Livin' ... in vancouver?

it used to be that my favorite thing about traveling was -- and here let me issue a warning to stalwart comrades: you can still exit this post with your sense of me intact -- shopping. it's the main way i orient myself into a place. i figure out where the funky shops are and it gives me a bead on the place. chain store after chain store: ok, i know you. a little side street with secondhand record stores and some hopeful clothing designer who's just hung out her shingle? we can be friends.

this time in vancouver it wasn't like that, and i'm not totally sure why. partly it's because vancouver, like everywhere else, is inundated with chains. granville, for instance, is like a linear version of south edmonton common: urban barn next to restoration hardware across the street from chapters and EQ3, and every one of 'em has its own starbucks. you know how people are talking these days about companies that are "too big to fail": why does that apply to pottery barn?

that's not the only reason shopping is different these days, though. even though we could have strolled some of the littler shops along main -- smoking lily specialists, say, or sunja link's flagship (ha!) or that new little design shop in deep cove -- i just wasn't motivated to do it. eh, it was drizzling, i was tired, and i came up with quite a litany of other excuses.

the real reason? i think we shop bigger now. so in fact what we did on the first night we were in vancouver -- seriously, friends, you can still leave! -- is troll MLS for the kinds of places we'd like to own. we think we could be happy with a second home in the low 700s, the burning question being west end or kits. we have become those lesbians, the ones who attend open houses in yaletown instead of going to the rally on commercial drive.

as i probably don't need to say, mo and i can no more afford a second home in vancouver in the low 700s than you can, and possibly even less, given that we are saving up to buy a new sleeping pad for the ole tent trailer (memory foam at superstore: $175). but it is telling that this is the line our fantasies take. while the acquisitiveness of this fantasy life makes me uneasy -- what happened to tread lightly, think globally, keep on rockin' in the free world? -- it also suggests tenderer things. specifically: that we are getting older. we talk about where we want to live when we retire, for example. what is charming about my fantasies of retirement is that i see my life as being essentially the same as it is now, only with more money: we're both in good health, our parents are all alive and independent, our friends are all vital and mobile. no strings, just possibilities. in my fantasy, we could just pick up and move wherever we wanted, and our perfect life would blossom in a new place.

and so i'm not going to challenge this fantasy. there is time enough to come to terms with grimness; life has a way of bringing grimness to you. buying a second home in a city like vancouver is a marker of gobsmacking privilege, especially if you think globally. but the real privilege? projecting the life you actually live as a fantasy for the future.

Home again, home again

it's 5:52 am and i am sitting in our living room in edmonton keying this post in the early morning quiet.

there are so many unusual things about that sentence i don't know where to start. perhaps with the quiet. i can't believe how beautifully quiet it is here. though i think of myself as a "city person," i find as i get older that i am less and less tolerant of city noise: the screech of subways, the ubiquity of car horns, buses, jackhammers, backhoes, garbage trucks, yelling. it's still exciting (nothing says new york like four trains screaming through a single stinky station), but i find the thrill wears off faster. bring on the electric car, i say.

it is also unusual to be a living room -- embarassingly, one of two living rooms i could be sitting in right now. after the compact apartment we've been renting, the house feels huge. you could lose a person here. also strange: it's detached on all four sides from its neighbours, perched on its own little patch of green. it feels isolated, not to mention wasteful and unnecessary, anti-social. then again, it has its very own patch of green, and yellow, and purple and orange and white, as the daffodils, dandelions and tulips are blooming. there's the promise of a bleeding heart, the tickseed and peonies are back, and the valiant little rhubarb is plugging along (ours being the only yard i know of not to foster rhubarb as a weed). it's may in edmonton, and everything is on the move.

but, edmonton.... edmonton, why aren't you better? why is it that when we want to go for lunch after our long and tiring travels, we end up at a chain restaurant in a shopping complex? why is your skyline so squat and repetitious? is it because you're built of houses? (but will the condos at railtown change that?) is it because you're so isolated that no one bothered colonizing you (no one til wal-mart and home depot, that is)? is it because we live in rec rooms all winter and patios all summer? (but why not better patios?) is it because we're space pigs? because we don't fund public art? don't have an architecture school? lack historical consciousness? tend to be lower class? worship the automobile? edmonton, edmonton ... i want you to be more enticing, more seductive, more beautiful. if you can't be pretty, be unusual, idiosyncratic. take me aback, make me marvel, strike me.

i'll be looking for something striking all the way to save-on foods.