I like you people.

I don't know how this blog will keep up, but if you have tumblr and like feminism, Edmonton, the Mountain Goats, and books, welp. I am here.

we can bury our time capsule in a pothole

I just went for a walk, nominally to buy cigarettes, but mostly because I bought rainboots yesterday and wanted an excuse to walk/stomp in every puddle I encountered. Which is something you should try, by the way. You end up feeling powerful, in a way, especially if you're like me and have spent the past however many years avoiding them. "Fuck you, melting snow!" you can say in your head. Or out loud. Whichever. Anyways, the melting snow and all of the mud and dirt that go with it made me think that if I were to create an Edmonton archive, it would contain the following:

• a taxidermied magpie
• a Roll Up the Rim cup, found on the side of the road
• a broken snow shovel
• photographs of all our friends who've moved away, in memory
• a jar of mud from the river

And we could bury it all in a pothole and wait about fifty years until it gets covered over. All of that is to say, I really don't know what I'd put in an Edmonton archive. Considering that I'd like to be an archivist, you'd think it would be easy. But I actually have no idea. It's hard to decide what's important, isn't it? What seems like it would be at the time might not be, really.

 I keep thinking about that Pine Point documentary, too. I've been looking at the website, and he's got a whole digital archive there of things he's collected himself and from other people. And I really like that idea. I always make fun of scrapbookers -- because do you really not have anything better to do with your time than caption photos of your golden retriever with Comic Sans praises? -- but in a way, they're doing something good. They're collecting their own memories. Creating their own archives, as it were.

Really, I like the idea of personal archives more than official ones, even. Have you ever stopped in one of those dinky little museums you find on the side of the highway sometimes? Curated by an elderly woman who gets super excited when you come in because you're her first visitor in a week? Go in next time you see one. Ostensibly they're about a place, or an event, but a lot of the time it's made up of stuff people have donated. Personal stuff. Letters, photographs. And they put it there maybe because they want to help commemorate something, but also because people are terrified of being forgotten and there's something about sharing such private things. Back to the Pine Point thing -- this guy is so intent on remembering a place that's already been forgotten, really. Because there's really nothing left. Literally nothing left. And I've forgotten where I'm going with this, sorry. But there's beauty in that. I love that archives can be anything. Whatever is important to you, you can collect. I save everything, I love physical objects, my bedroom is a shrine to the past fifteen years. An archive of Sam, as it were. An archeological dig site, if I get lazy and don't clean.

Back to everything/Pine Point/memory, I think that's what I'm going to do for my presentation, actually. Make some sort of collective archive of people, of us, of their and our memories and thoughts about this place at this moment. Oh goodness. I just had a good idea. We'll see if it's workable.

ANYWAYS. I'm slightly drunk, so excuse any "wtf is she even on" moments. And last last thing, speaking of archives, the Provincial Archive is opening for the Rural Alberta Advantage tomorrow night, apparently. So someone said. You might want to check it. It really is fitting, after all.

I really do want to work in a basement for the rest of my days.

I'm on a bus, waiting for it to leave the transit centre, having an oh shit moment, not on a smartphone. this is simply an acknowledgement of the fact that i've forgotten to write one for now (blaming my very distracting boyfriend  mountain of essays to write), and i'll do it when I get home. even though it'll be late. SORRY.

I went on an adventure tonight.

I won't describe it in great detail, because it was one of those things that are really only interesting to those who take part, you know? Anyways, we went to the north side to look at a car, and got off the bus too early because someone pulled the cord before they had to and we're the kind of people who don't like to admit to our mistakes or whatever. So we ended up walking for about fifteen minutes through this slightly sketch neighbourhood, and it was like walking on the goddamn moon, because it was fucking cold and windy (which, as an aside, I can haz sunshine?), and there were windrows and ice craters, which are just hazards to balance-challenged people like me.

I felt like a tourist and/or an astronaut, s'what I'm getting at. I hardly go over there, and -- I told this story a couple of times in discussions today -- the first time I really did, they dropped me at the Clareview LRT station only to discover that my friend's friend had had the bumper stolen from his truck; it was so stereotypically north end that I couldn't help but laugh, shitty thing though it was. Today I was meant to serve as "protection" or some such, which...lulz, no. The point here is that I have the same stereotypes that so many others do. And walking through that neighbourhood made me realise again exactly how little of the city I really know outside of my bubble. I feel like a tourist on the north side, the south side, in the satellite towns. When I try to conceptualize them, I end up just filling them in with the places I do know, and (except in the case of the Safeway/TD banks thing everywhere, which is true), it's all wrong. And this is a strange city to be a tourist in (do we even get that many real tourists? Or is Daryl Katz going to give us a new boost in that way, too?), because...really? People want to visit? How odd.

In all seriousness, I think it's good to be a tourist in your own city sometimes, really. Getting out of your comfort zone, seeing things that happen elsewhere, well, isn't that the point of touristing?  I don't know that you can have a full understanding of a place if you haven't seen or experienced as much of it as possible. Degrees and kinds of understanding exist, obviously, but to get the most out of it you need to explore as much as possible. Do what you're interested in. You're a tourist, after all.

It also just occurred to me that Edmonton is two or three cities: what it actually, objectively is -- a city with a million people, thousands of trucks, and a lot of ugly buildings; the way you see it personally; and the way everyone else sees it. All of these combine on some level to create what the city is, overall -- maybe there's no uniformly "Edmonton" thing (and I don't think there is), and how we see it in our own minds and which...oh god, that just cycles back on itself, doesn't it? That'll teach me to try and blog at 1:30 in the morning. I promise it makes sense when you think about it, though. I'd almost say that how we perceive it is the most important thing, really, since perception does shape so much of our understanding.

After all that we ended up in Dairy Queen, having a Blizzard because that's what you do when it's cold and windy, obviously. And that was my fabulous adventure, with all the cute bits left out so you wouldn't vomit, guys.

Pine Point & Dead Cities, pt. one.

This came up on my Tumblr feed earlier today, and it seemed like an appropriate thing to share. It's an interactive documentary about a ghost town in the Northwest Territories called Pine Point -- it closed in the late 1980s and now, twenty years later, there's nothing left. Not even the buildings where the townsite was. I spent a lot of time thinking about this (and a good hour or so just researching ghost towns in Alberta), and I do plan on writing a coherent post, but for now, here's just the link.

Pine Point

take the green belt to your house

First, can I say that I really want to be outside right now? I've spent as much time outdoors in the past few days as possible, barring that miserable miserable snow day (which, oh my fuck, whyyy?) I've got to go buy galoshes this weekend, because all I want to do is spend hours walking around. Drifting, even. That's not what this is about, though.

I used to make-believe a lot when I was little. Faeries and ghosts and magic and Ogopogo and the whole lot -- it was all real. I craved the unknown and the unreal, had to seek out everything hidden (fast forward 10 years and I can hardly watch The Ring. Shut up.) I loved all the little places in my gloriously suburban neighbourhood that didn't quite fit the mold -- the "Spanish villa" at the end of the street, or the string of trees along the pathway that had gone slightly wild. They were more interesting than orderly flowerbeds, anyways. Grownup me doesn't believe in faeries or Ogopogo (ghosts are still up for debate, really), but I haven't really lost my taste for the places that exist outside the norm.

When I go wandering, I love taking back alleys and green belts, crossing fields, using paths instead of walking on the main road -- essentially, anything to avoid using the sidewalk. Partly because it feels like an instant adventure -- probably this is a feeling left over from pretending I was a voyageur -- but also because it's straight up more interesting and usually prettier. There actually aren't many alleys around where I live, but there are a few green belts, and it's weird, because the nature in there is so ordered, trees in straight lines and all that nonsense, but if it's done right (or you're in the right mindset), it really can feel as though you're outside the city. Even with the backyards all around, it's just more peaceful, quieter. We need those spaces, I think. It can't be all urban, all the time. So thank god for gas lines?

The alleys, too. I think I love them because oftentimes what's in there is overgrown from people's yards...it's really just accidental, an afterthought. And it sets off so well against the crushed cigarette boxes, hey?  I've seen everything from daisies to overgrown raspberry bushes in alleys, and really, it's that starkness that makes it appeal to me so much. It doesn't fit. It's rather like in Mike Davis' article, with the post-firebombed places where the flowers would spring up, new and in abundance. Life where you wouldn't expect it, I suppose. There's one in particular, not very far from here or the river, and in the summer it's just utterly filled with wild roses. The gravel on the ground and these beautiful pink flowers just above it...I really like the juxtaposition, I suppose.

Which is really what it comes down to, isn't it? What's really so appealing about all of this is how it contrasts with the ordered nature of our usual existence. It's a little beyond the ordinary, and to use a cliche it's often (literally, even!) off the beaten path. It's freeing in that sense. So go exploring.

I spend roughly three hours a day in transit, depending; as a result, it's where I get a lot of my thinking done  about such important issues as whether Jersey Shore is real or if we're all just being trolled by The Situation, or if I should stop and buy Mini Eggs (the answer is always yes), or how I can convince my manfriend to grow his beard and buy a kilt and answer the call of the Scottish Highlands, which, to my complete surprise, he's not really game for. But no, today I had an "oh shit I still have to blog" moment was thinking about what I'd learned in this class, and it ended up cycling back to the bus.

I'm one of those people who's usually tuned out behind headphones from the moment I leave my house until the moment when I absolutely cannot avoid interacting with someone. It's better this way, trust me. Anyways, a couple of weeks ago my beloved, noise-canceling, "I'm wearing these so you won't try to talk to me" headphones broke (snapped, actually, which...I don't even.) On the bus, of course. It was horrid, and since I didn't have time to get to the mall to exchange them, I spent about 10 days alternately fighting with a pair of Apple's piece of shit iPod earbuds and giving up and paying attention to what was going on around me.

It wasn't awful. I mean, the junior high girls talking about J.Biebz and R.Pattz didn't get any less painful. Otherwise, though -- being forced to pay attention to the people I'd never listen to was sort of a learning experience. The kinds of things people will talk about in public never cease to amaze -- I'm looking at you, girl on the 109 talking about her discharge over the phone. Buses move through communities, but they're also tiny moveable communities themselves, and seeing how they function can be kinda cool sometimes. It's also interesting to see how sound or its absence can shape a place -- I never really minded taking the bus, it was almost peaceful, until my headphones broke and I couldn't hide behind Owen Pallett anymore. But when they're taken away, well. Like I said, buses are interesting. I almost want to spend a few hours taking random routes, and just seeing what the people are like, how the buses change depending on the time of day or the destination.

I guess maybe what I'm getting at -- since it's 5:04 and I'm supposed to be posting this four minutes ago, which, sorrysorry -- is that maybe what I've learned the most in 380 is how to experience places and spaces in new ways, and that I should do it more often. I've got my headphones back, thank you dear baby Jesus, but maybe every so often I'll start leaving them off to see what happens and what I hear. Just not on the junior high bus.