#i wind up in a found footage horror movie just trying to find a dang bathroom

[othernaut]

I live in Toronto, so snow has always been part of the landscape for me. Always a factor. This year has been particularly weird and worrying, in fact, primarily because there hasn't been a real, decent, sticky snowfall yet - which I describe as enough to plausibly make a snowball or lose your keys in.

I remember being a kid and going on a school trip to a sugar shack up north, wandering through the packed trees in winter while a flanneled, nature-loving rural introvert arrayed and comported exactly like every Canadian stereotype you've ever heard walked us through the drifts and showed how the trees were tapped and the sap collected. We spent the last part of the day making tire d'erable, the thing where you pour hot maple syrup over snow and roll it up onto a stick to eat it. It struck me somehow, being so simple - it was the first time I figured you could just do things to see if they'd work. Sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes you'd wind up bringing a classroom of almost-toddlers into the woods to see it happen.

My local environment is that mix of official English/French, and it's everywhere, so much that it's weird and notable to me when I see a product without conspicuous French on the packaging. I'm passable in French - enough to navigate an unfamiliar public transit system, with all its delays and complications, without having to ask anyone for help - and I always got that little thrill of exploration when I pass into a place where the street signs change and the English disappears. It's foreign without being unfamiliar. I also love when people literally translate French into English - what is that what it is, four twenty ten seven, oil of the nut of the coco - as it recontextualizes something I've known forever in a way I probably should have picked up by now.

My mother would speak about the first time she tried pizza and Chinese food and how, at the time, these foods were strange and exotic, "ethnic" in a way I have no grounding for. I've always known Toronto as brilliantly multicultural, so much so that I can't grasp the idea of people being mad at others for not speaking English in public - if you did that here, you'd be frothing every second you spent out of doors. It's just normal to live among everyone from everywhere. I should be able to get bubble tea, loukoumades, portuguese custard tarts, soju, homemade salsa, and a mortadella I could use as a bludgeon on the same shopping trip.

This is all thrown into hilarious relief whenever I go to Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls is basically the default Toronto day-trip location. You can get there in two hours by train; it's inexpensive, available and interesting enough that every cash-strapped parent has hupped their kids in the car with a 20-pack of Timbits to go goggle at it at least once. It's built-up, touristy, there's a Rainforest Cafe - and one of my favorite things to note whenever I'm there is how all the cute little Americans react to the place. How stunned they are by the natural wonder that I've seen on stamps and postcards since I was born; how happily they navigate the mall-like main strip that I spent my teenage years deploring. There's always a moderate amount of surprise, both at the idea that us bearfucking lumberjacks could be civilized enough for stage magic and mini golf as the long-accepted notion that the Canadian side of the falls is much more impressive than the American side.

The world at large tends to forget my city exists, but I don't mind as much anymore. I notice it in the background of TV shows, our City Hall a futuristic alien structure in a Star Trek sideshow. That's Toronto - a flash memory of something wonderful that I know from down all the way up.

i love finding out how big this world is. my girlfriend has only visited boston a handful of times, but i grew up here. i told her we'd be going to do the tourist traps in salem, and she said - which salem?

to be fair to her, there are a lot of other states that have a town named "salem." and i think there's some evidence that the witch trials actually happened in what is now called Danvers. but the thing is - she thought "salem" was like, a made-up thing. there wasn't actually a salem, massachusetts - like there isn't a gotham city.

they don't talk about it that much where she grew up, is the thing! and this made me laugh. a week ago she was talking about her hometown and said something akin to "well the museum's kinda like the one in richmond," and i had to explain i still had no frame of reference for what the hell this museum was like.

i love finding out what knowledge i take for granted. i used to live with 5 other women. 3 of them were from south korea. they had to take, like, a solid fifteen minutes to explain their birthday system to my gay math-blind ass, laughing as they did.

that same month, our roommate from denmark taught me the danish word for wreath by accident - she'd been talking about decorations, used krans, and i'd been able to figure it out through context. i just picked it up and kept talking. our entire house used krans as the word. she came home and slammed the door one evening, mock-angry, shouting: you motherfuckers! it's a - a wreath!

and how often do you use certain words, anyway! i am cuban, so i was raised with certain spanish words sort of sprinkled in there; but never how you'd think. in middle school i asked someone to pass me the recogedor - in a completely american accent, like i was speaking english. i hadn't registered it as a spanish word. i mean, how often in school do you actually use the word "dustpan" - i'd only ever heard it in the context of cleaning my house.

there are places that you grew up that you, just, like, know. that you assume everyone knows. there are things and people and "common knowledge" that you have that, just, like. doesn't exist for me. i don't know what you call your public transportation system, but in boston we call it "the T". our train cards are called charlie cards because of a song where a father accidentally abandons his family, which was written because our system of transportation. in boston, most people would snort and say everyone knows that, kid.

i think you and i should go on a long walk - it's getting dark early these days and we need any sun we can manage. tell me about the first time you saw snow. tell me about the stuff everyone knows about your home. tell me about the cities "everyone's been to," about the food "everyone's already tried." who knows. maybe it will feel nice to you - watching someone learn about it for the very first time.