Today I realized that I missed seeing my friend Matt play here in Toronto with his band, Comeback Kid, for the second time since moving here, and got a little depressed at how I can't afford the time or funds to go out and see shows. This was on the heels of listening to a ton of Grieves yesterday while studying finance, happy that I'd discovered a new MC to get excited about. The absence of playing music in my life has been difficult with the stress and time demands of school, like the colors of the world have less vibrance. (That, and being in a business school environments where other students either seem to go out 'clubbing' or not at all, has been a drag.)
Then this afternoon, Jen and I were having was having a conversation with Jen about bears, natural selection, human ethics, and bus tours, and suddenly found myself excited about the future prospect of taking a bus tour out to Banff where we could see wild grizzlies and amazing vistas. Lo and behold: another cliched getting-older moment! I should be so lucky to think about that, a day after my friend Ben (in town on business from Seattle) asked if there we felt trapped in town without a car; at that point, I'd mentioned the possibility that she and I could probably take a bus or train out to Stratford-upon-Tyne this summer for their annual Shakespeare festival.
Lots to do here, even though I often feel guilty about spending the smallest amount of money at all with how broke we are tight money is (trying to stay positive!). And as if on cue, I need to get out to Canadian Tire and pick up a cheap vaccuum that's on sale so that we can finally clean up our bedroom (shh! don't tell the landlord!), even if it does take me away from my finance study.
Woe be to me the next time I have to dive into such a dry, analytical subject again. My visual-storytelling brain doesn't do well with it, has no interest, and forces me to go against my natural instincts of avoiding something that I truly don't care if I ever see again.
And thus the sun returns, beckoning me outside, to get on with it, just like everything else I have yet to do today, and for the next two weeks.
Sounds travel up to our balcony quite readily from the street, especially at night. For some reason, it reminded me of how much older I am as compared to most other students, with several going out to the bars for St. Patrick's Day a couple of days ago. I happily spend time at home, finally finishing 200 or so flash cards for finance so that I can have some peace of mind at being more or less caught up with the material, even though I have a load of practice problems to do.
I'm putting on weight with the stress, but am staying focused and will do my best, despite feeling less than prepared for the papers I have to write yet this weekend. There's only so much that one person can do, and I've learned that if I state the obvious in my papers, I'll get points for setting up the problems effectively. Too often early on I felt that I had to start with a much higher-order idea before getting rolling, but just as life requires a foundation, so does a good case analysis.
At least I don't have to go war in Libya, right? Silly Democratic voters we were, thinking we were getting an innovative hybrid vehicle for a President, but it's clearly just the same old Chevy. I thought to myself earlier, "even if there was a fraud line I could call to report him, the automated voice would say 'please deposit $1 million to be connected to a representative'". I'll post that Who song on my other page for that... just another rich man's war, protecting those oil interests. I could go on, but will calm the nerves with some other study before bed.
Pastor Martin Niemoller, please know that many of us heed your words, and that we speak up for others. We may not run things, but dammit, we are trying.
I hate Managerial Finance.
After failing the midterm and being determined to pass the class on the force of sheer spite, I spent much of today and will spend the first part of tomorrow making flash cards that I can read on the train and the bus to and from school. The professor, while a great teacher in class, has made it clear from the midterm that you had better know everything, becuase if you don't, son, you are screwwwwwed.
I studied like a madman for my Management Accounting final a few weeks ago and knew everything that was asked on the final, going with my gut hunch and spending extra time on a couple of items that ended up being central to the exam. I stunned myself by pulling an A- in the class, leaving my school Internet account page up for half an hour, convinced for a time that I'd received someone else's grade, that they'd correct it and I'd get the B- or C+ that I had been expecting. But no, there it stayed, and there it still is.
I'd said that I wished the M.A. class lasted the whole term, but at this point I am joyously taking my A- and running. Hell, I can learn more on my own time any time I want to. But the sad truth is that yes, I am judged on the grades I get; I still have no internship for the summer and am fortunate that I have a chance at working at school full-time in an expansion of the part-time work that I've only just started. And the M.F. class is one where I truly don't give two sh*ts about the material, as though internalizing it would align me with the sh*tlickers that go on to Wall Street (and here, Bay Street) and become "financial analysts" and ten other versions of boring and pointless that I cannot imagine doing.
(Look at me being decent and censoring! Proof that all is not lost.)
In four weeks, I'll never again have to care about bond valuations, the new present value of anything, the present value of the capital cost allowance tax shield... it goes on and on. I brought the textbook with me to skim on the train while I ran errands and two separate people commented on how "interesting" the book must be. "It's my weakest subject", I responded in both cases.
Not for long, though. Not for long.
Dinner's ready on the stove, a simple meal of alphabet pasta and inexpensive sauce. I've had to learn a lot about how to eat well on a budget, and wish I would have learned that lesson much earlier in life, but can't go back and redo that, so will keep doing my frugal best going forward. I still have an internship to apply to and a paper section to write, with the dim hope of getting to some managerial finance reading before bed.
I've been under so much stress of late that I literally cannot think at times, and my mind draws a blank when I consciously try to think of something. It's as though my mind is keeping me from freaking out about things, trying to help me keep moving with the stress of a new part-time job, the 9.5 hours-a-week that the job takes that I desperately miss already, but which is providing me with valuable Canadian work experience.
I spent four hours today trying to apply for my Off-Campus Work Permit, including the train ride to and from school in which I brought my laptop along to do readings for the paper section I'm responsible for. I'm glad I went to school, though, as wrestling with the scanner and trying to get legible passport and study-permit grayscale copies, plus the system time-outs with the CIC website, easily would have cost over $40 with all the time I spent on it. And after all that, it wouldn't accept my U.S. debit card or the one credit card that I theoretically still have space on. In short, I'll have to request a special form that CIC has to mail to me, then I bring that to my bank with the $150.00 payment. Hopefully it won't delay the processing and I'll still be on track to be able to work full-time starting mid- to late-April.
The joys of being international, one step at a time. Dinner!
As I went to the counter to settle up, the counter guy told me shook his head when I gave him my chip card to debit my account. He wouldn't accept it.
"But you have a sign on the front door that says you accept Interac."
"Actually, I think that's just for the ATM."
"Well, THAT sucks."
Grumbling about the rip-off, I went to the ATM and paid a $1.50 fee to get $20.00 from my checking account, all because I didn't bring enough cash with me from across the street. I gave him the $20 and took my $18.50 back, and didn't give my customary thank-you after receiving the change. On my way back across the street, I thought, "Well, I suppose I could have left without paying," since he didn't have my name or anything of that sort. But it would have made no sense to bring on such bad karma, at the very least. We all pick our battles, and sometimes just knuckling under (and in this case, paying a total of $4.50, making Jen's printout ultimately cost 75 cents per page) is what life commands us to do.
After I got home, I went outside onto our balcony and looked scornfully down at the business. What did I see but a Second Harvest truck now parked out front of the 24-hour computer store, with people unloading a few overstuffed boxes of food and delivering them into that same building: a cosmic reminder that I needed to regain, quickly, the perspective that a small incident caused me to lose.
There's some recent backstory to explain my needlessly harsh reaction. Just last night, I had a conversation with a relative that I never expected to have to have, which nonetheless confirmed that financial support will be provded to keep us afloat here amidst the constant financial uncertainty. It will provide a level of certainty that we haven't known since receiving the news way back in early September about my financial aid award.
I won't soon forget waking up this morning; my brain was still confused, as though it still couldn't process the fact that the help will be provided, that the daily worries that have been at the front of my mind every single day do not have to hold such negative influence over my thoughts. To think that I can actually concentrate on school, work my new 9.5-hour-a-week job, keep on networking in the quest to secure a paid summer internship... the degree to which that cauldron of worry/frustration/suppressed anger/fear has bubbled is surprising. We'll keep on scraping and stretching just as we have, but with this, it will make it easier to keep an extra $1.50 fee from wreaking such havoc on my mood, as though that $1.50 was the difference between staying afloat and sinking.
Barring a truly bizarre disaster, I'll never know what it's like to be truly poor. I am an extremely privileged position to simply have worries about a course exam in a competitive graduate program, and am humbled. Still, I know what it's like to struggle. And I also know the lesson that we can never truly know what others are capable of until the time comes, with another reminder having arrived just 18 hours ago.
With that, I continue.
I decided to write for a bit as I'm across the street from our home printing out some materials for Jen, and had to pay for a half-hour of computer time in order to print the 25-cents-per-page (welcome to Canada!) document, which thankfully was only a couple of pages. The place smells like unwashed punks, which brings back the memory of some basement shows, but I can't tell if it's just the place, or if it's the guy who's fallen asleep and is snoring in front of computer No. 5 (I'm at computer No. 10 about ten feet away) but is not logged in, as evidenced by the oscillating graphic on the screen in front of him. It's pretty impressive, actually, how he's just asleep in the chair, while the front-counter guy pays him no mind, having since gone outside for a smoke and come back in. It's not that cold out - only 18 degrees - but who knows. It's a 24-hour place and there's that Mickey's Diner-type vibe that this place and all 24-hour joints have. It makes me a little nostalgic for the nights when I'd stay out at Hard Times reading things that I simply wanted to read, digesting the verbage of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, David Korten, so much that was so formative for me.
But back to the matter at hand.
After I'm done typing here, I'll resume studying for my management accounting final on Tuesday afternoon, which hopefully will not be as demoralizing as the managerial finance mid-term I took on Thursday, where I clearly failed it and it's only a matter of whether I am at the bottom of the score range or not. At least most everyone came out of the room shaking their heads, but it would have been nice to have some more rigorous class examples to give us a hint at the steamroller that we'd face. When studying the chapters gives you no real preparation, is that on me or the professor? It's a little of both, but the stereotype persists that every professor thinks that their class is the most important, and that things should be clear.
Then again, I've been exposed as a poor test-taker, much to my own irritation. My experience in the business world has taken me out of the if-you-fail-at-this, you'll-fail-in-business mentality, as my life experience has taught me that that's clearly not how the business world works; it may be that way in some areas, but of all the good I've been able to do, there's no punishment that has mirrored the effects of passing or failing a test. (Each loan application I ever worked with was its own "test", in a way.) I'm a much better writer than test-taker, am comfortable talking in front of people even with no real preparation, all thanks to my self-study and my band experience, respectively.
More to the point, though, I like the explanatory power of management accounting, regardless of how brutal and comprehensive the test is going to be. As I was going over the slides earlier this morning, I was reminded of how I'm still adjusting to adopting the mentality of a manager, being rewarded for thinking analytically and holistically, when my entire professional career (save perhaps for my Wellstone time when I'd mastered the requirements of the position) has provided no such reward for such thinking, and has in fact actively discouraged it through the job design and the organizational expectations.
To learn to think in new ways is one thing, but to have the confidence that you'll not only be able to apply them, but be expected to apply them - well, that's something I've never experienced, but it's something that I'm being trained for.
The sleeper has stopped snoring for the moment, and my time here is almost up. Time to move on, time to continue to prepare yet again for a three-hour moment during which I will do my best.
At home today while Jen is at work. Our older cat hollers, the younger cat expresses his hostility to the running dishwasher, and I've essentially finished one of the three papers I want/need to get written today; the next one up to bat is a group project where my portion is late, and I need to make sure I'm pulling my weight with the other three group members. No one likes a slacker in a group project, and no one wants to be perceived as a drag on the effort or as dead weight.
Another financial nightmare tailspin was averted when my payment plan at school was inexplicably cancelled, then an emergency loan was issued by another staff member who cared enough to ensure that I didn't have to beg for a place to, essentially, squat in Toronto, as without that loan, there was no money for March and April rent. There's still the stress of trying to find a well-paying summer internship that allows me to pay off that emergency loan by the end of May, but for now I'm maintaining the delicate balance. If I ever harbored any illusions as to why it was so difficult to go back to school, those illusions were demolished a long time ago!
News update: Jen is at work! Since I last posted, Jen was hired on to work full-time at what turns out to be a wildly popular day spa in downtown Toronto. It starts at minimum wage, but that is $10.25 an hour and will at least go up to $11.00 an hour by late April. I too was fortunate to be chosen for a student work-study position at school, where I'll be in contact with recent alumni and updating the school's demographic database. Rankings, rankings, rankings... the same system that had an effect on me (the Aspen Institute laurel, along with the Financial Times, the Economist, and BusinessWeek) is one that I'll now be contributing to. It should be fun, and I'll take all the money I can get, since what I've got money-wise isn't much! Training starts in about a week and a half.
No matter what, I've made great friends up here, every other student I know is just as shellshocked with the workload as I am, and those who went for finance/investment banking/consulting jobs have had to let their coursework slide for some significant portion of the term already, as I continue my quest to find something in Human Resources. At least I'm still making the solid effort across the board, and despite the financial pressure, am as glad as ever that I'm here.
