Beginning a new beginning

I just got back from The World's Biggest Bookstore, where I picked up yet another weighty tome of social philosophy, namely Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This one is for my Public Space and Political Culture course in the sociology department at York. I've got to read both this and Nietzsche's Will to Power as Art via Heidegger in the next week.

This is just the beginning of what will be a definite brain pretzling semester. But much has happened to me lately. Some snippets? ok..here goes...

I've fallen in love with Craigslist. I'd tried it while in Montreal and never had much success with it. Well, considering the fantastic success I've had with it here in Toronto, I must conclude that the Montreal problem was either linguistic (despite my posting in both languages) or cultural in general. Since moving here, I've found a house and two roommates (each separately from one another), and I've sold a couch, a bed set, a dog kennel and a few sundry books and decorative items. It's putting money in my pocket and I've met some super nice people too. Very cool.

I've had less of a love affair with York University to date. I won't go into details, lest one of my professors stumbles on my piece of the I-Space here. I'll just say that they're disorganized, somewhat lax and rather perplexingly uncaring of the idea that some MA students not only might *want* to finish their Masters' degrees in two years, they are fully *capable* of doing so! This latter comment stems from the fact that I was completely unable to register in any core, foundation or required courses this semester because, as a first year entering student, I'm at the bottom of the barrel in terms of course selection priority. Somehow it seems just fine that I work on my thesis and do electives prior to getting the strong grounding in my new discipline area.

So academically, it has been less than stellar so far (don't even get me going on the topic of how impossible it is for me to get my books from the bookstore!). But on the upside, the campus is gorgeous! It is a true campus, full of buildings scattered about in a relatively natural green setting. Though it is waaaaay up northwest of the city, making it a bit weird to get to, the cohesion that campus feeling gives to the school experience is very welcome to me, after spending five years in a few large office towers plunked down in the heart of Montreal.