The Tale of the Horrible Desk Mess

It’s amazing how easily our eyes adjust to chaos. Papers, books, a stapler, a roll of film, a ruler – quite a few things you’ve no intention of using – all spread out on your desk, and you don’t notice them. Maybe there’s a voice in the back of your head saying “I really need to clean my desk,” but it’s hard to wake yourself up and see the God-awful, soul-wrenching, vomit-inducing, disgraceful pile of crap that was once a workplace. If you haven’t experienced this feeling personally, take it from me: it’s a very easy trap to fall into.

As you may have guessed, it’s “Clean your desk with the blogosphere” time here at WBg (see what I did there,) which signals the start of a new semester. I’m always – not shocked, but exasperated – by how much of a mess my desk can become in just one half of a semester. In a way, I’m fortunate that I’m sensitive to dust: when I walk into a room and my nose gets stuffy, it’s time to clean. A few days ago, however, I took a good, hard look at my desk and realized what a trash heap it was. If the principle business of life is converting chaos into order, then an alien might have easily concluded that I was long dead. But when you’re in the moment – working on a project, studying for a test, writing a blog post – sometimes you’re so focused on what you’re doing that cleanliness doesn’t even occur to you. The thought that flashes through your brain is “papers in way of computer: move pile of papers.” Which you do. Where do you move them? Irrelevant – doesn’t even come up*. After all, this email you’re writing is taking up 99% of your attention, and in the 1% left over, the best solution you can think of is to move the papers to some indeterminate place.

Of course, this is all a very round-about way of saying that putting things away doesn’t really occur to me when I’m thinking about something else. Maybe some people would call this a “one tracked mind.” I call it concentration. And as long as I can get myself to clean my desk once or twice a semester, I’m fine with it.

* Of course, another way to mitigate this problem is the strategy I’ve suggested before: make it easy for yourself to be organized. If there’s a place for miscellaneous papers right on your desk, then you’ll probably put then there.

The End of a Blog Hiatus, The Start of a Year

It seems that, once a year, I end up taking a break from blogging. Most of the time the reason is that I’m overwhelmed with school work, and that is usually followed by a few weeks of responsibility-shirking that I call “vacation.” Well, this year’s blogging hiatus is now officially over. You can resume sleeping soundly, breathing easily, and eating a steady diet.

So, in the tradition of the blog hiatus, I’ll start off this blog post by telling you what I’ve been up to when I wasn’t blogging.

Toward the end of the semester, I decided to move out in January. I started looking for apartments, I visited a number of apartments in the McGill Ghetto and the Plateau (two areas near McGill where lots of students live,) and found absolutely nothing I liked. Rumors about the McGill Ghetto being largely full of expensive apartments in relative disrepair are all true. Most of the apartments I saw were small, cramped, and got hardly any outside light at all. Of course, on my budget, I knew that finding an apartment with a workable kitchen and plenty of sunlight was a long shot, but if you’re looking for nice apartments, I’d start looking somewhere other than the ghetto. Sunlight, as I’ve discovered recently, is very important to me. If I don’t get enough light, particularly in the morning, my day starts out bad and goes downhill from there. Some people might call it seasonal affective disorder, but I think that’s horse-puckeys, because I love winter and fall. I’d prefer to call it “there’s tons o’ clouds out there; it feels like night ALL THE TIME and it’s making me FRICKIN’ UNHAPPY!” Anyway, a 23 watt CFL bulb on a timer that comes on at 7:30 when I need to get out of bed seems to help. Now I need a poster of the Bahamas or something to put up in my room.

I haven’t been building that many things recently. I had a bit of a panic last semester when I realized that I was completely lost in two of my classes, and that I hadn’t been studying enough for another class. I spent the last two or three weeks of the semester studying like hell, and if I do say so myself, it was totally worth it. I haven’t gotten the grades back, but I’m proud of my effort anyway. For the first time since high school, I actually completed my goal of starting to study two weeks before the exam. I’ve never been one to study very much, but ever since high school my study habits have all but bottomed out. A professor in CEGEP once told me that the further you get in your education, the more you realize that it’s what you did during the semester – not what you did right before the exam – that determines how well you do in the end. Every year since then, when I’m making a valiant effort to stuff too much information into my already over-crowded brain, his words ring in my ears. It’s too late, I hear myself saying, I should have done this before. Well, this year I learned an extension of that lesson: even though what you did during the semester counts more than what you do at the end, you can still work double time and succeed, provided you catch yourself early enough.

Another lesson I learned this semester is that I can’t study at home. I suspect this is true for many people. It’s not that there’s so much going on at home, or that I’m easily distracted at home, but when I’m at home, my mind doesn’t want to do school. School work happens at school, and sleep and projects happen at home; that is how my mind works. So expecting myself to study at home is torture: half of me is frustrated because I won’t study, and the other half just wants to go to sleep. So the solution, it turns out is to study at school. And because I’m lucky enough to work in a lab at McGill, I study in the lab, which affords me a nice, quiet place to work. Coffee helps too. Admittedly it was expensive, but for about two weeks before my last two exams, I bought an OMG WTF sized coffee at Starbucks every day before I started to study, which was my reward and daily caffeination. Say what you want about caffeine: I frickin’ love it*.

In the next few days, I plan to write a New Year post (as is tradition here at Worldgnat’s Blog**,) a post about some project I’m working on (there are many, which haven’t been touched in months,) and a compiler comic. I’ll probably go back to my old schedule (one post on Wednesday, and one some other random day during the week.) I hope you all had a Merry Winter Holiday, that you’ll all have a Happy New Year, and if you don’t believe in holidays or new years, then I hope you didn’t and won’t have either of those, and that their non-existence was and will be merry nonetheless. I leave you with this holiday picture of me sitting in front of a Christmas tree, wearing an apron and a blue Christmas hat with Vulcan ears attached that I made myself (the ears AND the hat. From scratch. Hell yeah.)

"Christmas" is illogical. Nevertheless, live long and prosper.***

*Just so you know, it’s been at least a week and a half since I’ve had a drop of coffee.

**I should give my blog some hip-looking acronym like WBg. People might think that there was some purpose behind the name other than “I need a name to give my blog a name and the handle that I use everywhere on the Internet seems appropriate. Also: consistency FTW.”

***Yes, that is a Questionable Content “Baking is Science for Hungry People” apron. You should go buy one and bake in it.

Tuition: Why Should We Pay to Fix What Others Broke?

McGill and Concordia students marching toward UQAM to join the protest march.

In Quebec, we have very low University tuition. It costs about $1600 a semester to go to school, which is the lowest tuition price in Canada. The Quebec government, for those who don’t know, has decided to raise tuition fees from about $1600 to $3793 a semester; Quebec would remain the province with the lowest tuition in Canada. What’s the price of the tuition increase? About 30 thousand students who won’t be able to afford a university education.

At 1pm today, I began walking down McGill College avenue with a group of other McGill students protesting the tuition hikes. We shouted, we carried signs, and we took pictures and videos. A police escort led us to Saint Catherine street, where we met up with several hundred Concordia students, and began our march down Ste Catherine street toward the UQAM campus. The protest was mostly organized by the French universities, but the English universities joined in to fight against our common problem: tuition hikes that will make education too expensive for an entire university’s worth of students.

My take on the issue is this: doubling our tuition over the next five years doesn’t seem that drastic in comparison with tuition fees across Canada and in the US. In fact, it seems reasonable during hard economic times, right? But not when you consider the reason the government subsidizes education in the first place: because an educated population creates a better economy. The more available education is, the better the economy will be, because there will be more people innovating, creating better products, solving problems, and pouring money and talent into the community. When you consider that fact, raising tuition prices doesn’t make much sense at all. In fact, it makes more  sense to lower tuition prices even further. We shouldn’t be striving to achieve everyone else’s status quo, we should lead by example and keep our tuition prices low. Daniel Zinian, the president and director general of the Conférence des Recteurs et des Principaux des Universités du Québec, was quoted in the Montreal Gazette as saying: “We believe the people who benefit from universities should contribute to their financing…” I agree! The public benefits from university education because educated people create jobs. Education is the last thing that should suffer during an economic crisis; why does it seem that education is always the first thing to go?

After a brief rally at UQAM, the massive group of between 15 and 30 thousand students, faculty members, parents, and others who were incensed about the issue marched toward Jean Charest’s office to protest in front of it. I left the crowd at about 3:30 for a meeting on McGill campus, and as I left, I watched the seemingly endless mass of people pouring through the city behind me.

When I left the Arts Building to see what was going on – specifically why I heard the sound of a helicopter outside – I was informed that I couldn’t go back into the building, despite the fact that my raincoat and bag were still inside (not to mention that a group of my friends were still there, and had not been informed that the building was closed.) Fortunately I had left my blood glucose meter inside, and the security guard let me back in to get it. Some students had entered the James administration building shortly before, and the campus felt tense. As I left (with my bag and raincoat this time) I saw around twenty riot police marching in formation from one side of the campus to the other, and a group of mounted police blocking the Milton street entrance. Apparently the protest hadn’t become violent except for a few individuals, but there were a few beatings and some people got maced. I’ll keep my opinions to myself and leave it to people who were actually there to comment on whether the police and/or students were acting appropriately.

We’re living in bizarre, exciting, scary times. People are fed up with the state of things, and they aren’t willing to take it much longer. Throughout the strike, a thought was lurking in the back of my mind: the economy is bad for everyone, and this protest was the students refusing to pay for other people’s mistakes. We didn’t create this economic crisis – most of us were in high school when the seeds of the recession began to sprout – so why should we have to pay for the consequences? The simple answer is that we shouldn’t.

Further reading:

McGill Daily: Students Occupying James Administration Assaulted by Security

McGill Daily: McGill Students Violently Forced Off Campus

Montreal Gazette: Thousands of Quebec Students Boycott Classes

McGill and Concordia students marching down Ste Catherine street.

The French and English Universities, gathered together, about to march.

The crowd of people as I left. It continued for blocks and blocks.

On The MUNACA Rally

The rally as seen from the Roddick Gates.

Friday, September 16th, there was a rally for MUNACA outside McGill. The portion of McGill College avenue closest to the university campus was closed off and totally filled with MUNACA members, AMURE members (another McGill union which officially supports MUNACA’s efforts in this negotiation,) students, and other faculty and staff who support the MUNACA strike. The rally was huge and, apparently, wildly successful.

The rally was centered around a podium on the West side of McGill College avenue, where various speakers voiced their support for the rally, including Outremont MP Thomas Mulcair – a McGill graduate. I’m not sure who was actually running the rally, but he played the accordion well and often, leading the crowd in quite a few protest songs (when it rained the other day, I believe the same guy was mouth-trumpeting “Singing in the Rain” over the loud speaker impressively well. It was epic.) I took a few pictures of the rally, which I’ll post below.

This week, apparently, was McGill’s Aboriginal Celebration week. The only aboriginal themed event that I saw happened on Friday, and was poorly advertised, if it was advertised at all. Aboriginal people always seem to get the short end of the stick, which is another infuriating issue all together, but I think it’s unfortunate that MUNACA’s rally upstaged the festivities for the Aboriginal Celebration week day. The only good thing about the unfortunate coincidence of the two events was that the apparent size of the MUNACA rally benefited from juxtaposition with the small celebration.

Since this is my third post on the subject of the strike, I feel I need to explain why I’ve been spending so much time on this issue. First, the Internet is a powerful tool. As I said in my last post, I can’t afford to not cross the picket line. However, I do have a blog that a few people read, so it seems that the best way for me to support the strike is to use my blog to get the word out. After all, that’s the most important part of non-violent protests: showing the world that you’re not being treated properly. Second, I think it’s important to tell McGill University and MUNACA how this is affecting the student population. We students have a fairly unique perspective on the strike, since we sort of straddle the world of the strike and the world on the inside, and I’d like to share that perspective with the world. I’ll get back to doing some more normal posts eventually, but I think it’s important to talk about this issue now.

Update: Thanks to a response to this post, I realized that I may not have made my position on the strike entirely clear. I suppose that’s because I haven’t been able to find much detail on the actual issues being debated, and as a result, I’m not quite sure where I stand on all the issues. However, I do support MUNACA and their strike. From what I’ve read of the main issues, I feel McGill is being unreasonable, and I think MUNACA was completely justified in calling a strike. My intention for this post was to provide a somewhat neutral description of the rally. For further details on how I feel about the strike, please read my most recent post about the strike, and my first post about the strike.

Regarding the Aboriginal Celebration, after thinking about the juxtaposition I mentioned, I think what makes it so fascinating to me is that the two groups were both being neglected by the McGill Administration: The Aboriginal Celebration Week only really lasted a few hours, and McGill won’t agree to a reasonable wage scale for MUNACA. I think it’s unfortunate that a possible opportunity to promote Aboriginal rights may have been lost, but I believe it was just an unfortunate scheduling coincidence. I’m glad that the rally got the turnout it did.

You can see the Aboriginal Celebration in the background of this picture; you can't see that its attendance pales in comparison to the attendance if the MUNACA rally.