In the space between the bottom of my bare feet and the ground—that is where you loved me. No matter where you are standing, you’d say. An area of mosquitoes and dirt, but to you as captivating as any. Unfazed by your own strangeness, basking and romantic. At dusk we walked, a ritual among our many. Tirades of reassurance, stopping to debate the strangeness of a stranger’s license plate, the loudest crickets on earth. We lived in a city of warmth, a foreign city at times. How can I explain the way I wanted to be there more than anywhere yet could not stand to be there for a moment longer?

She’s looking across the table at me, but only because she’s trying not to look at him.

We met a couple weeks ago at some friend’s friend’s party and got to talking about our mutual hatred of our Russian Lit. conference. (I recognized her right away but I let her guess how she knew me for a while.) But I was a bit drunk and had to read her name off the attendance sheet today because I was too embarrassed to ask what it was again.

And then there’s him, Marco. My cheerfully oblivious best friend wouldn’t have noticed her anyways; he’s busy tapping away on some cartoony game on his phone under the table.  

I’ve been pretending to read along with our T.A. for the past five minutes, but I’m really busy coming up with the life story of the girl who’s been accidentally staring at me for a little too long now. So far she’s a vegetarian camp counsellor who hated her parents for making her learn the violin (even though she made it to first chair in high school), but I still can’t decide if she’s into lame art films or if she’s more of a shameless Katherine Heigl fan.

When I look up at her she quickly rolls her eyes at Whatever-His-Name-Is droning on about Tolstoy and smiles.

She’s wearing a tiny cross necklace. I bet she doesn’t believe in God.

After aspiring professor So-and-So stops talking mid-sentence when people start packing up, I walk around the table and ask her (Katie, unless I counted the number of seats she was sitting away from me wrong) if she wants to come with Marco and I to this open mic thing tonight at a record store. She glances at Marco, who’s still fiddling with his phone, and says yes.

As we leave the room Marco asks me what I was talking to her about.

“Nothing,” I tell him.

I meet her later on outside the campus gates, she’s wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a scarlet beret. Definitely not a Heigl fan.

“Where’s Marco?” she asks.

“He’s sick. Food poisoning I think,” I say, doing my best to sound sympathetic.

She’s disappointed but when we start walking and she tells me she’s never been to an open mic before I at least know she’s not dying to go home. She calls me by the wrong name (close, but still wrong) and then apologizes and says it was a “blonde moment.”

“You’re not blonde,” I say.

“I’m strawberry blonde,” she protests. “What colour would you call it?”

“Reddish,” I admit.

She groans and tells me I suck. We walk about a half block in silence and then she musters up the courage to say what’s really on her mind.

“So is this a date?” she asks.

“Do those still exist?” I say.

“What? Of course they do,” she snaps back.

“Do you think it’s a date?” I ask.

“No,” she says, a little too quickly.

I try to change the subject by pointing out the record store across the street. We walk inside and it’s a little less busy than I thought. There’s a small stage set up in the back corner with a few tables and about 15 other twenty-somethings hanging around; a couple are tuning guitars, others are talking or reading over poems on their crimpled pieces of paper.

There’s a bulletin board of photocopied gig posters, most for shows long passed. We walk towards the stage, (after putting out my arm with a theatrical “Shall we?”) passing rack after rack of overpriced vinyl records. I always thought the Wax Museum was just a stupid pun, but then it hit me how perfect it is: the best songs ever written sit around in racks or taped to hip kids’ walls, but no one listens to them—they’re just plastic decoration.

We sit down at a table and she pulls out a bottle of absurdly bright red lipstick, probably from Revlon’s Jessica Rabbit collection. The contrast between her lips and pale skin gives her an open casket kind of look that I’m trying really hard to ignore.

“Want some?” she jokes.

“Not from the bottle,” I say.

She laughs but turns her head away. Telling the truth wasn’t working, either.

A guy in a flannel shirt and knit cap takes the stage first, and plays a Jeff Buckley song so obscure that Jeff Buckley would’ve had a hard time remembering the words. His half-assed singing didn’t matter much; the song choice was the real performance. After as much applause as you can get out of a handful of kids trying hard to look like they don’t give a shit, he steps down and goes back to his table.

A guy in a plain but clearly expensive black hoodie and shiny jeans with carefully mussed hair hops on stage carrying a megaphone. He pushes the microphone aside, and starts speaking, softly at first, through his staticky electric conch:

I’m a friend request from a stranger.

I’m the Top 40 song you hate but you can’t stop singing.

I’m what you’re doing right now, with a witty hashtag.

I’m not listening; I’m BBMing and nodding my head.

But yes, I was the one who put those drunk photos of you on the Internet.

I am a fucking YouTube sensation!

Who am I? I am the modern man!

And I will never—I said, I WILL NEVER—apologize for it!

Just as fast as he was there he was gone, out the door and off to God knows where. Nobody clapped. Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything. We all just kind of sat there, looking for someone to roll our eyes at.

As exam time coincides with tax season, filing a tax return is the last thing on students’ minds. It’s unlikely that many students will file before the deadline on April 30. Furthermore, many students think they don’t need to file a tax return because they don’t make enough money to owe any taxes. While this is true, there are a few perks to filing your taxes that may give you an incentive, including putting a little extra cash in your pocket in time for summer.

First, filing a tax return entitles students to receive taxes withheld at source. For example, some employers may have deducted some tax from a student’s pay check. The basic personal amount for the 2010 tax year is $10,382. This means that the first $10,382 of students’ employment income is tax-free. Since most students fall in a non-taxable bracket, coupled with many credits available to them, they are certain to get back taxes that were deducted.

If students are 19 years of age or older, they are eligible to receive the GST/HST credit. This credit is meant to assist individuals with low and modest incomes to help offset all or part of the GST/HST they pay on the purchase of goods and services. In Quebec, students are also eligible to receive the provincial solidarity tax credit. This credit consolidates the QST credit, the credit for individuals living in northern villages and credit for the housing component.

Another reason to file a return is to get a refund of property taxes as a tenant. Students may be entitled to receive the refund if they were Quebec residents on December 31 and they were living as the tenant or subtenant of an eligible dwelling on that date.

In addition, students can claim tuition, education, and textbook amounts to allow them to reduce their income taxes in the current year or carry them forward in the future. Students can also claim interest they pay on student loans and their public transit passes.

Lastly, filing a tax return not only has benefits now, but also for the future. Filing a return creates Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) contribution room. This will allow students to make contributions immediately when they begin working full time. Deductible RRSP contributions can be used to reduce taxes.

Filing a tax return may be a confusing and arduous task to some; however, retaining the services of a good tax preparer will certainly make students’ lives easier as they concentrate on their final exams.

Kevin Nzomo is a McGill University student and works at Student Tax Prep Canada in Montreal, QC. He can be contacted at [email protected]

It’s not unusual to hear complaints from McGill students that Montreal in winter is simply “uninhabitable.” On a recent jaunt up the mountain, a friend and I looked out over the frozen city and the icy expanse across the river wondering what early settlers could have been thinking when they set out due north and decided this was a good place to settle down. Anyone who has been inducted recently inducted into the rites of Montreal winter has their own collection of symptoms which demonstrate the folly of these original explorers: frozen boogers, frosty eyeglasses, sweat stains from overheated classrooms, the precious study time eaten up by lacing and unlacing slushy boots upon coming home or going out. These complaints can be heard for the majority of the eight-month semester. Yet when finals end, and those four precious months of Tam Tams, suntans, and cream sodas in the park begin, most students up and leave, subletting their apartment or letting it stay vacant, sucking up dollars and, by osmosis, good vibes, until students return at the end of August, ready for a few weeks of good weather before repeating the dreadful cycle all over again.

Riding the train home after my first year at McGill, I remember thinking how stupid I was to have endured Montreal’s notorious winter just to leave as soon as the flowers were starting to sprout and puppies and babies were coming out to play. It seemed silly to have suffered for so long only to decline the obvious redemption the summer offered. I resolved to stay in Montreal for most of the next summer in order to see what this frozen city would reveal when the snow and ice melted and its famous joie de vivre could really shine through.

Though much of what I did last summer in Montreal can certainly be done elsewhere, the memories I now have of those good times actually helped me get through this winter. I can’t say they exactly warmed me: the boogers still froze and the glasses dewed with frost. But the knowledge that this city was capable of more than just trying to kill me, that the same frozen St. Laurent that made my pant legs dirty and my genitals shrivel could also serve up delicious barbecue during a lively street fair on a hot summer night, made the past few months endurable. If you have the chance—and it is yours for the taking—to stay up here for at least one summer before graduation, I highly recommend you do so. Here’s some highlights from the Montreal summer that once was mine and can, more or less, be yours:

One night some friends and I biked over the Cartier Bridge to a free Arcade Fire concert in Longueil. On the way back we stopped in Jean Drapeau Park and swam in the shallows of the St. Lawrence. We lay upside-down on the rocks with our heads near the water’s edge and admired the reflection of the mountains and the city lights on the river’s surface. We stopped for pizza on the way home and slept with the windows open, and even then it was a bit too hot.

Another night we drank a bottle of wine on a grassy knoll near the Lachine Canal. We then moved to where the water from the canal flows into the river, and sat with our legs dangling over the edge, talking about the books we’d been reading and how they made everything different somehow.

For my birthday we gathered some firewood and a few dozen yeasayers on the mountain for an all-night campfire. We watched the sun rise over the river and the city began to stir. Our clothes smelled like smoke for weeks afterward.

We established a probably unhealthy reliance on several ingestible substances, not least of all orange cream soda.

The famous McGill bubble is one not only of space but also of time. Montreal is a city of great possibilities that are only waiting for May to be revealed.