Where all the EFH2T went/Go with (my) flow

Ah, insomnia. What a productive way to spend an early morning. Since I’m unable to sleep, I’m finally getting around to addressing the disappearance of Everything From Here To There. The site is on hiatus until Billy has time to write again. So in the meantime, I will try to post more blarticles, and I have archived all of my EFH2T posts with their corresponding posts here (which can be accessed using the handy dandy “Categories” list to your right), except for “Go with (my) flow” which I apparently forgot the first time around. So here it is:

Go with (my) flow

Many zen-minded philosophers and spiritual teachers have told us to “flow” with life, to not fight the current of life and where it brings you. I think that’s generally good advice, but it’s also turned into a justification of a lifestyle that makes me pull my hair out in frustration. There are people who, despite making commitments, setting appointments, and otherwise binding themselves to their peers, tend to be flaky. Some of these people have the same argument for their behavior:

“You just need to learn to go with the flow.”

I’ve had a few conversations with people who, like me, are inclined to be punctual and accountable when we make clear-cut arrangements, and I’ve learned a few things lately.

A lot of these “go with the flow” type people are actually exercising an inflexible control over their environment. They may seem super earthy, or they may be otherwise unstereotypical type A personalities, but what I’ve noticed is that they continually play out the same scenario: they make plans, and rather than meet on equal terms, they force the other person to wait, or to reschedule, adjust, etc. It makes me wonder, if you’re trying to “go with the flow”, why make plans at all?

I think there is a hidden message in the argument. “Go with the flow” might mean, “Go with my flow. Don’t expect me to do what you expect.”

You might think that someone who seems completely unaccountable in the name of “go with the flow” would be someone not in control of his or her environment. But isn’t steadfastly abstaining from fulfilling your own self-imposed expectations a form of rigid control?

An example: I was just in Venice performing for the Biennale art festival, and there I met a funky middle-aged Italian man who was part of the community of people around this particular gallery. He is a bit of an enigma—the type of person whether you never really know is paying attention until he makes an out of the blue insightful remark amidst a lot of non sequitur ponderings (sounds harsh, but I actually liked him quite a bit). He randomly proffered a lecture to me on how I cannot make plans in Venice, that I have to see where the city takes me—a very “go with the flow” kind of guy. However, he made plans with one of the other artists to do a photo session before her performance, for which he completely flaked. When she confronted him about it, he gave her the same sort of lecture, completely defying her to hold him accountable for his own plan.

These types of situations usually drive me nuts. However, I have discovered an interesting sense of freedom in some of these relationships lately. For the first time I think in my entire life, I have, with these people, made a conscious decision to be a bit flakier, to show up when and if I feel like it, and to feel less obligated and accountable.

While our group was out celebrating after our performance night was finished, my enigmatic Italian friend invited us all to meet at his place the next morning to exchange photos of the night. We set a specific time, 10am, because I had to catch a plane that afternoon. As I walked back to the hotel with the artist whom he flaked on earlier that evening, she said to me, “Don’t expect him to actually be there.”

I shrugged and said, “We’ll see,” and thought more about it that night as I packed my bags. I decided that the best way to approach the situation was to not put myself in a position to be unhappy—to not rely on someone who I know is unaccountable. In the morning, I had a leisurely breakfast and did not rush to check out of the hotel. I didn’t feel like it. I felt like taking my time and showing up an hour late, and if the meeting happened to work out, then great, but if not, it only left me with an hour to kill, and that was just fine.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, our enigmatic friend was nowhere to be found that morning. Not even the guests staying in his apartment had any idea where he’d got to. So instead, I had a very pleasant conversation with another artist at the gallery downstairs, and trotted off at a leisurely pace to the bus station.

I would never in a million years let myself behave like this with someone I know is going to fulfill their commitments, but under different circumstances, I might have been angry and disappointed because I showed up on time, and where the !@#$ was he? I might have even shown up on time expecting him to disappoint me, which now seems a bit masochistic.

I do think it’s a shame we didn’t get together that morning, but I’m glad that I got to exercise this outlook. I think if we want to avoid making ourselves crazy, it doesn’t hurt to adjust—or let flow—our expectations. To be fair, I do wish that the people on the other side of the river would flow a bit more in my direction as well.

I guess the real question is… How do we all go with the same flow?

Jules Verne: Five Weeks in a really racist Balloon

So I finally finished Five Weeks in a Balloon, and I didn’t end up liking it any more as it went on. I don’t really know why, but the story just didn’t appeal to me. But the literal narrative aside, the book is a sad reminder of the predominant European condescension towards Africa and anyone of color back in the 1800′s (Five Weeks was published in 1863).

I believe I already mentioned that the book starts exactly the same as all of his other exploration stories (versus his survival stories, which start with a catastrophic event whisking a group of intrepid men somewhere or other). Since this is an earlier work, and I’ve already read many of Verne’s later works, I think the unabashed racism comes as a bit of a shock compared to the more tolerant, albeit ignorant, tones of the later stories.

Some quotes:

Nonchalance towards slavery, listing slaves among other “luxuriant items” traded by Arabs in Africa: “They trade in gums, ivory, fine muslin and slaves. Their caravans traverse these equatorial regions… in search of those articles of luxury and enjoyment which the wealthy merchants covet.”

On the finer things in Africa: “Why is it that such savage countries get all these fine things?”

A foreboding of the consequences of overconsumption: “The races of the future may repair hither… Just note the progress of events: .. Asia was the first nurse of the world… For about four thousand years she travailed, she grew pregnant, she produced, and then, when stones began to cover the soil… her children abandoned her exhausted and barren bosom. You next see them precipitating themselves upon young and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for the last two thousand years. But already her fertility is beginning to die out; …Thus we are already seeing the millions rushing to the luxuriant bosom of America… In its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will become weak through having too fully produced what had been demanded of it…. Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accumulating in her breast.”

Although this hasn’t happened, because Verne, like all the other shortsighted white men back in the day, didn’t give the African people any credit towards utilizing their own native resources, and didn’t even foresee them as having the intellectual capacity to develop technology and trade to destroy their homeland on their own, or to suffer remotely the consequences of globalized capitalism, corruption and pollution.

I guess that on top of the story of three white dudes in a balloon over Africa not appealing to me, I was constantly pulled out of the story by moronic, ignorant remarks about the “black savages” and the superiority of Europeans.

“These tribes are considered man-eaters… It has also been asserted that these natives had tails, like mere quadrupeds; but it was soon discovered that these appendages belonged to the skins of animals that they wore for clothing… But one thing that has been proven true is the ferocity of these tribes, who are really fond of human flesh…”

“…If I have to be eaten, in a moment of famine, I want it to be for your [his companions'] benefit…; but the idea of feeding those black fellows–gracious! I’d die of shame!”

There’s a lot more, but you get the idea. Also, I didn’t enjoy reading about how much fun it was for the sportsman in the group to kill elephants, and how much he wanted to just kill everything he saw for sport. Yes, Europeans were so very civilized.

Then there’s the fun reading the translation of Verne’s French. As previously mentioned, Verne’s translator often used the verb “ejaculate” to indicate an interjection in the dialogue. It happened a lot in this book, along with some other choices of words that are comical after 100+ years of language evolution. Some funny quotes:

“The Victoria resumed her flight, driven along by a spanking breeze.”

“Be quiet on that score, my dear Dick. With a little medicine, I shall work my way through the affair!”

“Ah!” ejaculated Kennedy, “the horrible brute! I can hold back no longer.”

“Oh!” ejaculated the astonished friends.

So I didn’t like this one, but the later books really are a world apart in their tone. And though Verne was probably playing up the characteristics of the arrogant British rather than expressing any agenda of his own (he was generally more about capturing realism in his stories), it is just a sad reminder of why the slave trade was so ubiquitously accepted at the time. But I don’t recommend reading this book unless you’re fascinated by the science of balloon travel. Around the World in Eighty Days is a much better adventure story.

EFH2T: Wait for the Birthday Girl, Don’t Whistle, Bless You

My latest post on Everything from here to there:

Everything From Here To There » Blog Archive » Wait for the Birthday Girl, Don’t Whistle, Bless You.

I’m back online after many agonizing weeks of living in an internet-free apartment. And no, I couldn’t just go to a café. It’s cold out…!

Wait for the Birthday Girl, Don’t Whistle, Bless You

There are a lot of different social conventions by which we measure each others’ agreeability, some of which may seem obvious to us, although a bit random to an outsider. A recent incident got me thinking about social indexicality, the signs and signals we give that indicate who and where we are in relation to one another. Indexicality is a general term for signs that indicate state or causality (ie, smoke is an index of fire). Socially, we can make strong judgments about a person’s overall character based on small individual signs and of what those signs are indications.

The incident was this: one of my students made a special birthday cake for me this past weekend and brought it to the club where we perform so we could all enjoy it after a late show. The group sat together with the cake, waiting for me to finish working to begin eating. As I was just about to join them, I heard the group telling one girl to wait for me, but she said that she didn’t want to wait any more, and so took the first piece of my birthday cake. I was a bit baffled, because it seems like such an obvious social agreement that the person whose birthday it is should at the very least be there before the cake is eaten, which is what the rest of the group tried to tell her. By itself, it’s not a very big deal, but from the perspective of social indexicality, does an action like that indicate a deeper character state?

I’ve been on both sides of the question, having worked and lived in several other cultures. You could call culture shock “indexical shock”. Many years ago, I worked with a group of Russian women who had a lot of superstitions and traditions of which I was oblivious. One day I really upset them by absentmindedly whistling, because they had a very strong superstition about whistling in the workplace—something about blowing money away from the business—which they considered extremely rude. They were also very adamant about everyone frequently knocking on wood (or your head, if no wood was available—I still do this sometimes!).

Living in Germany, it’s been difficult to not judge people as individuals for the culture’s lack of similar social indexicality to mine—for example, I’m used to the indexical of “if you hold the door for other people, then that means you are a nice person.” Berliners don’t generally hold doors, nor do they engage in many other pleasantries that many Americans find essential for whatever we consider to be civilized coexistence. Feeling that judgment against a large group of people is very alienating, though, and can become a persistent subconscious preoccupation.

Some of our American indexicals include things that baffle many Europeans, like our compulsion to extend invitations out of politeness without actually wanting to fulfill them and our general will to over-consume as a sign of prosperity. One English-culture convention I don’t understand is that we’re still compelled to say “bless you” when people sneeze out of sheer politeness or fear that someone will think we don’t care, despite the fact that the action is based on thousand year old superstitions in which no one actually believes any more. Sneezing, in itself, is not an event that warrants any reverence, yet it’s a popular notion in our culture that if a person doesn’t say “bless you” after someone else’s sneeze, then that person is being rude.

None of the actual conventions are the point, of course, because whether or not something is considered the “right” way to behave is entirely relative to the culture and the subject of endless debate. Essentially, it comes down to what we respect as individuals; a convention becomes a convention because enough people agree with it that it becomes the standard indexical of fill-in-the-blank: nice, rude, generous, hygienic, considerate, selfish, etc.

So how much can we know based on indexicals? Is it appropriate to judge based on a person’s agreement or lack thereof with popular cultural conventions? I think it is valid in a lot of ways, because it helps us feel relaxed to know we are surrounded by people who value the same characteristics that we do, and we can’t very well go around asking people, “Hey, are you nice or are you rude?” We need some sign that indicates in a way we understand that a person possesses these qualities in a way in which we sympathize.

However, there is a difference between social agreement of indexicals and social conformity. Indexicals, as indicators of character traits, are more intuitive, or at the very least associative on a deeper psychological level. But if we’re consciously agreeing to a convention like saying “bless you” without actually respecting its validity as an indicator of character, which I have done and still do sometimes, much to my own dismay, then that is where the action stops being an indexical of individual character and becomes a sacrifice to conformity. Whether or not that sacrifice is worth making is up to you.

I recommend thinking about what you do and do not respect as indexical indicators of character versus blindly accepted cultural traditions. As we go through the major changes expected over the next few years, this could help us feel more relaxed with each other and in general. Personally, I do support the indexical of “if you wait for the birthday girl, then you are considerate”, but I firmly resolve to stop saying “bless you” when people sneeze. Why not say “bless you” because I mean it instead? That seems much nicer.

Bridge of Sights… Riiiiiiight.

I had this in my previous post, but I think it deserves its own.

This is one of the most hilariously and tragically ironic things I’ve ever seen, and all the more reason why people should stop assuming that Europeans are somehow “better” than us capitalist pig Americans. This is a famous piece of architecture in Venice called the “Bridge of Sights” (Ponte dei Sospiri):

It presently looks like this:

Yeeeeeaaaaaah.

A typical American

at a comedy show last week, a comedienne interviewed some audience members, asking where they were from, what they did, and so forth. one man sat grimly in the corner of the front row with his wife, who thought it was all delightful. the comedienne asked this man where he came from, and he very smugly and slowly said, “America.”

i knew right away that he was not, in fact, American, not only because of his badly imitated accent, but because i don’t know any Americans in Europe who would say, “i’m from America.” we all, including me and all the other Americans at the show, say, “i’m from the U.S.” turns out, the man was from Scotland, and being a smartass.

it’s mostly the Brits who say that someone is “from America.” pretty much every Brit i know here says it out of habit–it goes back a few hundred years (many also still call us Yanks). a lot of people give us crap about calling ourselves Americans, on account of the north and south portions. it’s the only decent adjective for us (what else would we say? United Statesians?). but i don’t know anyone who travels and says they are from America. my generation was taught that it is an inappropriate thing to say, and that our country is called the United States. they even changed the name of the pageant. but this issue is one of those cultural divides between the scorching reds and everyone else. i’m sure Glenn Beck would vomit in his mouth hearing that Americans living in Europe aren’t ranting about how great “America” is. (personally, i rant about how great the United States of America is.)

the other comedienne made lots of jokes about Americans and how we all ski because we’re idiots, and so on. i laugh at American jokes, because they’re funny. we are usually insulted as ignorant, stupid, culturally lacking, judgmental, racist, etc., and not to say that it’s not true some of the time, but it’s ironic that the people who accuse us of prejudice are doing the same thing to us.

every time i meet someone from the middle east, as soon as they find out i’m American, they say something like, “oh so you must be really scared of me then.” one guy made a big deal of telling me that there’s an Arab living in my building, and doesn’t that frighten me… i usually just blink at them incredulously and say, “um, no.” i would apologize for the racial profiling of middle eastern people in my country, but we were attacked by an Islamic terrorist group, which consists of middle eastern people. if we were attacked by Irish redheads, we’d be strip searching them, too. i was detained for an hour both ways on my trip to Israel–they actually took me into an office where i had to show them my picture on my comedy group’s website before they would let me through. people get paranoid when they think they’re living under a bullseye. that doesn’t mean we think all middle eastern people are terrorists.

it’s often much dumber than that. i was telling some friends that my sister and i traveled from Vienna to Prague to Dresden to Berlin by train, stopping in each city for a while. this guy i’ve never met turns to me and says “that’s soooooooo American.” i blinked incredulously and said, “they’re in a straight line, and we only had 5 days. it’s an extremely logical trip to make.” i don’t even understand what he was implying–that Americans are smart travelers?

but generally, peoples’ prejudices about Americans are extremely vague and uninformed, because most of the people making these statements have never actually been to the U.S. how would the Germans feel if everyone in the world assumed they were all Nazis because there is still a neo-Nazi movement here? the NPD actually won enough support to be on the ballot this year.

a lot of Americans don’t travel outside the country, and for that we are insulted and dismissed as xenophobes, or arrogant duschbads*. before i actually lived in Europe, i never really formulated a response for this assumption. a few months ago, i was talking with a Belgian guy who again brought up the “i heard most Americans don’t even have passports” line. it didn’t take me long to respond once i thought about it. i said that despite what people like to believe, most Americans are not rolling around in money, and international travel is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. we do go to Canada and Mexico, just like the Europeans skip around to their neighboring countries, but the reason this “Americans don’t get passports” thing started is because until 9/11, we usually didn’t need passports to go to Canada and Mexico. if you didn’t look suspicious, they didn’t make a big deal out of it if you had a state ID, sometimes less. one time i took a bus to Montreal and forgot my passport. they let me through because i had a note from my mother wishing me a good time. i even boarded a plane once with no ID–they accepted my checkbook.

so i’ve tried to explain this to Europeans, and they usually just say, “huh. i never thought about it like that.” i also try to explain that many of our states are larger than their countries, and going from state to state is sometimes a bigger ordeal for us than jaunting from Switzerland to France to Italy, etc. i tell them i’ve lived in an Islamic country and studied Norwegian recreationally, and that we generally aren’t isolationists. i’ve often been told that i’m not a “typical American”.

my point is that it doesn’t make me feel special to be told that i’m not a “typical American”, as if i’m somehow the exception to the “Americans are idiots” rule. most modern Americans are paranoid as anyone else being threatened, but overall very tolerant and open to other cultures. our country is big, and contains a few hundred million people, including millions of immigrants and children of immigrants. get to know more of us before you call any of us “typical”.

phew. that’s been bugging me all year.

*duschbad=literally means shower bath, but sounds like something much funnier.