Category: Toronto

Living in a residence where nobody knows anyone else and where no action can generally be attributed to a specific individual illustrates what happens when the bonds of community are thin.

The refrigerator is often crammed with rotting, stinking food – all of it heaped together in opaque plastic grocery bags. Someone has been dumping a pot worth of tea leaves into the sink twice a day all summer, never throwing them away or even washing them down the drain. Someone also seems to have a habit of drinking 4-6 disposable cups of coffee in one of the bathrooms, then leaving the cups strewn across the floor. The other day someone stole my (inexpensive) razor, which I had been using since I was an undergraduate and which I left in the main unisex bathroom accidentally for a few minutes. Desirable food regularly goes missing, the kitchen and common room are always gross (especially during weekends when there is no staff to clean), with stained couches and carpets, sticky counter-tops, and a microwave spattered with vaporized remnants of instant meals. People are often raucous and loud at night. At one point, someone discarded a large amount of food belonging to other people so they could put four 24-can flats of Coca Cola into the shared fridge at once.

Morrison Hall has been good in terms of proximity to libraries, air conditioning, and extremely fast internet access. I will naturally be happy to move back into Massey on August 30th. I just wish it were possible to do directly, without the 9-day purgatorial period that arises from Morrison’s August 21st move-out date.