Re-discovered this blog today in a bout of boredom that involved uncontrollable naps, a pizza pop and a failed attempt to go swimming. Slightly depressed by my lack of stamina for, you know, doing shit...I turned to the internet. I did some internet sleuthing and discovered that my blog has been visited 347 times, including 3 page views from Russia! (?) Well, random visitors: your anonymous viewership (pathetic as it may be in numbers) gave me a much undeserved boost in esteem concerning my writing. So for your (anonymous) reading pleasure, another blog from the archives. This one is just becoming relevant for me again as I inch closer and closer to that scary state of University bachelor of arts graduate. And as I consider where next to call home:
Home often sneaks up on me. It happened today while walking around the streets of Montreal early this morning. May 1st is a big moving day in the city, and the streets are filled with pick-up trucks and u-hauls. Scantily clad men and women haul cardboard boxes up those archetypal montreal staircases, and leave mattresses onto the street en masse. The curbs become temporary storage spots for the unwanted remnants of student apartment--broken binders, econ textbooks, and bedside tables. There's something exciting about it all. So many new beginnings orchestrated simultaneously.
I've spent some time thinking about what home is for me. I've never had an easy answer to the question "where do you come from"? The most honest answer is a string of places that have slipped away from me. Or else an eclectic list of memories that never seem to add up to a suitable answer: digging up clams on sandbars, carrying my sister over seaweed, and searching for coins in the back of my grandfather's lazyboy recliner. I carry these images about like maps of where I've been and who I am, but the places themselves seem to have escaped the category of home.
But every now and then places surprise me and become home. It seems as though Montreal, or at least parts of it, have done just this in the past three years. When I first arrived here from the sanitized suburbs of Ottawa, I wasn't sure what to think of Montreal: it was dirty, dirtier than I imagined it would be, the sidewalks caked with winter's leftovers and the infrastructure admittedly falling apart in some sections (a piece of the Mercier bridge fell off in my first semester, as I recall). But despite it's rough at the edges quality, the city manages to win you over eventually. For one, it has an incredible energy. You'll know this if you've braved a frigid winter night when, despite the near minus 40 weather and impending snowstorm, city slickers pull on their toques for an outdoor dance party like igloofest or to catch an art show on nuit blanche. The frenzy over an important habs game is another thing entirely. I'm not the first to note that a montrealer's allegiance to the habs is religious. We wait for the return of the Stanley cup with an overpowering belief in not only it's inevitability but of it's moral justness. We're probably one of the only cities to respond to a WINNING GAME by rioting in the streets.
Montreal can be pretty too. If you don't mind ending up in the background of someone's wedding pictures, the old port is always a scenic way to pass time. And it tries so damn hard to be European, you can't help but be a little charmed. I'll stop myself before I become a spokesperson for tourism Montreal, but all this is to say that I'll miss Montreal over the summer and all the friends and family that populate it.
