Wanted: Something to Occupy My Time
The semester came to a close for me on April 10th, the day I handed in my two final term papers of the year. Slipping them under my professors’ doors was certainly a satisfying experience, as it always is, but it didn’t take long – about 24 hours – for that feeling to be replaced with a mix of anxiety and a healthy dose of the ‘what nows’.
It took me a solid week at home over the Christmas break to unwind from the previous semester, and it seems as though I’m dealing with the same challenge of letting go after this one. Nevertheless, though I’m still drifting in a cloud of uncertainty and don’t quite know what to do with myself, I’ve still had a chance to start reading for pleasure again, to get outside to enjoy the sun and to figure out what exactly it was that happened over the last three and a half months.
To be as brief as possible, this included: our ultimate frisbee team winning the intramural championships at the end of March, an interesting but cold trip to the Canadian Forces’ Peace Support Training Centre in Kingston, Ontario (thank you, Dept. of National Defence…), a rollercoaster of an economics course, my internship at the Privy Council Office (in limbo), a few interesting conferences and guest lectures – a highlight being Amartya Sen at the National Art Gallery a couple nights ago – and a development in my personal life that has taught me a lot of things and left me with a very good friend.
What’s happened on the outside world over that same time span? Among other things…the French government proved unable to reform their labour laws in the face of widespread opposition from hundreds of thousands of students across the country who appear to favour being unemployed to holding a job in which poor performance might just lead to their being canned; Iraq fell deeper into civil war, which can no longer be denied with sectarian conflict on a meteoric rise; Iran managed to distance itself even further from the international community by pushing forward its independent uranium enrichment program (for civilian purposes, of course…); the two Canadians held captive in Iraq were rescued by coalition forces and have since talked about returning back for reasons that escape rational explanation; and Afghanistan has become, whether we like it or not, the primary raison d’etre of the Canadian military for the foreseeable future.
Interesting times we’re living in, aren’t they?
On to the search for part-time gainful employment in our nation’s capital.
It took me a solid week at home over the Christmas break to unwind from the previous semester, and it seems as though I’m dealing with the same challenge of letting go after this one. Nevertheless, though I’m still drifting in a cloud of uncertainty and don’t quite know what to do with myself, I’ve still had a chance to start reading for pleasure again, to get outside to enjoy the sun and to figure out what exactly it was that happened over the last three and a half months.
To be as brief as possible, this included: our ultimate frisbee team winning the intramural championships at the end of March, an interesting but cold trip to the Canadian Forces’ Peace Support Training Centre in Kingston, Ontario (thank you, Dept. of National Defence…), a rollercoaster of an economics course, my internship at the Privy Council Office (in limbo), a few interesting conferences and guest lectures – a highlight being Amartya Sen at the National Art Gallery a couple nights ago – and a development in my personal life that has taught me a lot of things and left me with a very good friend.
What’s happened on the outside world over that same time span? Among other things…the French government proved unable to reform their labour laws in the face of widespread opposition from hundreds of thousands of students across the country who appear to favour being unemployed to holding a job in which poor performance might just lead to their being canned; Iraq fell deeper into civil war, which can no longer be denied with sectarian conflict on a meteoric rise; Iran managed to distance itself even further from the international community by pushing forward its independent uranium enrichment program (for civilian purposes, of course…); the two Canadians held captive in Iraq were rescued by coalition forces and have since talked about returning back for reasons that escape rational explanation; and Afghanistan has become, whether we like it or not, the primary raison d’etre of the Canadian military for the foreseeable future.
Interesting times we’re living in, aren’t they?
On to the search for part-time gainful employment in our nation’s capital.
posted by Per at 2:56 p.m.
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