I'm home! After 11 hours of transit, I am back in the suburbs that raised me. Everything feels exceedingly familiar and it's very odd. Alone in the house today, I played Leonard Cohen and took a bath and made pea soup, then fell asleep in my airy, well-lit room reading the essays of Vaclav Havel. It's a nice feeling after dorm life, although dorm life has its perks as well.
I suppose now is the time to sort of look back on my first semester in University, although I'm of the opinion that people do too much looking back as it is. I personally am quite guilty of this - at one point I kept a journal, a commonplace book, a photo archive, a recording project and this blog. All of them were used only intermittently, so it's not as though I spent my hours scribbling away in a forgotten nook in the attic. (hello, Emily Dickinson!) I suppose I started this blog as a record of the things I found cool in life, but it eventually got more autobiographical, and consequently less general and probably less interesting. I don't mind that I have few readers - I fully understand that my life isn't actually that interesting to read about, but I still need to write about it. So, in that vein, I suppose I'll look back on my first semester in university:
I was on my own for longer than I'd ever been, and though there were some battles with bureaucracy that I lost spectacularly, I think I fared quite nicely. I joined the nordic ski team, which turned out to be the best decision of my university career so far. I took organic chemistry, which did not. I found out that Advanced Placement tests were actually out to get me. I lived in extremely close proximity to a roommate and found out that I wasn't nearly as insufferable as I thought I was, although I was lucky to room with the chillest person at McGill. I biked around a lot until I broke my bike. I mentally thrashed a bit. I met a person whose name could be pronounced either as a cracker or as a thousandth of the standard unit of mass in the metric system and fell in love with him after a spectacularly ill-advised bike trip. I made friends and acquaintances in a world unlike that of high school cliques. I listened to Leonard Cohen a lot, much to the chagrin of those around me. I missed kayaking. I played considerably less drinking games than is average but still managed to beat boys in them.
I'm glad to be home.
