Another chapter in the continuing saga of "life is different here - go figure!"...

I think I am mostly able to take my new life at face value now, but I still have flashes of comparison that intrude into my consciousness and insist on evaluating, on assigning the unhelpful monikers of "better" and "worse" to my two most recent life situations.

One of the skills you learn when you live abroad is to say "It's not better or worse, necessarily.... just different." You learn to order things within their own internally coherent system, to relativize your ethics a bit. That fact that you never actually quite come to believe that, deep down, rears its ugly head when you go back home again. Because the fact is, you ARE going to think one way is better. One of the two ways way of greeting new people, or disposing of trash, or taking vacation, or getting from one place to another is going to fit in a little or a lot better with your vision of the world.

My own personal utopia, which used to consist of characteristics cobbled together from the fiction and non-fiction I'd poured into myself as a child, has slowly changed to comprise elements of the cultures I've visited and inhabited, however briefly. My perfect world has Palestinian hospitality, Namibian tenacious hope, German bread and environmental humility and emphasis on the family unit, and US-American laughter and friendliness and church culture. Does it mean I will never be quite satisfied wherever I might live? Or does it mean I have the ability to see a little further beyond than I used to - to root out the satisfying elements of each situation, to understand a thing on its own terms? Maybe a little of both.

One thought which has taken its time to get fully formed is this: the collective sense of humor changes fundamentally when you cross the ocean. Germans are direct; they say what they mean, and their humor reflects it. Americans are indirect. At least in the Midwest, directness is often perceived as aggressive, and we bend over backwards to be nice to people - to their face. And when it comes time for humor, it's kind of indirect too: teasing and mocking and sarcasm, elements that have been basically missing from my life for 4 years. (Germans don't do it, and it doesn't translate well into electronic media.)

It seems like in some subcultures here, the way that you show solidarity and friendship is by talking about people, using condescending tones and covering it up with laughter, saying something mean and making it funny by altering a tone of voice. It seems like the perfect vehicle for passive-aggressive behavior to me. But everyone does it. At home, at work, even on TV the best-written shows are the ones that have perfected a sense of humor that causes intentional discomfort.

It's subsided a lot since I came back, because I am trying very hard to fit in. It's a survival skill. But when we laugh at the expense of someone's self-image, even a little, it's hard for me to find the humor in that.