#113. Summer Serenity (Sunday, June 10, 2012)

What was your best day…of just taking it easy?

In the four months between the completion of my undergraduate degree and the start of my Master’s, nothing of significance happened. And that was totally fine with me.

Despite having just graduated, the summer did not start off well. I was back home, and even with the upcoming Master’s program (at a good school) was still figuring out my career direction. That, and the fact that I had no internships or anything lined up for those four months, meant things between my parents and I had gotten pretty dire. I needed to get out of Ottawa.

Then, in the nick of time, I found out one of my best college friends Tommy had gotten a summer job at a bank and thus wouldn’t be taking the job in the Dean’s Office for our university’s Math Department. So I leapt at the chance, talked to Tommy, talked to a few of the Math faculty I knew well¹, and soon enough it was settled.

So I packed up, took the five-hour Greyhound bus to Waterloo, and moved into my other best friend Masato’s place. He would also be a starting a Master’s in fall, in Statistics at Waterloo. And he went home to Japan for the last two months of the summer, leaving the place to myself.

The job itself was pretty standard. I helped with various administrative tasks in the Math Department², and worked on some special projects like creating a new Wiki and doing outreach for this initiative to connect current students to alumni (that Tommy had started). The best part of that, besides working in the same office as the guys writing the famous Waterloo middle/high school math contests³, was doing an extended interview with science fiction author and alumnus James Gardner.

In an otherwise quiet summer, that weekend was the highlight. On Friday, I took a bus after work to Mississauga to meet up with my middle school/early high school best friend Damien Bei for the first time in four years. That’s where I learned he had similarly struggled in university⁴: he’d dropped out of pre-med a year ago because of poor grades, spent a year back in Ottawa as a bartender and security guard, and now was back at Toronto finishing up some credits before transferring to University of Ottawa to complete a business degree. I shared with him my own issues⁵; and despite us having lost touch for a long time, it was like we instantly reverted back to our middle school closeness and understood each other right away. (All this during a large steakhouse dinner neither of us could afford.)

Then, on Sunday, I met up with James at a local coffee shop and spoke with him for over two hours on the craft of writing and its relation to math and science⁶. I of course found this to be a fascinating intersection of my own interests, as I was in the middle of rewriting my own science fiction novel at the time (#117).

I published an abridged version of the interview in the university’s newspaper.⁷, and looking back, I have to say that was one of the most underrated high-quality pieces of work I have ever produced (I can’t seem to locate an archived article, unfortunately).

Besides all that, the summer just had a genuine relaxed air: I was keeping busy (but not too busy), on my own out of school (for an extended time) for the first time ever, and things were looking up my with upcoming Master’s program. It was a unique period of my life that I knew, even then, was never going to be replicated again.

Specifically, our program advisor Bruce Maitland, for whose Financial Statement Analysis class I was a teaching assistant (the only one) last term.
It was summer, but Waterloo has a big co-op program so many of the students were taking classes that term.
My success on those was a big reason I got into Waterloo initially.
The problems on both sides were a big reason why we hadn’t reached out to each other before now.
Maybe not as bad by some measure, but even worse by some others.
With a deep discussion on the influence of noted author Ray Bradbury, who’d died five days earlier.
The quality of the photo I took of him – leaning casually against the brick wall of the coffee shop – was so bad that the editor had to crop out the entire background, making the picture in the paper look like an awkward photoshop cutout. The quality of the writing made up for that, though.