{"id":24242,"date":"2016-02-26T14:22:39","date_gmt":"2016-02-26T19:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=19399"},"modified":"2026-03-26T09:59:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:59:30","slug":"cold-ottawa-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2016\/cold-ottawa-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Erin's Blog \u2013 So Cold"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Erin's Blog \u2013 So Cold\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n
\"Erin<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Sweet Baby Jesus it\u2019s cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s really not, I hear you say. But you know, or maybe you don\u2019t know, that that judgement is so, so relative. You stand there, in your tee-shirt, telling me to man up because it could be so much worse\u2014you are from a small town just north of here\/a remote sphere of the Arctic\/Winnipeg and you have seen winters<\/em> and this is fine, just fine (this with an air of pride and a little trauma-induced madness lying just behind your widened eyes.) I\u2019m from Vancouver. If it snows in Vancouver, we all stare at the sky in wonderment, blessing the Gods of Precipitation that our grey rainy Christmas has been turned white\u2014cue Bing Crosby. And then we shut down all the schools and cars line the ditches because we have no idea how to deal with the world below 0 degrees. And then, 24 hours after it fell, the snow melts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was the object of merciless teasing during my first winter here. I\u2019m sure all of my whining was just adorable\u2014what could be heard of it through multiple layers of scarves. I spent hours recounting the wonders of west coast winters to anyone who would listen (and when there was no one here left to bother, to my Mom, over text). How cute, this young\u2019un, this na\u00efve little Vancouverite. You know nothing, Jon Snow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about this\u2014my whole first year, \u201cthe beginning.\u201d It\u2019s disconcerting, because I\u2019m not sure that I\u2019m allowed to have this kind of weird, nostalgic glow about anything at this stage of my life. But the peculiar combination of coming back after an 8 month absence, eyes no longer accustomed to familiar sights, and the knowledge that this semester will be my last here\u2014this makes me particularly prone to reflection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My four years here\u2014or three and two thirds, not over yet\u2014seem both incredibly short and endless. It seems a lot has changed for such a short period of time\u2014or maybe it isn\u2019t really short, a fifth of my life span. I realize now, looking back, that when I first came to Carleton I was very set on orchestrating a particular kind of university experience for myself. It may not have been entirely conscious, but I had a plan. I have since been thoroughly derailed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t really talk to any of those people who made fun of my winter-whining, anymore\u2014they were all lovely people, to be sure, but I was testing out different versions of myself at the time. I also met my best friend in my first year. She kind of snuck into my life, while I was gathering feedback on different Erin-prototypes. She was a friend of my roommate who fell passionately in love with my bookshelf; I became her librarian, and our first exchanges were literary handoffs. One day she spotted a new copy of Crime and Punishment <\/em>at the back of my shelf, the spine obviously and pitifully still pristine, uncracked; it turns out she too had a similarly untouched copy at home, and this\u2014our lofty reading goals and dismaying lack of follow-through\u2014is what sparked the beginnings of a beautiful friendship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(She has since read Crime and Punishment<\/em>\u2014the same copy that sat on my bookshelf first year. I still haven\u2019t. The spine is now cracked, but not by my hands. I\u2019M A DISAPPOINTMENT TO MY WHOLE DEPARTMENT AND I\u2019M SO SORRY)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, as I\u2019ve already discussed in earlier posts, English also snuck into my life while I was busy elsewhere. I was in Political Science, which I honestly thought would be a good fit for me\u2014or maybe it was part of who I wanted to see myself as. My first year seminar in English crept up on me much the same way my strange little literary companion did\u2014quietly asserting itself as my perfect match, and showing me who I was to be matched in such a way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am, four years down the line, just as likely to rehash the Vancouver\/Ottawa comparison, in the depths of winter, disparaging and somewhat astonished. But I have also realized\u2014this I whisper to you, a secret muttered under my breath\u2014that I have come to like Ottawa. Not in the way of my first encounter with it, in the warm glow of newfound freedom, imagined burgeoning adulthood. There are streets I\u2019m particularly fond of, coffee shops that I have come to rely and depend on, a grocery store that will be perpetually remembered with a kind of rosy cast, next to an apartment that I no longer live in\u2014an apartment which, strangely enough, constituted a record for me, the longest continuous living arrangement I\u2019ve ever had, though I stubbornly persisted in calling other places \u2018home.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And winter. There is something to be said for the blinding brightness of these winters\u2014and the beautiful sunrises. Even freezing cold, hand (perhaps permanently?) iced to coffee thermos, questioning the forces that had me anywhere beyond bed at such an hour, I have been brought to a moment of breathless, lingering appreciation. Bright, clear cold. Not to mention a positive side effect, for an introvert, of our frigid temperatures: having a built in icebreaker (\u2014hah!). We may make fun of how often we talk about the weather, but there is something that I quite enjoy in the enactment of this clich\u00e9\u2014the brief union of strangers, fellow humans slogging through a continual battle against the elements. (Except for you, in your tee-shirt, from the Maritimes, refusing to commiserate. \u201cThis is nothing,\u201d you say.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(The other thing that seems to bring people together in this way is the elevator situation in Dunton Tower. The communing of soldiers in the foxhole. Will these be our last moments?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think all of this is meant to be comforting\u2014to you, but probably mostly for me, as I cast my eyes forward and the stone drops into the pit of my stomach. People ask me how I feel about graduating so soon, and I say, \u201cExcited! And also terrified about being set loose on the real world\u201d\u2014laughing, to cover the uncomfortable excess of honesty in that declaration. I am excited. The world is full of possibilities. But I am terrified, because it is full of uncertainties. Flip sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And maybe I will be casting more of my security blanket behind me as I take my next few steps forward\u2014whatever I do next, it\u2019ll be different, more difficult, more frustrating, more scary. But the best parts about my university experience have been all the ways I\u2019ve gone off script. Very few things I planned turned out the way I wanted them too, and lots of things I couldn\u2019t have planned have become so integral to my life that I can\u2019t imagine having taken another path. And sometimes, like some bizarre form of environmental Stockholm Syndrome, you even come to appreciate the inhospitable beauty of a winter like these ones. What do you have left to fear, when you\u2019ve learned to appreciate the world at -25?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(And now, to lighten the mood, a graph, courtesy of Tumblr and Buzzfeed Canada. (Although please don\u2019t actually stop complaining. I enjoy our winter-enduring elevator-smalltalk fellowship.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The Cold Flowchart, Credit: Buzzfeed Canada<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Snowflake Image: “No Two Are Alike<\/a>” Courtesy of Laszlo Ilyes, Flickr. (CC BY 2.0<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Banner Image: “Goodbye to winter…<\/a>” Courtesy of Bert Kaufmann, Flickr. (CC BY 2.0<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sweet Baby Jesus it\u2019s cold. It\u2019s really not, I hear you say. But you know, or maybe you don\u2019t know, that that judgement is so, so relative. You stand there, in your tee-shirt, telling me to man up because it could be so much worse\u2014you are from a small town just north of here\/a remote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[117,25,849],"tags":[207,208],"class_list":["post-24242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-erin-blog","category-student-blogs","category-student-voices","tag-ottawa","tag-winter"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24242"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53674,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24242\/revisions\/53674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}