Teaching me to think for myself was probably your first mistake...

I love living in the city.

This came as a surprise to me, based on my country upbringing. And, considering how often my parents *hint* that I should move back to the country, I think it came as a surprise to them as well.

But, having given it a little deeper thought (which I am generally in the habit of doing) I came to a few theories as to how a girl raised exclusively on a farm in the middle of northern Alberta should come to feel so at home with the hustle and the bustle of a city.

I blame my parents.

My parents were not born and raised on farms. Though they certainly have stories to tell about visiting their relatives in the country, they were both raised in a city, and lived in cities as adults, and there's no way their urban lives didn't influence the way they raised their children. So even though they eventually moved to the middle of nowhere, they still hadn't totally assimilated to country life by the time I came around.

When they would cook foods with Indian or Asian influences, they'd tell stories about the restaurants they'd been to in Vancouver, and the experiences they'd had with those people and foods and tastes.

When we sat in the evenings, reading in the living room, it was CKUA radio in the background, bringing together music from every corner of Canada, of the world, of time, in every musical genre imaginable.

We watched the Edmonton News in the evenings, and then the fabulous Canadian political satire shows, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and the Royal Canadian Air Farce. When I was bored, I'd pick a book out of the library, from the books that my parents had accumulated over the years.

In short, my parents taught me to appreciate the variety and weirdness that exists in our world, whether they knew that's what they were doing or not. In foods, in books, in musical genres, in cultures, they taught me to seek out things that were different from what I already knew, to expand my own mind, and to learn from all these things.

Now...can you guess where (rural vs. urban) you can find a wider variety of weird shit?

I can't blame my love of the city entirely on my parents, though. Some of that has to be my own personality. For all they taught me to appreciate weird things, they could never force me to love them.

But I look around myself, standing in the middle of things like the Edmonton Street Performers festival, or the Heritage Festival, or the Fringe Festival, and the crush of people (weird people) and music (weird music) and the smell of food (weird food) makes me so inexplicably happy. That there exists so much in the world that I don't understand is exciting to me.

And even the people that live here that match me, demographically speaking, who speak the same languages and eat the same foods and listen to the same music and read the same books and have the same color skin and the same genitalia and sexuality as me...even these people, who match me statistically, are not living the same life that I am. We are totally different souls, and I am reminded of this all the time in the city. Every time I walk to work, watching the traffic roll past me, I wonder about the stories of the people in the cars. Or every time I sit on my balcony and listen to snippets of conversations I will never hear the end of, I am reminded that there are an infinite number of ways to live a life, and mine is only one.

It is a remarkably humbling and yet enjoyable feeling.

This city has given me so much to do and see and experience. It is a feast for an inquisitive mind. It is a bright tapestry of others' lives, and I love it. I absolutely love it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure at some point I'll write a post all about how much I love the country, because I do. See, I've got layers...like an onion.