DECEMBER 2, THURSDAY

JET LAG, CULTURE SHOCK AND TWITTERING

I am up at 4 a.m. in Swannanoa in the dark. The December temperature today promises to be 72F/22C with sunshine all day but with chillier days ahead. Jet Lag catches up to me in the afternoon but early in the morning I feel clearheaded and alive.

But before I forget it I want to deal with my own current passage through culture shock enhanced by jet lag. Jet lag will lessen and then disappear in a couple of days, but from my own experience over the years, culture shock will continue for days and may continue for months, or at least until I travel again in February.

The greatest culture shock I have felt over the years while traveling happens when I come back to the the United States. It comes from being forced to fit back into American cultural conventions. Or at least it feels as if it is specifically American cultural conventions of language, gesture, intonation, that does this but I don’t know if it is actually American cultural conventions or if it is fitting into my own cultural conventions, which happen to be American, which flattens me. If it is the second then if I were German I would feel this way on returning home to Winsen or if I were Indian I would feel this way when coming back home to Ahmedabad. The reverse would also be true. If I were German I would be freed from German cultural conventions and if Indian freed from Indian cultural conventions when coming to Swannanoa. That is probably why friends abroad are so enthusiastic about coming to America, a visit to an exotic land, half Wild West and half Big Macs with fries, and why I begin to shrink or freeze up when returning home to Swannanoa.

I think, though, for me, that there are two kinds of people. There are those who feel very uncomfortable when leaving home to be immersed in a new country where the conventions are strange. They seek out McDonalds in Germany because they feel that McDonalds will be familiar only to find that German McDonalds are slightly unfamiliar and Indian McDonalds are even more unfamiliar. They don’t really feel comfortable again until they visit the Oteen McDonalds just down the road. If the person is German while in Swannanoa they search for places to find German brotchen or wurst and are generally disappointed, and for reluctant Americans hash browns in India are a failed promise of home. Even scrambled eggs in Germany, Rühreier, are scrambled differently.

On the other hand are people who have a need to break out of American cultural values, people who avoid McDonalds overseas like the plague, and are delighted, when inadvertently trapped in an Indian McDonalds, that it is more like Indian street food than an American McDonalds, with no beef to be had.

My greatest nocturnal nightmare in long trips to India over the years is dreaming that I have suddenly been dropped back in Swannanoa against my will, followed by great relief when I wake to hear Indian scrounging dogs howling in the street.

Because for me a main reason for going to India is to let go of American cultural conventions and to be convention free for a couple of months. When I immerse myself in Indian conventions, puries and Rogan Josh or cycle rickshaw rides or the constant perfume of incense, the sensual pleasure makes me feel very alive. But I don’t pretend to fit in or belong in India. I bathe in India without either understanding or belonging. But when I come home this feeling of being culture free in a sensual way disappears and there is grass along the highway and big box stores and empty streets and I feel for awhile immobilized and depressed.

This doesn’t last forever, but at times it lasts for months, even a year, at a time before it dissipates to the point of not bothering me. But after a year of fitting in I begin to feel the yearning to travel again and after two years I can no longer wait to travel again, anywhere, with a need to let go of American conventions for awhile and a need to be rejuvenated and made fully alive by everything being new and different and drowning me in sensation.

When I arrived at the Charlotte Airport Wednesday evening I was dead tired. My body was irritated to be forced to be awake when it wanted to sleep, and this irritation only enhanced the irritation that something deep within me felt at leaving behind the continual newness and dislocation of German conventions with the realization that I would now have to fit into American cultural conventions which felt bland and without sensation and ordinary to me. I startled my son, Tom, by shouting back even more loudly at a woman cop directing airport traffic who shouted at me to keep me from being run over. I startled Tom, I even more startled myself. What was this Caspar Milquetoast, who accepted all kinds of German conventions that seemed odd to him with a smile, doing shouting at an American woman directing traffic who was trying to save his life? It wasn’t me doing it, it was some deep inner irritation enhanced by jet lag. I didn’t want to be told what to do, I didn’t want to fit in. And when in Trader Joe’s yesterday I was irritated again by a woman who insisted on helping someone else first, I could see that I was in trouble. I was the problem, no one else, and it wasn’t even my conscious self, it was some deep inner reluctance to return, which my conscious self is beginning to recognize.

Like every traveler, when people ask me if I had had a good time, I say yes, the trip had been been fine, with no attempt to say what it had felt like. I leave telling what it felt like to this daily WordPress post. There is no way to really convey what my trip felt like and no way to explain when they state, “It must be good to be home,” and I say “yes”, that I really feel that coming home irritates me for some reason. I’ll leave all of that to this daily post, which people can read with empathy or not read because it is out of their experience, and not interesting for that reason, because I have a need to share my experience whether anyone has empathy for it or not. Humans are like twittering flocks of birds in a leafless tree, people in a restaurant making a racket, twittering to each other, sharing their experience. Humans need to twitter on Twitter or elsewhere. Sharing is central to being human. I am twittering away right now. If anyone answers I am pleased, but the most important thing for me is the pleasure of twittering through words that I hear in my head as I twitter to myself, and that come out of my fingertips onto the page. The process of twittering makes me feel alive.

So this, in my own twittering way, is an effort to explain to myself what this irritation at returning to my own conventions, to American English, American informality, American casual clothing, American cliches, is about. It is also an attempt to put in words what makes me feel so alive when traveling, what turned me on in Naousa and Winsen, and to justify my excitement in looking for an Airbnb near the beach in Morocco in February, a place where I have no idea what I am getting into except that I will be leaving American cultural patterns behind and experiencing something new. As I start to anticipate the trip, the feeling of malaise at being caught again in American cultural patterns will begin to dissipate almost immediately, as I begin to dream of the unknown. And that is my twittering for the day.