7:00 AM: Wake up to the blaring of my alarm clock. First lecture doesn’t begin until 10:00, but due to the fact I have no internet connection, I literally have no idea what room to arrive in. BA 1134? BA 1135? BA 2315? I need to find someone with an internet connection.

8:00 AM: Starving. But at least not naked anymore. Wander in the direction of downtown in search of nourishment.

8:30 AM: Find a Subway restaurant and purchase an overpriced foot long meatball sub. Ask the cashier for stamps toward my next purchase and she laughs at me, saying, ‘We haven’t had stamps for a long time now. Where have you been?’. With a ‘hmph’, I resist the urge to pilfer her tip jar and instead trudge back to residence.

9:00 AM: Meatball sub successfully arrived in tummy. So thirsty. Seek out bathroom with a mug and drink the tap water. Lingering thoughts about E-Coli.

9:15 AM: Make it to the Bahen (BA) building and peak into each and every class involving an arrangement of the numbers 1, 2, 4, or 5. Give up quickly.

9:30 AM: Knock on an office door and ask the person to let me use the internet. No threats necessary. It’s 2135.

10:00 AM: Lecture begins.

10:05 AM: Examine the students in the room. There are about a dozen. Three students are obviously Canadian: One jerk sitting at the back of the room with his feet up on the table, a timid asian who’s sitting in the far left corner, as if he’s afraid of human contact, and your distinguished author. The Ukranians are packed in one group — about nine of them.

10:10 AM: Further contact with the Ukranian math students have led me to conclude that Ukranians are for the most part very lanky, very awkward, and very, young looking. In fact, about half of the guys remind me of 15-16 year olds. The girls (there are 3 of them) look older and could pass off as being 17-19. For the record, the Ukranians are all 5th or 6th year students — you do the math.

10:15 AM: My god. What a geekfest.

10:18 AM: The professor goes, ‘Let’s begin with a Riemann Surface’. Pause. ‘Does anybody remember what a Riemann Surface is?’

10:19 AM: ‘Chirp, chirp’, go the crickets.

10:20 AM: ‘Well, let me do a brief review. A Riemann Surface is a connected complex analytic manifold of complex dimension 1.’

10:21 AM: Gee, thanks for the review. Really cleared everything up for me.

10:50 AM: Theorem 3.2 (Hyperbolic Compactness). If S and T are hyperbolic Riemann surfaces, then the space Hol(S, T) of holomorphic maps is locally compact and sigma-compact. Furthermore, if K in S and K’ in T are nonvacuous compact subsets, then the set of all holomorphic maps f, from S to T satisfying f(K) subset of K’ forms a compact subset of Hol(S, T).

11:15 AM: What. The. Fuck.

11:20 AM: Any Riemann surface which is not homeomorphic to the sphere or torus (in the compact case), or homeomorphic to the plane or cylinder (in the noncompact case), must necessarily be hyperbolic, with universal covering surface conformally isomorphic to the unit disk.

11:30 AM: Eyes begin to glaze over. If I hear the word ‘homeomorphic’ one more time, I’m gonna flip out. And take half a dozen Ukraines with me.

11:50 AM: Lecture 2 ends. A good thing. Was beginning to throw up in my mouth.

11:55 AM: Make my way back to residence. Angry. Very angry. I didn’t come to Toronto to learn about this seizure inducing crap. The lecture was crap and the material was not presented in an easy-to-understand manner. I could have learnt more from a textbook — assuming that I actually did care about holomorphic dynamical systems.

12:05 PM: Meet with the residence porter. No waiting this time. Must be the murderous glint in my eyes.

12:10 PM: Tell the porter I’m going to cut my trip short. Reason? Holomorphic Dynamical Systems is just not working out for me. She tells me I won’t be able to get this week’s rent back. Bastards have me trapped.

3:00 PM: Third lecture begins, this time given by a different mathematician.

3:33 PM: Better this time around, but still not great. Material was more applicable and focused on the topic of differential equations with noise. The mathematical formulation of a very random and very chaotic system known as Brownian Motion was described and modeled. Though much of the math was oriented towards probabilists — involving stochastics, I’m comfortable enough to get a little something out of the lecture.

4:00 PM: Hungry. Always hungry. Trek downtown once more.

4:30 PM: Locate an A & P grocery store. Pile the following into a cart: Frozen pizza, sliced bread, peanut butter, strawberry jam, 1 L of milk, 2 L of apple juice, 1 L of chocolate soya milk, and a packet of rice cakes. Total cost: $22.

6:00 PM: Return to residence and wander the basement in search of an oven for my pizza.

6:25 PM: What the hell. They don’t have an oven here?

7:00 PM: Locate the residence’s only kitchen, but with no oven in sight. The kitchen/common’s room is much more posh than my own floor’s lounge.

7:30 PM: Microwaved pizza is the best I can do. Uncooked yeast, here I come.

8:15 PM: Dude. Totally demolished that pizza. So proud of myself.

9:15 PM: Have taken complete control of the kitchen/commons room. Brought down my laptop, coffeemaker, pillow, documents, and personal effects. Marked my territory appropriately. I live here now.

3:00 AM: Fell asleep with thoughts towards a potentially daring prison escape.