I didn’t want to go to Queen’s. My parents had both gone there, my sister and my cousin are there currently, and my boyfriend had been raised knowing he was going to Queen’s. I wanted to be different.
So my first choice was McGill, until I visited it in the winter. That was the end of that.
Next in line was Guelph, because I’ve always liked farms and you can buy a house there for the change you find in your sofa. But after visiting friends of the family in Guelph, I realized it was close enough to Toronto that my mother could drive out to visit every time she suspected my room was dirty. That would cause some problems.
My third choice was Western—nice sized town, cool fight song. Then I ed that my Dad had spent his first four years after high school there and there was probably still a hole in one of the dorms where one of his friends threw a table through a wall.
Dalhousie? I have this creepy mental image of showing up on the first day of class and noticing that everyone else is wearing a cable knit sweater and has brought cod for lunch and all I have is a ham sandwich. I don’t stereotype. Actually this goes for every school on the East Coast. I swear.
American Universities? I’ve seen Animal House.
University of Toronto? See Guelph. Times a billion. Except for the part with the farms and the couch change.
At this point I had crossed everything off my list except the Tuktoyaktuk School of Hair Design, and I eliminated that because I’d end up losing an eye if I worked with scissors.
So I’m going to Queen’s. And I’m looking forward to that.
I’ll have to find my way somewhere between my father’s experiences, who tells me about the keggers where his friends threw up on the porch in fall and it froze there until they could scrape it off in April, and my mother’s, who tells me that the smell of smoke gave her asthma.
I’ll have to be somewhere between my sister, whose floormates had to throw a party with the specific purpose of getting her drunk, and my cousin, who wants me to bring my frosh group to his house so he can “make friends.”
I may end up having to do crazier stuff than any of them to make my time at Queen’s memorable, but I’ll have fun doing it.
Oh, and I’ll probably get some sort of an education.
Emma will be studying English and Economics at Queen’s.
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