Print Edition: February 5, 2014
Vancouver: no artists allowed
Bad news for wannabe urbanites: Vancouver was recently named the second-most expensive city in the world to live in, losing only to Hong Kong.
This isn’t news to anyone. Vancouver has been jaw-droppingly expensive for a couple of decades now. You can actually buy a mansion in southern France for less than a Vancouver Special crack shack.
But the saddest consequence of the city’s insanely inflated cost of living is that an entire generation of talented starving artists are cut off from the city’s vibrant cultural scene. If you work in industries like film, business, journalism, or the arts, you’ve gotta be in Vancouver to make it happen — but even a leaky, bed-buggy basement suite is out of the average person’s price range. It means that only people who are already successful can be where the success is.
I know, I know — the world’s a big place, and there are many, many other places where a penniless liberal arts grad can make a career. But I’m still hoping someday I’ll be able to live in the city. Vancouver wasn’t always this expensive, and what goes up must come down, right? Right?
Mark woes!
Grades.
Just reading that word, some of you may grimace. I cringe right along with you.
I’ve been told it’s normal for your grades to drop once you enter university because of the different work load, different professors, different teaching methods, etcetera.
But that knowledge doesn’t make it any less irritating when you see that you’ve gone from being practically perfect to, shall we say, less than ideal.
Yes, studying is good and should be practiced in abundance, but it’s a hard shift going from not needing to study whatsoever to having to study every day.
Plus, as I’m sure many of you have noticed, it can be really difficult to focus. Suddenly even that little spot on the wall is more interesting than the pages upon pages of words in front of you.
Because of this problem, I have come up with a study system. I listen in class, then recopy all of my notes before exams. Wilting marks be revived! Wingardium leviosa, grades!
Mars: must we?
I can’t figure out this whole business of colonizing Mars. Have we given up on this planet? Have we admitted failure? I would like to know how we have the technology and willpower to live on a planet which is inhospitable to life, yet cannot seem to find a way to live in a place of fertility and growth without destroying it.
I guess there’s just no glamour in it. We want the new, the challenging, the dangerous, the unexpected. Adventure. Drama. We want to watch it all in real-time and HD.
The allure of the elusive is our greatest impetus for both growth and destruction. That we would prefer a red wasteland to what we have — or could have, if we smarten up — is ridiculous.
The time, money, and innovation going into a one-way trip to Mars could be put to a much better use. Unfortunately, it seems that no matter what happens, we’ll still arrogantly refuse to acknowledge the basic truth: you can only go so high.
But I guess that must be what makes us human.
You can’t be a hermit forever
As reading break approaches, the idea of doing actual work becomes less and less appealing.
This is a feeling I’m sure many students can relate to, and that often grows on a larger scale over the course of a year, or degree. We start eyeing the finish line.
The workload is too much! The second classes let out for reading break, I foresee a horde of students running for the hills to become hermits and tend goats — a simpler, kinder existence that will never, ever involve reading a textbook.
I welcome the urge to hermitize; it’s important to leave school sometimes, whether it’s for an hour, an evening, a weekend, or a season.
But just like that old saying about needing darkness to see the light, it’s important to remember the shadow value of leaving work behind — coming back to it. As surely as we climb those mountains to make friends with goats, we’ll be crawling back down the hill again to hit the books.
We’re better off remembering how nice it is to come down from the mountain, and not just how nice it is to go up.
