Yesterday took a neat turn. I went to class feeling kind of depressed and didn't say much of anything during the lecture. At the end of class Paul invited everyone out for dinner with the film crew, but I was intent on getting home and waiting out the rest of the day. I went to Robarts to see if Subway was still open, but it had just closed, so I went to catch the subway home.

I'd say I'm an adventurous guy, but sometimes I have these moments of hesitation that I end up giving myself a hard time over later. Heading to the station I thought about how good it would be to go out for a beer and relax and talk with someone. While I was waiting for the train, Dru and Andrea (from the film class I took last semester) came up behind me and reiterated Paul's invitation, so I went along. Another Ethiopian restaurant on Bloor near Ossington called Queen of Sheeba. It was mostly the same group that went out for Dru's birthday - graduate film students Sarah, Paul, Sal, and Alicia, plus Tony. After eating six of us walked to a bar at Dundas and Ossington and got wrecked. It was fun sitting around, talking shit and letting loose. Tony gave me a lift home at the end of the night and I told him and Sarah that they'd made my day.

Simple enough, but I was glad to get a second chance at turning my attitude around. The funny thing is that more than one person last night mentioned that they didn't like Wednesdays. I'm completely in that camp. Something about Wednesday gets to me. But yesterday proved an exception to the rule.

On the last day of classes for the fall semester of my Master's degree program, having stayed up all night working on a paper and presentation for subjects in which I never thought I'd find myself involved, something in me switched on.

Over the course of the semester I've been growing more and more apprehensive about my decision to enroll in grad school. I spent half of the time wondering why I bothered with classes at all. It's not that I didn't feel engaged on a certain level with the material. I liked my classes, but consistently felt puzzled as to why I was spending so much time analyzing how a book was made 200 years ago, how tonal combinations indicate an opera character's motivations, what a young boy's experiences in Communist Ethiopia had to do with Canadian identity, and the syntagmatic paradigms of filmic narrative language.

This wasn't what I was expecting. Last fall I sat down in my apartment on O'Connor Street in Ottawa and wrote to organizations and universities about why they should accept me and pay me money to keep studying. I wouldn't set foot in a library for months to come, but I was able to articulate my ambitions based on lingering ideas left over from theses I wrote, arguments that were born from things I felt passionate about in everyday life. Literature. Canadian writing. Film. Multidisciplinary approaches to art and instruction.

Since my first year of University I had my heart and mind set on becoming a professor. It was my plan over the entirety of my undergraduate career, and it was derailed in the year I spent apart from a classroom. I lost the feeling in being away from it. I began to see the potential in other opportunities and even as I accepted U of T's offer and moved to Toronto to continue my education there was a part of me that doubted the direction I had established for myself. Most of the time I engaged only superficially with the material, rarely speaking in class, sharing only brief pleasantries with the people I began seeing on a regular basis because I knew that in a few months time I'd be back in Ottawa, working, doing something else unrelated to the realm of education. In the meantime I would repeatedly stress over what I was actually going to be able to accomplish once I'd achieved my degree and no longer had to think about it. I hadn't fully discounted the idea of going for my PhD, but with my interest in all things academia flagging I didn't see it as something I'd likely pursue in the near future.

This line of thinking led to a disappointment in myself that I didn't immediately recognize - I had decided on some level to abandon what I'd been working so hard at accomplishing for the past few years. My experiences at U of T existed as nothing more than formalities. More than that, they led to a doubt I began to foster in myself about my own abilities, thinking that everyone around me was far more brilliant, more self-assured, and more prepared to see their education through. Without realizing it, I lost faith in myself, and though I've been completing my assignments I haven't been expecting them to garner results that are of any importance to me.

Recently I made the decision to sit down and talk with two people about this problem while I still had the time and my status as one of their students. Last week I talked with George Elliott Clarke about all things CanLit, an opportunity I haven't taken with anyone since I started back at school. Today I sat down with Linda Hutcheon and told her that the Master's program really wasn't what I had been expecting. I told her that I had been a Canadianist and took her course because of the importance of her work in the field. For the first time all semester I was able to hear her talk about CanLit. I asked her about the ramifications of becoming a professor, and whether she had ever experienced doubts. She told me that she'd had doubts right up until she'd actually started the job, and that the job market for professors is going to be very lucrative over the next few years for those who are willing to go where the work takes them.

She assured me that I would get to make the most of my interests at the PhD level. I told her about the declaration of interest and thesis proposal I'd written to get funding for the program, and she told me to bring it in with me after the break so that we could talk about it, outside of the context of a classroom.

Now, I had a feeling she'd say these things. Professor Hutcheon has routinely been a nice woman and great teacher (and I hope this will translate to the pity she takes on the paper I polished off at 6:30 AM). But after I left the office, I had felt that things were different, that I was starting to make my experience at University something personal again. I had started reaffirming my faith in myself. For the first time in months I held the honest opinion that there are real, attainable possibilities in front of me rather than a smattering of vague interests I won't ultimately pursue. I still haven't decided about continuing grad school, but I'm now under the impression that if I ultimately do it won't be out of the desire to retreat to some old pattern of thinking from which I've been disconnected. I'll do it because I've rediscovered that I really want to.

Time will tell. Right now I feel as though I can do anything I set my mind to. I can go anywhere and do anything. It's going to make my next semester so much more rewarding. And when my time in Toronto comes to a close I know I'll have picked my next step carefully and correctly.

As I mentioned, today was the last day of classes. Paul and I knocked our editorial presentation out of the park during a four-hour Bibliography seminar. I spoke up at length in Opera class after a semester of relative silence. My group ended up with a split grade of A/A+ on our presentation. After the meeting with Professor Hutcheon, I returned some books and walked home from Keele station deep in thought.

Updated To-Do List:

Friday, December 14th: Final project - Touch of Evil
Friday, December 21st: Critical reflection paper - Bibliography
Monday, January 7th: Final research paper (max. 14 pages) - African-Canadian Lit

Christmas is only TWO WEEKS away. I need to get to a shopping mall.

I met with Paul at the Kelly Library cafe and we discussed our presentation, which should be no big whoop. Apparently he had spent last year teaching in Germany and really wants to go back to the hamlet in the north part of the country where he was living. I went to Robarts afterward to grab some material on Visconti when I ran into Jonathan Abresch, a guy I went to Carleton with who migrated to Toronto for the same reason I did. It was only the first time I'd seen him on campus since the very beginning of the semester, so we chatted for a bit.

After picking up Professor Hutcheon book on adaptation at the University bookstore, I went home and fell asleep in front of some Simpsons episodes. After I woke up I watched I Shot Andy Warhol, which was the basis for one of the first essays I wrote at University over five years ago. Lili Taylor and Jared Harris are both really good in it. Hell, so is Stephen Dorff. I get a kick out of all things Warhol anyhow.

I broke down my Death in Venice essay into word counts for each section. I find it helps me write with more consistency at greater lengths when I know exactly where to stop and start arguments. I'm 553 words into a 4225 word paper. It shouldn't be too difficult. The trickiest part is going to be sourcing the opera-related material. I still don't even have a copy of the damned libretto.

But I do have peanut butter cups.

I'm elevating laziness to new, heretofore unreachable plateaus. I spent a good portion of the day on the couch watching episode six of The War, Punch-Drunk Love (which I hadn't seen in awhile but still have a strong affection for), episodes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons. I DID manage to come up with a few notes for the Bibliography presentation I'm making on Red Badge of Courage with this guy Paul on Monday. I'm meeting with him tomorrow to shoot the shit about what we're going to talk about in class. We only have five minutes each to talk, so I have the thing pretty much halfway written anyhow.

I bought a package of mini powdered donuts. I'm going to try very hard to never buy them again.

Tomorrow: essay.