Expletives do not suffice

In one of my most boneheaded moves ever, I lost my wonderful Fuji X100s camera at the Canadian Political Science Association conference.

I was at a morning panel on “Natural Resources, Energy, and Climate” and because the desks were small I put it on the one behind me. At the end of the session, I walked to my next event, sat down, realized I didn’t have the camera, and rushed immediately back to find it gone.

I checked both the Ryerson and Congress lost and found locations and asked all the nearby staff members. I also emailed everyone on the panel, in case one of them picked it up.

The camera’s serial number is 33A04584 and it is clearly labeled in two places with my name and email address. Perhaps someone picked it up and has yet to contact me.

It’s an extremely painful thing to lose: worth about four months of my rent or well over a quarter of a year’s tuition. Over 4,000 photos I’ve taken with it since I got it in November 2013 are on Flickr.

[Update: 7:30pm] In a hugely relieving development, one of my fellow audience members — recently appointed to a tenure-track job at uVic — saw the abandoned camera, picked it up, and has now restored it to me.

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.