Dear Internet, Where is Canada?

Alana Mairs

I love the inter­net. How could you not? You can ask it any­thing and it’ll never make judge­ments about your polit­i­cal beliefs or intel­lec­tual capa­bil­i­ties, just calmly respond to your query with a list of infor­ma­tion that’ll help you out. I ask the inter­net dumb things every day – and I know I’m not alone. Google Suggest is a fea­ture that shows you the top-searched phrases entered by other (anony­mous) peo­ple, and is a fas­ci­nat­ing peek into a very pri­vate activ­ity. Wondering what peo­ple are won­der­ing about Canada? Without fur­ther ado, here is a spe­cial “Oh Canada” edi­tion of what I call “Dear Internet,”: Dear Internet,

Happy Canada Day!

Supper vs. Dinner

Alana Mairs

Tonight, while decid­ing between a grilled cheese and a grilled cheese at the recently opened Acme Cafe in Vancouver, I noticed this head­ing on the menu:

My mom, who grew up back east, says sup­per. To me, the right word is din­ner. Is this a poten­tial entry for the Cross-Canada phrase­book? And what do you call it?

How to Tugboat

Alana Mairs

Easter week­end, 2010. We wanted to get out of town. We did not want to go far. Solution: rent a tug­boat for two nights in Gibsons, BC.

Photo credit: zameer­i­cle

The tugboat’s name was The Reliant. The captain’s name was David and the skipper’s name was Bill. We didn’t actu­ally meet the cap­tain and we only met Bill upon arrival: he was busy quadruple-tying the boat up to the dock because of the wind­storm that had stopped ferry ser­vice to other des­ti­na­tions and knocked the power out in Horseshoe Bay. I don’t know the name of the neigh­bour who dropped off a game of backgam­mon that night, but it was a kind ges­ture and much appreciated.

Tugboat rules from the cap­tain, copied and pasted from an email he sent prior to our arrival:

- Feel free to have a look in the wheel house, but be care­ful not to touch any but­tons please.

- Please do not turn the fan down or off on the stove. If it gets too warm open a door or window.

- If you want to look in the engine room be care­ful on the lad­der and while down below.

- There are pumps you will hear from time to time. If you hear pumps on allot,like every half hour call me. You should hear them go every cou­ple of hours which is nor­mal for a wooden boat.Don’t be alarmed.

Tips for tugboatting

1. Make sure you like the peo­ple you are going with. Tugboats are not spacious.

2. Do you like the smell of diesel? Yes / No (cir­cle one). If you choose No, you may have to recon­sider this adventure.

3. Tugboatting is a lit­tle like camp­ing. It can be cold, you may have to pee in the dark, and your clothes will smell weird when you get home. If you don’t like camp­ing, tug­boat­ting may not be for you.

4. Bring scotch.

5. Bring beer.

6. Bring your imag­i­na­tion, and as you eat Cheesies and look out the cabin port­hole into the night, imag­ine you are out at in a white-capped sea instead of quadruple-tied to the Gibsons dock,bobbing from side to side.

Photo credit: zameer­i­cle

In con­clu­sion

We returned to the city feel­ing relaxed and (per­son­ally) a lit­tle wob­bly. Can you get sea legs in two days? I did. If you are at all con­sid­er­ing spend­ing a week­end on a tug­boat, I highly rec­om­mend it.

After the Cold Rush

Alana Mairs

I came across this photo by Michael Edwards on flickr while try­ing to fig­ure out what life is like in post-summer Yukon:

From the photo, I con­cluded that liv­ing in the Yukon year-round may or may not involve occa­sion­ally explor­ing large fields of aban­doned appliances.

I asked Michael to describe the photo, and he wrote:

“This is a shot of Toronto-based artist Margaux Williamson, who was recently KIAC’s artist-in-residence here in Dawson City. One day I took her and fel­low artist Wednesday Lupypciw for a drive out to the Dawson Dump, or, as it is prop­erly called, the Quigley Landfill. I don’t know who Quigley is.

The dump has a great ‘free store’ — you’re encour­aged to set aside things that might still be use­ful, and scav­eng­ing there is great fun. (As it is for the dump’s many res­i­dent ravens.)

Row after row of refrig­er­a­tors, stoves, wash­ing machines, dry­ers, and hot water tanks cover an area of about an acre.”

Michael’s well-edited pho­to­stream pro­vides a peek into a part of the Yukon you won’t see in the free vaca­tion plan­ner that you requested from the Yukon tourism web­site that got mailed to you after you already returned from your trip (but thank you any­way, Yukon gov­ern­ment, I enjoyed the pic­tures and arti­cles nonethe­less, although they did not help me plan my trip), and helps me imag­ine what it might be like to live there.

Why am I obsessed with the Yukon? That’s for another entry.

In the mean­time, you can read about another Yukon expe­ri­ence last February from Geist’s Michal Kozlowski.

Where is Back East?

Alana Mairs

This sign at the Super-Valu off Commercial Drive caught my eye the other day:

“We do not accept the PC Gift Cards (good only for Alantic Super Valu back east). Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Other than the missing ‘t’ in Atlantic, what stood out for me was the phrase, “back east.” Growing up, my family used this term to describe the region where both sets of my grandparents lived: Ontario. We’d head Back East every couple summers to visit them, and sometimes they would come Out West to visit us.

I polled a group of people who ranged in age from their late 20s to early 60s for their definition of this phrase. This group included people originally from both B.C. and Ontario, as well as several people who have immigrated here but were born and lived extensively in other countries.

The results of my highly unscientific survey show that Ontario is overwhelmingly seen as the location of back east. Several participants also pointed out that their answer was contingent on their current location; for example in B.C., back east might mean Ontario, but in Ontario, back east means the Maritimes.

I also learned of an alternate expression while conducting my research: “down east,” which apparently means “really east, such as Newfoundland and the Maritimes.”

Geist’s phrasebook of regional differences notes that the expression in question is used if the speaker has family in Ontario. Otherwise, it’s “out east.”

And of course, to whoever created the Super Valu sign, back east is Atlantic Canada. Maybe they have family there.

Margaret Atwood: Trying Something New

Alana Mairs

The day before I went to see Margaret Atwood read and launch The Year of the Flood at the St. Andrews-Wesley Church on Burrard, I discovered that she was on Twitter, and had mixed emotions about this.

My first introduction to Atwood came at 16, when I read Power Politics. That collection of poems remains a constant on my bookshelf today and profoundly influenced my opinion of what poetry is, does, and can be. So the transition from: "Take off the signatures, the false / bodies, this love / which does not fit you" (from 'Hesitations Outside the Door', Power Politics) to "Did naughty Mr. Tweet send my recom. to everyone? I told him no!" (from @MargaretAtwood on Oct. 2) is not one I welcomed.

I knew that the event on Thursday would include singing, and I knew that Atwood was "reinventing the book launch", but I wanted to go to the reading with no expectations, so I didn't read any reviews or articles (and won't until this blog post is finished). However, I didn't go completely expection-free. I wanted the hairs on my arm to stand up. I wanted to look at the backs of the heads in front of me and not care they were blocking my view because the singing and reading would transcend me somewhere greater. I wanted to get lost in Atwood's words, the way I do when I read one of her books.

Having seen concerts at St. Andrews-Wesley before, I knew how vast the space inside can feel, with its high vaulted ceilings and stone columns, but I'd also experienced intimate moments of acoustic holiness there, even sitting in the far back. But what I felt the most on Thursday night was the hard wooden pew beneath my body. I felt disconnected from the singers, who sang "hymns" which bordered on cutesy/irritating, and longed for more candid moments with Atwood herself. After craning my neck for the first half of the hour-long performance, I ended up closing my eyes to imagine the world which the three other readers, the musicians, and Atwood were trying to create from The Year of the Flood.

I never expected to see Atwood singing/pretending-to-sing for the final hymn of the night, her arm slung around one of the singers, in an awkward sort of musical finale which part of the audience clapped along to for a while, before they realized the length of the song.

For me, the best part of the night was Atwood's unscripted answers at the too-brief question and answer period after the reading/musical interludes had ended. I liked the way she shrugged her shoulders unassumingly as she delivered dead-pan responses. I liked her answer to whether technology is an aid or a detriment to humanity; that it's neutral, and, like a hammer, can be either a tool or a weapon depending on its use. I thought of Twitter, which can be either a one-sided experiment in stalking or a way to interact with others and share information. Maybe I am okay that @MargaretAtwood exists, then (if it is indeed her behind this account). But I'm not going to follow her.

Lost art

Alana Mairs

Last week I got a postcard in the mail from a friend who I’ve known for about four years. As I read about her summer adventures in Amsterdam, I realized something: I do not know what the majority of my friend’s handwriting looks like.

In middle school, my friends and I agonized over which way to write a lowercase a: would it be to draw the round bit first and finish with a neat vertical dash (as we’d been taught), or the more stylish (so we deemed) way, which involved drawing the vertical dash first with a little hook on top (and sometimes bottom if you wanted some extra flair)? The former seemed boring and practical; the latter, mature and unique although more time-intensive. I personally settled on the first way, but the point is: I knew all of my friend’s penmanships and they knew mine.

And of course, I know my family’s handwriting. After practicing my parent’s signatures for hours I had every stroke perfected and was able to fool many at Guess Which One’s Real?, in which I presented a version of my dad’s signature and my forged version for examination. My sister’s writing is neat and tidy and when she signs her name the s on the end has a little upward swoosh to it. My grandma’s handwriting, on letters and cards sent at most major holidays, joined each letter properly to the next and was slanted at just the right, uniform degree. Is cursive writing even taught in school anymore?

I suppose in place of handwriting I can now recognize my friends by the way they electronically communicate. I know who writes in all lowercase, who signs their name with their first initial or with nothing at all, who laughs in hahas, lols or hee hees, and who emotes through a colon next to a bracket.

Still, though. Nothing will ever replace a handwritten note.