Merry Christmas, all, especially to the guy yelling in front of the church across the street

As I sat down to write something, I suddenly heard the sound of a man yelling down on the street.  Jen and I looked, and she correctly deduced that he was "crazy preaching", dressed like the Fourth Wise Man who was written out of the story.  The iPhone picture really doesn't do his outfit justice, since he was carrying what must have been one or two Holy Bible-esque parcels with his left arm, in the manner of students holding schoolbooks against their chests.  Even though we can often hear full conversations at the level of normal speech being seven stories up, the man's loud yelling bouncing off of all of the stone walls is making it difficult to make out much of what he's saying, except when he said "That is NOT loving thy neighbor as yourself!".  He's still going as I type.

I was going to write something about getting started on a book I bought several months ago, Harvard Business Review on Managing Yourself, about how I'm working to build up the fearlessness that I'll need to secure a paid internship for the summer, about how I was excited to go downstairs to the gym since it's never technically closed.

But all that has a tin ring to it when compared to the street preacher on a cold Christmas early-afternoon.  Most everything that I have to worry about is containable and none of those things involve the possibility of being unhinged in public.

As they saying goes, "the Lord works in mysterious ways".  I don't think you have to be religious to understand that.

Give thanks for your loved ones, work your plan, and enjoy the unstructured time that you've been given, wherever you happen to be.

Slow Saturday night, now Sunday morning

Semester is done, save for one paper that's due on the 23rd that I want to have done by the 21st.  Gave a good representation of what I could do, learned the system, what carries weight, met some great and solid people over the last few months.  Three-and-a-half months went by pretty quickly, it seems, but I feel like I'm on the right track with the school idea, and obviously need to have things fall into place financially for Year Two to happen, but trying not to be too concerned with what I can't control yet.

I have just over two weeks off until the winter semester begins and with it the summer-internship stampede, where I see what I can get and where I'm wanted, obviously in the hope of staying exactly where I'm at here in Toronto.  Jen continues to stay on the job-hunting trail and seems to have more frequent interviews coming along, so hopefully something will come through for her - not just so that we can breathe financially, but so that she can more fully take part in this city.

It's actually hard to write about the uncertainty, even though being a "poor" college student is hardly new or uncommon.  I feel like I can make the needed grades as long as I can stay the course, can meet the people that need meeting, can find the opportunities that need finding, create what I need to.  But the money thing... fuck.  Before, living in the same city where I grew up, there was always the feeling that I could just crash out somewhere if things really fell apart, could keep up the continuity of a job, where no one has to know or care where you live as long as you keep on showing up and keep meeting and exceeding what's expected of you.  But my family unit doesn't have that flexibility now; if we do, I can't imagine where that flexibility would come from.  And if "it" doesn't work, then what?  Do we get on a bus and go back to Minneapolis, or do we go somewhere else?  To Washington D.C., for example, where Jen has friends?  Do we try our hand in a place like Chicago?  And we have two little four-footed members of the family to consider, too, if it ever came to that - how would we pull it off?

The flip side of this, of course, is the amazing opportunity of just being here, having this platform to truly improve, and I can feel it helping.  Maybe this is what a new professional sports player feels knowing that they can be cut or sent down to the minors at any time, have everything upended; maybe this is what a fighter feels when they step into the ring, where the wrong defeat at the wrong time can throw them, sometimes permanently, from the ladder or wall that they've been climbing.  But the thing that keeps these people going is their own will to succeed, cliche though that may be.

I feel an affinity with that - I went downstairs to the gym today for the first time in weeks, determined to push my physical self as I've pushed my mental and time-blocking self with my schooling, I want to build my network further over the next few weeks, and really start to set out publicly what I'm all about when it comes to postitioning myself within and outside of school.  For I may feel the age and life-experience gap with a number of people, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they're good people, and ultimately that's the best reflection of the experience that I can take away so far.

As always, I keep on, and keep working to make the best keep on happening.

Quickly

I've worked hard before, but never with so much determined focus.  The degree to which the car distracted me was made clear by how much I've been able to buckle down, even though I frequently take longer to read things than I would like to, longer to chimp out a paper than I feel I need to.  The next couple of weeks will see a mountain of work that I've already scaled significant parts of, and I'll be grateful to see Friday, December 17th, at which time all of my finals will be done, and (with luck) my economics paper will be nearly finished, if not already completed.

I've made peace with the financial stress of school, but in so doing it has revealed another unexpected feeling: I am reluctantly spending loaned money and feel much better with the idea that I actually created some of my still-small surplus by selling the car.  I didn't actually create any wealth; I merely converted the durable good into income at a price less than its market value, feeling that the extra $1000 that might have resulted from higher pricing or a delay would not have been worth repeated trips to Buffalo (which I didn't and don't have time for) or the prospect of a snowstorm undoing the proper testing of the car (which still hasn't hit - a twenty-minute snow flurry yesterday is all that's really happened yet this year and even that melted away to reveal the still-green grass).  I was able to trust my gut, and again have it work - even letting the father of the buyer take the car for a spin while I waited in their home, talking on the phone to his son, who agreed to buy the car sight unseen on his father's recommendation.  The driver could have vanished, but he didn't, just like so many people that we trust could betray it, but don't.  It's a big small thing.

I woke up seven hours ago and with this writing exception, all that I've done is research for a group accounting project, get my portion of a paper completed for a group information-systems project, and have begun plowing through readings for tomorrow's classes, with a quick resume review needed as I have a strategy session at 5:30pm tomorrow for that.  I've never stared at a computer screen so much in my life, but I'm doing much more than staring: though the research, the note-taking that has resulted in an incredible pile of used scratch paper in the "den", I've had great focus, so much so that when I looked to my right and out the window a few minutes ago, I was again reminded that yes, I'm in a new city in a new country.

The view has become very familiar, but I think I'll always be an outsider, or rather, will never forget where I came from.  And that's a very, very good thing.

Fare thee well, fair Sally!

Though the prospect saddened me yesterday, I gratefully sold Sally the Subaru today (so named by Jen) to her first suitor in the greater Buffalo area.  I met with Bill, whose son Tim was intersted in it, and everything went far better than I could have expected.  Bill is the kind of conservative you don't see on television these days, someone eminently sensible and simply great to chew the fat with. He even drove me to the bus station and gave me a rundown of the run-down that is much of Buffalo, as "our recession hit about 30 years ago" when giants such as Bethlehem Steel saw their fortunes undone by global competition.

When I pulled up to their sleepy hamlet and saw another silver Subaru in the driveway, the good sense I had about it was reinforced.  It's good to know that yes, there are still limitless opportunities to find good people, no matter how brief the meeting may be, for a particular extended moment in time.

I'm on the Greyhound bus as I type, as yet another innovation takes hold, that of onboard WiFi.  I hope they're turning a profit with it, but regardless, I am a current beneficiary, and I only spent 20 dollars (!) on a one-way ticket from Buffalo to Toronto.  The things I've had to spend that much on in my new home for something that only provides a fraction of the utility...then again, maybe this is another reminder that yes, utility abounds for those who know where to find it.

I was apprehensive in a big-picture way yesterday: with the car now in the care of a new owner, my family is now fully committed to T.O. residence, come what may.  No "screw this, we're taking the cats and high-tailing it out of here" is an option now, like it would have been even if we might have been down to our last dollar at some point.  That last dollar is now a good distance further away with the sale of the car, though, and the freedom from gas that costs nearly $1.10 a liter, car payments of over $400 a month, car insurance that would have likely exceeded $400 a month - all of that is officially a thing of the past.

Amazing how car culture seeps into your pores, makes you think that you're at a disadvantage without one.  The car was wonderful, did everything I asked it to, and more; after all, the main reason I got it was to be able to court my girl, who at that time was a 30-40 minute drive away with scant public transportation options.  Now, of course, we live under the same roof, and without a car, I can focus that much more on my family and the challenge of my MBA responsibilities.

Back to work, onto the next challenge... and as the QEW traffic clog reminds me that I'm once again close to home, I again give thanks for the blessings I've been given, which I live every day.

Reframing idea: the Spaghetti Northern

Good grades, bad grades, ugly grades: all have arrived already and the job is to press onward, retain as much as possible, and really learn, ensuring that I get a B average in the process so that I may graduate.  The stated objective of the program is to take the student out of existing comfort zones and it has accomplished that in many ways; there's so much to take in with the new city and the learning that it's hard to turn off the switch.  Even surfing the Internet only packs more information into the Tokyo subway of the mind - I can look outside at the time and temperature on the Manulife Financial building just a few blocks north, which seems to be the closest I'll get to meditating anytime in the near future.

I'm off in a flash to finally get the box for the amplifier that John purchased ten days ago, and perhaps visit an appliance store in the event that I can't obtain a free box.  Then, I study macro- and micro-economics for the mid-term exam, complexity science, and organizational behavior.  Then, tomorrow morning, I team up with another student to do the written analysis for a quantitative-methods assignment that's worth 45% of our grade.  All of the huge numbers aren't really a stressor; knowning that there aren't many chances to shine through and affect a grade is where that comes in.  At least it's not law school, where one test at the end of a semester is the only shot a person has.

And it's amazing how much the Internet has changed formal education.  Half of my textbooks have "exclusive" online reference, half of the textbooks themselves are functionally useless in that they don't match up well with the covered material, and in times of difficulty, people ask one another their opinions rather than strugging in a vacuum.  It's not far off base from the world of work, I suppose.

Any romantic notions about self-betterment have largely been dispelled, but one person notably described my effort as "heroic", which continues to be inspiring.  As I try to bottle that feeling and all of the other emotions and thoughts that swirl around this effort, I give thanks for my fiancee, with whom I've been exploring this new place (we went on a "haunted Toronto" walk around the city this past Thursday, which was a great treat) and who has done wonders to help me adjust to the new hat that I wear as a graduate student.

And hey, if I ever feel too hemmed in, I can always look up Illuminati conspiracies online, or something - some things are simply guaranteed to restore harmony to my view and remind me that yes, I am paying attention to and focusing on the right things.

Nobody's ever said "ch-ch-ch-changes" before, right?

Not posting as much and definitely not journaling as I had been prior to the move.  Looking back, journaling served its purpose for me in restoring my ability to write concisely again and also in dealing with prolonged unemployment and family struggles, but with both of those things in the rear-view mirror, I need to stay away from writing until I can find a way to do so without recalling either or both of those.

(Fortunately, I have graduate school to attend to.)

A big surprise was not only being one of the few Americans in the program, but the sheer volume of people with engineering backgrounds.  Initially I thought of it as people looking to burnish technical skills with more business-strategy abilities, but in talking with a couple of students recently, it's even more pragmatic than that: Americans have long used India as a poster child for outsourced jobs, for people paid a fraction of what Americans were paid to do the same work.  But guess what?  The race to the bottom is never over in the modern era, as work that once would be outsourced to India is now finding workers even cheaper and hungrier in places like Thailand and Bangladesh.

I have a lot of work to do to keep pace, but I appreciate the energy it takes.  Besides, I wouldn't be in graduate school if I was simply paying $60,000 in tuition over two years to confirm things I already know.  I'd be more irritated if I *wasn't* getting enough work to do for that kind of money.

I think about my new life adjustment and contrast it to the current American political season and the bald-faced insanity just stupefies me.  Canadian news seems almost quaint by comparison, even with the Toronto mayoral election coming up at the end of October.  Nobody's freaking out about a mosque being built in NYC and there's no Sharron Angle or Carl Paladino or Christine O'Donnell to make people's heads spin; the candidates here just concerned with cutting costs and how to pay for things, and none of them have any real answers that I can detect.  Did I mention that September 11th came and went up here, and it was barely mentioned in the media, and discussed by none of my classmates?  I feel like I'm catching up on a lifetime of enforced ignorance, and it's not like I wasn't raised right or anything - I was raised to question and think, but sometimes you just have to get out of the petri dish to see it properly, no matter what the cost.

Back to catching up on my Financial Accounting reading, and hopefully off to another corn maize about an hour north of Toronto, a way to recap my engagement on 9/19/09 at Sever's.  Plus, it's Canadian Thanksgiving weekend and Jen is excited to make a pot roast tonight, for which we already have all the ingredients.

Life is different, and life is good!

Zip, zoom, read, WOW.

Have been gladly blown away by school for the most part.  So much reading to do all of the time, so much to jam into so little time.  It's like a rocketship that I'm glad to ride, and meet hundreds of new people, some of whom will likely become good friends into the future.

Jen and I will shortly head out for one of those events that only truly big cities seem to have the chutzpah to pull off.  It'll be her first time on the TTC subway, finally - all of the rides are free this evening and they're having a special all-night subway schedule for people to want to take in as many of the art installations as they can.  Oh, and it's barely 50 degrees out, so I get to break out my new coat I purchased today, which on clearance in Toronto costs as much as it would have at full price in Minneapolis.  The law of supply and demand with 5 million people-plus, I suppose, but I'm still proud of the score.

I've also started a daily photo blog here that an old friend inspired just yesterday, and will be adding things that I find in this new place as a collection of experiences.  There are so many new ways to see things; I've somehow been blessed to have the opportnuity to challenge my conventions and intend to make the most of this.

Off we go for art, sweet corn, and poutine!