Toronto Trip 1: R&R meets D&D on Day 3

I finished Neal Stephenson's Reamde recently, and while there's a lot I could say about it--"interesting use of MMOs in narrative" and "Dickensian level plot coincidences" for starters--what really resonated with me in terms of what's going on in my life right now is a passage on vacations:
"He had never understood vacations, never really taken them. But sometimes he had talked to people who did understand and take them, and the story they seemed to tell had something to do with getting away from one's normal day-to-day concerns, putting all that stuff out of one's mind for a while, and going somewhere new and having experiences. Experiences that were somehow more pure and raw and true--the way small children experienced things--precisely because they were non sequiturs, complete departures from the flow of ordinary life."
(Sidenote: one of the advantages of an e-book is that you can search for passages like that by looking for keywords--I would have had a real problem looking for that passage in the physical version. But on the flip side, I can't tell you what page number that passage is on if you wanted to look it up yourself.)
Now, my trip to Toronto last weekend wasn't a vacation; I was there on business. But it did provide that non sequitor from my ordinary life, and it was enlightening in that regard. In fact, it usually is when I leave for a different place; that's why most of my vacation post series tend to end when I run out of time to do the posts rather than run out of things to say on the subject. Still, we'll try to divvy up the experiences again, and see what happens.  First up, then: Dungeons and Dragons.

Travel Ready

I've probably mentioned this already on the blog, but I'm far too lazy to bother to check: I'm going to Toronto this weekend. Specifically, I'm going to attend the HASTAC Conference at York University, and deliver a paper--or at least a brief talk--as part of a roundtable on Sunday. The paper I'm not too worried about. Granted, it's not really written at the moment, but the skeleton outline is there. One of the nice things about basing your scholarly style around large amounts of reading is that when it comes time to do the writing part, you already know what secondary stuff you're going to be using. That saves time. It'll be a particularly interesting talk, because it's based on a project I was working on last year, and it'll thus necessitate a more personal approach than I'm used to doing. It's probably going to be a tone that's very similar to this blog, in fact.

Anyway, I'm not worried about the paper. As usual, it's the idea of traveling that makes me instinctively clench my gut. I think I know myself well enough by now to know that I depend a lot on routine and habit to define my day to day--having a schedule I can depend on is important to me. And when traveling, that sort of rigidity doesn't work. Granted, the planning can help a lot, but you also have to be fluid to opportunities and respond well to setbacks. I can do both--I just don't particularly like it.  The dizzying highs, the terrifying lows--no thank you. I'll take some mellow mediums, please. Such a life motto does mean you miss out, though. I've lived next to the biggest city in Canada, our big ol' cultural mecca, for five years. And it's been three years since I've stayed in Toronto for more than an airplane ride, and four years since I traveled there by myself. Hopefully, the conference will go a little way in addressing what I've been missing out on.

Later Days.

Toronto Part II: Libraries are the New Raves

My bike fell over yesterday, which means the chain got caught in the rear axle, which means I'm currently back to being without transportation. Further, since it's Labour Day today, the bike shop is not open, so I've got to wait till Tuesday at least to take it in. And since I don't feel up to the eight kilometer hike back and forth to the university, that means I'm working from home today. And as yet another direct consequence, that means I'm stuck using my keyboard with the broken spacebar, since my bike isn't my only possession with a tendency to crap out when I need it. And for added fun, my internet connection is randomly going out every few seconds.(In case you're wondering, I created the spaces for this post by copying a single space, then pasting it every single time necessary. YES IT IS TEDIOUS.)

And all this cause-and-effect is to make this point: if this post comes across slightly peevish, the above events are the reason why.

Anyway, today's vacation topic is libraries. When I went to Toronto, I went with the goal to maintain my minimum hundred-pages of lit theory a day, a goal that had already been recently tarnished, thanks to all the time I spent on that Batman game. (Still worth it.) I managed to fulfill that goal for two of the three days I was in Toronto, which was about as good as I could realistically hope to have done. And most of this reading was done in the environment I still find most conducive for it: libraries.

All right, I realize that "The Libraries of Toronto" isn't going to become a popular walking tour anytime soon. But even if I hadn't set the comp goal, there was about even odds that I would have wound up in a library or two anyway. See, the truth is, I like libraries. Especially public libraries. I like seeing how the assortment of books differs from branch to branch. I like seeing how the interior architecture complements the building's function. I like the wide swathe of humanity that comes through the door. It's almost like a franchise store chain, where you can travel the world over and still feel like you never left home--only the libraries are allowed to express a sort of individuality that your average heartless conglomerate lacks.

(Incidentally, here's too things I don't like about libraries, and I'll admit both have a certain amount of snobbery on my part: the large swarm of people in public libraries always buzzing around the DVD section, because Heaven forfend you actually read something; and the fact that any given time, a university library seems more a place for undergraduates to sit and study on laptops than a place for people actually reading or looking for books.)

So anyway, I went to three different libraries during my stay in Toronto. The first was the big kahuna: since I was on campus, I went to the U of T main arts library, the Robarts. This is the Robarts:
The Robarts Library, I'm told, was built in a style of architecture called brutalism. Why someone thought that it would be a good idea to construct a building where the end result being considered brutal is the best case scenario is left to other minds than mine. Here's what wikipedia says about brutalism:

Brutalism as an architectural philosophy, rather than a style, was often also associated with a socialist utopian ideology, which tended to be supported by its designers, especially Alison and Peter Smithson, near the height of the style. Critics argue that this abstract nature of Brutalism makes the style unfriendly and uncommunicative, instead of being integrating and protective, as its proponents intended. Brutalism also is criticised as disregarding the social, historic, and architectural environment of its surroundings, making the introduction of such structures in existing developed areas appear starkly out of place and alien. The failure of positive communities to form early on in some Brutalist structures, possibly due to the larger processes of urban decay that set in after World War II (especially in the United Kingdom), led to the combined unpopularity of both the ideology and the architectural style.

You know what else is unfriendly and nonintegrative? The fact that in order to go beyond the first floor of the Robarts library, you need a U of T library card. Admittedly, any grad student in Ontario can apply for one, but that didn't do much good right then and there. I could have sat on the first floor and worked, but it would have been like working in an afterlife waiting room; you don't know if what you're missing is heaven or hell, but you do know you're missing it. And since the interior isn't much less brutal than the exterior, I went elsewhere.

Specifically I went here:

Here in this case being the Lillian H. Smith Branch. It's not brutal, but, well, we can't have everything. It was, however, quiet, and that was all I needed to get my work done for the day. If I had more time, I would have loved to peruse their Merrill Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy,but there was some sort of sign in policy, and after being turned away at U of T, I couldn't bring myself to face rejection again so soon.

I never made it to a library on Thursday, but I did go to see lots of second hand bookstores, which I'll talk more about later. But on Friday, I spent multiple hours at this library:
This is the S. Walter Stewart District library. I wasn't actually intending to spend quite so long here, but the theory book I was reading was a little harder to read than I anticipated. Ah, hubris. The SWS library was a lot like the area itself. Again, I'll be talking about it in more detail later, but I think I can give you a good idea what it was like just by saying that its most frequent customer is mid-twenty to early thirty year old new mommies with baby strollers. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it bears an interesting constrast with the student atmosphere of the Robarts library, or the more cosmopolitan mix of social classes at the Smith branch (in that the Smith branch got a mix of students, the elderly, what looked pretty much like hobos, young women, and children. The SWS was missing the students and hobos. That might be to its credit.). It also had the best graphic novel variety. Take that to mean whatever you'd like.

And that was the library portion of my trip to Toronto. According to the Toronto Library website, there are 99 branches in the city; I have now seen two. It's nice to know there's something left to do on the next visit.

Okay, that wasn't nearly snarky enough, given the conditions I'm writing under. If you really want to get my mood at the moment, just insert a random curse word every five words. Yeah, that does it.

Laterdays.

And Now Back to Our Regular Programming

As you may recall from my last vacation, I believe that a proper vacation description can serve as fodder for multiple posts. In fact, last time around, I wrote a half-dozen entries chronologically following my trip back to Saskatchewan for a wedding, and, with one thing and another, never actually got around to the part where I, you know, went to the wedding. Oopsie. So, this time, I'm not sticking to strict chronology, but blogging about the parts of Toronto and the trip itself that interested me most. Which means we're starting with a philosophical discussion of vacations in general. But for those who don't really care about that and just want to hear about the trip, here's a quick sketch for now: long car ride, walking, libraries (yeah, I went to a lot of libraries. It was MY vacation, dammit.), fine dining, veggie chili, sushi, baby, cats, CN tower, U of T campus, Monopoly, Cranium, All My Best Friends are Superheroes, Honest Ed's, bookstores, photo tour, and Glen or Glenda.

On to navel-gazing! I don't have a lot of vacationing in my past There's a few reasons for this. First, there's the general social ineptitude issue that plagued my late teenage and early adulthood (what? Ask someone if they want to go on a vacation? Or if I could go with them? Isn't that terribly presumptuous? And I'd hate to have to force someone to say no--think of how awkward that would be for them. Yeah, issues.). A second, nearly as odd, reason comes from my aversion to paying for experiences--why should I pay to go somewhere else when I can relax right here? And finally, there's the completionist issue: I like to completely finish something before I move on to something else. It's one of the reasons I like video games, I imagine--you play, you complete the achievements, you move on. Under that logic, why would I bother going to Toronto when there is so much in Blank left to see?

Honestly, with all of those factors at play, it's amazing that I ever left Saskatchewan at all.

But I did leave, and buried somewhere in the reason why I left is the point to all this. You go to new places, you experience new things, because you don't know how they'll affect you. You can have some idea what the effect will be; travelling to Disneyworld and travelling to Afghanistan don't really carry the same set of expectations, for example. But how you'll come out of it, and what you'll come out of it with is undetermined. To use a vastly incorrect metaphor, it's like your life is a science experiment. Your desired effect is a greater level of happiness, and when you go on vacation, you turn some elements of your life--surroundings, location, culture, etc--into variables, and some you hold constant--yourself, your values, your travelling companions. While I didn't take any travelling companions, I did stay with people I knew while there, so they served as something constant, or, at least, something familiar in a new context. Of course, the whole metaphor falls apart pretty quickly, because your happiness is part of yourself and your values, and changing the former will probably alter the latter two elements.

Additionally, I wouldn't say I was particularly changed by the vacation, which is another way that life is not like a scientific experiment (or a video game)--evaluating the results of an experience is more complicated than that. On the other hand, it did disrupt my personal inertia, and reminded me that new things aren't bad things. So maybe there was a measurable change after all.

Next time: things that actually happened.

Later Days.