Culture shock in Washington, DC

Nothing like solitude in nature...

Before I went into Peace Corps, I really had no idea what culture shock was. I studied abroad in Scotland my sophomore spring, but I was not in a vastly different cultural environment. It took no effort at all to adapt to life in a dorm room with a view of the North Sea in a place where I could legally drink a casual pint (or three?) every night with an intoxicating group of English-speaking friends from around the world. I may have offended someone at some point with my brash “American-ness”, but if I did, I was having too much fun to notice. 

It's kind of funny, then, that I would feel some culture shock in my own country. From the moment I stepped out of the airport, the hustle, bustle, and formality felt very distinct from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

First of all, let's just get this out of the way: I moved from a county with a population density of 36 people per square mile, to one with a population density of 8,500 people per square mile.  Yes, wow. Erm. Hmm.

A few other differences:

Dress Code

DC: Most people who go to work at an office building wear professional dress. The streets bustle with people in formal business attire. Appearance and style are cultivated. Your office-bound husband trims his beard, or shaves, preferably.

Michigan:  There are maybe twenty people in town who have a regular need for a business suit or black panty hoses. The streets bustle with flannel and jeans. A university administrator I know wears crocs to work. My Michigan-living husband currently has a four-month beard going. (Hi, honey!) 

Cost of Living

DC:  I'm paying $1000 per month to live in a one-room basement. $10 per drink It’s easy to drop $25 per person in one sitting for brunch. These are good prices to pay for those things.

Michigan: We pay $500 for a spacious two-person apartment. A microbrew pint is $2.50. It's hard to pay more than $7 for an omelet.

Sharing is Caring

DC: Don't make the rookie mistake I did: you get in the back of the cab. Always. Your driver conveniently proceeds to your destination before taking up another fare.

Michigan: They charge a flat $3 per cab ride (cash only), but you will probably pick up two other random strangers along the way, both of whom are going to different places from you. One of you will end up in the front seat. The only rookie mistake here is not allowing 45 minutes to get picked up.

Pace

DC: You walk “efficiently”. You quickly learn the peculiar calculus of how many seconds on the walk signal are really necessary for safe passage. (If you thought that flashing orange hand meant “don’t walk”, think again.) 

Michigan: You cross the street when the cars clear, which is most of the time. People mostly move fast because it’s -10 degrees F outside.

Transportation

DC: Rush hour is a bloated two-hour period around 9 am and 5 pm that regularly slows highways to a creep. Public transportation is plentiful (and glorious) along certain main corridors.

Michigan: “Rush” “hour” means 10 minutes of traffic at 9 am and 5 pm. Traffic means more than ten cars on the road (and all of them are Subaru Outbacks). Good luck getting anywhere without a car or snowshoes.

Weather

DC: 2” of snow provokes preemptive mass buying sprees at the grocery and a government snow day. 

Michigan: The average snowfall is 180” per year and there are rarely snow days. For those counting, 180" = 15 feet. I will leave that to your imagination.

Forest

DC: Trees exist here in parks and back yards. The tree to people ratio must be far below 1:100.

Michigan:  There are trees in parks and back yards and pretty much everywhere else.

Philosophy of Life
With so much diversity here and in Michigan it's difficult to make generalizations, but I will say that the push here to "make a difference" and define oneself by career or social status is a lot stronger. That has been an interesting influence... more on that later.

Now that I've adjusted, the bustle of DC city culture is pretty pleasant and the costs are fine. I may never embrace paying $10 for a beer or $6 for a dozen eggs, but life here comes with its own benefits.

For one thing? Lots and lots of interesting neighbors.

On the road from upstate New York to Washington, DC

I love landscapes. Crikey, I can’t even describe the peace it gives me to look out on rolling hills or mountains. Lots of peace. I love rocks and all, but I think maybe subconsciously that’s what turned me on to geology. The lectures featured lots of soothing landscapes.

This post is a photo recap going all the way back to my journey here in late January from western upstate New York to Virginia through Pennsylvania and Maryland. (Technically the journey began with a puddle-jumping flight out of snow-laden Michigan to see my folks in New York, but that went without photo documentation.)

On road trips I always have this strange sense of loss as the landscapes pass me by, and it occurred to me that it would make an interesting memento to take a random picture of the road every 15 minutes.

Here is the result, chopped down to every 30 minutes. (With a few pics taken every 15 minutes when things got interesting.)  We left upstate New York around 11 am, and arrived in NoVa around 7:00 pm.

Ta-da! 

It was challenging, but also fun, to give up creative control and let the landscape speak for itself. There were a few highlights that we passed at the "wrong time", but it was an interesting exercise to let them go by.

Would it be corny to say that these country roads fill my heart up?

What it was like to see Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart live on stage

On Saturday evening my mom and I went to see Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart on Broadway in Waiting for Godot (with Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley). It did not disappoint!

© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons

When they entered the stage it took me a minute to process that I was actually watching them. I'm not sure I've ever seen such fine stage acting and it was really just enjoyable to watch these people I admire interacting so fluidly with a physicality that is lost in film.

These two gentlemen were huge fixtures of my adolescence. In a time when many of us are grasping for heroes, when popular media fixates on moral complexities, when many of us have lost faith in organized religion, we're still hard-wired to look for the moral to the story. We still need reassurance, even if it's symbolic,  that classic archetypal mentors are there to guide us, that "good" is not lost, that life has meaning. Personally I can't help but gravitate to them. Who doesn't need a Gandalf or Prof. Xavier? Who doesn't want Captain Picard's decisiveness and bravery?

The irony about what drew me to these actors is that the play itself is an absurdist reflection on the meaning of existence. It's full of moral complexities,  ambiguous and contradictory and open-ended. The lives of its two non-heros, Estragon and Vladimir, are meaningful if only for the brief identification with one another that life has allowed them. That was the salient point for me (because really, what other option is there?) Stewart and McKellen manage to balance the tragedy of meaningless existence with just the right touch of humor and camaraderie.

Billy Crudup was also simply astounding as "Lucky". I'd seen him in the film Big Fish but I had no idea he was also a talented stage actor. The play is relatively physical for all involved, but Crudup's character was in constant motion. Hensley was also fantastic as "Pozzo". I can't imagine having the energy these four had to sustain more than seven shows per week (including its pair, No Man's Land).

This was my first play on Broadway, and I'm really happy to have gone. So inspiring to see four people who are so very top notch in their craft. I also learned that British people pronounce it GOD-ot in contradiction to the US go-DOT. Apparently the matter is hotly contested, as Beckett himself didn't provide any definitive guidance. Another inspiring lesson in ambiguity.

Want to get in on it? There's still time; the show plays at the Cort Theatre and will be closing on March 30 after a five-month run!

A chance to see two legends in action!

source

I can hardly believe it, but tonight I'm headed off to New York to meet my mom and see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in "Waiting for Godot".

Both are not only two of the finest actors of our time, but they have provided the public imagination with strong symbolic images of leadership and wisdom. Not to step out as an enormous geek, but above all others, these two men filled the mythic reality of my adolescence.

I'm beside myself. Do I ever love these two people!

This is definitely one perk of living on the East Coast, compared to rural Guatemala, or say, rural Michigan. There are lots of great memories I've made in my rural life - but there really are once-in-a-lifetime sort of opportunities, and this is one of them.

Eeee! Tell you more on Monday when I get back...

International Happiness Day

Today is the United Nations' International Happiness Day. It sounds a little fluffy, but underneath the surface there lingers an important and controversial statement about how countries should pursue development. Traditionally, progress has been measured not in terms of social well-being but economic well-being.  International Happiness Day sounds fluffy, but makes a radical statement: that society should consider social well-being as a form of wealth in itself.

It is true that economic progress reflects societal well-being to a strong degree, but many scholars now recognize that beyond a certain point they are no longer directly related. As Robert F. Kennedy so famously put it:

"Our gross national product - if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them... It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play... It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."  [1]

Measuring happiness is a complex venture. Economic metrics are a lot easier to handle. Does that make happiness any less important for society, though?

Welcome, Bienvenidos, B'an Tulena

If you are looking for cat pictures, you have come to the right place. Oh yes, indeed, you have.

So, why am I starting a blog?

First, I just moved to the metro Washington, DC, area for a communications fellowship at a science institute. That has been an awesome change in my rural-small-town-bumpkin life that deserves some documentation. I can't believe all the new stuff I'm seeing all the time. Why did no one tell me that cities are cool? (Oh, wait...)

Second, I've always loved reading memoirs and other people's reflections on their own lives, but during Peace Corps I developed a serious interest in blogs. I ended up keeping my own (it's kind of the cool thing to do in Peace Corps), but I also just read a lot of them. There are two lifestyle blogs from that time period that I still read regularly; they were women to whom I could strongly relate in some way, who kept me connected to my hopes for the future in the US.

I also spent far too much time in my first year back from Peace Corps absorbing web media - especially blogs - nutrition blogs, news blogs, mommy blogs, lifestyle blogs, science skeptic blogs. I've learned a ton in the last year from some of the thoughtful bloggers out there (more on them later).

And what about the Oliver blogs? Oliver asks. I promise at some point I may actually post some pictures, you know, like, related to Washington DC.

I naturally thought at times about starting a blog to join the conversation, but most of my free brain cells were devoted to teaching labs and finishing my Master's, so the blog hasn't happened... until now!

So here we go! Thanks for dropping by.