I like to think of myself as the kind of person who is a good enough friend to not make his friends do too terrible of things. Low-maintenance. Because of that I end up in situations like yesterday where I moved the stuff out of my apartment to my storage locker on my own. All my fine Vancouver friends had work and things so I figured I wouldn’t insist on putting them through navigating my futon down twisty flights of stairs in exchange for pizza or whatever.
Tonight though I went to the opening of SFU’s Alone Together: Connecting in the City and it made me sad about being a person who doesn’t naturally reach out and do stuff with people. The Vancouver foundation did a survey and found that 25-34 year olds feel the least engaged and the most lonely in the city, which surprised them (they assumed it would be the elderly). One speaker talked about how it’s the meaningless little bits of chitchat (and futon moving?) we do that creates community. Another talked about political activism in municipal politics and how the highest role in our democracy is supposed to be the citizen but we think of politics as something done by other people. He also thought we don’t value the importance of the individual enough which makes me wonder if he’s ever thought about things from a different culture’s perspective.
It was all very interesting and clearly trying to be inspirational. There was a terribly cheesy music video and the opening band was clearly chosen because of their upbeat nature, but Shane Koyczan did two poems and he was great.
On Thursday I’ll be taking a Uhaul truck full of books, shelves and an awkward futon to Campbell River, but I’ll have to come back next week to get a last bit of work on the video project sorted out. And to feed my roommate’s fish till her new roommate gets here.
