The Tribune

Did you see what she is wearing? Omigod, I can’t believe he just said that! Admit it, we all pass judgments on others for the silliest of things-their outfits, their musical preferences, whatever. It’s human nature. There is a bit of snob in each of us. In my case, however, it is more than just a bit.

Apparently, you have already met the person you will marry by age 21. I call bullshit. I just hit the magical number and I’ll be damned if that saying rings true because, frankly, my options are looking bleak. I have yet to meet the Prince Charming who will whisk me off to a life of white picket fences.

Moving away from home for the first time triggered something inside my mind. As a Freshman, a sense of loss washed over me, and this sorrow manifested itself into a bizarre syndrome, an inexplicable dependency, a mind-boggling complex. A small fish in an increasingly bigger pond, I yearn for communication with those I left behind.

If I regret any of my columns from this year, it would be February’s “Middle-class guilt.” My regret isn’t so much over the views I tried to express, but over the fact that I haven’t yet negotiated a comfortable balance between the nuanced views I try to maintain and my emotional writing style, which tends to be excessive and – as my mother complains – angry.

I arrived in Montreal in Fall 2008 eager to begin my graduate career at McGill as a master’s student in political science. I knew McGill had a reputation for academic excellence and talented, open-minded, and intellectually stimulating students and faculty members.

I thought I knew who I was before I came to university. I thought, for instance, that I wasn’t a racist. But when I told two girls tabling against Israel that the State had a right to exist, they cleared that up for me. Which was lucky, because after a year of educating my Jewish youth group on the dangers of Islamophobia, I might have gone my whole life not knowing how much I hated people different from me.