First of all, I'm starting to enjoy watching soccer, which is a huge warning sign, and I'm pretty sure I felt some kind of vestigial unexplainable national pride whenever I watched Spain play. (Germany as well, to a lesser extent) (Vestigial? Like a tonsil or a useless wing-like appendage? I guess that's what nationalism is in Spain now: an extra mostly useless organ or limb that might give you a bit of a functional advantage in athletics but in general just makes people look at you like an uncouth fascist hunchback mutant. [There's a *little* truth in there but mostly just mixed metaphor.])
Not only did I enjoy watching the "technique" or "skill" or whatever they call that nonsense used in the actual playing, but I felt myself automatically liking and feeling an affinity for the Spanish team. I also discovered that I immediately hated every player from non-German/Spanish teams on a personal level, even before they scored any goals or pretended to get hurt a lot or took their shirts off in the field and let their crazy come out like the arrogant untalented jerks they are.
(By this I mean the Italians. [which beat Germany by being obnoxious.] No one ever scored enough points on Spain for me to really have time to articulate my dislike for them this clearly.)
(This natural dislike of people based entirely on their nationality seems pretty American actually, but the fact that it involves soccer teams is a pretty huge no-no.) (Maybe when the American Repatriation Police interrogate me I'll just call it Football! Is it especially American to deviously overthink things like this? I'm not sure, but I know it's American to stubbornly stick to my guns and refuse to change my terminology just because I know that the other culture will fundamentally misunderstand my nominalization.)
It's kind of like going to England and asking for fries, and when they say, "do you mean crisps?" you just throw your tea into the nearest available sink or body of water and say, "FRIES. I MEANT WHAT I SAID AND I SAID WHAT I MEANT."
(An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent?)
(haHA! Dr. Seuss is American.)
(butttt his family was all German immigrants... Plus Americans tend to avoid poetry unless they're children or Maya Angelou. Thus my internal national/cultural identity is still in question. Crap.)
(Also there are no elephants in North America. But being ignorant of a fact is about the same as that fact not existing, right? AMURICA.)
What makes this scarier is that I went through the entire Fourth of July without shouting "AMERICA," eating processed meat trimmings, OR burning myself with vaguely illegal fireworks. Not even once. (I did manage, however, to be that obnoxious American who doesn't speak the native language and just insists that if he speaks English slowly and clearly enough, everyone will understand. [Even after the German lady behind the counter has already admitted in German that she doesn't speak English]).
Worst of all, I'm pretty sure I actually bought some clothes at H&M at one point. Should I come forward about this in customs on the way back and just apologize? Or should I try to sneak through, (with my H&M clothes in my carry-on, of course, hidden inconspicuously beneath Sperries and sweatpants.) and then try to do my own self-imposed repatriation later on? That sounds lazy and procrastinatory, so in the spirit of Americanism, I'm gonna go with that one.
A few more things:
- I seem to no longer have a problem with wearing dark blue jeans on a 30 degree day. (Er I mean. um... 85 degree day. Conversions are hard to do.) Luckily I still have less than a clue about how much a meter is.
- I'm developing an affinity for public transportation. When I first arrived it was like "SCREW THIS BUSES ARE CONFUSING, SOMEONE DRIVE ME," but for some reason or another subway maps are starting to make sense to me. Also I just walk everywhere. When I'm carrying my suitcase though, public transportation is still my arch-nemesis, hellbent on humiliating me and bringing me teasingly close to the brink of a breakdown, but somehow knowing exactly when to stop. (At the beginning of my trip, all public transportation was somehow capable of this.) Finding the right train car and carrying my bag (the size of a small couch and twice the weight) through the train without accidentally mauling someone and then somehow getting the bag into a safe spot to store it--(breath)--is literally a nightmare. Literally in that once I'm done with it, I sit down and pretend I'm asleep and convince myself that it is no longer a thing that happened. (Trying to disconnect myself from reality is becoming part of my routine.) (It can be fun once I'm pretending to be asleep to exaggerate the previous nightmare; I start putting famous people and friends in the place of other passengers and I inevitably add a sword-fight on the roof, because no dream train ride is complete without one of those.)
- I can stand sparkling water now? Also I'm completely accustomed to just eating bread with various toppings for 2 out of the 3 meals in the day half the time. (I'm still not accustomed to *not* having huge cups of coffee though, so I just kind of overdo it on the caffeine, which, in addition to being a general college thing, seems to also be a European thing.)
- Sometimes I notice the way I speak English changing according to whatever other languages I've been speaking. (THE COMMIES BE CORRUPTIN ME WITH THEIR BROKEN ENGLISH) (For some reason I think America doesn't need any help corrupting my English) Spanish, when directly translated, sounds a lot like really archaic British English, so here's a hypothetical example dialogue of some of my Spanish-influenced English:
- Someone else: "Hey Michael, by the way, the clean laundry's already on the bed. You still need to put the sheets back on though; sorry about that."
- Me: "I see. That appears well to me, do not preoccupy yourself. I had not been given account of that the dirty clothes yet had been collected. What convenience! All of it that I had wanted to wear tomorrow is yet clean!"
- Speaking of which, I've grown accustomed to stiff and crusty clothes that have never been in contact with the substance known in America as fabric softener. I'm exaggerating the crustiness, but drying in Europe is done with clotheslines because they're less lazy and a little more environmentally conscious.
- Naked people on beaches and in saunas and at pools and occasionally in parks no longer really faze me. (The list of things people do in parks in Europe would boggle your mind and rattle your senses while leaving your children with lots of inappropriately detailed questions.)
- I now expect every church I see to be at least a little impressive and medieval looking, and every town should have at least one cathedral. (there's actually a very sophisticated scale for measuring how medieval looking a city or church is; I require a 3.5 for a city and a 6.2 minimum for any church that I'm going to look at for an extended period of time.) It is also a little unorthodox for a town to NOT have *at least* a few huge random stone walls or gates scattered haphazardly in random places around the city, as if the original builders were creating more of a hedge maze than a fortress.
Probably the weirdest Europeanization I'm dealing with is the fact that I'm no longer bothered or enraged or even really notice when I hear up to 4 different languages spoken around me at once as I walk down the street, only one of which I really understand. It's when I hear English that I do a double take or get upset or worry that they're talking about me behind my back, which is a weird reaction now that I think about it.
In conclusion: I love America, but I'm not *in love* with it.
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