FRESHMAN JOURNAL
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The Circle of College Life

By Emily Kellogg, University of Toronto

TIn the basement of Sorbara Hall, a residence hall at University of Toronto, the washing machines are always churning. The laundry room is small, and cramped, fluorescently lit, with cold tiled floors, and off-white paint washed yellow by the energy-efficient lights. And the lights never go out. Students come and go, dropping socks and fabric softener, reading heavy textbooks, or texting furiously, but the faithful wall of washers and dryers continue to propel a continual surge of laundry in circles.

Everyday seems like it's own circle-encompassing in its novelty, and engrossing in its complexity. I never used to have days like these.

In high school, a day consists of going to school, going to an extra-curricular, going home, working. A day as a first-year university student is a topsy-turvy balance between keeping your head in clouds of academia, remembering to pay your cell-phone bill, making it to the grocery store to pick up shampoo, and, in between it all, remembering to be an 18-year old kid. The days wash over you, and they turn you in circles, and all of a sudden, you're at the beginning of a new week, in the same seat, in the same lecture hall that you were last week, but this time you're older: a little more sleep deprived, a little more caffeinated, and the air is a little bit colder.

Socrates describes the idea of diving into a new sphere of life or existence well in Plato's Republic: "But the fact is that whether someone falls into a small diving pool or into the middle of the biggest ocean, he must swim all the same." But what one forgets when looking floundering to keep one's head above water, is to look at the shore left behind.

When I read the paper, watch the news, it all seems surreal, as though I'm now looking at occurrences in the U.S. through a filter. One is obviously space, but the other is more akin to a kind of continuum shift. Wall Street, the election drama, none of it seems like it can actually be happening, because, not only am I in a new stage of my life that is an assault of visceral awareness, I'm also a country away. I can't help but feel like a stranger to my own country and even my own family.

Everything and everyone is aging and changing. And I'm watching the leaves fall and thinking about abstract philosophy, or murmuring Russian vocabulary, with the gnawing thought that as I grow, learn, expand my mind, the world and my old life is changing into something that I don't recognize. As I stood in line for coffee this morning, I eavesdropped on two chattering first-year girls, talking about their first month away from home: "I never quite know what's going on, there's just too much to think about. And there always seems to be more laundry to do."

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