ACCOZZAGLIA

The average completion rate for first-year undergraduates who enter university and complete it is about 55%.

Lately, doubt has superseded my confidence. This year, unlike the last, is really making me feel completely dumb at certain turns. The abstract is increasingly escaping my grasp, especially when heady, philosophical topics are the order of the day. I understand that learning complicated concepts like post-structuralism and post-modernism — in the specifically theoretical, scholarly sense — compares to learning a new language.

Incidentally, I’m also learning a new language, separate from post-structuralism, but increasingly, I’m feeling an impermeable wall which eludes me from the comprehension I so urgently want to have. It presses me to question whether I am particularly unable to learn languages. When I hear the words, I finally grasp the idea once the speaker has moved three or four clauses onward. When I am asked to speak, I freeze. When I read, given appropriate time, I can translate what is before me. And when I write, I feel unsurprisingly at my most confident. But to pass, and to grok, I must be adept at all four, and I am not.

These academically labyrinthine problems might be, alone, fairly typical and manageable for any adult learner in a university with peers half her age. As is par for my character, I have bit into a huge chunk, which is proving a bitch to chew and swallow. I could whine and argue that this isn’t my choice, but in the end, it really is. I want to be here, to learn, to convocate, to land, and to continue with other things to keep me occupied from then on.

So to assume three jobs — a continuing writing contract reaching to 2005, a bicycle messenger, and a literary review researcher — along with sitting on two boards of directors and tutoring English to a high school student currently struggling with an F-average, one might believe I’m off my rocker. Well of course I am. I’m also mental for having done most of the things I wrote off into my past, but oddly, some regard pieces of those past experiences as “admirable”. N plz.

My equilibrium, balancing the above, was fine until unpredictable variables got tossed in. One might as well account for this beforehand, but when the indeterminate is impossible to ascertain when planning, some nevertheless leave a safety gap. I don’t. It’s a character flaw. It’s par for there to be wrenches in the machine, and if I started to plan my life around the possibility for unpredictable circumstances, then much of what I have accomplished might never been started, too afraid to proceed with the big, scary steps of living.

Remarkably, my ex-girlfriend was right, damn her otherwise. In Toronto, I have a marginal network of friendship and support which is about to get a whole lot more marginal. She once warned that in her experience, it was very hard to establish meaningful relationships with people here — at least with people who didn’t have an ulterior motive. Ironically (or maybe it’s a kind of paradox), this ex-girlfriend lives in the same city I do, and she is perhaps the last human I want to stumble into here in the GTA. As a looming dark cloud which has floated heavily above me since September 2005, I constantly dread the outside possibility that we’ll bump into one another at my most least expected moment. Let’s hope, for mutual welfare’s sakes, it never happens.

At the UofT, the competitive nature of those in attendance thwarts much of my own way of solving problems: my peers operate on a closed-source approach to solving problems introduced to us during lecture, while I muster a clearer comprehension when a collaborative effort is trying to crack the nut. “Open source” isn’t a phrase one hears much around campus — that is, unless, one is prattling with a crack team of geniuses (uh, students) at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology.

Whatever. Everett and Seattle both introduced and taught me to understand what it means to feel very alone, and they prepared me for what I guess is now a matter of permanency. With time, I grow into a more cynical, more bitter shell, and in consequence, a much less desirable person to be around. What aggravates matters is that of late, I am acknowledging my own mortality, my own finite time left, and that in so many ways, it forces showing my hand to the playing table — one of a sobering examination of my own limitations as an organism, a subject, an other, whatever.