Gay Building

            On Wednesday I was still low on energy and so, since I had an appointment with my TA around midday to talk about my essay, I took a siesta at 9:30. Shortly after getting up at 11:00, I started getting ready to leave by 11:45. It was a very warm day for the end of February and so I bundled up a little less for my ride downtown. I wore my spring gloves but put my winter gloves in my backpack just in case.

            I hate going places and doing things.

            There were new potholes on O’Hara, Maple Grove and Brock. Every time I go out it’s almost like being on different streets.  It seems to me that there are more potholes this year than any previous winter. It turns out that I’m right. Between January 1^st and February 13^th of this year the city of Toronto filled in 46,294 potholes. That’s more than were filled during the same period in the last two years combined and 7,000 more than in the same period in 2013, which was a very similar winter to this one. It’s freezing followed by sudden thawing that causes most potholes and the temperature has yo-yoed like that all winter long. We’re going to have a lot more road closures this summer I’ll bet.

            I was half an hour early and since the weather was so was nice I sat outside the Jackman Building and looked over my essay. After a few minutes though a woman sat down at the bench across from me and lit a cigarette, and so I went inside and took the elevator to the seventh floor. I didn’t have to write down the room number because it was 711, which is the date when Donald Trump honours the victims of the great Slurpie flood. The door was propped open by a chair. I stood in the hall, only peeking in but Ira heard me and told me to enter. He’d been alone for his first appointment slot, so that meant there hadn’t been any need for me to wait downstairs.

            I went over the three main questions of interest I have in comparing T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. I told him that “The Wasteland” and “Howl” are kind of the two sides of the same coin in that each has its own wasteland effected by forces that impose themselves on sexuality. Eliot’s wasteland has been caused by rape and Ginsberg’s was brought about by the prohibition of homosexuality. Each of these serves as a metaphor for overall devastation in their respective worlds. I said I was also interested in the fact that in “The Wasteland” there are individual women characterized, whereas in “Howl” the women are generically grouped. The third thing that I wanted to look at is that both “The Wasteland” and “Howl” have a character that draws together the two sexes. In Eliot’s work it’s the transgender prophet Tiresias that acts as a bridge between men and women, while Ginsberg presents Neal Cassady as a godlike bisexual hero with the power to satisfy both men and women.

            Ira liked the first and second idea but said that if I use the one about generic versus individual women I have to offer a reason why this difference exists in the two works.

            It’s always good to come and see one’s TA before turning in a paper because it tends to positively affect one’s mark. I asked Ira if he would be grading my essay but he answered that he could only promise that he’d try. This worried me because one is often assessed according to how the TA sees that the student has listened to their advice. If a different TA marks a student’s paper than the one that advises them about it, the positive psychological effect of having gone to see one’s TA is lost. Ira gave me some assurance by saying that he was taking note of everyone that comes to see him and he was going to try to make sure that he was the one that marks the essays of those students.

            My appointment had been for 12:30 but since I’d gone in early I was out of there by 12:40. I rode back to Parkdale and before going home I went over to the Lucky Supermarket to buy a bag of spicy plantain chips. The place is the same but there were different people behind the counter than I’d seen before. The store sells a lot of West Indian products but all the staff seems to be from Pakistan, as did the new couple that served me. Nobody is unfriendly there but I’ve never seen a more perky and gregarious seeming couple than this man and woman. There was a line-up for the checkout as usual, but they smiled and thanked every customer as if each of them had done them a big favour by shopping there.

            A cute, kind of punky looking little teenage Gypsy woman stepped into line behind me and swore at the length of the line. She only bought a bottle of water and when she left the store, handed it to an older woman who looked like she might be her mother that was standing outside with another woman. They all talked loudly as they walked up the street and went into H & R Block.

            I went home and while I was unlocking my door, Benji came out of his room to complain about the guy in the apartment above him. He said it sounds like the guy is jumping all the time. I suggested that maybe he’s dancing. He added that he thinks the man is a homosexual because he’s always bringing guys up from the street into his place. He also assessed that Nickie, the Jamaican woman in apartment 1 is probably a lesbian. He seemed to be basing that claim on the fact that Nickie got her apartment on the recommendation of Greg, who used to live in apartment 5, because Greg is Gay, plus she also knows the guy on the third floor we’d just talked about. I told him that gay men and lesbians don’t necessarily hang out that much and I proposed that maybe they know each other because they are all Jamaican. Then I thought Benji said, “If the committee finds out, they’re gonna have problems!” I suddenly envisioned some draconian anti-gay organization that I hadn’t been aware of. “What committee?” I asked. He corrected me that he’d said the “community” and clarified that he meant the Jamaican community, which he said is against homosexuality. He recounted that someone had called my Ethiopian upstairs neighbour, David, a “buttyman” and he asked Benji what it meant. Benji expressed the worry that our building will get a reputation for being a gay building. I thought that would make for hilarious architecture if buildings had sexual preferences. I told him I didn’t care if anyone thinks our building is a homosexual building.