Socializing

Since moving to Toronto I have been used to being pretty much on my own. It takes a while to make friends, and I think it is even worse in grad school because motives and lives are so different here. I am glad that I am in this dorm for the time being as there are always people around and we see each other at meals, so it is like being surrounded by a family...an odd family, but a family.

I never look forward to the weekends as they seem like so much time with nothing to do but be alone. Granted, I have a lot of reading and work to do, but there are times when you just want to sit and talk to someone uninvolved in what you are doing. I was excited this weekend because one of the other grad students here was going to drive me to IKEA to buy sheets for my bed. It was tons of fun and we ended up going to a mall to try to find her a wallet. She is totally cool but sadly leaving in December. I was prepared for this to be the excitement of my weekend and the rest of the weekend filled with a whole lot of nothing. Then, after IKEA the woman I TA with called to invite me over to her house for dinner. Yay! A social invitation. It was nice, again, to get out and see people outside of school. It was also nice not to eat in the cafeteria.

Sunday morning I got up and was on my way to Starbucks when I ran into another grad student who invited me to breakfast. Breakfast turned into a trip to the bookstore. Then I was to meet this gay undergrad who works in the department for coffee at 3pm. The coffee at 3pm evolved into shoe shopping at the downtown mall, afterwhich we got caught in the rain while walking back to campus. If I were sexually attracted to him this would have been quite romantic and/or pornographic, but alas, he is far too physically reminiscent of two other people in my life and that just works against him. If that weren't bad enough, I brought him back to my room to dry off where we ended up talking for 4 more hours. It was 10pm and we realized we never ate dinner and were hungry, so went to find something to eat. Basically, it was an 8-hour coffee.

I didn't get a damn thing done this weekend...none of the reading or work that I needed, but somehow spending the time being social and having the semblance of friends in this new city was probably much better for me than reading would have been. Now I have a lot of reading and catching up to do. Oh well....its worth it.