Odds and ends

SSN

I said I wasn't eligible for a SSN, and had to get an ITIN instead. This is what I was told, but it was a lie all along. Because I'm in the country as a J-1 instead of F-1 status (I have no idea what that means), it turns out I can get a SSN after all.

So, after going through the first few steps of getting an ITIN, I started over, and went off to the Social Security office. It turns out that I'd decided to go to the office right when they were especially short-staffed. When I arrived, the board said "now serving 33", and it stayed that way for a full half hour. My number said 65. Thankfully, they started moving people through a bit more efficiently, and it was just another hour and a half before my number came up. Little did I know that there were actually 2 entirely separate queues--there was one for SSN applications generally, and an entirely different one for SSN applications for foreigners. There is no indication of this, however, until you go all the way through the first queue, at which point in time your name is stuck onto the second queue, and you have to sit back down and wait some more.

After all that, I got a letter telling me that my SSN card would arrive in about 2 weeks. I asked if I could find out my number before that, and was told that it's actually quite impossible for me to find out my number before I receive my card. This is despite the fact that it should take about a nanosecond for the relevant computer to assign me a number; also despite the additional fact that the really important thing is the number itself, with its physical manifestation in the card being relatively useless.

Money

The university has a generous sum of money saved away for me, and is ready, willing, and able to sign this money over to me--as soon as I get a SSN. Until I give them that SSN, they can't even start to write out the cheque.

That's OK, because I have plenty of money in my Canadian and Japanese bank accounts that I can use if I absolutely have to. But I'd like to avoid doing that if at all possible, because of charges and poor exchange rates.

Phone

There are two options for acquiring a phone line.

Option 1: Provide a SSN and 6 months worth of credit history.
Option 2: Provide a copy of a passport (or any other alternative form of identification), and a large deposit up-front.

If I had my SSN, I could provide them with a credit history (which I have in abundance), and get my phone line. Alternatively, if I had my SSN, I could get a lot of money from the university, which I could use with my perfectly good passport to get my phone line.

Basically: I'm screwed.

Courses

These are fine. I'm taking too many courses right now, but it's not too much pressure because there's no expectation that I'll complete them all for credit.

The star of the semester is a course on "Kierkegaard's Socrates". I originally shied away from this course, because I know next to nothing about Socrates and precisely nothing about Kierkegaard, but upon reflection I decided that those were perfectly good reasons for taking the course. We're going through Keirkegaard's The Concept of Irony in quite a bit of detail, and the combination of hard (but not impossible) interpretation with (to me) completely new ideas has me in philosophical nerd heaven.

I'm also taking a course on Darwin and how he developed the idea of evolution, as well as a course on evil, which is going to involve a lot of reading about the Holocaust, torture, and other cheery topics.

A touch of hero-worship

On Sunday there was a hoity toity seminar about Kant and Hegel, with one of the listed speakers being John McDowell. I'm a fan, so I almost went, but it involved a lot of reading before hand (there were going to discuss the papers, not present them), so I gave it a pass. Also, it was at 10am on a Sunday.

Early Monday morning I luckily got word that Jürgen Habermas was giving a talk later that afternoon. Habermas, being a superstar not only in philosophy but also in just about every corner of the social sciences, drew a large crowd, and the seminar room was so packed that I had to sit on the floor. I managed to get a clear line of sight to him, from maybe 7 feet away. He looked at me a few times! It was so exciting.

Later it was brought to my attention that Habermas had probably attended Sunday's seminar. I got to thinking who else I might have missed, and started to get a little mad at myself for not going. On the other hand, if this place can draw big names like that once, it can do it again.

Dubya

Everyone I've met so far really hates him. One of my fellow first-years applied to U. of Toronto just to open up the option of getting out of the US. It makes me feel at home.