Batter up!

During the G7 Summit in Charlevoix, Quebec, the American President is flabbergasted to learn that he has been misled about the origin of the term, "Canadian softwood lumber."

Quite the contrary from the looks of it.

And woodn't you like to know?

A cleaning charge will be added to your bill

From the CBC news website, 2 April 2018

The Canada Tourist Board/L'Office National du Tourisme du Canada wants you to know, the luxury hotels feature all the modern conveniences--valet parking, irons and ironing boards, flat-panel TVs, towels, and hot and cold running seagulls.

We the tropical North

Listening to Poolside's "Tropical Heartache" makes a Canadian winter much easier to cope with. The fantasy of a Costa Helada lifestyle brought to warm, heart-beating, booty-shaking reality. Why I can almost see myself roller-blading and break-dancing along Harbourfront now. And I'm doing both simultaneously!

Toronto has some similarities to Los Angeles. No, it's not necessarily a compliment. Discuss.

The lily of Don Valley

About the title of this blog, And Quiet Flows the Don Valley Parkway--this is an improvisation on the title of the well-known novel by Russian author Mikhail Sholokhov and a rather slow-moving freeway that runs up the Don River Valley on Toronto's Eastside.

So far, though, it's a novel well-known by me and one other colleague at work who has a Ph.D. in Russian literature. I don't know that she found it especially amusing, but I can read Canadian facial expressions about as well as I can read this novel in the original Russian.

For the record, no one was particularly amused about my reference to The Umbrellas of Sherbourne either. (Sherbourne is a TTC subway stop on Line 2.)

Feh, you want gems, go to Africa.

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I tell ya, I'm wasted on most people here. But I don't know where I belong and never have and haven't figured out yet where I'm going in the future. South Africa seems too dangerous and deadly. Europe seems too easy-breezy. Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, too far away. Antarctica, colder than a month of snowy Mondays in Toronto.

Latin America maybe? Latin America seems just right. It's where I always saw myself anyway. Maybe the time is right to explore, especially now that I've worked hard enough to save some money and might one day work lazy enough to take a vacation or two.

The story so far

"DVP congestion" by Floydian - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

I've been meaning to do this for a while--create a blog specifically devoted to my life in Canada. After all, when I moved from Central Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh, I transitioned from Bothered and Bewildered in Blogtucky to Montag's on Fire. So now that I've been in Canada for 2-1/2 years and now have become a permanent resident, it feels like it's overdue to create this separate space to discuss all my "Canadian class" experiences (a little immigration humo(u)r).

My first step is to gather together past posts from Canada Day 2015 (the day I officially moved--although the immigration and moving process began several weeks before that day) to the present, ones that had a mainly Canadian focus and were originally published to Montag's on Fire. So far, I'm discovering that there are not as many from the early days of my immigration as I had imagined.

I think this is because I was simply too busy working, something I continue to do a lot of in Canada, like every other immigrant, regardless of class, age, or culture.

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Not to stereotype too much, but it holds true: the native-born seem laidback and lazy to me while it's the immigrants who keep things moving in the Canadian economy. It seems the same in America and Europe as well, so it's not a peculiarly Canadian phenomenon, just maybe a Western one. You can rest and relax when your present feels settled and your future seems secure. Otherwise, you gotta keep moving, striving, and (hopefully) succeeding.

Having said that, there are things that do feel especially Canadian about this phenomenon, or better said, socially democratic. On a recent visit, my friend the Archivist was the one to use the word "laidback" to describe Canadians. Me, I use terms like "lazy" and "spoiled" and "Bernie Sanders-esque." I'd like to think that Canadians have no idea how easy they have it, but in fact they do because they some can be quite smug about their lives when comparing themselves to their American cousins. Part of me is a little resentful of this (OK, OK, more than a little resentful)--I'm working my ass off at 56, and they're sitting pretty thanks to social welfare and unionization at 26, 36, and 46. And no matter what I do over the next decade, I suspect they'll still end up better situated for retirement than me.

Nonetheless, I feel like I've had more exposure to life in different places than my native-born Canadian colleagues have had--or at least exposure to life on a different scale. American life can be big, global; Canadian life feels small. The people I tend to get along with best here (although I've done a crap job of making friends) are the ones who've spent some time in the U.S. or in other countries or those who even just moved from one province to another or went to a university other than the Big One in Toronto.

For better or for worse, living in Washington, D.C., in my 20s had a profound influence on me. I still expect the culture and people of big cities to be dynamic, powerful, global in perspective, and passionate. I perhaps unfairly held San Antonio to the same standard and was often disappointed. Although now I appreciate and long for San Antonio more than I used to--it was at least culturally aware of Mexico and had its own unique Tex-Mex culture. Pittsburgh was an even bigger disappointment, not living up to my perhaps ridiculous, youthfully idealistic standards. Maybe one day I'll come to appreciate it better, too. Oddly, I felt a certain yearning for Pennsylvania when the Philadelphia Eagles recently won the Super Bowl, of all things. And at least I had friends in Pittsburgh. But then I worked a lot less in Pittsburgh. Whether it was because I was lazy, spoiled, or Bernie Sanders-esque, I could not say.

* * *

To supplement the slim pickin's of this blog, over time I may add musings from my Facebook posts and tweets, where I probably have expressed myself and my relationship with Canada more fully. It's far easier to write a punchy post or trenchant tweet than an essay on a blog. So those who know me best have a better record of my on-the-surface feelings about Canada. However, they lack the depth of my feelings available from my blog.

Lucky you, dear reader.

In the meantime, I'll continue to add my own personal "Canadiana" from various sources and provide new posts as time allows. I'll still keep up Montag's on Fire--which has become a tad too much Resistance-focused of late (I'm working on that)--but my so-called life in Canada deserves some recognition and introspection all on its own. Let's hope I can do so through this space.

I am Sasha Farce

Author's note: Reposted to this blog on February 14, 2018. 

My issues with gender non-conforming behavior/bad, hopeless drag deserves a fuller treatment. The short version: I don't get why gender non-conforming behavior is such a big, new thing--Gays and lesbians have been doing it for years. We were gender non-conforming before gender non-confirming was cool. 

Probably not a big revelation, but I think gender non-conforming means a lot more than wearing a dress or sporting a butch haircut to show how "radical" or "woke" you are. It's about resisting stereotypes of what the conventional wisdom says it means to be a man or a woman. And that involves so much more than clothes, make-up, and hair. I have straight friends who are gender non-conforming--they live their lives as people, not as 1950s archetypes.

Oh, and with RuPaul in the world, there is no excuse for bad, hopeless drag. 

So stop it. Stop it right now.

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Guuuuuuuuuuurl.

Rethink this.

Rethink everything.

Nick Kroll explains it all for you

via GIPHY