I'm close enough to moving to Boston that I feel like I can almost literally see a scrolling number marquee counting down the seconds until BC-Day. It's a pretty dramatic piece of mental imagery, that scrolling marquee. It's a tense symbol, the exact opposite of, say, a rainbow or an open road. I suspect that people who are or were seasoned movers (like military brats or, I dunno, buffalo herders) would scoff at the stressed, borderline-funereal seriousness with which I'm mentally treating my half-cross-country move. But as someone who has never really left her bubble, even exciting educational prospects and a generally sunny attitude aren't quite enough to keep my gut from feeling anxious and bummed at the prospect of relocating.
It's not helping that I still can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that exactly two months from now, I'll be giving up my citizenship to Chicago, and in three months, Illinois. Three months, then five years. Five years. 2016.
*clucking chicken*
...
Moving on.
After having lived in The City now for about a year (and I do love living here), I feel like I now have tentative claim to join that ultra-cool, swaggering, sunglasses-wearing, chic-dressing, CTA-Pass-wielding clique of Urban Dwellers. See my nose, up there among the skyscrapers? I know what it's like to be bored on the L. I've been to beaches other than North Avenue. I know the names of a fair number of neighborhoods, and their associated demographic profiles. I don't gawk at the skyline. (That's a lie. I do. Anyone who doesn't is soulless. Or blind.)
Interestingly, after having gained this knowledge--the knowledge that distinguishes a City Mouse from a Country Mouse--I feel like, for the most part, I've simply graduated from Crotchety School. The City-specific lessons that a City has to teach you are, I've found, not character-building, but rather like a medically applied leech to your empathy center. Illustratively, living in The City has taught me:
- not to make eye contact. With anyone. Ever.
- that it is never inappropriate to honk, loudly and often, no matter how early the hour, how domestic the neighborhood, or how temporary the obstruction
- that unfamiliar people who approach you are probably mentally disabled, in need of money, and are best avoided
- that my car can never be parked in the same place for more than a week or something [expensive and perhaps boot-like] will happen to it
- that everyone else drives too slowly and are clearly ignorant, befuddled tourists
- that everyone else drives far too fast and are clearly impatient maniacs
Now, I'm not saying that living in the city for too long will necessarily make you a worse person... just that, over time, perhaps it might, in some ways, make your everyday approaches to at least some situations not completely unlike that of a sociopath.
Just kidding. Sort of. Go Cubs.
Someday I'll write a short, lighthearted post again.
Several weeks ago, Newsweek ran a cover story entitled “The Beached White Male.” As the aquati-dramatic headline suggests, the feature article focused on how the recent recession has plighted middle-aged, college-educated white males in America (…a.k.a. “The Man”).
The article could frustrate anyone who’s ever heard of homeless people. The story follows the post-2008 lives of a handful of formerly-Trumpesque businessmen. The men’s three biggest complaints are 1) they feel too ashamed to tell their still-credit-card-freewheeling wives that they’re unemployed, 2) they’re now struggling to afford their 9,000 square foot homes, and 3) their sex drives have been negatively affected due to feelings of lost masculinity.
Ninety-nine problems, man. Admittedly, “The Already-Impoverished-Prior-to-2008 Single Mother” is a considerably less snazzy tag line.
Still, I don’t want to aim my Mockery Death Ray at The Beached Man himself. All of us are psychologically wired to base our notion of what’s fair or tragic on our own experiences, our lives and immediate peer group—not on, say, sub-Saharan orphans. It’s unnatural to experience a significant blow, comparable to your own personal experiences, and feel unaffected, thinking, “Well, at least I’m not a starving amputee.” For the washed-up businessmen featured in the article, the unexpected deprivation of their Fortune-500 lives must feel at least as tragic and soul-crushing as, for example, failing a semester of college would have seemed to my own privileged, White Girl brain. Tragedy is in the eye of the beholder.
The more deserving target of the Death Ray, rather, is Newsweek itself, who, with their journalistic obligation to reporting Important Things, decided that this story was cover-material, over and above… anything else, frankly.
But I still don’t want to be too hasty. Perhaps the story about the plight of the impoverished Latina woman went out in 2009, and now Newsweek is scraping the barrel for new martyrs to feature.
To find out, I decided to turn to hard-hitting investigative journalistic techniques (and by that I mean, searching for “recession” in newsweek.com’s online archives and seeing what popped up). After browsing roughly 1,500 titles, what I found was that, since October 2008, Newsweek has published one or more lengthy (at least 3 pages on newsweek.com) articles on how the recession has affected the following specific American demographics* (listed in order of frequency, starting with the most frequent):
men
college students/new graduates
Baby Boomers
the West Coast
rich people
the Midwest
white men
small businesses**
Further, Newsweek writers are prone to calling the 2008 recession the “mancession,” and they’ve dedicated several short articles to how the recession was actually good for women, as more of them have been forced to work when their mancessed husbands lose their jobs. I managed to find one women-authored article arguing against that idea, but I found literally not one article focusing on the specific effect the recession had on the most famously disenfranchised populations in the U.S. (e.g., people of color, the working poor, the homeless, single moms, etc.).
You could argue that "Poor People: Still Poor" isn't cover-story news. Or that Newsweek is catering to their primary readerly demographic -- they want to write articles that will interest their generally white male readers, and an article entitled “I Know You Think Things Are Rough But People Who Don’t Have White Skin or Prostates Generally Still Have It Worse Than You” probably isn’t going to do the trick. “The Beached White Male,” on the other hand, not only interests their readership, but garners extra publicity by all the controversy it generates among its non-white, non-male non-readers.
Still, I can’t help but think of my Psychology of Racism class, where one of the more pointed lessons was that, in order for systems of privilege to be upended, those in the position of power need to get educated about the disenfranchisement of others. Newsweek, given their readership statistics, has the ear of The Man. And what do they do with it? Convince The Man that he’s the disenfranchised one. Someone deserves a Pulitzer.
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* This means I utterly ignored all articles that were about “Americans” in general, global (rather than American) concerns, Obama, and any stories focusing on the reasons behind the downfall of the market. Obviously, these topics comprised a fair portion of the article-age.
** I quickly found that titles can be misleading when you’re on a hunt for diversity. There was one article entitled “The Color of Money,” which turned out to be a profile of a deceased artist. Another called “Poverty Hurts,” about how new college grads will have a hard time finding a job. Another called “A Room of One’s Own,” about space issues on airplanes.
So, it’s been over a week since the president announced Osama bin Laden’s ambush and death. Now that the media climate is slightly less rank with the musk of Post-Osama Retrospective, I feel okay talking about it myself.
Several things surprised me about the whole, messy ordeal. I’m surprised it happened, frankly. I’m surprised it happened in Pakistan. I’m surprised that the operation was kept so successfully under wraps for so long. (As Garrett noted, for however worried anyone was or is about WikiLeaks, clearly some secrets are still secreting successfully.)
And perhaps as a result of my Americanism, naiveté, or simple bemusement over anything that seems a little ridiculously “meta,” I was also surprised by the overall strong reaction to the overall strong reaction that Americans had to the news.
Intellectually, I can appreciate why various people, both in our own country and around the world, were a little taken aback by what appeared to be unrestrained, patriotically-flavored glee at the announcement of bin Laden’s death. The mood, particularly in New York and D.C., was reminiscent of the Munchkin parade after the house-crushing of the Wicked Witch of the East. Which might not seem so unreasonable until you remember that bin Laden was a pretty serious political and quasi-religious figure, and the Wizard of Oz is a kid’s movie.
On the other hand: September 11th was a day that resulted in an explosion of shock, grief, fear, and rage, and since then there has never been an event that's offered a counterbalance of needed, conciliatory relief. Since 2001, there has only been a slow, plodding progression of disappointments, confusion, and antagonism over the U.S.’s arguably misguided attempts to respond to the attack, as well as compounded sadness over the subsequent military, Iraqi, and Afghan lives lost in that effort. Over the last decade, there has been continuing terrorist activity and near-misses, and very little in the way of events that would give mourners of 9/11 reason to feel hopeful or resolved.
I don’t believe that Americans reacted to Obama’s announcement last week in a thoughtful, considerate way. I believe the reaction was an emotional deluge (the word catharsis has been bandied about a lot, and for once I don’t think that Aristotle would particularly object) that burst out with such rapidity and fervor that deconstructing its source is all but impossible.
I believe it’s a mistake to react with distaste and judgment to the happiness that emerged in D.C. and NYC. The reasons for the “gleeful” reaction are necessarily complicated, a powerful cocktail of raw emotion—that The Face of Terror is gone, that the U.S. government achieved a goal, that there is finally just one excuse to feel like something has been resolved, that Al Qaeda is maybe even just a little weaker, that there is perhaps a reason to believe that the U.S. will stop being at war sometime soon, that Obama has proven himself to be sort-of-okay at the whole military thing, that the U.S. suddenly (if briefly) felt like a united country.
For people in other countries—who may, as a result of cultural and political differences, always view the actions of Americans as dramatic, brash, arrogant, and in bad taste—I can understand their lack of understanding at last Sunday’s celebrations.
But as for the born-and-raised Americans who quickly decided to be jaded, intellectual, and embarrassed over the burst of emotion from their countrymen and -women, I’m confused and feel a little pity by the lack of understanding and empathy. It's a free country, and all that, and people can believe what they will, but I just hope to never begrudge an emotional surge of non-antagonistic joy in a group of people who have experienced such pain.
It wasn't until I was halfway through my first year at IWU that I discovered what a big freakin' deal the study abroad program is there. I eventually heard from several students that the study abroad program was a major enticement--even a deciding factor--in their choice to attend the university. Small though it is, IWU partners with dozens of study-abroad organizations, meaning that a student can practically throw a dart at a map and find a viable destination for international study. Plus, unlike many schools, IWU allows financial aid to carry over and apply to your overseas schooling. Heck, sometimes it was even cheaper than staying at IWU. I discovered that a surprising number of frustrated, suburbanated students saw this tiny, landlocked, corn-studded college as their unlikely gateway to Abroad.
I went to the study abroad fair as a freshman, after dozens of professors and organization representatives talked up the magic of Abroad in my classes. There, I found myself surrounded by students bitten with the international bug, eager to whip off their Ameri-centered glasses and experience the world. I felt a little like an impostor wandering around the fair, actually. My reason for attending the fair was that, after so much impassioned imploring, I frankly felt guilty for being so ignorant and/or ambivalent to this apparently incomparable opportunity at my fingertips. I went to the fair by way of apology for remaining unswayed.
Obviously, I left the fair still more or less unswayed, too, given that my passport remained unmolested throughout my tenure at IWU.
Don't get me wrong; I believe that it's vitally important to be informed about other cultures and countries. There are thousands of places in the world that would dazzle me, and I believe that there is probably no better way to become educated about the larger world around you and to appreciate the multiplicity of viewpoints in the world than to see it firsthand.
Still, I've never been able to get myself to feel impassioned about being in other countries for very extended periods of time. My generally positive attitude about travel is always overshadowed by the expense, the separation from loved ones, and the anticipation of my embarrassment over being an ugly American inherent in the prospect of travel.
I'm going to go ahead and use this personality quirk as my excuse for why, when people ask me whether I'm excited to be moving to Boston, my answer is usually to the tune of "...I guess." The inquirers always seem surprised and a little disappointed that my answer isn't delivered with more enthusiasm (despite the fact that I'm not exactly known for my giddy excitability).
I view my forthcoming move as an interesting sort of challenge. It will be challenging to try my hand at living in an entirely new environment, to learn the culture of an unfamiliar city, to find out whether I can actually develop a taste for seafood or become invested in college sports. And as a chronic overachiever, I like challenges, but it's not the sort of thing that has me doing cartwheels.
If this "climb every mountain" attitude seems worrisome for its lack of OMGBOSTONICAN'TWAIT-ness, know that my inborn lukewarm reaction to traveling does not reflect my feelings about Going to BC as a whole. I'm very excited to actually Be In Grad School, to leave my office job behind and re-immerse myself in the scholastic environment which I've always felt to be my emotional home.
In other words, the journey from cubicle to classroom is the "travel" that really has me psyched.
Glad we got that cleared up. I'll be in the nerdery if you need me.
