Has truth ever felt so close to fiction? In the span of a month, there’s been a flood in my apartment (I woke up to water pouring through a live light fixture), a tree has fallen down outside Nexus HQ, and there’s a dead squirrel on the front steps of our office, all its insides seemingly sucked out, its corpse laying flat like a pancake. I’m waiting for Stephen King to pop out of a closet. The heavy fog, high winds, the pandemic; it’s officially at the point where, if I heard something undeniably eerie (a ghost gobbling up a security guard in the Young Building, for instance), I’d shudder and carry on. After a while you start to get desensitized to it. (Except the squirrel. Rest easy, my furry little buddy.)
It’s also just that point in the semester where witnessing nature at work is enough to make you crack. The point where you might catch some shut-eye on a coffee break or hand in a reading response after merely skimming the material. Keep on going—give or take a day, we’ve got about seven weeks left in the term. There’s almost more behind us than there is in front of us, and given that not too long ago this seemed to be the term to end all terms, one takeaway so far is that no matter how many assignments there are to do, how many trees fall, or how many cups of coffee have to be chugged, it will always end with us students in a stronger position than we were when we started.
As weeks turn to months in a new era, the many different brands of madness in this world have proven that post-secondary will always be one steadfast constant. Regardless of what’s going on in the background, we always need to learn. Many systems of higher education were as archaic as our political systems, and were in desperate need of change. Through the advent of largely online classes, Camosun has become more accessible, possibly cheaper (not in terms of tuition, but in terms of the overall cost of living for a student who is, say, learning remotely from a small town, or a student living here but not driving to campus), and, my personal favourite, more flexible.
The sense of cabin fever ramped up for me recently, so at the end of every day, I now put on my reflective jacket and take a long walk in the dark. Last week, I saw a glimmer bearing through the quiet nothingness; as I approached, I saw it was the year’s first Christmas lights. We’re getting close. The eggnog—or whatever marks the beginning of the holiday season for you—is closer than you think. And while many people curse seeing these early signs of the holidays, I’m welcoming their warmth in this coldest of years.