No Rush

The last semester of my late return to higher learning is almost at an end. I've managed to survive living in the Bermuda triangle of grease (that being Pizza Hut, Ho Lee Chow and the downstairs poutine shop) without turning into a whale. Despite my rusty intellect which, until recently, was more attuned to eyeballing the correct amount of Crown Royal for 12 'King Kong' shots than to writing a critical compare/contrast essay on 'The Tempest,' I jumpstarted my brain function back to life. I was pleased to find that underneath the encrustation of rust there's still a blade with a bit of an edge on it.

When I think about the process of going back to school I feel deeply humbled.



I've learned how to make my own refried beans because those fancy canned ones are now too expensive for my meagre budget.

When my air mattress sprang multiple leaks I did my best to repair them with scotch tape, which worked very well for all of 20 minutes. So a couple of times a night I roll onto the floor to switch on the pump and reflate. Though the mornings seem colder when I wake up in a trough in the middle of my saggy bed, my ass touching the floor, and the mounds of my useless bed enclosing me like a fort.

I sit in class with people almost a decade younger than me and I marvel at their focus, their seriousness, their (for lack of a better word) 'adultish-ness.'

Visions of my 19-year-old self confront me when I look at them. I was dreadlocked, pierced, stoned (sometimes) and with a chip on my shoulder the size of a Buick, it's more like a teenage film cliche than who I used to be.



But the humility and admiration I have for my classmates has a vein of reservation running through it. In our print media classroom we all sit in front of our own massive flatscreen monitor. People also bring in their own laptops, cameras and smart phones. So many devices designed for something called "communication" which mostly serve to draw our eyes away from the faces directly in front of us and into the online, social media, blog, vlog universe. Which is somehow more valid because those cute witty updates and comments we make are enshrined for all to see. We can preen and revisit our cleverness, link it on our twitter feed, and make sure everyone knows how damn witty we are.

It is such an honour to sit in a class and talk about ethics and story. Now I'm no saint and probably check my facebook account more than a normal person should. However, after serving the drunk and ungrateful masses for the past five years something about the whole situation makes me want to scream.

"These are the best goddamn days of your life people!!!! Let's go to the pub. Let's talk. Let's be YOUNG!"

Today, outside my window, snow is lightly falling. Each flake is doing a dizzy, eccentric dance as it resists its journey to earth.

I relate. Once you hit the ground life is stationary, so why not prolong the dance as much as possible? Why ever stop dancing?