I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I know and don’t know the GTA — that’s the greater Toronto area, for those of you not so graced to be in the land Lord Simcoe’s spirit presence, er, har, har.
Why have I been thinking about this? I’ve been thinking about it because I feel that I thought more broadly when I lived elsewhere in Canada. This is no fault of Bay Street or the CN Tower, specifically; a lot of it has to do with myself and my own attempts to get grounded here in a big, interesting, and overwhelming city. In order to do that, I have to pay attention to the city, right? Yes. But here’s some other potential factors, in no particular order:
- It’s fair to say that anywhere I’ve lived there’s always been more going on than I could keep up with. That factor is expanded greatly in a city on the scale of Toronto, where just wading through the local alt-weekly listings is going to take more time; and then, it will take more brainpower to sort through said listings. Ditto for — hey! — actual news.
- Since arriving here, I’ve been lucky to be involved with a group of people quite involved in civic activism and journalism through the Toronto Public Space Committee and Spacing Magazine. Both these orgs share a commitment to public space and civic issues; which, if you’re really gonna be up on, you’re not gonna have as much time to understand what’s happening in, say, Dauphin.
- The explosion of blogs like this one. This point is an attempt to admit that my difficulties in seeing clear to Guelph could be a temporal thing as well as a geographic thing. Before I moved to Toronto, I rarely read, let alone wrote, in blogs, of which there are, I now believe 7.9 trillion. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I’ll play devil’s advocate here and speculate that maybe if I lived somewhere else I’d still just feel more overwhelmed and less informed in 2007 due to the proliferation of overwhelming media content in blogland. And still just as poorly informed about what’s happening in Dauphin.
- Knowing who the people are that I’m competing with, and associated personal neuroses. When I lived elsewhere, there weren’t many people I knew competing for the same markets I was writing for. Now, it seems like most people I know — or know of — are competing for success in the same markets. Used to be when an editor used to turn down a pitch of mine, I wouldn’t have a stricken feeling of “Oh no, has X already pitched them? Did they get the story? Or can they just do it better?” And used to be I wouldn’t read local papers and magazines using up extra intellectual energy wondering how so-and-so pitched such-and-such, or who they found out their scoop from, or, perhaps most significantly, berating myself for not whatever mysterious thing they had done.
- The supersizing of success standards in larger cultural centres. When I first moved to Toronto, I took a course at a local art college to finish up some degree credits from a maritime school. The bitterness of one of my new teachers, a respected, well-known mid-career Canadian artist, struck me intensely. He insulted other artists and designers in our classroom, gossiped about art and school politics, and generally just seemed like he thought life had served him a raw deal. One time he complained that one of his friends had shows in Japan and Europe, but wasn’t able to get respect in the T-dot. At the time, I thought, “Cry me a river! Let me get this straight, they *are* recognized for their art, and they’re even, it seems making a living from it. Isn’t that all you can ask for?” The teachers at my former school had been, after all, quite content seeming in their faculty positions and associated artmaking practices, Japan or no Japan. So of course I was horrified when I found myself in a similar emotional state on occasion of late to that same embittered teacher and artist. The demon of needing more than just a bit of recognition and adequate income had struck. And, like having a zillion brands of sneakers parading around in front of your sidewalk eyeballs rather than just, let’s say, 3, seeing more had led to wanting more.
Does all of this mean I’m going to leave Toronto? No, I’m old enough to know that these problems lie more in me than they do in the longtiude and latitude I find myself in. Yet these symptoms I’ve described, these insecurities, these time-wasting obsessive loops, are characteristics I’ve seen more of in cultural workers of Toronto than those of anywhere else I have lived. Could be a takes one to know one kind of scenario, but, goldarnit, whatever it is, I think for now I just need to strive towards creating my own private Winnipeg to retreat to occasionally… if only in the wheatfields of my mind.
I promise only non-solipsistic blog posts soon.
International Women’s Day rolled around again this year with the usual much-needed-yet-tokenist-seeming columns rife with evidence of how women are still an oppressed majority in Canada. You know: still making 70% of what men do, still killed or injured by the opposite sex in large numbers, and still underrepresented in elected officials (in the House of Commons only 1 out of every 5 members has ovaries).
