I’m really starting to think of myself as a hip and cool person, travelling around and becoming a distinguished gentleman and scholar. This weekend I went to Ottawa to be told how great I am, and I was thoroughly convinced.

Fulbright Canada, the benefactors of the Killam Fellowships program, to whom I am deeply and eternally grateful, put on annual seminars for all the students and researchers they’ve given money to. My understanding of the situation is that Fulbright is funded heavily by the Canadian and American governments, who like to see pictures of things in order that they may be proven to exist. Unfortunately, Fulbright is not in the business of, say, building bridges or delivering refrigerators. Fulbright’s goals are more abstract: things like learning, cultural awareness, and open-mindedness are all fine things to put in brochures, but somehow, Fulbright needs to find a way to take pictures of them. To this end, Fulbright gives us all a bit more money to fly to Ottawa in the fall (and Washington in the spring, but that’s down the road a ways yet) and participate in “fall orientation”. Fall orientation consists of a lot of meetings and fancy dinners and speakers and panel discussions, none of which are terribly interesting but which are easy to take pictures of and suggest some degree of intellectuality, thus comforting the powers that be and protecting Fulbright’s income streams in the years ahead.

My adventures with fall orientation began dispiritingly early last Thursday morning, around 4:30. I, being a responsible, think-ahead kind of person, had called for a taxi in advance the evening previous, and was disappointed to find it not where it had promised to be, that is, outside my dormitory. Calling the taxi dispatcher, I was assured that I must be mistaken and the taxi was, in fact, in exactly the same place as I was – outside my building.

One of the things I’ve learned about America is that there is a very high degree of respect for authority in all its forms. Campus police, for example, the object of ridicule and occasional pranking at Dalhousie and UPEI, are genuinely feared here. I think this is because the campus police actually do have some legal power here, although I still haven’t had it explained to me clearly. Being caught by campus police doing something contrary to university regulations leads to being “written up” or “referred” or even “documented”. Clearly, the threat is of a descent into a Kafkaesque quasi-judicial system that even a business student could not fill out enough forms to escape. I do my best to avoid the campus police.

Anyway, this respect for authority comes across in more subtle ways as well. A person presented with clearly false information will assume it is true as long as it bears the stamp of an authority figure of some sort. Securities are purchased based on good ratings given by ratings agencies that have a vested interest in the success of the securities. “Authority” is trusted even to the extent of causing the near-collapse of the global financial system, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that a tired taxi dispatcher wasn’t quick to properly assess the assertion of his high-tech taxi tracking system – the details of the operation of which I was not able to find out despite repeated questioning – that this taxi was directly outside Terrace 3, Ithaca College. I would have thought, though, that he would have been able to come to the conclusion without my help that that information, in combination with my telling him that I was directly outside Terrace 3, Ithaca College, was an obvious contradiction of the laws of either physics or normal human behaviour. After a few seconds of waiting, though, I decided he had had long enough and was not going to get there on his own.

I informed him that I was not standing on top of, lying underneath, or intersecting the taxi. I inquired once more as to the nature of the taxi tracking system and was once more rebuffed. I asked if the system might possibly, in some way, ever in a million years, be mistaken. He mulled this over for several seconds, attempting to radically change his worldview, and finally made a deep “Hmmmmm” sort of noise that I naively interpreted as sudden comprehension.

“Where are you, again?” he asked. At that moment, the taxi pulled up. I said a hasty, no doubt deeply confusing goodbye to my friend the taxi dispatcher, and got in.

Now, reviewing this blog post for (maybe obviously) the first time, I can see that it rambles a little bit, clouds the narrative with unnecessary musing, and could be a little too colourful in its literary style. I can also see how that could be annoying to readers. However, I have spent a full 35 minutes writing it and I’m not about to just delete all that. So, in the interest of balance, the rest of the post shall contain no musing, speculation or time-wasting of any kind. My ride to the airport was uneventful and reasonably priced. My flight left on time in the morning without major incident and I arrived safely and punctually at the Lord Elgin hotel in Ottawa. I walked around Ottawa for a couple of hours, got tired and returned to the hotel lobby to read for 45 minutes while I waited to check in. The book was Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I recommend it but offer no comment.

I like my way better. This whole post has gotten boring and dreary. It is also as much as I feel like writing for the moment. Next time, we’ll explore fancy meals, long walks, and infringements on my freedom of speech.