In Other Words

Sick of homesick

Its been a busy week, which isn’t bad, because it means that they can’t kick me in the nads too hard when I’m done here and looking for an extension of tenure. Its also been semi enjoyable as we’ve been trying to put together a presentation, which requires communication between myself and other parties. This is good because it means that I get to talk to people rather than just sitting behind a screen and staring at it. I’m a social junky.

Even my lunch hour has been busy these last couple of days because I’ve been trying to finish this bastard of an article for the Expat and it went like shite.

It was probably mainly because I just couldn’t get the hang of the bugger. It was all about homesickness and this was fine, but for one little detail. I don’t get homesick. The last time I got homesick was when I was four or five and I ended up screaming for my mummy. Since then I’ve always enjoyed the company of my parents, but I’ve never been homesick. I’ve been too busy exploring the facets of this new place that I would call home, even if only temporarily.

This meant that I couldn’t write about it from a personal point of view, so instead I had to write it to somebody. For non-writers this might require a bit of explanation. When people write they write too people. They do this automatically, imagining in their mind’s eye who they are writing to. When they write a letter to a friend its easy, they imagine the friend. In this blog I imagine either Liana or myself as the main target. When you’re writing to an audience of several thousand you still need to write to an ‘individual’ be this an individual in that crowd (average joe, or Liberal cynic) or a friend, etc. When I was writing this bastard of an article I couldn’t help but get some dumb American fourty year old chemically blond bitch in my head. It was horrible, how ever much I tried to write for somebody else she just kept coming back.

It frustrated me for days, I just couldn’t get a good story on paper because I was always writing it to this stupid person whom I really didn’t want to write to. Somebody I considered annoying in her belief that anywhere outside of the US sucked and somebody who wouldn’t give some place where her family wasn’t at a chance. In my time travelling with my parents I had seen several of these women and they remained incapable of getting used to a place because they spent more than half their time visiting their families back home. It drove me nuts!

So how did I solve the problem? I wrote it to these women’s poor husbands. The husbands that are trying to make a career abroad, but can’t because their stupid bimbo wives keep whining about going back home. I wrote the article in the hope that these guys could then get their wives to adapt and get used to a foreign country so that these men wouldn’t be stranded in some backwards little village in the middle of hickland all their lives.

posted by Symbol @ 2.7.04