strangeness at the heart of SFU

Anecdote time!

This morning I had arranged to meet a friend from Halifax for lunch up at SFU. He’s in town for a few days on his way back from a conference in Prince George, and there was no other time or place we’d both be able to meet. (I’m not actually in the habit of entertaining visitors by inviting them to school with me). After some confusion, and some difficulty on his part in navigating our school’s maze of a campus, he arrived with an equally out-of-town acquaintance in tow. It was actually pretty fun getting to guide a little tour. They were both impressed by how big (?) and unique SFU’s campus is.

Weirdly, someone was filming some sort of movie or t.v. show today, and as I was showing around my two visitors, already feeling self-conscious about how my university appears to outsiders, I was picking my way around movie sets filled with actors who were posed and dressed up all “student-like.” I actually came upon a “scene” before I even noticed it was being filmed, and felt like there was something very peculiar about the way everyone was stationed evenly around the convo mall, looking colourful and happy and ethnically diverse. It was strange to experience this place where I so spend much of my everyday life as “other." Suddenly I felt like I was inhabiting someone else’s idea of a university rather than the real thing.

This made me think of two things: firstly, Highmore’s discussion from “Figuring the Everyday” about finding strangeness in the day-to-day. He says that everyday life is made ‘sensational’ when we put it on display. Frequently, he argues, these kinds of representations are concerned not with “everyday ‘everyday life,’ but the everyday life of ‘others.’” (14). As I mentioned, I think part of the reason I felt so odd was that I was witnessing the material of my own everyday life being other-ized. When I tried to frame my daily experience for my visitors, and as the film crew did so on a grander scale, SFU became an object of display. For a moment I didn’t see it as simply the backdrop to my daily routine, but strange and exotic, as I imagine it is in the eyes of people not accustomed to post-apocalyptic style architecture.

Second, the event got me thinking about tourism. Often when we visit new places we do so with the intent of escaping our everyday lives. But don’t we also travel in order to ogle the everyday lives of others? Not to suggest that my visitors were out to make me feel exploited, or that I necessarily felt that way. But there’s something inherently voyeuristic about the desire to observe, and to consume the experience of other people’s daily lives. Is it really possible? I guess my question is somewhere along the lines of something Susan asked last class. That is, when we put the everyday on display, or put a viewfinder around it and label it “the everyday,” (as in, “the everyday life of university students,”) does it retain or transcend that category?

I don’t know, but I’ll be happy when all the film crews are gone and I can walk distractedly to the library in peace.