A slightly better US-UK film

I just watched (and not for the first time–what a terrible confession!) a movie, “The Wedding Date” that has a mixed US and UK cast and plot.  Compared with my thoughts about “The Holiday” my overall response to this film is better… as evidenced by the fact that I had seen it before!   The whole film takes place in about 4 days, so the “love story” of the main characters (played by Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney) is a bit weak and subject to my usual rants about Hollywood insta-love, but the side story with the sister and her fiance redeems the movie for me.  They actually come through a messy revelation and triumph through adversity, realizing that their imperfect relationship is “worth fighting for”.  (There’s an in-joke here but I refuse to give more away, see the film if you haven’t!)  The characters on the UK side also include a few of my favorites, including Jack Davenport (from the UK’s “Coupling” and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies)  and Sarah Parish (who I loved in UK exports “Trust” and “The Vice”).  However, the funniest part of the movie from the perspective I have, an American trying to understand the English “stiff upper lip” attitude towards emotions, is this:

when the sister’s fiance has just found out about his fiancee’s dirty secret and he is sitting in the car with the romantic lead (Dermot), and all he can think of to say is, “I trust you’ve enjoyed your trip to England.” 

I saw this movie the first time before I moved here — that line would not have gotten a laugh from me then — but after nine months here that line had me literally doubled over.

How many expats to change a lightbulb?

Fortunately, in my case, I managed to finally change a lightbulb alone, thus making the official answer, “it only takes one expat to change a lightbulb.” However, I will note that (a) removing the old lightbulb required some time, as it was not the “screw-in” type common in the US; (b) I stood in front of the lightbulb display in the store for a full ten minutes trying to identify which bulb to buy, and (c) having finally brought the new lightbulb home, I could no longer remember which position corresponded to “on” or “off” for the light-switch and had to leave the room to test another light-switch. BUT in the end, success, and so on this rainy day, the expat said “let there be light! And there was light, and it was good” 😉

Women and politics

The US presidential race is heating up long before it should… and thanks to the serious candidacy of one H. Clinton, the issue of gender roles has been firmly in the limelight.  Those of us who happen to be female but work in male-dominated fields are quite familiar with this week’s snarky criticism of Clinton by Elizabeth Edwards:

“Keeping that door open to women is actually more a policy of John’s than Hillary’s,” she said, suggesting the New York senator may be avoiding women’s issues to “behave as a man.” 

It’s a catch-22, really and truly.  We females can’t make any progress in a male-dominated field without acquiring (or perhaps intrinsically and already exhibiting) a certain set of “male” traits.  We are told to be tough, not to be emotional, certainly never to cry or to exhibit weakness, and in many cases we are encouraged to fall in line with a testosterone-fueled work environment.  We are encouraged to be more male, and in doing so really bad things can happen.  Yet, if we don’t act “male” enough, we are unlikely to succeed.

The differences between male and female archetype personalities–and the fact that the combination thereof brings a richness to life including work environments–is simply not allowed when the field is still dominated by one sex. And certainly, when a woman rises too high in the power game, when she is in a sole position of power and authority, then she becomes open to the sort of comments made above by E. Edwards (who should really know better).

I had a colleague comment to my face this week about the sheer number of women who have failed in my line of work (read: chosen to get out of the testosterone-fueled rat-race, in many cases due to a desire to procreate and actually have time to mother their children).  The comments were issued with the standard throw-away remark, “no offense” but I admit it, I was offended and I typically am.  However, it’s another of those “not allowed” feelings for a female in a male environment: we are to react to “boy talk” just as the men do, even to the point of enduring borderline sexual harassment.

There’s no easy answer here.  I’m glad the idea of a female president is in the spotlight, and I hope Hillary Clinton comes back at Edwards with a mature yet totally devastating response.

Not since the Boston tea party?

OK, I have to admit it, I seem to have missed the Harry Potter boat entirely.  I have not read the books and I have not seen the movies. Yeah, everyone tells me to jump aboard the bandwagon, but that would interfere with my own preferred reading materials (at the moment “Kate: The Woman who was Katharine Hepburn” by William J. Mann, highly, highly recommended!)

I was, however, quite puzzled and bemused to find that the uproar over an early review of the book, published in the NY Times, seems to have re-invigorated the ages-old feud between the US and the UK.  Who knew that dribbling information about the latest in a series of childrens’ books could ignite the same sort of fury as the events leading up to the revolutionary war!  I quote:

“The New York Times review said its copy was purchased from a New York City store on Wednesday.

A Bloomsbury spokeswoman called the review “very sad”, adding that there was only one more day to wait until the official release in book stores around the world. Twelve million copies of the book have been printed for the U.S. market alone.

She likened the events in the United States to the Boston Tea Party, a protest by American colonists against Britain in 1773.

‘But over here it is blockades as usual, with the embargo being enforced unflinchingly and without exception by all our customers,’ she said.”

Perhaps we are taking Harry Potter just a little bit too seriously?

Misleading “cultural” research

The headline was intriguing, “Study: Americans Don’t Understand Others.”  I clicked on the link hopefully, dreaming that perhaps there was some hidden wisdom in there that would make me understand my difficulties with the local English culture and people.  Alas, this was not to be the case.  The article opens thusly:

• “Rugged American individualism could hinder our ability to understand other peoples’ point of view, a new study suggests.
• And in contrast, the researchers found that Chinese are more skilled at understanding other people’s perspectives, possibly because they live in a more “collectivist” society.”

However, the entire article is a lot of hot air based on a single experiment with a single event (a request to move a block) and was conducted on an extremely small group of people.  Nowhere in the article does the writer admit that perhaps this is all a load of hooey, that the authors of the study might have been lacking some cultural sensitivity in drawing conclusions such as this one:

• “That strong, egocentric communication of Westerners was nonexistent when we looked at Chinese,” Keysar said. “The Chinese were very much able to put themselves in the shoes of another when they were communicating.”

The experiment was designed around the participant (American or Chinese, and only 20 of each) being asked to move a block on a table in response to instructions from a “director”.  There were two blocks on the table but the director could only see one, the ask-ee could see both.  The Americans were less likely to put themselves into the director’s shoes and thus did not tend to guess correctly which block to move (given that the director could only see one they were to move the director’s block) and thus did not catch on to what was being asked of them.  Now go back and read the quotes inset above, and see how likely it is that those quotes followed directly from the results of this particular experiment.  No, I did not think so.  

Given the greater respect for authority that is common in Asian cultures, it is unclear to me that any strong conclusion  follows from the results of the experiment: other interpretations of the results–Chinese were more likely to consider the perspective of the authority figure–are not only possible but more plausible.  The experiment simply does not test any hypothesis of “rugged American individualism” or Chinese “collectivist society”.  Nor does an experiment about moving blocks on a table actually speak to communication styles since moving blocks is not actually communicating.

(In matters of Chinese culture, I prefer not to overinterpret given my own lack of experience but instead to put this out there and hope my sister–who lived in China–will comment on how she would interpret these “findings”.)

Stormy weather

We are having some reasonably wild summer weather here in the UK, and quite frankly it makes me home-sick.  Yesterday there was a proper thunderstorm complete with loud noises and lightening.  Oh the way this took  me back to thoughts of my childhood in Minnesota, of thunderstorms, hail and tornado warning sirens.  I see that today’s weather.com headline is “Stormy in the Midwest, Northeast” so I can pretend like the storms are an experiential bond between me and my fellow Americans.

Reflections on pond-jumping

It’s summer in England and the country seems to have been overrun with American tourists.  I go back and forth on my level of identification with my fellow Americans: compared with the tourists, I’m a local, but compared with the locals, I’m still a stranger in a strange land.

Something struck me funny and familiar about today’s date, so I thought about it while walking to work this morning and realised that it was precisely one year ago today that I was here in the UK interviewing for the job that I now have.  My how much things can change in one year!

I accepted the job offer more or less on the spot, without any sort of thought or contemplation about what it meant.  The implications slowly set in during the gap between the interview and my starting date in October–it was three solid months of paperwork and logistics.  I recall fondly the first few weeks here, when I felt like Alice through the looking glass–everything was strange but charming and interesting.  It was not too long before the reality of the circumstances of daily life set in–it’s already been almost three months of my venting my frustrations on this blog.

I’ve now actually lived here for more than nine months, and the adventures continue.   To a first approximation, nothing about my life here is as I had expected.  Some of that is due to the fact that in making such a big move with such a substantial change in circumstances, there was really no mechanism for having detailed expectations.   Most of my thoughts about what my UK life would be like were pretty indistinct.  I should have realized that I could not cling to my life in America, but would have to build a new life here from scratch.  I should have known that my closest circle of friends would change although perhaps I could not have predicted which people in the US would keep in touch.  I certainly could not have predicted the new relationships with people here in the UK.  Perhaps most importantly, I could not have predicted how much this experience would change me.

At the end of the day, I’m happy here.  It’s not easy and I’m not really settled yet.  I can hope that in another year I’ll have made some progress on that front!  But it’s funny, I moved here for the job, and now that I’m here the job is not the most important thing.   Life has taken on a richness that I never really felt in the US and it is this change in me that makes this whole pond-jumping adventure worth it.

More on cycling

I don’t always make time to watch sports but I certainly do follow them, especially things that normally are in the category of “other sports” in the US.  I was totally devastated that I was in Italy earlier this month when the Tour de France was in England; I might not have braved the crowds for the prologue in London but I certainly would have watched the stage to Canterbury–I even had an offer for company from a friend who lives along the route.

The great news, now that the mountain stages have begun, is that one of my favorites ever–Iban Mayo–is doing really, really well.  Read all about it on the Iban Mayo blog.  I’m just sad that he’s no longer riding with the coolest team in cycling, Euskaltel-Euskadi.  Oh well, the tour is full of disappointments, like Robbie McEwan coming in outside of the time limit.  (At least he first won the stage ending in Canterbury, again I wish I had been there to see it!)  This year’s tour is bound to wind up with new-ish faces on the podium in every color.

Ah the English plumbing

In the US, every house or apartment that I lived in had the same basic configuration of amenities for bathing: a bathtub with either a sliding door or shower curtain rod, and a fixed or detachable showerhead above one end of the tub.  This handy arrangement allowed for great flexibility and was ubiquitous to the point that I don’t recall really ever thinking about it.  I have been utterly amazed to have  not once found this combination in my time in the UK.

During my travels prior to moving here, and in my temporary apartment in my first four months of living here, my accommodations invariably had only a shower stall.  My current flat has only a bathtub, and one with separate hot-and-cold-taps at that.  My first purchase on settling in was a rubber hand-held water combiner thing that attaches to the individual taps and produces a mini shower-like spray of water of an intermediate temperature… it sort of works.   And sometimes it leaks all over.  At least you can rinse your hair with a stream of fresh water.  Normally I don’t mind this arrangement too much, and I simply kneel in the tub and have a pseudo-shower.  This has been tricky in recent days, since I seem to have torn a muscle in my leg in Italy and I find kneeling quite uncomfortable.

But I admit it, I’ve had trouble getting used to the idea that a bath is not a relaxing evening thing involving a good book but a rushed thing done in the morning before work.   I am  finding that I miss my flexible American arrangement where either a bath or shower was an option.  I get this sense that the shower-stall-only configuration is somehow seen as progress as it is characteristic of newer English construction.   It certainly takes up less space to forgo the footprint of a bathtub.  Regardless, and as usual, it’s amazing the things I didn’t anticipate missing about the country I left behind: I find myself fantasizing about the modern American master bath with both a shower stall for the morning and a separate and large jacuzzi tub for an evening soak with a good book and an adult beverage.  Now that would be progress.

Prince’s little gift to the UK

Today I was extremely lucky to be an American living in the UK.  I have previously confessed my obsession with another Minnesotan… I just picked up my copy of the Mail on Sunday, in which a free new Prince CD was included for the price of the paper (£1.40 = less than $3) about 10 days before its normal release elsewhere in the world.  I’m listening to it now… I’m sure I’ll have something to say after I hear the whole thing, but I love the first song!  It’s been interesting how the recording industry has attacked his Purpleness for this interesting move… from the perspective of the newspaper it was pure genius: the Mail was being stocked in HMV record stores today for the first time.   For an artist who has been around for more than 20 years, it has been a remarkable media blitz and publicity stunt of the revolutionary sort.  I say good for him… now I must go listen to more of the CD!