From: Phil
To: The Host
Date: Dec. 30th, 2008
Subject: Invitations for Pre-New-Year’s dinner
Did you forget to invite some people?
[List of Names]
- p
From: The Host
To: Phil
Date: Dec. 30th, 2008
Subject: Re: Invitations for Pre-New-Year’s dinner
I don’t know how to reply to this email without sounding weird… but I’ve invited those who we usually hang out with. I probably haven’t spoken to [those people] in years…
[Signed, The Host]
From: Phil
To: The Host
Date: Dec. 30th, 2008
Subject: Re: Re: Invitations for Pre-New-Year’s dinner
Sorry. I guess I’m a bit out of the loop. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all still back in high school.
- p
Place: Pre-New-Year’s-Eve dinner. Post-party cleanup
Date: Dec. 30th , 2008
“Well, who is she engaged to?,” I asked none too gently, gritting my teeth as I scrubbed furiously at a piece of baked lasagana on glass, “Who is this guy, anyways?”
“Why is it such a big deal for you that she’s getting married?”
“Because she’s one of us,” I said, clearly emphasizing the “us” part to remind everybody there was indeed a them (that we never spoke about).
He clearly didn’t get my point. “So?”
Someone next to me chimed in. “Because, it means things are changing.”
Place: AC 888, 20,000 feet over the Atlantic.
Date: Dec. 31th , 2008
Time: Midnight

There was a gentle ‘ding’ from above and all the headrest-movie-screens blacked out simultaneously, plunging the cabin into darkness.
Then the intercom crackled to life.
“Welcome to 2009,” said the captain.
Quiz time.
a) The sound of champagne bottles uncorking
b) The sound of sparklers crackling, couples kissing, and passengers cheering
c) The sound of gentle snoring and babies crying
d) The sound of silence
If you’re wondering what it’s like to be flying over the Atlantic when the New Year strikes, the answer is d) the sound of silence.
Oh. And maybe the gentle tappity-tap of a glowing Macbook as this author tries to write out his final thoughts of 2008.
But I’m getting to that.
When you’re a student, you live your life according to the the four-year calendar: Grades 1-4, Grades 5-8, Grades 9-12, and the four undergraduate years of college.
Of course, each of these quartic-year groups are further separated into academic years; each year is separated into academic terms and exams; each term is separated into academic weeks; and each academic week is dictated by the individual requirements of each separate class: weekly or bi-weekly assignments, tests, group projects, honours projects, and so on and so forth.
There is an orderly air to everything.
This doesn’t mean life is easy.
High school (to a high school student) is no easier than college (to a college student). People often make the mistake of looking back and whining about how good and easy life was, but this is simply a bias of perspective. It was never easy.
It just seems that way, now. After all, you’re older and wizened.
Teenage angst and acne, for example, seems so insignificant compared to the problems of a single working parent, trying frantically to get through college — but then again, try explaining that one to the average high school student.
That’s what I mean by a bias of perspective.
For my friends, however, 2008 marks the end of this quartic-year cycle.
2004 was the year of university applications, high school prom, and eventually, high school graduation. Four years later, many members of this class are either finished with their last vestige of education, or are are the verge of finishing.
Life, for these people, will no longer be measured in groups of four years or in academic terms, separated by excruciating and sleepless exam periods. Life is just as regular — they still wake up and head to work every morning; they will all have deadlines to deal with and forms to fill; they will all have bosses and supervisors.
In short, life doesn’t really become any less busy. Just different. More flexible and requiring full independence.
But most of all, there are changes in social structure.
Friendship — within the school system — is easy. You and your fellow comrades are bound in circumstance, whether that means being locker neighbours, sitting besides each other in class, or as residences in the same building. But at the end of each quartic-year cycle, these friendships fragment.
Our group of friends is like the swanky, restricted club in town. We’ve dropped all the not-so-regular customers and now, the only way you get in is by being someone’s plus-one. Or perhaps by being really good friends with the host.
And this scares me.
I never got a last quartic-year cycle.
‘04-’06 was duo-year (undergrad), ‘06-’07 was a mono-year (masters), and ‘07-’10 will be the final, triple-year piece of the puzzle. Except two of those don’t count, right? Because by the end of undergrad, I was supposed to be finished.
But it never felt finished.
So where am I, now? Did I fast-forward through the last cycle? Or am I actually behind, stuck in this weird purgatory-like place, inhabited by people who never finished high school or never finished college?
Maybe I’m just different.
Professionally, I feel so far ahead. I’m at the point where I’m comfortable with what I know, but more importantly, I’m comfortable with what I don’t know. High school students, by the way, think they know everything, and that’s where the crucial difference lies.
There’s an unusual calmness I feel now. It’s hard to express, but there’s this one scene in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation which delivers a truthful pang to my heart every time I see it. In that scene, the lovely Charlotte (Johanssen) is lying next to the wizened Bob (Murray). She asks him, “Does it get easier?”
“No,” he says at first. Then, “Yes, it gets easier. The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you.”
Professionally, I know who I am, and generally what I want. I know what I can do, and I don’t let things I can’t do upset me.
2008 has been a year of such professional growth and maturity.
And so in that respect, I feel ahead.
But if I’m ahead of the curve professionally, I’m behind the curve socially.
I stopped making friends after high school. After all, how could I? I started university in 2004. By 2006, I was in my last year, while the class I’d begun with was in their second. In 2007, I’d leave the country to pursue school elsewhere.
Ah, of course, I’d make ‘friends’. People I say hi and goodbye to when I pass them on the street or in the department. Perhaps people I chat with when I find the time to attend some party. But the real friends? The real friends you get to know, then learn to love, and invite to dinner parties and buy birthday and Christmas presents for? I stopped making those ages ago.
So for me, my group of friends is still largely the same group as it was at the end of high school. Then judging by the opening e-mail of this post, if anything, the number of new friends I’ve gained since then has plunged into the negatives.
This is why I balked when I heard a friend from high school had just been engaged. It was inconceivable! To me, marriage is as foreign as it is to a Grade 9 student. It’s like arriving in homeroom, only to find everyone you know has gone off to work at their jobs, or to tend to their babies and wives and husbands and goddamn garden patches.
No, not everybody is getting married and having babies. But things are changing. New friendships are being forged and old ones are being left behind.
I mean, Jesus Christ, why do I feel like I’m being left behind?
Where to from here?
In one of my previous posts, one of the readers made a jibe about one of my previous prophecies. One that was printed in the city newspaper.
“He expects his time at Oxford to be more relaxed than the last three years have been,” it says in the newspaper.
“Dude, that crystal ball of yours was so off the money,” came the jibe.
It has and it hasn’t. Professionally, I’ve continued to grow. I’m more mature and calmer about my fate in the world. In that respect, it is more relaxed. Phil-the-mathematician is alive and kicking and well as ever. He’s teaching, he’s researching, he’s writing, and he’s publishing. He’s also sleeping, by the way.
But Phil-the-everything-else? Phil-the-friend, Phil-the-boyfriend, Phil-the-joker, Phil-the-athlete, Phil the living, breathing, socially adept human being?
I just don’t know anymore.




