Cultural Misunderstanding

Ahhhhhhh----the supreme delight and satisfaction of finishing a paper assignment. And it only took me about three hours, is a bit too long and will be tightened up tomorrow, and is absolutely true and rather funny, if I do say so myself.

My young prof asked us to write of a personal experience of having a cultural misunderstanding. My personal experience of this assignment is that it's kinda voyeristic of him to require this, but when reflecting over the last few days, I realized that most of the 18-20 yr olds in my class (and I) would have a difficult time writing of an abstract cultural misunderstanding in 3 pages. Can't really do justice to the Israelis and Palestinians in 3 pages. Or the situation with Ellis Island or First Nations. So let's keep it breezy and first hand, right? So against the advice of my pal who worked with me through this certain period of time in the 1980s, I plunged into my story of Midwest Gamine moves to South Florida and emerges from her naive realism into the diverse and much louder Southern Branch of the Gotham City Culture.

I think my pal was afraid I'd come off sounding too bitter, or bigoted, or bitchy, but I think that it's possible to write about how overwhelmed a person can feel being immersed in a totally new cultural environment, being completely ignorant of how it all works, feeling very young and inexperienced about life in general, and be honest in describing it without being any of those b-things. Plus, since it's all true, and I remember parts of it so well, there is a bit of actual recreated dialogue. The part in the bagel place changed my whole attitude about living in South Florida.

Okay, so seeing as I was the one in the minority in the BocaWorld, I get to be the one who lost her naive realistic innocence and joined the greater Gotham Culture. Naive Realism is the anthropology term for when people think that the entire world is the way that they see their own particular piece of it. That got smacked right out of me the first month I worked there. I learned a lot of things, including some bad Yiddish words I used to be able to use but have now forgotten, I learned how to give shit and got better at taking it when I had a name tag on. I also learned how to hold my own, and wished I'd have been able to learn that better in my teens instead of in my 20s and 30s.
And now I get to write about it for college credit. So so cool. And what's really funny, is that if I were even bolder and still had more of my East Coast on, I'd have included how living in Gotham Culture for so long is sometimes why the Snark Episode happened with this young prof in the first place, and also why he reacted as he did, being so West Coast as he is. But I am not so bold, at least for this graded writing assignment. Maybe sometime, since I'm staying in this department for my degree, he and I will laugh about it all.

He'll laugh reading my paper, and that's my strategy.