FRESHMAN JOURNAL
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are We defined by our things?

By Emily Kellogg, University of Toronto

FEBRUARY 2009

The University of Toronto sprawls across a subsection of the city—its classically academic buildings seamlessly melding into an indie-cool colony of the blasé and disenfranchised youth of our generation—and on the other side of the campus assimilating into an upscale shopping district, home to the visiting celebrities, the subject of undergraduate stalking and picture-phone snapping. Telephone poles and lampposts swelling with flyers indicate the colony of confused undergraduates who weave their way through the metal obstacles on their way to class and, more importantly, caffeine.

In a campus encompassing so much—it can be hard to find your place, or even your next class: a sort of "placelessness" encompassing both the logistical and metaphysical aspects of the university experience. Hardly any of the first-year students who have swarmed onto the campus in search of a life, love, friendship or career direction, have been able to conquer the mental abstractions that inevitably come with the pursuit of knowledge; not to mention, succeeded in finding a set purpose or path for the life to come. And so, we seek a common-cause, something to stand up for, believe in, march for and speak out against.

As a girl on my floor remarked to me over a late-night Red Bull, "I'm just looking to fight oppression. I don't know how, but I want to feel like I'm doing something." 

The sentiment seems to be universal. Thrown into university life, the schooling can seem like a safe haven—when you're thrown into the future without having time to synthesize the present, university sort of throws you a lifeline. Four years of figuring it out, of studying and working towards a goal, and more importantly, learning to listen to your own voice out of the chaos of parents, professors and peers.

For now, all I've really begun to understand is that I don't understand much of anything. And so, as I make my way through the obstacle course that the winter weather has created, I consider those poles, swollen with flyers and potential. They change with every passing day, yesterday coated with a purple flyer questioning the existence of God, today covered with a portrait of an earless Stephen Harper presenting a disco-themed Indie rock gig at the great hall.

I look at these new opportunities, I take it in, and as they layer over each other in a swollen mass of frozen paste and battered Xerox paper—and I realize that I, like everyone else, is just a scared kid looking for her thing. That obscure and elusive idea that someday I'll have a thing to return and to retreat to that will encompass my swelling mind, protecting it from the elements of the cold, and the confusion. And I understand that, when friends go out to protest a cause they don't give a damn about or rattle off their extraordinarily naïve and pretentious world views, we're all in this together, trying to solve the "placelessness" by finding a thing--by picking a flyer and following it to its inevitable conclusion.

Janice Gross Stein, a professor of political science and influential Canadian academic and analyst commented on the state of affairs, "When someone gives you a simple solution to a complicated international issue, they're usually wrong." But university is all about throwing yourself into the gray, trying to make sense out of chaos or finding something concrete to do in a world full of potential and abstractions. So whether we're hoisting a sign or writing an angry editorial, we're all just trying to find a clear path in the cold world of gray.

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