INDEV students are a tight-knit group. Most of them spent their first year together at St. Paul’s University College, and with a class size of 23, it’s not hard to get to know everyone. But some students have found that being guinea pigs in a new program has its downsides as well.

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“It felt like they were telling me, ‘If you can’t survive this, you shouldn’t work in the field,’” said Allison. After six weeks of further discussion, INDEV staff urged her to come home on account of her pressing health concerns. But, four months away from graduation, they would not provide her with an alternate way to complete the degree requirements. This question was left hanging, and only added to Allison’s burden.

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Word on the street is that the INDEV administration is looking to beef up their contingency plans in response to this article, so hopefully they go through with substantial changes and include students in the decision-making process.

More than the joy of reading, I felt good walking into the library and choosing the book in the first place. I belong here. I have a library card, I’m part of the club.

Being part of the club is important when you’re lonely. We’re all lonely in a way, but the feeling intensifies when you live by yourself.

For all the downsides to having roommates – labeling your food, coordinating shower times, splitting the utility bills – there’s still that tenuous bond that comes with cohabitation.

I’ve tried to fill that lack of community in different ways. Playing at open mics and hanging about in a few of my favourite coffeeshops helps to quell the loneliness for a time. Sometimes I’ll get cabin fever and spring from my desk chair as if from live coals, and head over to Baltimore House for a pot of Earl Grey tea with that slice of lemon they put in it.

Other times I’ll go for a walk in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, just to stir my sense of adventure. There’s nothing like curiosity to stave off the dull insanity of being alone. I breathe the unfamiliar sent of someone’s cedar hedge and fantasize that I’ve lived here all my life, pretending that that whiff of fresh greenery holds childhood memories.

The greatest distraction from my solitude is food. There’s always a new cafe to check out, always a new corner store to get that same old late-night junk food. But the black licorice, bags of jujubes, and chocolate-covered almonds can only do so much for me.

I find I impulse-shop a lot more when I’m living on my own. A picture frame here, some exotic spices for an unusual recipe there, maybe a book or a dvd that I don’t really need. It’s certainly an appreciable difference from my spending habits when I’m living with friends.

Is it callous to attempt to quantify this? If I added up all my excess expenditures, would I be able to measure the value of companionship? I’ll leave that question hanging for now, because I can’t bear to find out how much I’m missing.

There’s something liberating about paring life down to the essentials, shunning extraneous material goods, and taking pleasure in the simple life. Of course, the Waterloo co-op schedule makes it difficult to accumulate too much because I know I’m going to have to move all my stuff out of my place every four months.

Digital decluttering, though, is a whole different animal. There’s a similar satisfaction of accomplishment when I delete old random files on my computer, or purge my Facebook friends list. Tonight, I decided to go a bit further and deactivate my accounts on a bunch of websites that I’ve decided I can live without. Posterous, Bitly, Reddit Radio, Kobo, Stock.Xchng, Last.fm, Songkick… it’s quite a tedious job to log in, seek out the account settings page, and possibly go through the help documentation to find out how to sever ties with the website in question.

It was through this process that I realised a hidden benefit to alternate login options like Facebook Connect. Logging in to third-party websites through Facebook or Twitter makes it a lot easier to close one’s account – it’s a simple matter of going into my preferences and revoking the third-party access.

I had always avoided using Facebook Connect because I felt that I had more control and freedom by signing up to each website individually. The flipside of that is an intensely tedious process when I want to delete my accounts. It’s a trade-off, but Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon so I think I’ll know how I’m going to approach Facebook Connect in the future.

This was a cultural, rather than a spiritual practice for me; much like baking gingerbread or putting those kitschy Swedish wooden horses by the fireplace. But I saw Advent from a more spiritual perspective when today, at church, it was juxtaposed with Jesus’ warning of his second coming.

At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.

Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that he is near, right at the door.

…

But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come. (Mark 13:26-29)

It’s an unconventional passage to be quoting during Advent, when we’re supposed to be thinking of sweet baby Jesus and wise men following the star to Bethlehem. But Advent is about anticipating the arrival of the messiah – so it’s not a huge leap from Jesus’ end-times speech.

It’s that image of actively waiting, being on guard, being alert, that got me thinking. This kind of eager anticipation means that everybody I meet, every sight I see, every rock and tree and bug, has the potential to be Jesus incarnate.

This goes beyond “treat others as yourself” and “we are all children of God”. If everyone and everything is a potential Jesus, I have to be prepared to love those things and people unconditionally. I must see the good in everyone. I must see the Jesus in everyone.

What if anticipating Christ’s return means living as if he has already manifested himself in everything I see and touch and feel? Do I have the ability to love the world in this way? To devote myself to the world and everything in it? Maybe I do, if Christ is also manifested in me.

One of the downsides of co-op is the constant packing up and moving to other cities. I do 4 months of school, then 4 months of work – back and forth until I graduate. It takes a toll. So I was really gunning for a job in the Waterloo area, so I wouldn’t have to move out of town again. But, not willing to put all my eggs in one basket, I applied to some jobs in other cities.

The interview process can be stressful enough, but the real mindgames happen during the ranking period. After each interview, employers rank the candidates from most to least favourable. But I’m not allowed to see my rankings until all of the interviews were over. This caused co-op to permeate my consciousness as I replayed each interview, fretting over the details of the conversation. Did I present myself professionally? Did my questions sound cheesy? I hope they didn’t notice me fidgeting with my cufflinks. Maybe the cufflinks were too much, should I have opted for a regular dress shirt? I hope my palms weren’t sweaty when I shook her hand.

After a month of waiting, the results are out. I’ve been offered a few jobs – good jobs – but none of them are in Waterloo. The rest of the job applications show a cryptic message: “Ranked”. One sterile word, and yet full of nuance. I wasn’t the top candidate, but I don’t know where in the ranking I place. It’s a vague message that says “You’re good, but not the best. You might be good enough, though, if the top-ranked person doesn’t want this job.”

From these tea leaves, it’s my turn to rank the jobs according to my preference. I can give a rank of 1 to one of my “Offers” and be guaranteed employment, or I can take a chance and go for a job that I was only “Ranked” for. One of my classmates was offered two jobs in Waterloo, one of which she would obviously have to decline. I was ranked for both of them.

With the top candidate out of the running, I strategized. I weighed my options. There were two jobs that I really wanted. I was offered Job A. It’s a good job, but out-of-town, so I’d have to move. Job B was the one recently declined by my classmate. Equally good, located in Waterloo, but I wasn’t completely sure that I’d be next in line.

If I ranked Job B above Job A, I might be able to stay in Waterloo. But then, I might not get any of the jobs and be unemployed for the winter term. It was a tricky situation. What would the other candidates be thinking? How would they rank their jobs? This was no longer a simple co-op application: it had become a study in psychology and game theory.

Desperate for more information, I emailed all the other candidates. This is a common tactic that has helped many co-op students navigate the shadowy ranking process in the past. I revealed my preference for Job B, and asked if anyone else had plans to rank it number 1. That way, we could get a better idea of what everyone else was doing.

I felt better. I also felt devious, like I was gaming the system. But then, it dawned on me that I was, unknowingly, manipulating my competitors. By announcing that I was going to rank Job B as my first choice, I influenced their decisions. I effectively said, “If you want this job, you’ll have to get through me first.”

This should have made me more confident, but it just made me all the more anxious. Now I was worrying about how the others would react to my email, on top of all my other calculations. No one responded to my email, so the risk of unemployment was still present if I went for Job B.

I chose certainty. And so the results came in, and I was matched with Job A.

Then came the unwelcome news: Job B was left unfilled. All the other applicants had come to the same conclusion as me: “I’d better not risk it if someone else ends up being ranked higher than me and I get left without a job.”

The secretive nature of the job-matching process makes it worse off for everybody. The applicants, in our fearful uncertainty, don’t know how we should do our rankings. Employers like Job B end up with positions unfilled. What a tragic irony, to be made pawns by an unfeeling computer algorithm.

I had high hopes for the Presto card. In theory, it would be great for transit users across southern Ontario. A single transit pass that could take you from Hamilton to Bowmanville, on any GO bus, train, or local transit service. No more keeping exact change in your pocket. No need to hold onto paper transfers. Loyalty discounts depending on how often you take transit. Online payments from your smartphone.

The potential was huge. And I think it’s fair to say Presto hasn’t lived up to expectations. There are frustrating flaws at every level of the system, and if we’re going to save Presto before it completely collapses, a real overhaul is in order.

The experiences I’m about to describe are my own anecdotes; they may not be representative, but they represent problems that need to be fixed. The reason so few of my friends have signed up for a Presto card is partly due to the bad experiences recounted by me and others.

In the midst of last August’s heatwave, I tried to board the Lakeshore West train in Oshawa. When I arrived at the platform, the Presto machines are out of order. A few minutes of confusion later, I realized that there might be a working Presto station inside the station building. Thankfully there was, and I got on the train in the nick of time, after trundling back and forth with my luggage.

Upon reflection, this is what I think happened: it was 42 degrees outside that day, and the sun was shining directly onto the Presto machines. They overheated and stopped working. I’m not sure how thoroughly these machines were tested, but reliability is key in any computerized system, which is only as strong as its weakest link. If the card readers can’t stand a summer heatwave, I don’t look forward to their performance in a February blizzard.

Second anecdote: This has happened several times, but I often fail to tap my card when I get off trains. (For the uninitiated, you have to tap once when you get on and once when you get off so the system knows how far you’ve travelled. The catch is if you forget to tap off, the system charges you for the furthest possible destination you could have gone to.)

When I get off the train, I’m at my destination. The trip is over, and I’m moving on to where I need to be. The nondescript Presto card machines don’t grab my attention as I leave, because most of them are oriented towards people entering the station. This has happened to me at Rouge Hill, Stouffville, Oshawa, and Union Station.

The fix for this is simple. Put card reading machines directly on the platform so I see them when the train doors open. Or, better yet, have the machines inside the train doors so I can tap off before I leave.

Third anecdote: I boarded the bus in Mississauga, tapped on, and got off in Waterloo. As I leave the bus, I tap off and am about to walk off when the bus driver calls me back. He thinks I didn’t tap the card properly, but I definitely saw the green light go on. He was under the impression that he had to personally take my card, and tap it himself. Which he did, thereby charging me another $4.20 to initiate a new trip. I was frustrated, but the old guy obviously didn’t know how the payment system works. So, staff training appears to be a big issue. I phoned the help line later that night, but they couldn’t verify the transaction, because it takes 24 hours for transactions to appear on my account.

Which brings me to the fourth anecdote: A 24-hour wait time? Really? You know, this is 2011. I can buy something on eBay and send the funds to a vendor on Hong Kong in a matter of minutes. This applies to topping up my account online, too. After filling out my credit card information (there’s no PayPal option), I have to wait a full cycle of the sun to use my Presto card. That means I can’t top up my account if I realise that I won’t have enough to make the trip into Toronto to see that concert tonight.

On the topic of their online tools, a Presto account forces you to use a 4-digit numeric PIN as a password. That’s about the least secure password system ever, and it handles my credit card information. Does that make me feel safe? Of course not.

One last anecdote: I checked my Presto balance yesterday morning. $39.26. Good. On the trip home for Thanksgiving, I boarded a bus at Scarborough Town Centre and tapped my card. A red light flashed. “Insufficient funds.” Exasperated, I started to explain to the driver that I did have money on the card, that I checked it just this morning. It must have been be a machine malfunction.

The driver seemed equally exasperated. “Forget it. I don’t have time to deal with this. Get in, I have a schedule to stick to.” So I rode the bus for free because the Presto system was too glitchy and time-consuming to bother with.

I think all these problems can be traced to the organizational structure of Metrolinx and GO Transit. Presto actually runs as a separate division under Metrolinx, the arms-length agency mandated by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation to plan the transit system for the Greater Golden horseshoe. GO Transit is also, technically, an independent division under Metrolinx. One of the fundamental problems with this setup is that GO and Metrolinx have different mandates. GO Transit’s service area includes cities like Barrie and Kitchener, which are outside of Metrolinx’s focus on the Greater Toronto/Hamilton Area.

I haven’t the faintest clue why Presto is its own division, separate from GO Transit, underneath an arm’s-length organization that has only sporadic contact with the government. The bureaucracy is unfathomable.

Presto was supposed to be about making transit more convenient and seamless for people. Needless to say, it hasn’t delivered. We need to get rid of the silos. We need interregional transit planning to be integrated with the realities on the ground. And that means bringing everything back under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Transportation. Public transit is a public service, and new departments shouldn’t be made for each little project.

For the ideas of Presto to succeed, we must kill the organizational structure that threatens to strangle it.

When Dallas Green took to the stage, he puzzled over the Tourism Hamilton advertisement next to him. “Is this true? Hamilton’s the waterfall capital of the world?”. Raucous cheering answered his question. “Well, nobody ever told me about this. What, you just keep it to yourselves?” Apparently so.

Consider this my small contribution to casting off the old, grungy, industrial image of this great city. I live a short walk from King and James, the heart of downtown Hamilton. Unlike, say, Yonge-Dundas square or Union Station, the concrete here is tempered by mature trees, grass, flowerbeds and benches in Gore Park.

The Niagara escarpment, which contains the Bruce Trail, cuts right through the middle of the city. The impracticalities of developing buildings on a sheer rock face means that this strip of natural beauty has been more or less preserved, even in close proximity to a built-up urban area.

In the north end, Bayfront Park is filled with the sounds and sights of children playing, boats being launched, fishing rods, boom-boxes, joggers, and folks chatting. Biking through it the other day at sunset, I was struck by how similar the atmosphere was to my childhood vacations at Presqu’ile Provincial Park. No wonder Bayfront Park was named one of Canada’s best public spaces by Spacing Magazine.

I’ve always found it funny how new suburban subdivisions aggressively market their forest-lined lots and proximity to a rural paradise where everything is green. Little do those prospective homeowners know that their precious vista to the hinterland will be razed and replaced by more tract houses in a matter of months.

If you want to live somewhere that actually protects its green spaces and makes them accessible, Hamilton’s your city. I’ll let the photos and videos I’ve taken in the past few months speak for themselves. These were all taken within a 20-minute bike ride of my house.

To be honest, Moby-Dick has to have the slowest-moving plot of any book I’ve read (including philosophical works like Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling). But what it lacks in action, it makes up for in enchantingly beautiful prose. Herman Melville delights me with his turns of phrase and rich vocabulary. To be sure, it is this quality that makes the novel’s epic length not just bearable, but pleasurable and even invigorating.

Nowhere is this quality more nakedly apparent than in chapter 42, The Whiteness of the Whale. Yes, this entire chapter is devoted to exploring the meaning of the colour white, and how that meaning is perverted when juxtaposed with a great and terrible creature such as a shark, or a polar bear, or in this case, a sperm whale. It’s superfluous, for sure, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

It would seem Herman Melville has a subtle sense of humour (or obliviousness), because he introduces chapter 45 like this:

So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, … requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood …

Some might go mad trying to read a story as pretentious and lethargic as Moby-Dick. But when I’m listening to the audiobook, I just pretend I’m listening to a wise old man, perhaps with a bit of Alzheimer’s because he keeps repeating things (though that doesn’t explain the absurd amount of detail).

If you have the time and patience, read Moby-Dick or listen to the audiobook. When you emerge from the 136 interminable chapters, you won’t regret it.

My dad can attest to my early teen car obsession – religiously reading the Wheels section of the newspaper, fawning over taillight design (of all things!), going to the Auto Show in Toronto every year… I was set on getting my own car the day I turned 16.

As it turns out, my 16th birthday fell around exam time so I put off getting my licence for a month. The allure of driving started to fade. I got my first road bike the following autumn. And I never looked back.

Two years later, I had made the decision never to own a car. What prompted my abrupt turnaround? Part of it was environmentalism. I was becoming aware of climate change, deforestation, and the pitfalls of the industrial development model. Around this time, I also decided to be a vegetarian for environmental reasons. Automobile ownership wasn’t something I could square with my new worldview.

Part of it was my first-year Urban Planning courses, which had basically conditioned me to hiss under my breath at the mention of expressways, drive-thru restaurants, and surface parking.

The single biggest influence on my conversion to bicyclism (it’s a word) was probably one of my co-workers, Kevin, who was a fellow lifeguard ay Cedar Park resort in the summer of 2007. Now, if you’ve ever been to Cedar Park, you’ll know that it’s in the middle of nowhere. The rural roads that lead there take you up hills and down little valleys as you make your way past farmers’ fields. But Kevin biked to work. Up those calf-splitting hills, both ways, every day. Alongside pick-up trucks doing 90 km/h. And he liked it. What was even more fascinating was the fact that he used to be a big car enthusiast. Had a souped-up Civic. But he gave it an engine that was too powerful, and it exploded. So now he has a $2000 bike with all the bells and whistles (literally). To be honest, it’s a lot less maintenance and Kevin was fit. That was the first time I saw cycling as a really viable option for my primary mode of transportation.

I still have that road bike I bought in 2006. I’ve upgraded the wheels, got some better brake shoes, and replaced the handlebar tape. I feel like I’ve bonded with it over the years, like one would with a horse. And recently I took another step towards sustainable transportation and bought a cargo trailer for my bike.

After a few weeks of use, I can confirm that it was money well spent. I took it to the grocery store, and loaded it up with two week’s worth of food plus a big cake. It was delicious. It’s a liberating feeling to carry big, heavy loads without requiring a car. Yesterday, I biked an hour across town with my cargo trailer in rush hour traffic to get a computer desk that someone was getting rid of. The trailer handled the task beautifully. It was an added bonus to see the amused looks of bewilderment from people as I headed home on Barton Street with a big desk bungee-corded to a bike trailer.

I think part of what makes me enjoy this kind of cycling so much is the interactions with motorists on the road. For the most part, drivers are either nervous or extremely courteous around me. For all the rhetoric out there about angry drivers, I find that if I’m confident and well-aware of my surroundings, I have zero problems. And I hope that my presence on the road will make motorists stop and take a second look at the status quo. I hope that more will see cycling not as an alterative form of transportation, but as a viable first choice.

Admittedly, we need more pioneer cyclists out on the road to make that happen. So dust off that bike in your garage, strap on a helmet, and leave the car keys at home. Let me assure you that busy roads are not scary places, and that you can carry a computer desk through downtown Hamilton on a bike.

Here’s some inspiration:

PD: Professional Development. Also known as How to Pontificate About Nothing, or perhaps Hoop Jumping 101. These online courses, which we take in tandem with each work term, are like a welcome mat for our transition into the working world that reads: “Follow the crowd. Do as I say. Don’t ask questions.”

The courses are structured in the worst kind of linear, there-is-only-one-right-answer format that squashes creative thought and stifles discussion. They ensure that we graduate with a standardized set of essential workplace skills, because God forbid we forget to use the S.M.A.R.T. checklist when we communicate in “the real world”.

I’m doing PD3: Communication right now, which contains such absolutist nonsense as “All employers will be pleased to be addressed by their last name!”. In a half-baked attempt to be relevant, one module had a story about Star Trek, which illustrated that it’s always better to be “civilized” than “barbaric”. I didn’t realise we were still in colonial-era England.

One exercise asked me to pick the “best” ending to a dialogue between co-workers, then write a paragraph about it. This was my paragraph.

This exercise took the classic “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis” approach to presenting three alternate endings. It’s a formula that is predictable and guides the reader towards the last option – synthesis – requiring very little critical thinking on my part. Because of this, I can confidently say that Jim’s third response was his best. It combined the attempt to foster community (“I’m sorry you’ve had some issues”) with the attempt to keep company operations moving smoothly (“It might be worthwhile to ask her for a meeting”), all tied together with a requisite qualifier to absolve the speaker of responsibility (“I don’t understand all the circumstances”). The lesson here is to always speak as if you’re reading an HR Best Practices guide word-for-word.

PD encourages us to avoid risks, water down our ideas, and conform to become productive employees. All things, might I point out, that run counter to Waterloo’s marketing pitch as an innovative institution that embraces the “spirit of why not”.