A landmark building

When I was a Ph.D. student, I often visited the Robarts Library on the University of Toronto campus.  I have to admit it looks pretty ugly (though Umberto Eco admires it). Remember those British cartoon adventure shows from the 1960s like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet?  Those puppets would be at home in that building.

But it is a great library.  To get to the main stacks you have to take the elevators up to the top floors, so you're studying in an "elevated" milieu. (I like that there's a mezzanine connection between the tenth and eleventh floors, and between the twelfth and thirteenth.)

I've also spent a lot of time on the fourth and fifth floors where they have microfilms and stuff. (They also have a big globe there.) One an earthquake tremor happened in Toronto and I felt it slightly on the fifth floor.

I haven't been there in recent years.  But it has the biggest book collection I've ever encountered.  If the Toronto public library system doesn't have a book, chances are Robarts does have it.

Impromptu speaking

I haven't had a lot of occasions to speak in public.  One came when I was living at Goodenough College in London back in the mid-'90s.  Desiree McGraw organized a recycling group and I helped a lot with it.  I'd take things out to the big recycling bin out on the street.  Unfortunately, at first I didn't realize that in Britain "cans" only mean aluminum cans. (Tin cans they call "tins.") I also took some stuff up to the big recycling center in Camden Town.

A lot of beer and wine bottles accumulated in a smelly basement room.  One time I was taking away a big load for recycling.  When Mrs. Vickers the warden saw me carrying them, she thought they were my bottles and said, "I hadn't thought you were a drinking man." That was really funny to me because, like my parents, I never drink.

So the occasion for me to speak came near the end of my stay when my residence, William Goodenough House, had a big meeting.  Unexpectedly, it was up to me to speak about the recycling program.  So I got up and talked about how we were doing it and encouraged other volunteers.  I did it pretty well.  In fact, some people were impressed that I managed to do it in two minutes flat!

The best therapy (marijuana)

I really can't say anything about smoking pot.  I've never smoked it or noticed anyone else smoking it.  But I will say that it should be legalized and regulated, not because it's totally harmless but because its illegal status just makes it more harmful.  That goes for other drugs too.  History will look back on the "war on drugs" as a prolonged disaster.

I once saw a drug transaction on the northeast corner of St. Clair & Oakwood.  A couple of scruffy-looking guys exchanged money and a pill capsule.  They weren't bothering me, and I didn't bother them.

Classroom fights

(This is a subject I suggested.)

I'm not the type who usually gets into fights.  But I remember when I was twelve.  I was a sensitive kid, and some kids gave me a hard time.  Grownups expected me to ignore it all and call that a solution, but I got angrier and angrier.

One spring day, in science class we had a complicated experiment to do involving Bunsen burners.  We normally did these experiments in teams of two, but for this one the teams were paired into groups of four.  Now this science teacher bore a grudge against my family because my university professor father had given her husband a failing grade, as a result of which he couldn't graduate.  Now she paired me and my lab partner with the two people she knew good and well I didn't get along with.  I begged her to pair us with someone else, but she wouldn't listen.

I ended up hitting one of these guys, and got sent to the principal's office. (No consequences for the other guy.) Later, when I told my mother about it, she got really angry.  Getting mad at the teacher and the school was her second reaction; her first was to get mad at me.  My parents were so angry that they actually took me out of school for a whole week, until they lost their nerve.  I was a bit resentful:  they shouldn't have suggested this course of action if they didn't mean it.  But Mother simply couldn't think of anything else to do about it.

I also got in a fight that fall.  I'd made a promise to myself, "If this guy bothers me one more time, I will let my fists fly." (It was the only way I could get through the day.) Then one day, before long, I had to deliver on my promise.  This time I didn't tell my parents, and they only found out when the school phoned them.

Snowstorms

I used to like snow when I was little.  We had a big yard compared to Toronto, so we sometimes got big snowdrifts!  Then we'd need the big scoop shovel to clear the driveway. (We never bought a snow blower.) The last winter snowstorm would often happen around St. Patrick's day.

Days when school was cancelled because of snow weren't uncommon in rural New Brunswick.  But not all winters were the same.  I remember one year when they started a cross-country skiing group in my junior high school, but there was never enough snow for it!

Snowmobilers would sometimes pass through our property. (They killed a couple of our trees.) I've never ridden a snowmobile myself.  I prefer stuff like tobogganing and skating.

There aren't a lot of big snowstorms in Toronto these days.  But when one happens, I remember my youth.

May

Living in the city today, spring doesn't mean so much to me.  But when I was growing up in rural New Brunswick, winter was fiercer and spring was more welcome. (Or at least it seemed that way in my youth.) There'd sometimes be warm weather in April, but it was in May that the real warm weather started.

Mind you, it could still get cold in May.  When we drove on rural roads we'd sometimes see some vestigial snow in the ditch.  In a few years, it even snowed in May!

May was the month when we'd start to prepare our vegetable garden.  I'd start by deepening the ditches around it, digging up mud and dumping it on the garden side banks.  My brother John complained that this had a "diking" effect, but I couldn't see any other way to do it.  I should have said, "Do it yourself if you want it done better." (John was the big gardening expert, but I did more of the work.)

We'd also till the ground before planting. (We used to rent a machine for that.) We bought our seeds from a Vesey's catalogue in P.E.I.  After I'd moved to Toronto in 1990, for a few years I'd continue to visit New Brunswick in May and get the seeds planted, until my parents moved to Toronto too.

My first date

This is actually a recent memory:  I had my first dinner date about six months ago. (Better late than never.) It started when I went to a trivia contest at Kramer's near Davisville station.  My team won, and the prize was a Kramer's gift certificate.  I was willing to share it with the others, but I'd so dominated the team that they let me use it myself.

So I took Cecilia to dinner there.  She's a Brazilian whom I met in the Classic Movies Meetup group.  I wore my green cardigan, which I don't usually wear.  I kissed her hand, but maybe that was overdoing it.  For the life of me, I can't remember what I ate.  I have yet to go on a second date.

February

I'm partial to February simply because my birthday is then. (I was born on the same day, month and year as the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.) When I was little, there was a hit song "The Age of Aquarius" from the hippie musical Hair.  So I associated the Aquarius sign with hippies, who rather scared me.  Imagine my surprise when one day I looked up my astrological sign and found out it was Aquarius!

People talk about the February blues, but they don't seem to affect me that much.  I've always been a bit of an indoor person myself, so winters don't get to me.  I really enjoyed snow when I was young.  Today I'm in the city and don't encounter as much of it as I did back then.

February is also the month of Valentine's Day, which never really interested me.  Even today I'm not much of a romantic type.  My idea of something romantic is fighting for Tibet's liberation.

Betrayal

When have I felt betrayed?  There was the time when I was about fifteen and my parents had taken me out of school and had me take Grade 10-level correspondence courses with the New Brunswick Community College.  The first math lesson involved a Venn diagram, and I correctly answered 9.  But there was a mark next to it so the market thought I'd written 91.  He would have known that I meant 9 if he'd looked at my diagram, but he just wrote on it, "Too small and messy." He concluded, "Do over properly!" And I couldn't ignore him, I had to do it over again.

I asked my parents to contact the Community College and complain, but they just said, "We aren't going to have anything to do with him because he's unreasonable!" Which meant I was on my own.  What bothers me is that they were rewarding him for being unreasonable!  Because they were afraid of him, of course.

That was just the start of the troubles in the six courses I was taking.  As my course work went on, I got angrier and angrier. (I eventually got an ulcer.)  It went on so long that I ended up writing rude things to the markers.  And now Mother started worrying that I'd hurt their feelings.  When they hurt my feelings, that just meant that I was too sensitive.

Now here comes the betrayal.  My parents insisted that I write a note of apology to the markers.  Even though there was never a single complaint about my rudeness, Mother got the idea inside her head that I had to apologize in order to finish the courses.  Though what I wrote wasn't an apology, my resentment was (and is) permanent.  It was a very bad time in my life.

My biggest mistake

I don't like to think about the mistakes I've made.  Sometimes I consider what I'd do differently if I were living my life over.  One thing is that I'd have started developing my singing and acting talents while still young. (As it is, I've started developing them in recent years.)

Another thing is that I would have made a bigger effort to reciprocate friendliness.  There have been times when people were friendly to me and I was capable of nothing beyond an awkward response. (My social development has been slow, possibly because of Asperger's Syndrome.)

There's one mistake that I remember in particular, though it certainly wasn't my biggest one.  Back in the 1990s I moved to London for eight months to research my Ph.D. thesis and was living alone for the first time.  On my first weekend there I went out to do some shopping on Oxford Street, which has a lot of stores.  Unfortunately, that weekend was the 50th anniversary of V-E Day, and they were having a big World War II exhibit nearby in Hyde Park.  So Oxford Street proved to be even more crowded and uncomfortable than usual.  It was the wrong time to go there.

The funny thing was, I actually ended up feeling pleased about this mistake, because it was my mistake!  I liked the feeling of being completely responsible for myself, even in my mistakes.  I made a mistake and world didn't stop.

Potluck dinners

I've been to a few potluck dinners.  The problem with them is that people tend to bring way too much food.  If I were arranging one I'd have about half the people bring food, and the other half drinks and such.

At home we sometimes have potluck to get rid of leftovers. (How did people do this before microwaves?) I can usually be relied on to finish off the pasta, especially when it includes fettucine alfredo. (I cook a good fettucine alfredo.) Except that I don't care for vegetarian lasagna.  Sometimes I'll get corn on the cob and eat that while the others eat the leftovers.

Sometimes my brother John and his girlfriend Kathrine come over and bring dinner.  Except that they're vegans, and I rarely care for vegan food. (Vegans make you appreciate mere vegetarians, who are easier to cook for.) Generally I'll sneak out to McDonald's or KFC after a while.  So I don't care for vegan leftovers either.

But I do approve of people eating as little meat as they can.  In both world wars they had Meatless Mondays, and I say we should bring them back.  You could say that I'm a hypocrite to encourage others not to eat meat while I eat it myself.  But there it is.  I'm just glad that I like some foods without meat.