Rules for Collecting Experiences

After I graduated from college and moved back home I created some rules for myself in an attempt to find my way in the new social situation I was in. (The situation shouldn’t’ve been that different. I was back home, after all, and so were a lot of my friends, if they’d even left in the first place. But socializing without the structure of school–even if it’s homeschooling–is a very different beast than socializing as individuals who have no structured time in which they are all expected to be in the same space.) These rules were simple. Don’t turn down an invitation and, when in doubt, do the thing you’ll remember doing.

As a writer I’m always trying to collect experiences, so even when my impulse was to stay home and watch another episode of Breaking Bad I would accept invitations and do the thing I was more likely to remember, a month from now. (Yes, I’ll remember the episode of Breaking Bad, but I won’t remember the act of watching that episode. Probably.)

Just because I made these rules, didn’t always mean I followed them, but I’ve been finding them a lot easier to follow on this journey. Something about knowing I’m going to be in a place for a limited amount of time makes me more likely to go out and do things. I won’t have the opportunity to try out that bar next week when my friends all go again, I won’t get a chance to meet this person in a few days if I decide to stay in tonight and read, I won’t be here next month when the art gallery has it’s next free night. I have to do it now. It’ll be my only chance.

This is how I managed to convince myself to go the opening of the latest show at the p|m gallery. A friend told me about it, but wasn’t able to go herself, so I would be venturing into the unknown by myself, but it would be breaking the rules not to go.

It took me about forty minutes to walk there. (Despite Toronto’s public transportation proving to be user friendly and pretty efficient I’ve been avoiding it mostly, due to it’s price. And two miles isn’t so far a walk. I’m of the half of humanity that values my money more than my time. I really enjoyed riding the street car the few times I did, and the way it sighs along its tracks with the occasional electric hum. It sounds like a spaceship. But it sounds just as much like a spaceship when it passes you while you trudge along the sidewalk.) There were a handful of people standing in three distinct conversational clutches when I arrived and I wasn’t sure how to join any of them, so I looked at the art. After all, that’s what one does in an art gallery, right?

It didn’t take me long to work my way through it. p|m gallery is a rather small, which would prove useful later when it made migrating from group to group easier, but was a hindrance at first, as the small, well-lit space with bright white walls provided little in the way of corners to hide in. I found the pieces interesting enough. I really enjoyed how the religious icons became deformed and cancerous sort of monsters in Keith Bently’s work and spent awhile trying to figure out whether there were lights behind the Edith Dakovic pieces that made the wall around them seem to glow. (I discovered later that they’re painted on the back as well as the front, and that’s where the hint of color came from.)

Perusing the art could only take so long though and then I didn’t know what to do with myself. I stood next to a Virgin Mary oozing what looked like miniature hand grenades from her face and commanded myself not to leave. Luckily someone offered me a beer before the introverted coward in me won out. The woman disappeared down into the basement to fetch said beer for me and I was left still standing next to the Virgin Mary. I decided to take off my sweatshirt as a sign that I really was staying for awhile. (My sweatshirt is the warmest article of clothing I packed, because when I was trying to make everything fit into a duffel in August it seemed kind of absurd to be carrying a winter coat around.) Getting out of this sweatshirt is something I’m continually struggling to do gracefully. There’s a trick to getting your arms out, and making sure whatever you’re wearing underneath doesn’t get yanked up over your belly as well, and not inadvertently punching anyone, particularly the Virgin Mary, while you arch your back in just such away to be able to get your head through the neck hole. I’m sure I look entirely ungainly doing it, and this only makes me feel more awkward. Luckily no one seemed to be staring at me when I emerged from the hoodie, and the woman didn’t return with my beer until after I’d accomplished this task.

With a beer in hand I somehow found myself able to join one of the conversation clutches with ease. Already I can’t recall how this happened. Maybe I followed the woman who fetched me a beer into one, maybe with a bottle in hand I just felt that smidge of extra confidence that allowed me to join a circle of three well-coiffed people discussing something that had nothing to do with the show–I think I took part in only two conversations about the actual art on display the entire evening. After finding my way into one conversation it was easy to drift to another and soon I was talking to a librarian about the experiences she’d had couchsurfing in Iceland, as well as learning that Toronto has a zine library.

The character I’d been eyeing since he arrived, an older gentlemen wearing a straw hat with at least three different ribbons tied around it, a plaid vest over a shirt of an entirely different sort of plaid, and then a yellow long-sleeved undershirt under that, stumbled into my conversational circle when he came back in after having a smoke. He was an artist, a weaver specifically. He asked the woman in the conversational triad we’d inadvertently created what she did, and she stumbled over saying she was a painter. How unfortunate it was that she’d stumbled like that, if you’re going to say you’re a painter then you’ve got to own it, I thought. Then I heard myself stammering in an almost identical way when telling him that I was a writer.

We talked for awhile about our growing dependencies on electronic devices, and Cassandra from Doctor Who, (he brought her up, not me, relating her to a science fiction short story where the elite existed only as brains in towers that were serviced by the lower class. Or something. I swore I would remember the author of this story, but apparently I didn’t and Google is failing me) and the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and the weaver’s up-bringing as a Catholic and how it affected his relationship to the statues Bently had deformed. Can you tell he did most of the talking of the three of us? Was it because he was male? Was it because he was confident? Or an extrovert? Or was he one of those shy people whose defense mechanism is to act gregarious?

Eventually he moseyed on and this left me with the painter. We ended up talking for quite a bit about how her most successful artistic friends are the extroverts, because they’re the ones who can gladhand and make the connections needed to get your art shown or your story published, and how this seemed rather strange since artists are considered generally to be introverts.

I thought about this as I walked the forty minutes back to where I’m staying, because I think that’s part of the reason my rules have been easier to follow while I’m traveling than when I’m standing still. I feel the need to make connections more strongly; whether because I might need a place to crash for a night or because I want someone else to help me get a sense of wherever I am. This entire journey is dependent on other people. I’m having to ask for a lot more than I’m used to. So it’s important that I build my stats relating to interpersonal connections and ease of interactions. If I’m hoping to spend a year sleeping on people’s couches I can’t let my introverted instincts go unchecked.