When I lived at Massey College between September 2012 and spring 2015, I was grateful and often struck by the oddness of mostly surviving on U of T’s ungenerous funding while living a block from St George subway station, surrounded by million dollar condos.
I’m still grateful to be living near campus, letting me perform all life necessities on foot. At the same time, the memories that have been overlaid on this neighbourhood in the last few years have largely been those of stress, anxiety, and conflict. Friends who used to live nearby are now virtually all gone, and memories of people like my villainous ex-flatmate and the man who attacked me this summer across the street from my house have me always anxiously checking who is around.
I’m in one of the ‘beyond exhausted’ spans of the PhD, nicely matched with the cold and sore throat that have endured for about three weeks now. I very much hope there won’t be any new major upsets and it will simply be possible to do my data analysis, write my chapters, defend the dissertation, and find some new major project to move on to.
