After six months in the States, I still had people who were strangers coming up to me and addressing me by name. Most people didn't introduce themselves, though, so I was constantly talking to people who seem to know quite a bit about me, but about whom I knew nothing more than the color of their hair.
What made it worse was the assumption that I knew what was going on. I was expected to know these people, to remember their names, and to speak comfortably with them.
Some of them were related to me.
Everyone knew everyone else already. I constantly felt left out. I didn't get pop-culture references or the inside jokes that we now call "memes." I got laughed at, and told that I lived under a rock. I got asked ridiculous questions, like whether I wore clothes in Africa. I was accused of lying when I told someone that peanuts grew underground and when I said that pineapples do NOT grow on trees. (Why do people ask if they don't want to know?)
Even beyond the realm of extended family, I never seemed to know the social rules. I didn't know where to put my purse at a party. I couldn't properly gauge the level of "dressiness" or lack of dressiness appropriate for various events. I still have trouble with these things, and I don't know if it's just my oddball-ness or if it's a carry over from growing up in a different culture.
Those first few years back in the States were like being dropped on a distant planet. Every fourth or fifth step I took felt like a wrong one, like the floor suddenly tilting under my foot.
Things got alot better as I went along. In college, I made good, close friends, and started to feel like I had a place I belonged. I came to terms with the concept of American Democracy and the freedom of capitalism as a much different thing than the dorkwads who hung out at the corner fast food joint in their skanky clothes and couldn't distinguish between Libya, Siberia, Nigeria and Liberia, nor locate France in the correct hemisphere. Ah, shoot. I'm wandering off into a different post. Sorry.
At any rate, years passed, and while I am still an oddball who doesn't know how to order a beer at a bar or where to to put my purse, I eventually hit my stride being an American.
Then I moved to the rural central Midwest, and became a member at a large church in a very, very small town, where everyone knows everyone else and they've all got grandparents buried in the church cemetery.
The floors have started tilting again.
Just be yourself. Let the chips fall where they may.
I have never lived in another culture, and I often feel like an alien myself.
People are a strange bunch and sometimes you just won't click with many of them, or they with you.
Where my wife and I go to church, we have very few friends that we really like or have much in common with (aside from our Lord). We get along alright with just about all, but we would probably choose to not hang around with very many of those folks.
Like my pastor says (once in awhile) church is God's idea of a good time...not ours.
Posted by: steve martin | 15 July 2009 at 08:52 AM