chestnutvinegar

This is a record about the time after I had graduated from Simon Fraser University (SFU), and before I had moved to Japan. The time period is from March to late September 2005. I was 21 years old throughout.

I graduated from SFU in June of 2005. Classes had actually finished in March, and therefore it really felt like I had graduated in March. At this point, it was just me, and the big box electronics store where I worked at. I had the dream of going to Japan to teach for a year. My friends had gone overseas and seen the world in their own way, and I wanted to do that in my way. My way was Japan.

Unfortunately, I lacked initiative to do many things, and I was one to talk of many dreams and do nothing to actually actualize them. I was a 21-year old working at a big box electronics store in Whalley (a poorer area in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey) with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. This was about the time where I started getting really into Jack Kerouac and Hermann Hesse. SFU and other universities in the Lower Mainland (the Vancouver area) had a “U-Pass” where students could ride the bus and SkyTrain for free (all students had to pay about 90 dollars in student fees for this bus pass for the semester). My U-Pass expired at the end of June, and therefore I had time to use it, and use the library at SFU as well. This is where I found my first Hesse and Kerouac novels, which I read on English Bay, in between napping on the grass. I was making good use of my Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology.

I had a friend that lived around Renfrew in Vancouver, and I would often also use the U-Pass to go to his house, and play pool, or video games like Street Fighter II in his garage.

Like the beginning of many changes in my life, one night, perhaps while playing Street Fighter II, I had a sudden epiphany about where my life was heading, and a giant surge of fear that I would fail to do any dream that I ever had. In May, about two months after classes ended, I was still at that big box electronics shop, I still talked about teaching in Japan for year, and I still slept on the grass near English Bay. I figured that something needed to change, and I had learned from my dad that the best way to change something is to give yourself a giant kick in the ass. I have heard that it doesn’t matter who the kick in the ass comes from.

I put in my notice at the big box electronics store. I said I wanted to quit. They understood, or perhaps they were happy. I was soon going to be living at home without a job in my parent’s basement thinking about teaching English in Japan for a year.

SFU had had an “internship” or “co-op” program with a children’s English conversation school called Peppy Kids Club in Japan. Students could take a working holiday visa, and teach at Peppy Kids Club for 6 months. Peppy Kids Club had an office in Vancouver. So I sent an email application to Peppy Kids Club to teach English in Japan for a year. I got an interview. I didn’t have any dress shirts, let alone a suit, so I wore this fancy (for me) V-neck Adidas shirt, and tried to part the mess of a mop on my head in the middle.

The interview was in a building on Seymour Street. I talked with a the interviewer for about 30 minutes. The next day I was offered the job via email. I was a jobless person with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology living in his parent’s basement that had a job offer in Japan for October.

Peppy Kids Club had recommended that new recruits bring $3,000 dollars to bring to Japan. Our first paycheck would be almost two months after arriving, and so we needed to have enough money for that time. I therefore needed a job, and needed to save every cent in order to be able to go to Japan to teach English for a year.

I had a friend who worked at a bar in Whalley. The bar looked fancy from the perspective of an unemployed Sociology graduate who wears Adidas v-neck shirts to dress up. The bar was also by a SkyTrain station. I believe my friend was a sous chef at the bar. He said that they were always looking for dishwashers, and with a smirk on his face that anytime I wanted a job he would get me one. I asked him for a job, and he got me one. At this time my dad’s office was in an office building connected to this bar, and so he could tell his colleagues his son with a Bachelor of Sociology degree living in his basement was washing dishes in the bar downstairs they had lunch at.

I bought a lot of Hesse books at some used bookstore on Main Street in Vancouver, and read them on the bus to and from work. At work I worked the morning shift, which was the shift that the other dishwasher wanted. I washed dishes, peeled onions and potatoes, and smushed potatoes into fry shapes. I was a vegetarian and one of the chefs always made me a really awesome veggie burger. Another guy was into philosophy, but I didn’t talk to him about philosophy much. I don’t think I wanted to talk to my friend at work too much, because he was a hard worker, and I really just wanted to get my work done, get on the bus, read more Hesse and count down the days until I would be going to Japan.

I remembered in September I bought Against Me!’s “Searching for a Former Clarity” and played it in the kitchen, and it didn’t really grab me at the time. I like the album more now. There are some great tracks on it.

I don’t think I saved as much money as I needed, but I saved over $2000 and had bought a plane ticket. My mom gave me some more money, and I think paid for a year of traveller’s insurance for me.

I also liked hiking around this time. I remember two hiking trips especially from the summer of 2005. The first was hiking up to Garibaldi Lake and onto the Black Tusk. This was with a group of men who were outdoorsy, or at least competent at that sort of thing. I was more in love with the mountains in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums while sitting in my boxers talking to people on MSN Messenger after a day of work. We hiked for hours up to Garibaldi Lake, onto the alpine meadows, above the tree line where the path disappeared, and we traversed up on gravel. Eventually we came to the snow, and continued upwards. We finally reached the Black Tusk, which looked like a black tusk sticking out of the top of the mountain, and required people to climb up it for about three to four metres before going through and up its crevasses to reach a sort of summit. I remember getting to the tusk and telling the men in my group to go on up, and that I knew my limits. I saw people sitting at the base of the tusk, which itself was a fairly sharp decline. I imagined falling down from climbing the tusk, and falling down the mountain. In the end, I thought, “fuck it”, and powered through the climbing bits, and made my way to the top. I sadly have lost my photos from this trip. Down the mountain, above the tree line, I remember running down over the snow on the way back. That may have been stupidly dangerous. It was very fun at the time though.

The second hiking trip was with a friend who I had met at university. We had decided we wanted to hike up what I think is called Eagle Ridge along Buntzen Lake. We had also decided that we had wanted to stay overnight on top of the mountain. Again, the Dharma Bums or something probably motivated me to do so, and I believe my friend just liked nature. We took the various buses needed to get to Buntzen Lake (the route did exist), and we hiked. The sleeping bags I bought were not for trekking, they were for camping with a car. They were big, and we had no real good way to carry them, so we constantly had to readjust our bags. The hikes first two hours or so are quite steep and painful, but we had known that. We have reached the top ridge of the mountain, and walked along seeing patches of snow still left on the ground. After walking by small ponds, we found a nice flat area on top of the mountain. The ground felt like moss, and was very soft. We laid down our sleeping bags, and slept under the stars. We weren’t hikers who did this sort of thing often, but naive freshly graduated students who had heard about people doing these sorts of things. We wanted to experience them too. The next day we finished the hike, went along the top of the mountain and back down to another area of the path along Buntzen Lake.

I believe I finished my job as a dishwasher in the middle of September, and that my plane ticket for Japan was on September 29. I had given myself a few weeks to get my shit together.

I have become desensitized how huge the decision to move to Japan for a year felt to me at the time. I think the North American bubble can seem quite huge. I didn’t really know anything about Japan. I didn’t really especially like anything about Japan, except for having my love of video games as a child (I now have the love of video games of a child). With zero expectations, and zero knowledge, it just felt like a step into an unknown. I may have compared it to death.

It was September 29. At the airport, my mom cried, and my friend consoled her. After I had said my goodbyes, probably with a big stupid grin as nothing had set in, I had put Against Me!’s “We did it all for Don” on my Discman, and really took umbrage in the line “we’re going to force ourselves to live”, which perhaps seems a little melodramatic now.

I got on a plane, and I went to Japan.

I forget which movies I watched on the plane.

Eventually I landed in Tokyo, transferred onto a plane to Nagoya, and started my training as a Peppy Kid Club Native Teacher. I would turn 22 in December.

This is an impersonal history of my time at Simon Fraser University (SFU) from the fall of 2003 to the spring of 2005. It sometimes is not very impersonal, and somewhat personal. I did the third and fourth year of my undergraduate degree at SFU. My memory is shaky, especially for certain semesters, so some facts are probably incorrect. I looked at some transcripts that I have, which were attached to an old email from my parents for when I had applied to do my Masters, so the course information is correct.
When I first started going to SFU, I unfortunately felt that I must not be as academic as the other students because I did two years at Kwantlen University College, and other students went directly to SFU after high school. I had thought I might be unable to participate in class discussions like a real SFU student could. Of course I was grossly mistaken, and I sincerely wish I learned that way of thinking is damaging at a younger age.
My first semester on the mountain (SFU is on a mountain) was in the fall of 2003. It was my third year of university, I was 19, and I took four courses. Each course was 4 credits, and there were 60 required credits in total for third and fourth year, which made me required to take 15 courses. I took four courses every semester at SFU, except for the spring of 2004, when I took three.
The four courses of the fall of 2003 were the Sociology of Art Forms, Classical Sociological Thought, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, and Public Policy. A strong theme of this semester was being assigned hundreds of pages to read per week, being enthusiastic to dive into the readings like an academic would, and not completing them. I think I slowly but surely started reading the required literature, and by my last semester, read about 70% of assigned readings in full.
For the Sociology of Art Forms class, we were assessed with two essays, a “mid-term” 10-page essay, and a “final” 20-page essay. That was the professor’s method of assessment for all his classes that I took with him (and I took three in total, the other two were in the spring 2004 semester). The class was less about a sociology of art forms, and more about how Hegel viewed the arts (the book we read was called “Hegel on the Arts”. I think this upset some students, but I was infinitely more interested in how Hegel viewed to arts than I was about any sort of textbook with statistics and norms. The contents of the course stay with me to this day, and I still use them when I think about art (admittedly, I don’t think about art too often). My 10-page paper was an analysis of the song “Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist” by the Weakerthans (from the 1997 album “Fallow”). I did a crap job of it, but I really enjoyed doing it. I think if I had the opportunity to resubmit the paper, it could have been something great. My 20-page paper was an argument that video games (or interactive media) are a type of art. My main (or best) argument was about the video game Metroid Prime, because all those RPGs I liked were really like lots of text with cool stories. Metroid Prime had an interesting interactive way of telling a story, and showing a world. I could not bring myself to write a paper on a conventional subject.
In my Classical Sociological Thought class, we read Durkheim, Marx and Weber. I skimmed Durkheim pretty well (we read the Division of Labour in full, which was apparently Durkheim’s doctoral dissertation). I enjoyed Marx, but I think that was mainly because we only did the easier texts like the German Ideologies. I don’t think I ever cracked that Weber book, but I may have. The first day of class the professor played the Bad Religion song “American Jesus” (off of 1993’s “Recipe for Hate”), and before that during a self-introduction, I mentioned that I had seen Bad Religion three days in a row the previous week (their show at the Curling Club in Victoria was especially great). This did not really make for a great connection between us, and I honestly felt a little awkward about having a love of Bad Religion in common with my professor. The professor was really good at seeing through bullshit, which was a problem.
Philosophy of the Social Sciences blew my mind, as did the professor. We read all these different texts that were to typify various ways of thinking such as Positivism and Phenomenology. Postmodernism was the worst, because I didn’t get it. I didn’t get Phenomenology, but it was the best. I think I thought I did get it, but when trying to explain it, it was fairly obvious I did not really. For this class, we had to write two page essays on each paradigm (I have a sneaking suspicion that “paradigm“ is the wrong word) and then do an analysis with that paradigm on Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”. I did a presentation in my (at the time) happy go lucky way of doing presentations, and I hope it made the topic (Marcuse on progression I believe) interesting.
The Public Policy class was taught by a “leftie” (his words). It was my first time to meet a leftie that wasn’t some sort of cynical anti-establishment whatever person. He was a man with lots of experience working in Ottawa, and working on various government policies that are meant to help the disadvantaged, or whoever. It wasn’t all just about posing I suppose. He seemed like a genuinely good person. I remember very little about the actual content of the course, but I do remember learning about childcare in Quebec, and various pension programs.
In my second semester (the spring of 2004) I took Classical Marxist Thought, the Global Division of Labour, the Sociology of Knowledge. I had realized I could only take three courses this semester, and still graduate “on time”. I was deeply interested in Marxist thought and Phenomenology, and was looking forward to dive deep into both.
The Marxist course and the Global Division of Labour course were by the Art Forms professor from my previous semester. I changed stores at my part time job this semester (a big box electronics store’s music/video games section), and I was working about 30 hours a week for most of the semester. That led me to sleep in, cut classes, and ultimately not try very hard. This was regrettable. We read Capital Vol. 1 in the Marxist class. We started reading it incredibly slowly. The professor thought understanding the history of the commodity (the topic of the first long chapter) was especially important. I thank the professor for that, because it really did provide a solid basis for understanding the book, as well as Marxist thought in general. I’m not too concerned that my grasp on the valorization process isn’t as good as it could be. I remember diagrams on the blackboard distinguishing mercantilism from capitalism, and having this awakening about how capital is key to capitalism. It seems so obvious in hindsight. I sadly do not remember what my 10-page or 20-page papers were about. I know that while I tried somewhat hard on the 20-page paper, I received a very poor grade on it. I remember not being happy about that. I assume I had a sudden inspiration of creativity that took me in a direction that was best not to go in.
I forgot the majority of the Global Division of Labour course, but I have two distinct memories. The first is a debate students had with the professor on the first day about how neo-colonialism is basically colonialism, and how the professor wouldn’t have it. I respected the professor because the argument seemed to be more about shit you’d put on banners, or share on Facebook (if Facebook was around) rather than a legitimate discussion on what neo-colonialism is, and the similarities and differences with colonialism. The second memory is my 20-page paper, which touched upon the Meiji Restoration in Japan. I knew nothing about Japan, and I didn’t learn anything writing that paper. I opened books to random pages, quoted lines, and put together some sort of paper. I felt bad that I got a B+ on that paper, as I didn’t deserve it. The paper was about the Meiji Restoration’s influence on Japan’s postwar economic miracle, and I think I would disagree with the argument the paper was presenting now.
The Sociology of Knowledge was taught by the professor who taught the Philosophy of Social Sciences. This course was on a Tuesday night, and therefore there was no sleeping in, or leaving early for work, as I had made myself unavailable to work Tuesday nights. This course changed my way of thinking more than any other course. Berger and Luckmann’s book “The Social Construction of Reality” is a book I think I actually read because I was so intrigued. Like in his class the semester before, this professor asked each student to do a presentation on the topic of one class. This time I was in a group of four with other people, and we did a jeopardy-like game. It worked. We also read Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. I think I was not able to comprehend the professor’s comments regarding Kuhn not actually being a postmodern thinker, and how postmodernists have misrepresented his work. I reread the book later that year with a friend, and have thought about the book afterwards, and think I understand the professor’s point now. However, at the time, whenever I tried to explain Kuhn to my friends, I ultimately could not do so in a convincing way. I think that was proof that I in fact did not truly understand. We had also read a third book in the class, or we were supposed to. The title of the book was a question, and perhaps that turned me off from the book. (I really dislike questions for titles of things.) Either way, it did not get read.
Fall 2004 was the beginning of my fourth year of university. I had thought I had one more year to go until I became an adult. (I did not realize at that time that in the fall of 2005 I would be singing and dancing with Japanese children across the Pacific.) There was a sort of contradiction in my fourth year: I believe I tried really hard. I had remembered getting better grades that any other year at Kwantlen or SFU. However, my memory is the foggiest about my fourth year. Before checking my transcripts, I was only right about the timing of two courses.
In the fall, I took Qualitative Methods and the Anthropology of Biotechnology. I also took by distance Canadian Ethnic Relations (a course I remembered due to the coursework being relevant a few years later), and the Sociology of Ageing (a course I did not remember until I looked at my transcripts). I had taken all the Sociology classes that I was interested in, and was moving on to Anthropology classes I found interesting. However, I still had the requirement to take two methodology classes, one of which is the Qualitative course mentioned above, and the other I took in the spring of 2005.
The Qualitative Methods course I had mixed feelings about. The professor was a very nice person, and I performed well in the course. However, I really didn’t connect with the professor or the class content. The professor talked a lot about challenging the structures, and that came across as shallow to me. My qualitative project was an ethnography on smoking pot. My methods of research were autoethnography, and interviews. I had to get all participants to sign papers, and I allowed everyone to use an alias as I was “challenging the structures”, and needed to make sure the man wouldn’t apprehend any of the people I interviewed. I got an A+ on the project, which always seemed funny to me.
The Anthropology of Biotechnology was a course that I greatly enjoyed and that I loved with passion. Sadly, I think I had rubbed the professor the wrong way. We learned a lot about eugenics policies, and how all these things were conceived in countries in the late 19th and early 20th century. It is very interesting, and a part of history that is sadly forgotten. I believe I wrote my paper on the history of how schizophrenia has been viewed by professionals. That resulted in receiving a very poor grade, attached with a comment saying that my paper had nothing to do with the course. The connection in my head was that when schizophrenics were forcibly sterilized, and the definition of the word mattered. “Feeblemindedness” would’ve probably been a better topic, and looking more closely at specific policies would’ve produced a better grade on the paper.
I basically have zero memories about the two distance courses. I suppose I did not complete any readings except for the night before papers were due, or tests were had. In those situations, I had binged on the information, overloading my short-term memory, and within a few days (after tests were taken and papers were wrote) I had completely forgotten everything. I remember learning that the politically correct term for old people was ageing, and not aged. Ageing is a process. We’re all on a journey.
Spring 2005 was my final semester at Simon Fraser University. I was ready to excel at all my courses. I was ready to have a GPA above 3.0. I was under the impression that to get to graduate school, I would need at least a 3.33 (B+) GPA, but thought that at the very least I would need a 3.0 GPA. This struggle for a B average was in great contrast to lazily excelling at school earlier in life. This semester I took my final required course, Quantitative Methods. I took the Anthropology of Biotechnology professor again (I signed up for the course before I learned how much he hated my paper) for the course Anthropology of the Past. I also took Anthropology of Medicine and Sociology of Religion.
I didn’t like the Quantitative Methods class, which was unfair, and didn’t like the professor, which was even more unfair. Due to all the theory courses I had taken, I had grown a dislike of quantitative work, and preferred to read about Phenomenology or Marxism. The professor was kind to me, and graded me kindly. He also emailed with me after the course ended, and provided a reference for me for my application to teach in Japan. The class was all about using some data set, and putting the data into SPSS (a statistics computer program for the Social Sciences) to prove or disprove something. Thinking about it right now, it actually was a great class where I learned a lot. If I had internalized more of the content, I would have probably been able to do a much better Master’s thesis years later.
The Anthropology of Medicine had an amazing professor who was full of life, and I wish I remembered more about the course, but I don’t. I don’t even remember what I had presented on. I remember the people in the course more than anything. There were great people in the class. I remember someone had taught in Japan for 6 months in the class, and I wanted to teach in Japan.
The Anthropology of the Past course was a course I enjoyed a lot. I felt that at this time I had finally understood what university was all about. I felt more confident talking in class and writing papers. I believe I did all the course readings for this class, and greatly enjoyed looking at how the past is remembered. My paper was on hardcore punk in Washington DC in the early 80’s. I showed my Minor Threat DVD in class during my presentation. I think that may have cemented the dislike my professor had of me. One of the texts we read in this class had about an Apache group in Arizona, and how they used place names as a way of telling history. It was really easy to read, and an interesting book.
The Sociology of Religion class I think I didn’t like, and I think I allowed it to represent to everything about the discipline of Sociology (as I viewed it) that I did not like. The course was heavy on how to define religiosity as a variable. For example, people who self-identify as Christian versus church attendance. Then there was defining church attendance, and how often does one have to go to church in order to be considered “devout”. I am unsure if this sort of discussion was a major part of the course, or just what my mind has latched onto. I believe the professor was also a Weber-man, and therefore we must have done some Weber-related stuff as well. I would be guessing as to what that would have been though.
After two years at Kwantlen, two years at Simon Fraser University (on the mountain) were finished. I graduated, quit my job at the big box electronics store, got a job from my friend and worked as a dishwasher in a bar for 10 weeks or so. I saved up a few thousand dollars and I moved to Japan to teach English for a year.

This is an impersonal history of my time at Kwantlen University College (where I did the first two years of my undergraduate) as I remember it right now. Some facts are probably wrong.
When I was 17, I graduated from Tamanawis Secondary School. The same year, I enrolled at Kwantlen University College, and went there for 5 semesters. It should have been 4 semesters if I was to have done things properly full time, but the first semester I only took 4 courses, and failed one of them (it was first period, and Calculus), so after “two years” (four semesters), I took the summer semester as well, and was able to finish two years of university courses in two years.

My first semester I think I was probably a little high school shit, treating everything like high school. Kwantlen was just a little bit further of a walk. I got bored and talked through Sociology, got a C in Political Science after not wanting to include references in my paper, failed Calculus (mentioned above), and I have absolutely zero memory of the English course I took that semester. There was a girl I think I “liked” who was in the English class though. I think the course was on academic writing, and I am unfortunately still bad at writing.

9/11 happened in this first semester, and I remember a person from my high school told me about it as I arrived on the campus. I had people from high school in two classes. I thought the guy sitting at the front of the class wearing a trench coat was so smart for being able to converse with the instructor.

My second semester started in January of 2002. I was 18 then. I was thinking of trying hard this semester, and was tired of the lazy me. I think it was then I learned one couldn’t snap their fingers and stop being a lazy person. It was a crappy realization. I took an English literature course with a professor I had heard things about. Because of him I read all those JD Salinger books, and realized that Shakespeare wasn’t boring and stupid. He gave me 40% on a paper and said it sucked. I think it was around this time I got tired of getting my hair cut, so I had longer hair. I took a history course on Canadian history. I believe the instructor really didn’t like me, but I really liked his course. I took an Anthropology course where the instructor said to “write your biases” in your work as that’s what good anthropologists do, so I wrote that my bias was that I was an apathetic shit from the suburbs. She didn’t like that, and told the entire class how amazing she was for reading such drivel, and for being academic enough to not fail “that person” then and there. I still haven’t forgiven her for that. My psychology class was all scientific, and I think that’s when I realized that psychology, despite sounding like a cool word when I was in high school, wasn’t for me. He made us buy a huge textbook. I believe it was also this semester I took a Philosophy of Religion course, with a who would now be called a New Atheist for an instructor. He wrote his own (unpublished) textbook. If I remember correctly, his all convincing academic argument against God was that children die. I took the course with a person I knew from high school.

After taking subjects from eight different fields, I had thought that I should probably decide on something for my second year. I decided on Sociology.

I think I took three Sociology courses, one English literature course, and that Math course I failed for the fall of my second year. I got an A- in the Math class, and I was really happy about that because I had found it so hard a year previous. At that time my favorite album was Pinkerton, and near the end of the semester I found out the guy I sat beside in Calculus also had it as is favorite album. The English literature course I think I mainly took because I took the same instructor the previous semester, and he wowed me. We read Canterbury Tales, so maybe it was about older literature. We also read Hamlet, but I forget the rest. Oh, and John Donne. The Flea. The Sociology courses were a theory one, a methods one, and then one on the mass media (Bush lies, kill your television, etc.). I really enjoyed the people I took these classes with, and I think I scoffed at the little high school shits. I really enjoyed the social theory stuff, and remember that the instructor had thrown a lot of good stuff our way that I was eating up. I didn’t really “like” the methods class, but I remember talking a lot in it, and I may have said funny things every now and then. I have conflicting feelings about the mass media course, and this is not the place to resolve them. I mainly think how different the world was in the fall of 2002 when I took the course compared to today. It blows my mind.

Thinking about it, I think I didn’t take the media course in the fall, it was in the spring of 2003 I think. I took another Psychology course with an instructor who was American, and who had a reputation for being easy (she gave As), which she did. Like the previous psychology class, I remember nothing at all from this class.

To fulfill my science requirement, I needed to take this Atmospheric Geography course, which was basically the course people that were in Social Sciences or Arts took for their science requirement. As someone who enjoyed math and all that stuff quite a bit, it was incredibly easy. I’m not sure if this is the spring or summer of 2003. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was the summer.

I took a world history course too, where I really couldn’t gel with the instructor. In the first class, there was a big debate on if Egypt was an African country or not, and I just could not understand. My answer “it’s in Africa, so yes” gave me a pat on the head and a “thanks for playing university today”.

I took a Social Psychology course with the same instructor who gave the As easily. I got an A again I believe. I also took another Sociology methodology course with the same instructor as last time, but with a friend. I had liked the professor, but my friend showed me how he was a bit of a weirdo. I’m not sure what I eventually thought.

There was another Sociology course I took and I think the number was 1225. I have no idea what it was about, but I think like the Intro to Sociology course I took, I didn’t like it, and thought it was silly. I really liked that theory course (which was 1235 I believe).

I think it was Geography, World History, and weird Sociology course in the summer.

At this time, to transfer to a university (UBC or SFU), you needed a C average (2.0 GPA). I think it changed the semester after I did so, but because it was a relatively low requirement, after the summer semester I went right into SFU (Simon Fraser University) in the fall of 2003.

Thinking about all these classes, it’s amazing how many people (whose names I don’t recall) I remember for the first time in years.

That was an impersonal history of my time at Kwantlen University College.