When Stanley drops me off at my new home in the predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant area, he looks around uncertainly, asking if I am sure this is the right place. It’s past eleven p.m., and I’m not sure, but if he wants to wait I’ll go check. My landlady, a tiny Egyptian woman, opens the door. She looks like Jasmine from Aladdin — an idealized, safe sort of exotic, with big eyes — and makes my name sound like “Caught-ligne,” which suits me fine. I wave goodbye to Stanley. He waves back.

I am one of several tenants in a building my landlady co-owns with her husband, a rough-edged Latino who hints at having deserted from the army in Iraq. He dangles bits of information like a carrot, daring me to ask. I never do. My room is off the back on the ground floor — servants’ quarters 200 years ago, when Brooklyn was a Dutch settlement. Accordingly, my room is small and dark, with only a well-used mattress in the corner. A single-pane window in the lower half of the wall overlooks the patch of dirt that passes for a backyard. In its centre is an iron stake set into a concrete pad. Attached to the stake is a heavy-duty chain, and at the end of the chain is a beautiful husky named Spirit. I wake up most mornings to Spirit’s lonely black eyes staring directly at my face through the window. I can’t really deal with this, so I start closing the curtains. But I still know he’s there, because later, when the sun shines in, I can see his nose spots smeared all over the glass.

Once, I ask if I can walk Spirit. My landlord looks amused. “Nah,” he says. “We don’t do that.”

In February, a record snowfall blankets New York, and the brown slab of the backyard suddenly becomes several dirty white hills. I look out the window one morning to see that Spirit has pulled down a power line that was previously out of reach. That, or it fell from the weight of the snow, but, regardless, Spirit is happily gnawing on the end of the power line (I say happily because his tail is wagging).

Shit, I think.

t the office, my overuse of the word “shit” is my biggest claim to fame. I am The Canadian, and, like the many bands from my native land that have been breaking through, I am slightly familiar, slightly unfamiliar — in other words, just mysterious enough. I answer questions about cultural enigmas from my homeland (example: “Who is the Canadian equivalent of REM? ” I settle on Sloan). I have a funny accent. But most of all, I’m profuse in the use of “shit.”

This first grabs my boss’s attention when I say, “What the shit? ” during a photocopier incident. “What the what? ” he says, his eyes flashing. Then, slightly louder: “What the shit? Did you just say, ‘What the shit’? ” Now, any good culture writer, for whom OCD is more a job description than a disorder, will stop everything to over-analyze an aspect of cultural difference. Convinced he’d stumbled upon some defining divide between north and south, my boss immediately assigned me to write out, in full, the many uses of “shit” that I know. The resulting document was to be called Shit: A Guide to Canadian Usage.

Shit: A Guide to Canadian Usage

shit coarse slang • noun 1 fecal matter resulting from the processing of food and drink by the digestive system (I just took a shit). 2 something undesirable or of poor quality; literally or figuratively similar to actual shit (This photocopier is shit; this photocopier is a piece of shit.) ¶ Note that in the latter case, the object in question is even less valuable than shit itself, merely a piece of said shit. 3 in an ironic turn on the original meaning, something highly desirable (You, my friend, are the shit; hot shit; king shit ). • adjective 1 indicative of shit, usually used in the figurative, or even the obscure (He just ate a shit sandwich) (What happened to him was terrible). • prefix (That record was shit town). • interjection 1 an exclamation of anger, disgust, etc. (Shit!). 2 preceded by the, indicates something at once mysterious and undesirable (Who the shit are you? What the shit is this? ). • transitive verb 1 to expel feces. 2 to carelessly or passively expel something (He shit that song out in a week; let’s shit and split) (Let us depart this unpleasant place, and furthermore expel it from our memories, as one expels feces from the body). • adverb modifies a verb in the negative (My brother got shit canned ).

shitty adjective (Shitty call, ref! ) • shittily adverb (That poutine was shittily made).

Note: When in doubt about using the word “shit,” just remember that wherever “fuck” works, so does “shit.” A classic example of “fuck“‘s linguistic flexibility, “Fuck those fucking fucks,” can just as easily be “Shit on those shitty shits.” If you can dream it, “shit” can do it. You’re welcome.

n my final year of university, I read a lot of Joan Didion, particularly her non-fiction. She writes of her native state, California, in the way all of us wish we could write about home, perfectly balancing the sense of the personal and the historical. Her ancestors, like many before and after them, made the long and difficult journey from the East in search of the West’s elusive promise. They were almost part of the Donner party. Imagine! Some distant Didion being gnawed by settlers stranded on the top of a mountain.

I read this and thought of my father’s family. Having arrived in Canada from Italy poor and unmarried, my great-grandfather followed the lure of mining jobs in the Elk Valley. In California, gold. In BC, coal. For those immigrants willing to risk being buried alive or blown to bits, the company provided a home that, like its occupants’ lungs, grew gradually black. My great-grandmother died at thirty-eight, from breast cancer, in that house. A generation later, my father was born there. He never strayed far, and eventually started his own hunting, fishing, and backcountry recreation business.

I think, too, of one of his mistresses — a client and a Californian. In a letter my mother later found, the woman invited my father to run away to her, to bring those beautiful little girls with him. My father, when confronted, admitted he had been considering it. His clients were mostly Americans like her, people with money and opportunity. Slightly familiar, slightly unfamiliar — in other words, just mysterious enough.

In New York, I look for Joan Didion, who, having long ago adopted the city as her home, lives on the Upper West or East side; I’m never sure. I know I will never find her, but every tiny old lady with big glasses (there are many of these about) offers a glimmer of possibility. I stare at them. Follow them, occasionally. What else is New York for if not the possibilities of such encounters? I devise a mental scenario in which I am Didion’s neighbour. She and I meet up occasionally and go for lunch. She thoughtfully chews bits of torn bread, mashing them with those flat, lined lips old ladies get. I say, “I don’t know, Joan,” in this fantasy, as if we’re in the middle of some grand conversation we always have about something important.

When, months into my time in the city, an outdated copy of New York magazine ends up in my research pile, I see I’ve missed Didion reading at NYU by one week. One week. What a nasty city this is.

eople cross in and out of your vision here. They hesitate to befriend, so everyone you know is like that person at the supermarket who picks up the avocado you dropped and engages you in some small talk about guacamole, or the Mexican drug cartels, or your cousin’s time share near Cabo San Lucas that she keeps bugging you to be part of, or whatever. Almost significant.

The whole time I am in New York, no one tries to date me, and I don’t try to date anyone. At home, I am a dater, the kind of girl who always has a boyfriend. I miss having one, though I miss no one specifically.

Men they like me, ‘cause I’m a warrior. A warrior.

One still-cool spring day, my boss takes me out for a beer. He’s my age. We like each other. He’s a pale wreck, because the magazine has just been sold and people are getting fired and he might be next. Earlier in the day, he got hives, which I found fascinating because such reactions to stress seem so extreme. It’s in the same category as women (or men, for that matter, but mostly women) screaming when frightened — like the dial gets yanked up to eleven in nanoseconds. I feel my reactions are muted by comparison. When stressed, I get stomach aches. When frightened, I gasp.