Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Grading, writing, and applications

In the next couple of days I have a lot to wrap up.

For the ENV381 course where I’m working as a TA, I need to finalize the details of my assignment grades, calculate participation grades, and grade one last batch of final exams.

I am applying for three summer positions: internships with The Walrus and The National Post, and a Google Policy Fellowship at the Citizen Lab. They’re all long shots but worth a try.

Finally, I need to finish writing and editing my paper for the graduate ethics conference on May 5th.

I’m also trying to make the most of the last few meals of the term at Massey College.

The comfortable spring

As far as weather goes, this is the nicest time of year in Toronto. The days are long and bright and the temperature mostly varies between warm enough to be comfortable in a t-shirt to cool enough to be comfortable in a light jacket. It’s easy to spend hours outside, whether undergoing physical exertion or just sitting and reading. I keep the windows of my room open most of the time.

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing // Memory and desire, stirring // Dull roots with spring rain.

I think I have mentioned before my revulsion for some standard practices with dead humans: embalming with toxic chemicals, burial in elaborate coffins, and efforts to isolate corpses from the outside world through concrete burial vaults and similar.

All that runs fundamentally against my self-understanding as one animal in all the multitude of nature. When my time comes — and I hope it won’t be for many years — I would like to be buried in as little as possible, for instance in just a cotton or linen wrapping, in a place where the molecules of my body will become the bodies of plants and animals and return to the great circulation that has been ongoing for billions of years. This would be after any usable organs or tissues have been donated.

Any kind of religious ceremony would be an insult to my conviction that those who think the universe or ethics can only be explained via the supernatural have no evidence to support their case. I would appreciate a gathering of friends which should be pleasant and well-catered, maybe a few musical performances: Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” has been a long-time favourite and is well suited, as is Radiohead’s “Exit Music”. A bit of Antonín Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” would speak to being Czech and North American. Mourners should have a snootful of a decent whisky, beer, or wine while listening to the music.

If one or more people want to “speak my death” in the Orson Scott Card sense of the words, I hope they won’t choose flattery or comfort over honesty.1

An advance directive to address the horror of being alive but unable to reason or communicate would also be prudent for me. The simple version is: if there is no prospect of a reasonable quality of life and my life is being sustained by external means like a medical ventilator, I would prefer for those means to be discontinued. If I end up in some sort of long-term vegetative state, I would be grateful for a never-ending stream or loop of folk music played at a suitable volume through headphones.

1. Anybody wanting to do this, including my parents and brothers but also any other people who I have met and any strangers to me, should perhaps read the first two books in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. I definitely do not endorse the author’s politics, but I like his ruthlessly honest concept for a death ritual.

No clear time horizon

Here’s the converse of having fairly clear expectations of the future: suddenly having to start thinking about all sorts of long-term choices with no confidence about where in the world I will be after a certain date.

It may be that I will be leaving the PhD program and, in that case, I really don’t know what I would end up doing with myself.

When I was trying to leave Ottawa, I applied to jobs in the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. When none of those worked out, I applied to a bunch of PhD programs. Coincidentally, I was already living in Toronto when I decided to attend U of T.

Toronto is quite a high-cost city, but I am also in a pretty fortunate situation here, with a very nice place to live which can be afforded on even a grad student’s income. Being near Massey College is another plus (as is feasible bus travel to Montreal, Ottawa, Boston and New York), though my five years as a junior fellow come to an end by September. Affordable housing would be hard to find in Vancouver, which would be a natural alternative home. It has been a long time since I have lived there, my family is there or nearabouts, and it’s a beautiful part of the world (where important climate activism is ongoing). A third option is another big round of job applications, with the relocation decision to be driven by what comes up.

Nothing is certain at the moment. It remains possible that I will complete my PhD at U of T. From the perspective of the research itself, I am strongly inclined to stay on. Having done so much to develop a method for studying all of Canada’s campus fossil fuel divesment campaigns, it seems a shame not to carry it out. Theoretically, I could recast it as an independent research project, and potentially seek funding from NGOs that would be interested in the results. It may also be possible to reach an agreement with the university to write an independent research project and use it along with my courseworks and comprehensive exams to award a lesser degree.

One option to handle the next few months is to try to apply for summer TA positions, complete my current teaching work and grading, and prepare for the two conferences where I am presenting in the next couple of months. By the end of August, it will be definitively settled whether I am continuing with the PhD.

I am reevaluating my life.

I bought a couple of used books today, fixed the earphone jack on my iPod, and went for a long aimless walk.

Ending up in Trinity-Bellwoods park in the afternoon, I assigned myself a project of talking to strangers. One trick is that people are almost always cool with you speaking directly to their dog. Dogs are pretty easy to win attention from, and it’s natural to segway from that into a discussion with a dog owner about their dog.

Part of me wanted to just blast familiar sound through noise-isolating headphones, but the prospect of having conversations with strangers had particular appeal while trying to combat with alienation of graduate school.

Over the span of a few hours, I had some kind of conversation with at least fifty strangers. A lot of it was about dogs, but I also met people making major life decisions, people with philosophical reflections on their life choices to date, one young man with several scientific toys and a fondness for the conservation of angular momentum, an aspiring welder, and two self-identified addicts who thought I look nothing like a police officer despite my hiking boots.

Early on, I met two actors practicing a sword-versus-dagger fight which will be part of a play performed on April 30th at the Revival Event Venue between 6pm and 9pm.

Maternal visit concluded

I spent most of today working on the theoretical framework for my forthcoming proposal, but this morning I went with my mother and some of her friends to see Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum.

Also, I took a break in the evening to try yoga for the first time in Massey’s Upper Library. It was quite challenging, both because I lack the balance and flexibility and because my injured wrist cartilage had a tough time with all the ‘downward dogs’. Still, something worth trying again, especially if I can’t return to Judo.

Thesis update

I went into my thesis proposal presentation on Tuesday with the hope that it would meet with general approval and that I would soon be moving on to seeking ethical approval and beginning research.

Things have worked out dramatically differently, and I am now engaged in an intense effort to write an entirely new proposal on campus fossil fuel divestment — this time, fully structured around a particular theoretical framework from the literature on political science.

Grad school in March

Today was both an illustrative and exceptional day.

Breakfast was my standard porridge of kidney beans, quinoa, and mixed frozen vegetables, with a Whole Foods avocado as a bonus and topped with nutritional year and Sriracha sauce. I got a large coffee on my way to my research design class at Trinity College, where my fellow PhD student Erica Rayment presented her research proposal on the effects of women members of parliament on parliamentary discourse and gender policies.

Then I spent the afternoon reading at Massey College, in the welcome and recently unusual company of my friend Aldea. Having come across a reference in a paper on fossil fuel divestment, I dashed across the snowy street to Robarts Library to pick up first one and then a trio of books on universities that divested from apartheid South Africa. I was pleased to see that more universities are divesting from fossil fuels.

At five, a large group of junior fellows assembled in the common room to toast the election of Benjamin Gillard as Don of Hall for next year. It included a few friends who are rarely seen around the college these days, a few also in their fifth and final year of the fellowship, and lots of those who have become fellows in the last few years.

I won’t be attending tonight’s intermediate Judo class because my wrist is still injured and painful, but there is a talk my friend Katerina organized on the “The Hype & Hope of Artificial Intelligence” and I have no shortage of thesis reading and writing to do in the lead up to my own presentation next Tuesday, hopefully with departmental approval and ethical clearance to follow soon after.