Indeed, it was the book I was reading my first night, when I discovered much to my chagrin that out there in Ontario, Labour Day and other holidays mean something: that everything is closed. Everything. I spent my first night wrapped in Pashminas, contemplating the cultural assassination this was likely implying. I was reading it when I discovered that the courses in my Environmental Studies program insist that you print hard copies of all of your assignments, despite the fact that three of my four courses have Moodle pages. When I discovered that liquor stores close at nine. That it is a common practice for grocery stores to package their produce in styrofoam. That the city releases warnings against swimming on certain days. That someone in Montreal thought that Calgary was in British Columbia. Smiling at people encourages them to follow you home. Museums tend to be free Wednesday afternoon. Bus fare works only in one direction, and only if you are confident of your travel path. Bus drivers seem to know every single street and business in the city (not true of Victoria, which is much smaller).
Point is, the title made entirely too much sense to me as I mired in picky-detail culture shock. It's not things like population and multiculturality and the 40-minute subway ride that have been throwing me, but the inconsequential details taken for granted. So Sedaris was the perfect companion in my bewildered wanderings through Ontario's quotidian absurdities. He deliberate examines of the nutty little details of life; indeed, he relishes in them:
I've always admired people who can enter a conversation without overtaking it. My friend Evelyn for instance, "Hello, so nice to meet you," and then she just accepts things as they come. If her new acquaintance wants to talk about plants, she might mention a few of her own, never boastfully, but with a pleasant tone of surprise, as if her parlour palm and the other person's had coincidentally attended the same high school. The secret to her social success is that she's genuinely interested—not in all subjects, maybe, but definitely in all people. I like to think that I share this quality, but when it comes to meeting strangers, I tend to get nervous and rely on a stash of pre-prepared stories. Sometimes they're based on observation or hearsay, but just as often they're taken from the newspaper: An article about a depressed Delaware woman who hung herself from a tree on October 29 and was mistaken for a Halloween decoration. The fact that it's illegal to offer a monkey a cigarette in the state of New Jersey. Each is tragic in its own particular way, and leaves the listener with a bold mental picture: Here is a dead woman dangling against a backdrop of scarlet leaves. Here is a zookeeper with an open pack of Marlboros. "Go ahead," he whispers. "Take one."
I'd like to think I'm a blend of the two, but then think back on the conversations I've had here; so many have started with, "Well, when I got here on Labour Day..." and ended somewhere around the fact that you can evidently recycle styrofoam. Usually I'll include what I routinely call "the one fact I knew about Toronto before I got here": it's illegal to drag a dead horse down Yonge Street on a Sunday. The story's changed, slightly; I now know that it's not "Young," for one thing, and it's become much more dramatic with the East/West divide. "Did you know," I'll say, and we have a ready-made conversation.
Then enters the mouse who makes tactical use of the collection's title, but I'll leave it to the sale rack at Munro's to share that one with you.
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