I turned in the second draft of my comp. Now it's time to make piles - what to keep, what to sell, what to give away. It's also time to reflect, as most transitions result in taking stock.
My time here in Toronto started out kind of rocky. The city is heavily populated by students and the apartment stock gets pretty competitive around the beginning of each semester - which is of course right when we were trying to find an apartment. Chris was definitely not a fan of Toronto and nothing I could do could convince him to like it. Despite that, he chose York over CUNY (thank goodness) and we decided to pick up and move here. Trying to find a place was ridiculous. There was a huge line for most apartments, they were pretty pricey, and the level of ass-kissing and personal scrutiny was, well, humiliating. Of course, Chris and I don't play nice in that way. Not that we were dismissive, but we both have a hard time engaging if it's not genuine. It's the reason we both don't do well in crowds of strangers. Inane small talk eludes us.
Because the west side of Toronto is coveted, we moved to Leslieville - a "dangerous" east side neighborhood. Chris liked its pre-overrunbyhipsters Brooklyn-ish feel. And our rent was cheap. But when we got there, the apartment wasn't ready and it looked nothing like the landlord said it would (he just bought the house and was planning renovations). The place was dark, dank, and cold. The upstairs neighbor smoked like a chimney and the smoke would come through the vents. It was gross. Given all these variables, plus the fact that it took me a good hour and a half on a good day to get to campus, I was in no place to produce anything approximating good academic work.
The "drama" of Toronto was exacerbated by the fact that our union, CUPE 3903 went on strike about two months into my first semester of my PhD. I was *just* getting a groove and BAM! we were out on the pavement - literally. About a week before the strike, my chain-smoking 24-year old upstairs neighbor was killed by a stray bullet while smoking outside a local bar. Oh, and the entire economy collapsed. The world felt like it was shifting under my feet and I couldn't hold on.
One of the great things about the strike - trust me on this one, it was very difficult for me to glean good things from this debacle - was that I met a lot of people who I wouldn't have ordinarily met. That part I liked. But, the strike itself was a fucking joke. The strategizing was all wrong. Frankly, a lot of grad students are really good at deconstructing but are too rooted in ideology to intervene effectively. It just wasn't clear what the union - and the membership - was trying to do with this moment. Furthermore, it wasn't clear that the strategy team could fully account for our ridiculous demands at a time where people were losing their jobs to a frightening degree. In short, we played it all wrong and we were a joke, even in left circles. It was really disheartening and it colonized my energies and destabilized my commitment to left politics in Toronto. In that way, I really felt like I was alone.
Right around the time the strike ended, our new upstairs neighbors informed us that our house had bedbugs. Fucking bedbugs. That was that for me and we decided to move. I just couldn't handle another thing to have to handle, if you know what I mean. So about the time that we were wrapping up our first semester after remediation, Chris and I had to pack up and move across the city. We found a lovely apartment on the cusp of Little Italy and Little Portugal - near Kensington Market. It's bright and pretty - and I am still living here. Sadly, the building, a beautiful 1920s apartment building, was bought by a new company and is being turned into condos. I got out just in time, actually. Ah, the wheels of "progress" just keep turning.
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