CampusIntel

As winter comes around it’s funny to see how people begin to dress. I don’t mean the people who wear copious amounts of clothing to keep warm (honestly, wearing long poofy coats, warm hats, mittens, big scarves and a hood pulled over looks smart to me). No, I’m talking about those people … and my of them seem to be a younger age group…who think that it’s appropriate to dress in a sweater with no hat or mittens when it’s minus 20 degrees out! I feel like my parents when I say these things, but it really is ridiculous! Now, I know when I was younger, it wasn’t cool to wear snow pants and big bulky coats, actually, whenever I was forced to wear these things I would complain incessantly. I felt like I looked so outrageous… but looking back I never complained about being cold…I only complained about not looking cool…Now I have to laugh because as I grew up and moved away from home I started to realize that people who didn’t dress warmly were the ones who look ridiculous. I think when you start getting older you realize that it doesn’t matter what people think and that those people your age who are judging what you’re wearing when it’s cold out…they’re judging you for what you’re NOT wearing. If I see someone my age for instance waiting at the bus stop shivering because they refuse to put a coat on or zip up the one they have on or insist on wearing a baseball hat instead of a toque I want to yell out: buddy, do you know how foolish you look?! It’s winter for crying out loud! Dress for it!

            I remember last year during the bus strike (…*deep breaths*) I had to walk 45 mins to work at about 7am in like minus 28 degrees (oh it was a fun bout)…during that time there was no possible way that I would even consider dressing for any reason other than the weather. No matter how much I might have looked like the abominable snowwoman I would layer stockings and PJs under my jeans, I would put as many layers of socks as I could fit on my feet and still put my boots on, I would put mittens over my gloves, a toque under my hood down to my eyes and a scarf that covered my face so all I could do was see through a small space. During this time, I felt like everyone in Ottawa was a kind of allied together, where everyone who had to walk anywhere because of the strike was dressed just like me with only the bare (excuse the pun) minimum of their skin showing through the mess of clothing they’d have on to keep warm. I think during this time, everyone, even younger kids and teens felt obligated to throw aside the classification of what was cool and what wasn’t and agreed that wearing whatever you needed to in order to keep from freezing was finally more important. It was a sort of universal understanding everyone had, there was no judgement of any kind as to what you were wearing as long as you looked warm.

            It’s unfortunate that this trend wore (another pun! Oh my gosh, I’m just full of them!) away after that winter…I’m not saying I wish the bus strike would come back this winter so we could all bond together again as “warm terribly dressed Ottawa’iens”, but I do think that it built a bit of a community were people judged a lot less…even if it was just on that small level.