Where the hell do I go from here?

Or, what have I got myself into?

After 7+ years of living abroad, I’m back in America. Small-town America. More specifically Keene, New Hampshire, a small college town of just over 20,000 people near Vermont. I’m already starting to regret this.

I won’t get into any clichés about culture shock, reverse culture shock or what-have-you, but there hasn’t definitely been some serious cultural ‘readjustment’ going on in my head and body.

The more immediate concern is, where do I take this blog from here? I’m flattered that people have enjoyed stories of my shenanigans in Central Asia, interspersed with anecdotes from similarly exotic locales, but surely I’m going to have a tough time bigging up Keene, New Hampshire, aren’t I? At the very least, this will definitely test all my creative powers. You see, I’m the type of person who identifies with ‘all things morbid and evil. I love the splendour of decay, the foul beauty of corruption’.* I don’t think I’m going to find much of that here.

Time for yet another arcane literary reference to justify my existence

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera speaks of graphomania: a mania for writing, or to have a public of unknown readers; isolation breeds it. It becomes an epidemic where there exists:

* an elevated level of general well-being, where people can devote time to useless activities
* a high degree of social atomization or general isolation
* the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life (for example, there are many more novels written in the UK and France than in Israel), though in this case I’ll substitute ‘person’ for ‘nation’

I think all three of these situations apply to me. What does that mean? Probably that there are no excuses for not writing a lot. I’ll have to really dig deep for material, however, so any and all suggestions are welcome. Please send along any interesting ideas or angles I could pursue.

First off, why am I here?

In a nutshell, in order to get my teaching certification in secondary social studies. The aim is to get this over and done with as painlessly as possible. My course ends on 9 May 2010 and I plan on having a one-way ticket to somewhere far from here departing on 10 May.

Okay, so I’m being a tad melodramatic. It’s not all that bad. Yet.

Cultural adjustment 101 – the things I’d forgotten about

After years of living in various 3rd world hellholes, there is much about America that takes some getting used to:

* the general orderliness and omnipresent rules and laws. Case in point: having to wait for the blasted green man to cross the road. My first day in Keene, whilst flat-hunting, I was ticked off by a policeman for jaywalking. Later, a car honked at me from some 200 metres away for not waiting to cross.
* at sporting events, the artificial noise and music pumped into the stadium to juice people up.
[in a somewhat related note, I’ve often wondered why in America the national anthem is played before domestic sporting events. This has long been a fascination of mine. I thought America was the only country where this happened, but I found it to be the same in Israel, just before a Beitar Jerusalem-Maccabi Haifa match. I can understand it being played in Israel, which faces a justifiable existential threat. But why here?** I should also add that Emma has alerted me to the fact that the national anthem is also played before [ice] hockey games in Russia, which ruins the thesis I’d been working on.]
* the lack of public transport outside of major cities. I’m completely isolated without a car in Keene, and I generally abhor driving.
* the language barrier. Seriously. Most of the time I find it harder to communicate here than places abroad. I’m not sure I can properly explain this, but it somewhat relates to my next point:
* the overly hospitable to the point of excessively annoying and obnoxious and overwhelmingly perfunctory customer service in restaurants. It starts with the greeting, which never fails to rile me up: ‘Hey, how you guys doing, my name is Ashley and I’ll be taking care of you this evening. What can I get you to drink?’ Why do they always say that they’ll ‘be taking care of us’? What are they, babysitters? It’s enough to make me miss the surly, insolent customer service characteristic in the former Soviet Union.
*the fact that you can’t buy individual pens and nor can you test the pens before buying them as you can just about everywhere else. My father points out that by this stage in my life I should know which pens I like, but I can never remember and I inevitably end up buying the wrong pens. This happened to me recently when I was shopping for stationary.

As for my classes…

So far, uh…it’s early days yet, I’ll give it time. The first week is never a good indication of how things stand. At least I hope that’s the case. But I’m not terribly encouraged by the early signs.

My first class, which deals with exploring teaching as a career and is intended for freshman (for non-Americans, that’s first-years) who aren’t sure whether they want to pursue teaching as a career, really led me to question what I was doing here. Why I have to take this is beyond me, but I have no choice. There are 24 students in the class: me, another boy, and 22 18-year old girls, all with nose studs, and all named either Katie or Rebecca. I quite like both names, so I hope this doesn’t taint my associations forever. For most men, this wouldn’t be a problem. For me, it was downright terrifying. Especially as I constantly got picked on by the professor as the old, wizened man of the classroom.

After the professor introduced himself by playing an agonizingly cringeworthy guessing game of ‘How old am I? How long have I been teaching? What do I teach? How often do my wife and I have sex?’ that lasted 15 minutes, the two teaching assistants, who are second-year students, introduced themselves as follows:
‘Hi, I’m Steph, I’m a sophomore, I’m on the dance team, yay!, I study blah-blah-blah…’
‘Hi, I’m Katie, I’m a sophomore, I’m a cheerleader, yay!, go Keene! I study blah-blah-blah, my boyfriend and I blah-blah-blah every night…’

We then engaged in inane group activities which reminded me way too much of teaching English activities with teenagers. I even got to work with the same type of irascible, churlish girls that have proven to be my bête noire in the past.

God help me.

[I thank my good pal Asif for recently sharing his fortune cookie with me. We decided that it will be my motto to guide me through these dark times at Keene State: ‘When you have no choice, mobilise the spirit of courage.”]

Bizarre flashbacks and unwelcome déjà vu that remind me of my age

It’s been a long time since I was an undergraduate, and I’d forgotten all sorts of other niggly little things. But I’m also not certain what’s new and what’s different. Hell, when I started university back in 1994, we barely had the internet on campus! We certainly didn’t have mobile phones if memory serves correctly (fellow Tuftonians, am I right here? Did anyone have a mobile? Can you verify this?)

Other observations from my first days:

* I must be the only person on campus not wearing jeans or shorts.
* I’m one of only a handful of males that doesn’t wear a backwards baseball cap.
* the usual, annoying endlessly dull conversations that consist of question: ‘Oh my God, you went to --------- high school? Did you know so-and-so?’ and answer: ‘oh my God, he’s like my boyfriend’s little brother!’
* Poster sales! With the same selection as 15 years ago, including all American college students’ favourites: Dave Matthews, Reservoir Dogs and Che Guevara. Doesn’t this shit ever change?
* Girls wearing pajamas to class. This will never change.

But fret not friends, there is hope

Most of my readers know my fondness and at times downright obsession with t-shirt slogans. I didn’t expect to see too many funny ones here, assuming that people would be a bit more conscious of the message they’re trying to get across. But I spotted a classic one the other day on the back of a girl’s shirt:

‘The front view is even better’

Maybe this place won’t be so bad after all.


* Sylvester Viereck
** Michael Billig, in Banal Nationalism, touches upon this theme