept for an hour, and then I went to Axel’s residence for dinner, because he said his dad bought him pork chops and he would make us some. This was nice since I am lazy and have no food and hadn’t eaten a decent meal in a few days. I met his apartment-mates; his roommate Greg seemed very nice and a good person to share a room with. Louis, one of the other guys in their apartment, is an obvious party crazy maniac and a stoner and just one of those people who is all cool, if you know what I mean. Actually, he was a very, very nice guy, and I enjoyed talking to him, but I would not be overjoyed to have to study with a fellow like him in my home. The fourth guy, Peter, is fresh off the boat from China and speaks very little English. I met him briefly for about four seconds before he was off with the Wok he’d brought to have a cooking party upstairs with his Chinese friends. And these were the first people I met who are going to McGill.
The residence was having this evening event where you went with others from the res to a bistro, a diner, or a bar. I told Axel I wanted to go to the bistro, which we did. This was excellent because we were sitting across from each other and next to these two girls who were roommates and more my kind of people. One was pretty outoging and nice, and we talked for a long time about the benefits of computers over laptops and vice versa (by the way, since all these other rich foreign kids at McGill have laptops I have opted to get one too). The other was also fresh off the boat, but from Germany, and was very jetlagged from her trip to Canada since she had only arrived on Thursday night. She was very pretty (I know looks are not relevant, but she was! She had this blond hair blue eye look, you know... European!). Anyway, I enjoyed talking to these two people since they were the first I met who were not obsessed with drinking and smoking and partying. The German girl, Kathrin, is also in the Arts Faculty, and she told me I should go to the Frosh week events, so I think I will, just so I won’t be a total loner for the rest of my life. Besides that there is a boat tour, which sounds okay.
After that, we went back to the residence and I was in Axel and Greg’s room when about two billion people came in to hang out with them. Of course, the guys offered people beer, but I hate beer so I didn’t drink any. Then these two girls walked in and just started unrolling a cheapie cigar and rolled the longest joint I’ve ever seen, and smoked its ass off right there in the room. Then these other people walked on in, stuck a frozen pizza in their oven, and started to DEAL marijuana, right there on the kitchen table. Suffice it to say that despite the obvious chance to meet people, I’m quite glad I don’t live in residence. What a place to study!
Anyway, today was this orientation day event all day, so I went to that. I met this girl who seemed nice but very young, from Toronto, and she worked at the Bay too! Later on I met up with Kathrin again and I hung out with her all day. Fortunately she is a pretty shy person so I didn’t feel obligated to try and meet any other people. Although I kind of randomly met a lot of people without actually talking to them. I swear, Anthony, about 90% of the people I’ve met are not from this country. I met a guy from Iraq, a girl from Kuwait, about 8 people from New York or New Jersey, 5 people from Britain, and too many people from Germany to count. In case you are wondering, I am not such a social butterfly, but I met these people because orientation day activities kind of forced us to say hello to people and exchange names and countries of origin.
Then I came home in the fucking pouring rain (I walked to see how far it was... Far!) and was in a lonely kind of mood because everyone seemed to have friends and I didn’t, and I ate McDonalds to console myself! Which I feel fat about now... Anyway, that’s okay.
I’m still very lacking in basic necessities here. I have no pots and pans or dishes or cutlery or anything. I have no TV. No laptop as of yet. Since I’ve spent time out of the house, though, it hasn’t mattered too much. I wish the apartment didn’t smell though; that bothers me. The dampness. Actually I’m just in a foul mood on dampness since my shirt is damp from walking home in the rain, and it is making me feel cold.
I feel like I’m in a time warp sometimes. Here I am in Montreal, and it’s as if Ottawa never existed, like I’ve been here all my life. Then I feel like I’m just nowhere because I have so few connections here. I’m going through the motions of the day, and the fact that this is a much more beautiful city than I ever imagined makes that easy, even enjoyable, to do, but I haven’t had much chance to really get to know it yet... The city, that is. So it just seems like I’m nowhere and time is flying by. My grandmother has this grandfather clock in her house that says Tempus Fugit at the top of it, above the face. It was always there in the doorway in her house in Montreal, when she still lived here. And today I was walking by the street with that house on it, and through Westmount, and I realised that the Westmount clock (which is, if you don’t know, shaped with these flowers on this green grass and is really big just on the right as you enter Westmount from the west, like if you were coming from out of the city or something) says Tempus Fugit on it too. I guess Montreal just knows better than most places how time flies. I feel like I have so little time left to decide what to do with my life, but in another way it’s like everything is just beginning. The advisor for psychology who made the presentation yesterday mentioned that there is a possibility of entering medicine after I get a bachelor of arts degree. What the hell is that? I thought I was finally sealing my fate by majoring in psych... Why are there always more decisions? Sometimes I feel old (don’t laugh), but sometimes I feel so young that I haven’t even had a chance to have regrets yet. I just wish I could have a big ass disappointment so that I would know what to expect. Anyway, I’m just saying that time is passing me by like crazy here, and I don’t even know when I’ll have the time to go back to Ottawa again. It’s all so different than I expected it to be. But I guess I’m exaggerating and that soon all will settle down and I’ll be ready to lead a normal life again.
It’s funny how much you miss your friends when you realise what it’s like not to have any surrounding you.
I think this is Sunday:
As for me, I don’t have anyone to come with me tomorrow for my first day at McGill. Of course, it’s not a real school day; I’m just going to a psychology meeting to have advisors and such people look over my course schedule, make sure I chose the right ones, and tell me if I’m in the right place right now. But it’s still something that’s a pain in the ass to do, since I have to find a bus to take me to the university, locate the Stewart Biological Center, and get myself into the right room inside of it by 2:30 PM. Fortunately or unfortunately - only time will tell - my boyfriend has finally given me a call to say he is sort of moved into his residence situation, and would like to meet with me at some point tomorrow. I told him to get his ass over to my place and keep me company tonight, but he made up some bullshit about not having subway tickets, although I then informed him that you can buy the damn things at the station which is about twenty paces outside his front door. I guess I’m meeting him for lunch tomorrow anyway, so at least I will see one familiar face in this insane city.
I guess this is the first time in my new-found semi-adult life that I have faced even an iota of adversity, which is kind of a good thing, since it makes me a lot more conscious of things around me. I keep thinking of interesting things (interesting to me, anyway) while walking around the streets of Montreal. For example, that Quebecers in their characteristically self-involved way, really take advantage of a person’s moral sense of guilt. These Montrealers will walk across the busiest street in the middle of the downtown area, whether the pedestrian light is red or not, whether the car traffic light is red or not, or even if a truck the size of an African elephant is thundering towards them at a speed that is definitely not even close to the limit on that road, with a complete disregard for their lives. Inevitably, or at least usually, the motorist will screech to a stop about two inches away from the glaring twenty-year-old mother and her two toddlers, and these people get away with their righteous crap just because the poor old truck driver had a soft spot for human life. Honestly, laws were created for a reason, and I think people should be willing to face the consequences of breaking them. I often have the urge to run over people jaywalking across Montreal Road in Ottawa when cars are coming from both sides, but I resist because maybe they didn’t have the higher education offered in kindergarten to teach them to look both ways before crossing. And just think, Anthony, this is just one of the insanely mundane ideas that has run through my head since I have arrived here. I am obviously in dire need of social stimulation.
I bet you are thinking right now, What kind of adversity are you facing? Yes, I know it’s pretty hard to believe that a person living all by herself in a beautiful city with a three-bedroom apartment, two futons, a bed, a couch, an armchair, two dressers, and about three hundred nifty-looking lamps is facing adversity. Well, maybe not. But I’m all by myself with no one to share all of this with! I keep thinking about how cool it is to have set up this place a bit so that it looks nice, and wanting everyone I know to come over and have dinner with me and a chat over some red wine in the evening. So at least my loneliness leads to some difficulties, and I can say honestly that I am not living the high life at all.
This is Tuesday:
Dear Anthony,
I’m sorry I didn’t write you a letter yesterday; I don’t know if you’ve noticed this yet, since I haven’t checked my e-mail to see if you checked your e-mail yesterday or today and replied to my previous e-mail, or wrote me anything at all. I ended up taking an active part in the McGill social scene for the first time since I’ve arrived here. It’s nothing too special, actually. Well, I will tell you about my day yesterday, after which I may or may not be inspired to conclude with my emotions regarding the subject.
I was woken up yet again yesterday at eight in the morning because the phone was ringing. How lovely, it was my boyfriend, who had just got his phone installed in his room in residence. I informed him that it would be nice not to phone a person at eight in the morning just because you happen to be awake. However, we had planned to meet at 12:30 that day for lunch anyway, so it’s not like I would have slept much longer as it was. In addition, the worker man who installed all of my lights arrived for the second day in a row at 8:30AM in order to fix my leaking faucet in the kitchen. He also kindly agreed to install one final hanging lamp on the ceiling at the end of the hall where it meets the kitchen, but was unable to fix the faucet. He said he’d ask the landlord to give him a new one to put in for me, and that he’d return in a week. So I thought to myself, Well, I’ve been woken up for good now, might as well take a shower... When lo and behold, this man comes back five minutes later because he got the new faucet for my sink already! So now my sink doesn’t leak, but my shower still does and the constant noise is extremely irritating, so I believe I will speak to my landlord about this, as well as about giving that other underling fellow of his some proper English lessons.
Having showered and dressed relatively nicely, since I had to go out to a meeting on the subject of majoring in psychology at McGill, and wanted to make a pretty good impression in case I happened to meet anyone, I set off on the metro for downtown, as I had two metro tickets and did not realise I could also use them for the bus. I met Axel, who was all hell bent on meeting people and getting to know people and yadda yadda yadda, and we went to have lunch in this bistro place. I, in case you were wondering, am not too keen on meeting people, as I am always convinced that they will either hate me or think I’m weird or badly dressed, so I declined his invitation to eat lunch at this barbecue his residence was having. Axel seemed distressed by the fact that I, contrarily to him, seemed hell bent on isolating myself in this basement (which, by the way, still smells disgusting, and my mom said I have to go tell the landlord to do something about it). Anyway, at least he had brought me flowers, which is what I was hoping would happen since I had put a nice empty vase on the end of one table in the living room the night I organised placement of the lamps in my boredom and loneliness. Still, I fear for this relationship in this city... We are obviously going to have very different groups of friends, since I am not a party animal except when I’m with my best friends back in Ottawa.
After lunch, I wanted to shop, so we did that for a short while because Axel had to open a bank account and I had to go to my meeting for psychology at the Stewart Biological Sciences Centre. I don’t know if you are aware of the fact that Montreal is built on what is possibly the steepest incline of a fucking hill that exists, but I will let you know that the Stewart Biological Sciences Centre on the McGill campus is about halfway up this hill. So I walked up there, and discovered that going to class there will be more of a workout than any membership at the YMCA down the street will give me this year. The meeting was boring as hell and made more so by the fact that I didn’t know anybody at all. All in all, I was pretty depressed.
Then I went home and slept for an hour, and then I went to Axel’s residence for dinner, because he said his dad bought him pork chops and he would make us some. This was nice since I am lazy and have no food and hadn’t eaten a decent meal in a few days. I met his apartment-mates; his roommate Greg seemed very nice and a good person to share a room with. Louis, one of the other guys in their apartment, is an obvious party crazy maniac and a stoner and just one of those people who is all cool, if you know what I mean. Actually, he was a very, very nice guy, and I enjoyed talking to him, but I would not be overjoyed to have to study with a fellow like him in my home. The fourth guy, Peter, is fresh off the boat from China and speaks very little English. I met him briefly for about four seconds before he was off with the Wok he’d brought to have a cooking party upstairs with his Chinese friends. And these were the first people I met who are going to McGill.
The residence was having this evening event where you went with others from the res to a bistro, a diner, or a bar. I told Axel I wanted to go to the bistro, which we did. This was excellent because we were sitting across from each other and next to these two girls who were roommates and more my kind of people. One was pretty outoging and nice, and we talked for a long time about the benefits of computers over laptops and vice versa (by the way, since all these other rich foreign kids at McGill have laptops I have opted to get one too). The other was also fresh off the boat, but from Germany, and was very jetlagged from her trip to Canada since she had only arrived on Thursday night. She was very pretty (I know looks are not relevant, but she was! She had this blond hair blue eye look, you know... European!). Anyway, I enjoyed talking to these two people since they were the first I met who were not obsessed with drinking and smoking and partying. The German girl, Kathrin, is also in the Arts Faculty, and she told me I should go to the Frosh week events, so I think I will, just so I won’t be a total loner for the rest of my life. Besides that there is a boat tour, which sounds okay.
After that, we went back to the residence and I was in Axel and Greg’s room when about two billion people came in to hang out with them. Of course, the guys offered people beer, but I hate beer so I didn’t drink any. Then these two girls walked in and just started unrolling a cheapie cigar and rolled the longest joint I’ve ever seen, and smoked its ass off right there in the room. Then these other people walked on in, stuck a frozen pizza in their oven, and started to DEAL marijuana, right there on the kitchen table. Suffice it to say that despite the obvious chance to meet people, I’m quite glad I don’t live in residence. What a place to study!
Anyway, today was this orientation day event all day, so I went to that. I met this girl who seemed nice but very young, from Toronto, and she worked at the Bay too! Later on I met up with Kathrin again and I hung out with her all day. Fortunately she is a pretty shy person so I didn’t feel obligated to try and meet any other people. Although I kind of randomly met a lot of people without actually talking to them. I swear, Anthony, about 90% of the people I’ve met are not from this country. I met a guy from Iraq, a girl from Kuwait, about 8 people from New York or New Jersey, 5 people from Britain, and too many people from Germany to count. In case you are wondering, I am not such a social butterfly, but I met these people because orientation day activities kind of forced us to say hello to people and exchange names and countries of origin.
Then I came home in the fucking pouring rain (I walked to see how far it was... Far!) and was in a lonely kind of mood because everyone seemed to have friends and I didn’t, and I ate McDonalds to console myself! Which I feel fat about now... Anyway, that’s okay.
I’m still very lacking in basic necessities here. I have no pots and pans or dishes or cutlery or anything. I have no TV. No laptop as of yet. Since I’ve spent time out of the house, though, it hasn’t mattered too much. I wish the apartment didn’t smell though; that bothers me. The dampness. Actually I’m just in a foul mood on dampness since my shirt is damp from walking home in the rain, and it is making me feel cold.
I feel like I’m in a time warp sometimes. Here I am in Montreal, and it’s as if Ottawa never existed, like I’ve been here all my life. Then I feel like I’m just nowhere because I have so few connections here. I’m going through the motions of the day, and the fact that this is a much more beautiful city than I ever imagined makes that easy, even enjoyable, to do, but I haven’t had much chance to really get to know it yet... The city, that is. So it just seems like I’m nowhere and time is flying by. My grandmother has this grandfather clock in her house that says Tempus Fugit at the top of it, above the face. It was always there in the doorway in her house in Montreal, when she still lived here. And today I was walking by the street with that house on it, and through Westmount, and I realised that the Westmount clock (which is, if you don’t know, shaped with these flowers on this green grass and is really big just on the right as you enter Westmount from the west, like if you were coming from out of the city or something) says Tempus Fugit on it too. I guess Montreal just knows better than most places how time flies. I feel like I have so little time left to decide what to do with my life, but in another way it’s like everything is just beginning. The advisor for psychology who made the presentation yesterday mentioned that there is a possibility of entering medicine after I get a bachelor of arts degree. What the hell is that? I thought I was finally sealing my fate by majoring in psych... Why are there always more decisions? Sometimes I feel old (don’t laugh), but sometimes I feel so young that I haven’t even had a chance to have regrets yet. I just wish I could have a big ass disappointment so that I would know what to expect. Anyway, I’m just saying that time is passing me by like crazy here, and I don’t even know when I’ll have the time to go back to Ottawa again. It’s all so different than I expected it to be. But I guess I’m exaggerating and that soon all will settle down and I’ll be ready to lead a normal life again.
It’s funny how much you miss your friends when you realise what it’s like not to have any surrounding you.