Indoors/Outdoors

Posted at 06:37AM on Feb 13, 2009 by

Hey People,

Remember, way way back, when it was first starting to snow? I decided that rather than going all the way down to the bright, shining fluorescent lights of the McLennan stacks, I would do my homework in a café. As the snow came down, the ground got covered in white, the outdoors began to change; and I began to become very aware that this café didn’t have Wi-Fi.

So it’s snowed/is snowing, and as any person with feet can tell you, it’s difficult to walk around right now. It’s made me rethink my relationship to the indoors and the outdoors in a drastic way. In other words, I don’t want to go outside (because it’s cold, and snowy), and want to stay inside (because it’s warm and sweatery).

So the Internet is inexplicably tied to the indoors. Obviously, you spend most (all?) of your time on the Internet also indoors.

So I am curious, is cyberspace just an indoor space? And not only that, but if I am spending all of my time on the Internet, indoors, is there anyway to engage with this city – a city that seems to be turning against me more and more as every degree of warmth slips away -

Am I digging deeper and deeper into a big hill of self-possession?

You do become aware of the outdoors in a whole new way during the winter. It was possible once to just walk along – now you have to watch every step on the snow and the ice. Winter has insinuated itself, we can’t just forget about the outdoors. The cold air reminds your skin you’re out in the city, even if I want to put on my headphones and forget.

It’s weird how a new snow screws with the narrative – even after everyone gets good and bored with snow falling, every new snow blurs the lines between road and sidewalk. Cars go from one to the other, drive slow enough to seem like pedestrians. Cars and people are so separate during most of the year, but during wintersuddenly people have to get in the streets and shovel around these cars, push them out of snow banks.

Coming back second semester there was that urge to get re-acquainted, see new places, make old/good places a force of habit. So this sort of counter-acted that natural need to stay indoors.

But how could the Internet, something that had helped me stay indoors, help me get outdoors?

Everywhere I go, people check the weather on the Internet. This is one way to remind yourself there is something else out there, something you might have to drive or walk through in the near future.

The McGill Daily’s beginning of the year, “Disorientation Guide,” directed me to the Stille Post Montreal – a great place to find reasons to leave the indoors. Although it is also in paper form, the Mirror’s beginning of the year list of “Noisemakers” was a wonderful overview of the things going on in the city – a place on the Internet or indoors reminding you where you lived and what was happening where you lived.

It’s been floating there, in the back, but now I’ll just say it: the Internet has a real de-spacing effect. Sitting in my room, it’s easy to forget I am in Montreal.

This blog is always trying to find ways this isn’t true; always trying to find connections between the Montreal – the place where we use the internet – and the spaces of the internet itself. But sometimes there can be a real and distracting disconnect.

Then again, sometimes I go out looking for this disconnect. Example – keeping up with the GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS, I am drawn to this terrific podcast (Planet Money), made in the US (for National Public Radio), often engaging with US issues, US crises.

Problems in Iceland and Cambodia seem to be the same distance away online, but there are things that are happening around the corner and down the street, in other words, in Montreal. There is a blog that this blog will probably be coming back to again and again. It’s called Spacing Montreal, and it deals with issues that are happening in this city – to this city – along with pictures of the city, a kind of virtual walk down the street.

A new semester also means new friends, new people, huddled like those pigeons on that big grate at Parc and Prince-Arthur, to walk down the street with. We all get to where we are going, and for the next five minutes, we all start taking things off – coat, scarf, gloves, hat, boots, maybe a sweater or other. It seems easier to see the city when you work your way from warm spot to warm spot with a group of friends.

I usually don’t have anybody on my way to school in the morning. Sometimes I listen to music during the walk. It is a way to create some artificial warmth - especially this.

So I will try and get outdoors, wander around in the snow - and keep blogging.

-Sam Neylon