Two Jobs and Suburban Malaise

I had two jobs to do today. The first was to track down Civilizations 4 and therefore spend the rest of the day in front of a computer screen. The second job was to find a brown afro wig so that someone can go as Napoleon Dynamite for a Halloween party.

Sadly, the two tasks required me to drive out to the middle of nowhere suburbia. The land of SUVs, box stores, and industrial space mazes.

I managed to find the wig in the store I expected to find it. It was so nice not to have to search around for an entire afternoon to find it, but a part of me feels gross and nasty from my visit to suburban Toronto.

Toronto has become a highly suburban city as downtown home ownership is well beyond the grasp of many. I can't understand why anyone would prefer living in the suburbs to living downtown. Don't tell me that price is the issue since I expect most houses in the suburbs are more expensive than the building in which I live.

I suppose that size is the factor. A 3000 square foot home in Whitby is much cheaper than it's equivalent in downtown Toronto, but I have really come to an important understanding.

When I moved to Toronto I had all my stuff in boxes. It was all the stuff that I thought I would need and use. Since my life at that time was in such disarray and so unknown, I hesitated to unpack since I knew that I might have to move again (see blogs from July). In an effort to maintain order to my life, I unpacked what I knew I would need and put all the miscellaneous items in the closet.

I have lived here for four months now and those boxes are still exactly where I left them. They haven't been moved, opened or even thought about. All those "essential" items that I've hauled across the country are essentially just sitting there waiting to be made useful.

Forget "bird flu", the accumulation of "stuff" is a pandemic. Our society says, "buy more and you'll be happy" and we follow along and fill our homes with stuff we don't need. Though I am living modestly I am just as guilty here.

If you are considering a move from downtown because your 2000 square foot home "just isn't enough space" and you "can't afford" to live in downtown, consider looking through your filled to overflowing storage areas and your triple layered bookshelves and purge, baby, purge.

If you need any further proof as to the necessity of this, I simply invite you to visit a Walmart. Look around you and decide if you really want this to be your life. This is where the suburban person shops. This is what the suburban dweller accepts as "normal."

It might be a nice place to get a wig and a video game, but I sure wouldn't want to live there.