Coming to America

I have long admired T.S. Eliot's eloquent edict, that “We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.” Can I contextualize the decree? Remember where I first read it? No, I'll admit I cannot (and a quick web search to find its origins retrieves only a barage of annoying inspirational quotations collections, business leadership forums, or other bloggers attempting to uniquely utilize it). But its impossible to deny that it has a nice ring to it.

I flew back "across the pond" to the United States last week for the first time after a year abroad, and so much of what had been familiar now seemed strange. Actually, I've always disliked the deliberate understatement of the idiom "across the pond." The Atlantic Ocean is not a pond. A pond is where you raise goldfish. However, now I have a better appreciation of the irony underlying the phrase, because there ARE big differences between the US and the UK, no matter how desperately people underplay them for mutual benefit.

'Course, I'm not going to write about the big differences, like race and class and how offensive I found a poster that I saw on the tube that was advertising visiting hours at Buckingham Palace by displaying an old photo from the 1960s of the Queen receiving a gift of a giant wreath of flowers from a young African girl. That would take too much emotional and intellectual energy for a weekend so I'll mention the superficialities.

For example, Americans seem really nice! I was in the lift--erm, elevator--going to the 18th floor of my friend's apartment, when the man next to me exclaimed, "Hi! Sure is hot out there! You have a good afternoon!" I recoiled a bit, thinking, "Do I know you?" This kind of overt pleasantness is startling after a year in the UK. Its also inspiriting. I appreciate the engagement and I believe its usually genuine. On the other hand, it was reassuring to me to learn whilst in the UK that one can interact with the world with my brand of sarcasm and bitterness and still be considered a very nice person.

Also: Americans are really fit or obsessed with becoming fit, and I am unconvinced this is healthy. I have an aversion to fitness as a program per se, because when I was a child my family was obsessed with health food in a very unhealthy way. This is one of many childhood traumas that has shaped my adult life. It explains my champagne socialist love of rich food with complex flavor, as growing up my mother, brother, and I were denied butter, anything other than skimmed or, worse, powdered milk, peanut butter, most cheeses, white bread, any sugary desserts, anything fried...and the list goes on. My father welded together his own set of bodybuilding equipment. Now I embrace a lot of this. I also don't think children should be fed piles of sugar or processed food, and I admire the way my mother baked her own bread and pizza dough and made chocolate cakes with yogurt instead of oil. I did not admire the insults my father launched at her if she looked pudgy.

As I was walking to my friend's house in DC last week, tired from jetlag, melting in the humidity, lugging my heavy suitcase, and seemingly walking even more slowly than I was because the expansive scale of the concrete neighborhood was so intimidating, a muscled young man jogged past me carrying a water bottle in one hand and an ipod in the other. Humph, I thought. Well isn't that great. We can't all be training for the Marine Corps Marathon. He then ran past me in the other direction, and I realized he was running circuits from the traffic light at the next intersection. He came towards me again, and again, and again. He stressed me out and made me want to smoke a cigarette! From what was he running????

How can I get some of that jogger's energy? I'm going to need it if I move back to DC. The city runs on youthful ambition. Its fascinating, but I worry about all of the Anne Taylor Loft-clad young people who succeed there from the beginning. Do they never develop a sense of how other places operate? Simultaneously, DC seems insular yet open-minded and outward-looking. Its doubtless an international city, yet so many people are there to do similar types of things. Since coming back to London I have a renewed sense of excitement for the cosmopolitanism that I felt so tangibly when I first arrived here.

Nonetheless, I recalled why I love DC. I love the sensual feel of the humidity, the garden parties, the inherent contradictions like the molasses pace of the rat-race, the greenery, and the view from the bridges over Rock Creek Park. I delight in the way everyone stands in front of the White House with big grins on their faces these days. Well, okay, not the crowds of angry Iranian activists upset over Iraqi crimes in Camp Ashraf. Mostly, I cherish my friends. I would love to live there again, and soon.

At the same time, I was ecstatic to go back to London. I found myself missing the kayfiyeh clad hipsters, the drunks on the tube, the fact that I never, ever have to fish around in the bottomless pit that is my purse for my ID in a pub, that I can drink coffee on the underground and wine on the grass outside of Hampton Court Palace, and that the posters on the underground aren't so serious. As I was on the DC metro train to Pentagon City (before I encountered the jogger), I was disturbed by the lack of adverts for anything other than military hardware ("The Only Platform for the Joint Cargo Aircraft"), health-care reform, medical insurance, or calls to "Rebuild America One Worker At a Time." Consuming DC metro marketing is exhausting! By contrast, the London underground trumpets Orangina with writhing ballerinas and bouyant jazz dancers proclaiming one needs "Shake It to Wake It!" It hawks theater performances, novels ("One beautiful British summer, a girl lost her heart to a boy named..."), and Magner's Pear Cider ("We love apples, just not in our Pear Cider").

Above all, I was happy to return to the Turkish bodegas near my house that sell freshly-baked rounds of sesame bread for 49 pence. I'm going to miss those bodegas. I was standing on 12th and G streets in DC when a man who had been trekking around for awhile asked me, "Where can I grab a sandwhich around here?" I thought long and hard but came up with a blank, confessing, "This is lame, but I'm sorry, I don't know. You may have to walk aways. There isn't much in this neighborhood." (Maybe I'm wrong? Correct me if I'm wrong). But what is wrong with DC in its lack of street food? I think, if the international development gig doesn't work out for me, I should open up a street vending cart and try to make it as a journalist on the side. I could sell crepes and food with European cachet. Egyptian-style koshari could be brilliant. The cheap, practical, national dish has four carbohydrates and spicy fried onions! I could charge $4 for a plate, $1 a carb. It would be pure profit! Who wants to join me? See, in America, one feels as if anything is possible. In the UK, well, things seem different. My favorite comedian Eddy Izzard captures the difference, saying "When I was a kid in school, the career advisor came to see us and said, 'Look, I advise you to get a career, what can I say?' And he took me aside and he said, 'What d'ya wanna do, kid? What do you wanna do with your life? Tell me your dreams!' So I said, 'I wanna be an astronaut! And go into outer space and discover things that no one's ever discovered before!' He said, 'Look, you're British, so scale it down a bit.'"

When I was twelve and thirteen I actually went through a phase where I wanted to be an astronaut, but its a good thing I changed course because I hadn't ever been on a plane at that point and as it turns out I'm kind of afraid of flying. At some point during my DC visit I was avoiding the humidity in the air-conditioned Borders book store and I read part of a chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. It was about common conditions under which most plane crashes occur (I have little idea how this fits into the larger point of his book). Apparently, many crashes happen in bad weather, on flights that have been delayed, and in instances where the pilots have been awake for more than twelve hours before departing (this all seems rather obvious, other interesting conditions included pilot and copilot rarely having flown together, and an average of seven consecutive errors). Anyway, my flight back to London commenced with an announcement that boarding was severely delayed, as weather had been terrible all day. When we finally did board, we waited on the tarmac another two hours for thunderstorms to clear out of the Northeast. The entire two hours were filled with a baby's unrelenting, piercing, wails.

The only good thing about the flight (besides arriving in London in one piece), is that I had a really good time talking with a not unattractive gentleman sitting next to me. When the plane shut down its engines and the infant continued its high-pitched, mournful, lament, he and I sighed long exasperated sighs and knocked our heads against the seats in frustration. I guess this prompted him to talk to me. He (or I?) said something about needing a whiskey. I (or he?) said we should give it to the baby. Thus began a long conversation, but I realized when he bounded away to make his connection at Heathrow that I had absolutely no way to get in touch with him again. That's fine, but I was also thinking it would be a fun missed connection to write, something like: "We hated the crying baby and were both a little afraid of flying but didn't want to admit it. We drank a lot of wine to forget about both. You seemed interesting. I'm the woman you thought was crazy for wanting to move to Jordan. You had to run off to Greece and be fancy. I hope you weren't meeting your wife there on the islands, or your male lover."

Ah, well.