For the record, I do not believe in self-analysis. True self objectivity  –  it doesn’t exist. The most sad and rotten woman I know refers to herself as jovial. If I could slip out of this shell, turn my mirror into a window, take a gander, God knows what I would see.

That said. The pattern I see in my writing is a continual affinity for the other, an appreciation, or even a thirst, for diversity. At home, my mother asked me why almost all of my friends are Asian. I responded, “Anything different than me is good.” Me, I know. I want to know the not-me.

In Discomfort Until Death, I wrote “Discomfort, where I live, where I love, and without which I wouldn’t know a thing about me, or you, or the world at small.”

In Nice-olation, “I don’t know how to dazzle my new friends with linguistics. I only know to say cool, to laugh, to apologize and refuse late-night “una demandas.” But there is movement and interaction and curiosity and acceptance brimming the way my Heineken glass was a moment ago.”

This speaks to Gonzalez’s notion of participatory observation. “Do I know why I am doing this study, both personally and professionally?” It takes a consciousness of one’s culture and oneself to be able to access what I consider different, the other, and what my motives are for enveloping it.

Also, in Nice-olation, “So, how will these Italians ever know that I’m cool – if I can’t tell them, if I can’t prove it?”

In that affection for the “other,” though, there is also a pattern of disdain for anything recognizably the same - metaphorical mirrors.

In Discomfort Until Death, “I’m aware of how loud Americans are and embarrassed of it. I’m mortified like a teenage girl is about her mother’s fanny pack, of how little foreign language I know.”

In Urbino Island of the Mind, “It is not enough to be with friends. To chat. We must get dressed, we run out the door, we chat it up, we take pictures (this is who was there and this is totally what we did), we post those pictures, and just when you think you’ve had enough we comment on those pictures, and then comment on those pictures’ comments.“

In Drink the Water, I wrote “In my home-city the barista rolls her eyes to the point where I consider her possibly going into seizure when I ask for soymilk in my shitty café au lait.”

Abrams and Zweig say, “At moments like these when we are possessed of strong feelings of shame or anger, or we find that our behavior is off the mark in some way,
the shadow is erupting unexpectedly. Usually, it recedes just as quickly, because meeting the shadow can be a frightening and shocking experience to our self-image.”

Ring a bell? the “other” Americans. “Meeting the shadow” is not so jarring that I flail into the kind of depression that the authors explain as a potential result. However, it is enough to make me not want to pull out a map in Roma but just continue to walk, totally lost, but with confidence. Me? I know where I am going. Uhhhh, this way, obviously.

I could say that it is a learned behavior. I grew up within a sea of cornbread-fed Nazi poster children, in a time of grunge and counter-culture, where individual difference was a prized possession. But, what difference would it make?

This pattern does hold value for who I am though - a genuinely quiet and curious being - and it facilitates success in my area of expertise. Expertise in writing? Hardly. Other people’s stories, this is what I know. And this, in turn, I guess, affects how I see reality; there is no one reality. Reality is subjective and mine is not yours or hers or his. And furthermore, that is really cool.