Love. What, at its most basic, is it really? I don't know. But I think of love when I think of Jen. Does this mean that I loved her, or that she loved me? I don't know. Can there be an attachment between two people without them even realizing it? I am unsure. But I will keep the idea alive for later.

"Jen," I said quietly as I leaned toward her, almost touching her face with mine. "Have I ever told you that you have really pretty eyes?"

"Right!" she said. She smiled and nudged her fist into my shoulder. "You're so full of it."

We were sitting on the lawn at the south side of Hart House. It was a muggy hot day in September. The long lazy shadow of an old tree kept us cool. From there we could see the Parliament building on Queen's Park.

"Do you think we'll ever be important?" Jen asked. She pointed at the old stone building. It brushed the sky with its green copper roof.

"I'm not finished talking about your eyes," I said.

"I'm serious."

Jen looked at me for a second and then turned away. She looked back toward the Parliament building.

"What's wrong?"

She raised her shoulders and took a deep breath. "I don't know," Jen said. Her voice was chased by a current of tense breath.

I gave her a hug.

Jen smiled slightly, and said, "I just feel insignificant." She pulled up a few blades of grass and tossed them into the air.

"We're going to do great things."

"Yeah. I'm going to be a famous bestiality star."

"What?"

"Never mind," she said. Her face brightened somewhat.

I laughed, and gave her a hug.

We're going to do great things – famous last words spoken by troubled souls with too little time for the important things in life, like friendship. What is friendship? Once more I am left clueless, except that in Jen's arms I know that I found something.

A true friend does not stifle the other person's personal growth. I think that a real friend will correct the errors of his soul-mate's ways and help his friend to achieve beyond either of their own individual abilities. But how often does this happen? Probably infrequently. And when it is done, it is not often done well.

"What was that hug for?" Jen asked. The sun sat low behind our backs, making a hundred-foot shadow out of a twenty-foot tree.

"Just to let you know how I feel," I said.

"Well," she said, looking at me with those eyes, "thanks...."

"You're welcome," I replied. "We're okay."

"Well, do you really think we'll be okay?"

"I don't know. I hope so. Why can't we be? Everyone else is okay."

"But what if something happens? What if there's a car accident? Or a shooting?"

"I don't know," I said.

I should have told her that we must live with the intention of still being alive next week. Life does make chumps of us all, but not right away if we are lucky. If we are vigilant.

I was under-whelmed the first time I stood in the lobby of the Faculty of Music. On the outside it looked like a giant brick, and on the inside it looked like the inside of a giant brick. Red-brown in color, uniform in shape, and uninspiring in disposition, the Faculty of Music was the big cell where musicians were sent to have their spirits whither.

The Faculty was sort of like an Academy Awards ceremony – everyone giving awards to each other in the name of self-congratulations. Everyone was busy climbing over each other for decadent recognition.

When standing in that box of a lobby, one can look up and see two glass domes that break through into the third floor. They look the same way that a thirteen year old girl's breasts do when they first break though into the minds of all the boys that notice her.

Students would stand around on the third floor, look down through the domes, and peer at their competitors below. Other students would look up from the lobby and squint at their adversaries above. This tension often caused the domes to fog up. Considering the number of drug-addicted students, this was just an external reflection of the state of their minds.

Nailed on to these muddy walls were paintings by anonymous artists who painted with equally anonymous brush-strokes. What were these things that they painted? They looked essentially like a kid had flung his brushes at a canvas and said, 'Here: my new masterpiece for mom's refrigerator door'. More essentially and truthfully, these paintings were picked by the administrators of the building as a reminder of our place in the world.

Students see these paintings and know that they are in a wildly competitive and unforgiving place. There can be no comfort drawn from these artworks. They were painted in an anguished manner and so always project anger onto the unhappy students who look at them. Consequently the paintings are nailed up high enough so that they could never be removed by a would-be liberator.

But who would want to liberate the students from their burdens? That saddle, that baggage, that weighing-down of the spirit: this source of so much anguish is the bread-and-butter of therapists, councilors, psychiatrists and drug pushers, prescription or otherwise. For every young student there is an army of three or more people employed to make sure that this youthful neurotic stays on track and remains functional yet dependent.

Under the surface of every happy student is the potential for a serious malady. And each potentially grief-stricken young person is another potential hour's wage, another potential specialist's fee, or another prescription charge waiting to be paid. Oh heaven forbid those paintings be taken down! Don't let those heavy veils be torn away to let the airy lightness of happiness invade!

Too many people would lose their livelihood to such rampant contentment. Society would crumble as the Conservative upper classes descended into poverty, having had their main pillar of stability knocked out from beneath their perch. Those manicured lawns would go fallow and weed-stricken. The tax base would collapse. The electorate would be in revolt. International war would break out. Peace and order would only be restored through nuclear Armageddon – an event tragic enough to place the entire population into a state of melancholy madness; thus replacing those students who had been freed from their arduous mental bondage.

My first music class was on the art of conducting. The teacher, who was some petrified old student of Beethoven, stood at the lectern with his mad-scientist hair reaching out toward me.

With his Proper English way of speaking he said, "Conducting is an art." He paused to let us appreciate the profundity of the situation.

He continued forth, saying, "There is a tradition that must be followed in order to be a proper conductor." He glanced at the accompanist by the piano, and said, "We must communicate tempo and volume changes clearly and precisely. Watch as I conduct this section from Brahms' fourth symphony."

The accompanist played, closely following the teacher's every conducting gesture. The teacher's head bobbed around for emotional emphasis. The short section ended and the teacher said, "Now, watch what happens if I don't conduct the tempo and volume changes."

The pianist started from the beginning again, but this time there was a lack of life to his playing. The teacher's head and raggedy hair remained immobile. His hands did little more than beat time. The music, uninspiring and mechanical, ended mercifully quickly when he stopped early.

"I don't want to bore you with the rest. You get the idea," he said flatly.

Now the teacher called on me to get up and conduct a short piece. I was doing something that I had never done before and I was scared. The teacher looked at me dully and frowningly. He handed me his baton and sat down.

"Go ahead," he said.

I stood behind the lectern with the score opened in front of me. The accompanist waited for his cue. The teacher stared impatiently. I smiled nervously at the other students, took a deep shuddering breath, and raised my hands into position.

My right hand bobbed lightly and then dropped suddenly down. The accompanist began furiously hammering at the piano keys. I found myself to be conducting faster than I should, and I was bearing down too hard at the beginning of each measure. The teacher gave me a vexing look, which made me stop suddenly. He sighed, got up reluctantly and snatched the baton from my closed hand.

"You put too much effort into leading the music. It's not that hard to do. You don't have to push your way into the next measure."

I sat down and he conducted the same small section again.

"See? I don't swing my arm down too strongly. Only enough to do the job."

His long ancient finger pointed at me, and I was again forced to be the center of unwanted attention. I held the baton, more tenuously than last time, and started over again with this singular thought in my mind: Don't fuck up! I was beginning to feel confident after ten or twenty measures. And then I saw these two girls in the second row looking at me and giggling and saying things to each other.

I must have turned red with embarrassment. The baton fell from my hand. The accompanist stopped abruptly, and I stood there trying to stutter an explanation. The Old Throwback stood up and put his arm on my shoulder and nudged me toward my seat.

"Would somebody else like to try?" he asked.