Note – July 31, 2008: I recorded this piece in October of 2006 when I was really hating expat life. Currently, we’re in Seattle and while my feelings about expat life haven’t changed all that much, I’m not in that place anymore. Heads up, there’s profanity in the audio, you can’t miss it. I thought about pulling this, but it is so of that particular moment that I’ve decided to leave it be.
Tech notes:I’m using the PodPress plug-in for audio, with troubleshooting from ExIT. It seems to work in iTunes when I use mp3 files. You can subscribe to Nerdio (NEV Audio) using the RSS feed. Give it a try.
This audio entry includes music by Julie Andrews, Outkast, Chris Isaak, and Death Cab for Cutie.
When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad
Thanks to Tuckova, who thought I should join Lost in Transit, and Mig, who did not object.
I hear you … 🙂
Thanks for the unvarnished truth … I always feel like crap after I’ve written of it but homesick I get. You wrote so accurately of it that I’m smiling …
Oh, and Under the Tuscan Sun as a movie is NOTHING like the book. The book has been a place that I’ve gone every time I’m in transit since moving from Te Anau some years ago. It’s a ‘pick up and read any page’ kind of book, with sometimes wise or beautiful things within. The movie is completely unrelated to anything in the book … truly.
It is much nicer to blame feeling out of step and out of place and out of sorts on being out of your home country than on being out of your mind, although sometimes I suspect the latter is the truth.
Also I find this comforting: the system for getting anything done here is weird and the people are unsmiling and cold and the food is bland at best. But it’s… it’s not my fault. I live here, I’ve settled here, I chose it. But the system is not any kind of reflection on me; the people make me seem positively pollyanna in comparison, which is nice; and I’ve learned how to cook.
Basically it’s easier here than feeling, as I do in America, as though somehow I’m supposed to see myself in the country and I don’t. Like, here my feelings of belonging are a gift, and my feelings of not-belonging are a given. And in the states, it’s a given and a burden, respectively. If that makes sense.
Not that I don’t know EXACTLY how you feel, sitting here with my flat flavorless tortillas and my bags of dried chiles that I’ll stir into the sauce later in an attempt to make something that will taste sort of close to right.
Haha. Amen. But what has this become? NPR?
But at least I now have a term to ascribe to my detestation of Texas…. I’m just homesick for California, check, the real world.
Thanks!
My play by play reactions:
The audio seems to be working! Sound of Music–very appropriate choice of music! 🙂
Right on about the guilt of homesickness.
Piles of green vegetables? Ha! I was thinking about the seafood post–the need of proximity to the sea to get seafood. Well, it doesn’t seem to work the other way around; that is, central Europe is just a bunch of fertile valleys and fields, but where are the piles of vegetables?!
I keep hearing about longings for pho. If anyone wants to visit Prague and check out the pho offerings at the giant Vietnamese market east of here, I’d be happy to join!
(Di sent me here in a roundabout way)
Oh my god, this is fantastic. It made me laugh and cry all at the same time. You said it better than I ever could. This is the first time I’ve visited your blog and obviously I didn’t know what I was missing. I’ll be back.
Oh god, Pam, I LOVED THIS. It brought tears in certain moments…and sadly, made me realize that NOWHERE feels like home to me anymore. If this place did, I wouldn’t still be living underground (virtually). A few days ago, out of the blue, I felt compelled to listen to a St. Thomas AM stream as I sat in the morning dark having coffee. Suddenly I MISSED West Indian accents…and was flooded with the old familiar…goofy radio personalities…the daily, morning “hurricane prayer”…candidates advertising their fundraising fish fries, etc. Things that grew to annoy the shit out of me suddenly made me nostalgic. I left the ‘phones tuned in and left a note for J. I called him at lunchtime and he said he’d spent the entire morning, as he said, “Missing home.” Shit. We don’t know where the hell we belong anymore. But you really captured some universal feelings here in a deeply personal way.
P.S. As Di said, Mayes’ book is nothing like the film…you might enjoy it…I did. And I think she was teaching at S.F. State when she was bouncing back and forth to Tuscany and buying/renovating her place. The movie was lame.