A Monumental Test

I moved to Toronto last September from Hamilton, Ontario. It was something I had always wanted to do.

I can remember when I was young, around age 10, thinking about how amazing it would be to live in a city with both a Major League Baseball and National Hockey League team. I would go to games all the time, befriend people in the stands, and just generally revel in the fact that I was this lucky.

Of course when I entered my teenage years all of this changed. I noticed that going to sporting events cost a fortune. Who can afford $300 tickets to the Toronto Maple Leafs?

Around this time I also became increasingly disgusted with sports fans. Every one of them, I thought, sounded even dumber than the last. I still loved sports as a teen (and I still do) but when I went I grew more disgusted with sports fans.

As a teen and into my 20’s I did not grow to hate Toronto because I thought it was filled with dumbass sports fans, far from it. What I did was learn to love it for something else: its hipness.

I wanted to move here because this is where all the cool shit was in Canada. There was the Toronto International Film Festival, Kensington Market, Lee’s Palace, and an unimaginable wealth of artistic talent within the city. I figured if I moved here I’d be likely to catch an amazing concert on a Tuesday and go to an art gallery on a Wednesday, something that simply wasn’t going to happen in Hamilton.

So in 2009 I moved here. It was great. I got a shitty little apartment on Parliament and Howard St. in St. James Town. Life was great.

Around November of that year a new annoyance hit me: Yuppies.

I would walk the down town area and would almost go blind with rage. “Who the fuck do these people think they are,” I would ask myself almost daily. Every day I would see them wearing their clothing that I knew they could barely afford. Clothing they bought to look presentable in the offices of a company that was most likely destroying something that I love. I’d see these vermin in bars either networking with other douche bags or drunkenly hitting on women and looking like potential date rapists.

I hated them. I hated what they did and what they stood for.

As any of my friends would attest, I was not silent in my loathing of these people. I would tell anyone who would listen about how much hatred I directed at them. It went so far that I refused to cut my hair and shave my face just to be the anti-Yuppie. “I will not be a part of your lifestyle,” I told myself.

By the end of November I hit my anti-Yuppie high water mark. I decided that from this point on I would never, ever, go south of Queen Street and into the financial district.

It wasn’t difficult. If you don’t work in one of those financial offices you can easily avoid that area of the city. Days, weeks, months passed and, except for rides on the subway, I avoided Yuppies like they carried an airborne and contagious strand of cancer.

I felt stress and anger, for the most part, melt away. Sure, I would still complain about Yuppies from time to time to my friends in Hamilton but for the most part I was comfortable.

Two weeks ago I had grown so comfortable that I decided that it was time to finally cut my hair and shave for the first time since August or September. I went to a barber shop on Parliament St.; I knew I wouldn’t find a Yuppie in there. It looked great and I no longer looked like a hobo. Maybe I was wrong, maybe these people don’t deserve all the hatred that I’ve projected upon them. Actually, if I put a nice suit on and maybe carried a briefcase I might have been able to pass as one.

So yesterday I called my friend and asked her if she wanted to do something after work. She works in the financial district but I don’t hold that against her. She said yes and said she’d take me out for dinner.

At this point I did something drastic (well, for me), I said I would meet her outside her office when she was done work. I was so confident that I could now walk down into the Lion’s Den and not have a complete meltdown.

Around 5:20pm I began my walk from the Eaton’s Centre on Yonge and Queen St. towards her office on York and Adelaide. I was so confident that nothing would upset me that I decided to take the long way and walk down to King St. past the Toronto Stock Exchange.

“Surely, I have to be strong enough for this by now,” I thought.

I walk down to Bay and King St. where the Toronto Stock Exchange is located. I smell something odd. It’s a sweet smell, but it’s not something I’m used to on a day to day basis. I took a look around to see where the smell is coming from and I couldn’t believe my eyes. A stereotype had come to life right in front of my face.

There I was face to face with a man in his mid-40 to early 50’s wearing a navy blue, two-buttoned suit and a black overcoat. He was holding a copy of a financial magazine in one hand and in the other a large cigar that he was smoking.

I couldn’t believe it. I had seen people like this on television and in the movies but I didn’t think people like this existed. He was a fictional character come to life. He looked like Gordon Gecko.

This was a huge chance for me to blow up. This guy would have made me pull my hair out just two months ago. What I did next astonished me; I didn’t get angry. I simply chuckled and shrugged my shoulders and kept walking.

One small step towards normalcy!