i had a lovely chat about edmonton and city and space and flexible cities and well, the entire contents of this course without so much discussing the course, with le parents over coffee. really awfully strong coffee. fantastic coffee though! it dawned on me in that moment that i might even like edmonton. what? no! never! was it the coffee?!
it is growing on me. the way a growth grows on you. the kind of growth that you don't regard as that scary until it keeps growing and you realize it might be questionable. but you learn to live with it and you look at that growth almost fondly. jane fondly.
the point is is that cynicism is bad for you. or at least me. i considered cynicism a fantastic trait until i started hearing people i admire discuss it negatively and i had to recognize that it is indeed cynicism which is causing me to regard this city so negatively. by walking it and engaging it i am not only more comfortable with the city itself but my own skin, my body, the way i move through the city, winter, and accessibility to certain city areas. most importantly, by being forced (though i hesitate to use this word) to take part in the city i find it more accessible during winter and certain areas are no longer marked as "bleh" in my mind because a sort of curiosity is starting to push the cynicism out.
now before engaging with other cities i think it would be useful and AWESOME to use edmonton as a type of training ground. too often i have entered a city and failed to actually engage it because i didn't know where to start. even though i had walked through a city i didn't know what exactly to look for or exactly how to walk it.
plus parkour. parkour in edmonton. AND THEN EVERYWHERE. think about it. how awesome would that be?
instead of "GO FORTH CHILDREN AND WALK THE CITIES OF THIS GRAND EARTH" it would be more like "GO FORTH BADASSES AND PARKOUR THE SHIT OUTTA THIS PLACE!" though i dunno how grammatically correct it is to use parkour as a verb. hrm.
(you've no idea how many times i had to go back and delete swears. i apologize for my potty mouth.)
(i wrote while listening to a friend's suggestion of an album that "revolves around a single riff" by a band that "started out as a black sabbath worshiping doom band". if that helps to explain why there's absolutely no coherence here. it is one song and it is literally an hour and three minutes long. it's surprisingly good. F'REAL!)
I like your idea of using Edmonton as a sort of "training ground" for learning how to travel through cities. For how is one expected to take on larger and seemingly more active cities if you can't even move through Edmonton? Even when I'm in Edmonton sometimes I experience that feeling of "where to start?", I definitely need to get out of the car and start walking this city more often.
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