#121. 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 fine with me.
Despite having just graduated from Waterloo, the summer did not start off well. I was back home and, even with the upcoming Master’s program, 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 me had gotten dire. I needed to get out of Ottawa.
Then, in the nick of time, I found out my best college friend Tommy Tong had gotten a summer job at a bank and thus wouldn’t be taking the job in the Dean’s Office for Waterloo’s Math Department. So I leapt at the chance, talked to Tommy, talked to a few of the Math faculty I knew well, 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 Takamura’s place. He would also be a starting a Master’s in the fall, in Statistics at Waterloo. And he went home to Japan for the last two months of the summer, leaving the place to myself.
I helped with various administrative tasks in the Math Department, 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 contests1, 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 university2: 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 my own issues; 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 science3. 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 (#124).
I published an abridged version of the interview in the university’s newspaper, and looking back, I have to say that was one of the most underrated high-quality pieces of work I have ever produced. (Though 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.)
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 with my upcoming Master’s program. It was a unique period of my life that I knew, even then, was never going to be replicated again.