When people say they’re bored of Toronto, I just think they’re spending too much time with other people. Or, perhaps, with too many people. Even when they’re your friends, the number of participants in a social plan dilutes the quality of it. Because you all have to agree, you will, instead of going to see a play or trying that new Ethiopian place or dancing to less familiar songs, end up eating and drinking and chain-smoking at The Usual. And then, when the people surrounding you are not your friends, but also not not your friends: eeesh. Sometimes I dream of a world without acquaintances. This is only, I think, because of the hours, all the hours, spent participating semi-officially in things that require air quotes: “events,” “VIP lounges,” “afterparties,” “nights of discovery,” “artistic celebration” and “great fashion at affordable prices.” Nights when you dress nice, make nice, look nice for the camera without looking too, ick, happy. I always think it might be different, and it always ends up that I like going out ten times more than being out. Sometimes after these nights, which usually end at a time I’d call evening, I go to other things, more willingly, but the boredom doesn’t often abate. I spend too much time looking at people and feeling looked at and wondering what everyone is thinking. And then drinking, or doing whatever, just to stay out, just waiting. Something might happen. I’m never bored alone. I’m almost always alone when I travel; I love it that way. It has taken years to realize that I can escape the interminable same-same-same-same-ooh-look-just-kidding-it’s-the-sameness of here by merely pretending I am new in town, and being by myself. At first, pretending you’re new in town is as simple as talking to taxi drivers, who will tell you about the three streets in the whole city that aren’t under construction, and where to get roti really late. It’s true that taximen (and two–two, ever!–taxiwomen) in Toronto are often harsher and less easy to talk to than the ones I meet when I’m away, or maybe they’re just less impressed with the colour I’ve bleached my hair. But sometimes they’re just bored, too, and waiting to be asked what they think. Talk to anybody, your server, or the guy at the convenience store, the way you would if you were in a foreign city and needed directions or things to do. Yesterday this bandana’d guy at the Queen & Bathurst corner store, the one where they sell Jones zero-calorie cream soda, told me the whole plot of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is good, because I wasn’t going to read it and now I don’t have to. It is, he said, about finding good in the world. He did not say whether you find it in people; jury’s still out, probably. If you can fly a plane, do that. My friend has a friend who has a friend, etcetera, and one fine-ass morning in July he took me low over the city in what felt like a bathtub. At 2,000 feet, your whole life is a board game. The OCAD building is a carnival ride; the ROM, a plastic fighter jet. Only the CN Tower looks real ,while everything else is unfamiliarly perfect. And there are so many more trees than you thought; you can’t wait to look up at them again. Easier than a home-to-home round-trip flight is a hotel room, as long as you don’t call it a staycation. (I just hate that word, is why.) One Christmas, two years ago, the man and I stayed at the Fairmont Royal York. It might be the city’s least cool hotel, and it was the best. It’s even better if you go down to the library club and pretend you’re two businesspeople, both stuck with cancelled flights, although it gets tricky when you realize you have no idea what a businessperson does. Do they wear nylons? Two weekends ago, before the bachelorette thing, we went on a “jaunt,” as in GoJaunt.ca–a new site with flash sales on carefully packaged s***cations. Dinner was at a Chinese restaurant, Lai Wah Heen, which was kind of boring and white-cloth but also amazingly detailed and delicious, and I’d never have gone because, like, Twitter didn’t tell me to. Lai Wah Heen is in the Metropolitan Chestnut, around the corner from someplace I lived while in school, and as we went into the lobby I said, baby, remember? After our first date I made you run through this hotel with me, and I played the piano, or tried, and felt like we could have been anywhere. That’s one of the top feelings there is: opposite of, and sort of compensatory for, that particular aloneness at crowded parties, is this sense of transcending geography. You should have it–the anywhere feeling–as often as you can. You should run alone or ride your bike or drive with no sense of direction until you find yourself lost. You should go into weird-seeming places where you know you won’t know anyone. Like, last weekend, two of my friends and I were leaning against the bar of an expensive cocktail joint posing as a speakeasy, and nearly fainting with lassitude. We left en cab. The driver told my friend, who was champagne-crying and asking all kinds of why, that she would be happier if she were more tolerant, like the Dalai Lama says. We got quiet for a second, and then we got out. Beneath and to the west of my friend’s apartment there’s a Korean karaoke bar. It was three a.m. By then, they were playing funny top-40 remixes on blast and drinking still, eating leftover fried things. I was joking when I said let’s go in, but then I wasn’t joking, and my crying friend was convincing them to sell us Corona Lights, and we were drinking them and dancing like madwomen. The more sane women eyed us suspiciously and said things we didn’t understand. But one of them danced with us, and that was enough, and by four a.m. we were all dancing with such equal abandon that no one was looking at anyone else. “Where are we? I never want to leave,” said my now not-crying friend, and I said, well, we’re about two seconds from home.
