Temporary TCKid Home

well gracious i’ve always dreamed of rambling on a blog online! this is my lucky day 🙂 what do i even write here? i had a geology test today, and a debate, and i made a scrambled omlette thing for breakfast. well i find solace in this whole tck community. From previous stalking everyone seems warm and awkward all at the same time…..and i love it. I’ve been in Charleston for 8 months now and it feels just like home! i wake up everyday, hug my best friends, listen to the birds sing, and even bake a pie! Then i jump on my magic flying pig and we swim through waterfalls of chocolate and rainbows! ……I’m miserable. It’s just some days I’m like, yeah this is the day, Carpe diem! and others im like im gonna go eat cereal, maybe clean a window for the sake of accomplishments, and go back to bed. just the same old meet people, greet people, chitty chat, all the live long day. who am i gonna run up to and say “what do i want? A SHWARMA! when do i want it? NOW!” Thats right, no one sane. My instant-best-friends-mix is becoming recipe worthy i’ll tell ya that though. a month back i had a full conversation with a (doubtfully sober) homeless man who walked into the subway where i was enjoying my five dolla footlongggg. He looked at my food and said “Aww you shouldn’t have!” and i said “I know i’ve been waiting here forever, what took you so long?” and i actually had a better convo with him, then most people down my hall. You know why? well im not that sure, why either….we both enjoy hoarding crap and talking to ourselves! kidding, but i realized, that neither of us have homes. our welfare and sanity depended on being able to pick up conversations with random people. His was necessary for money, mine is for fitting in. And there we were in Subway, with mutual understanding of one another. A poor old black man, and a young white college gal, joined by the forces of isolation. huh. that sounded alot more doom and gloomier than intended. back to the glass is half full! im so glad theres more tck’s out there, it’s especially helpful with all the little questions in my head like “where am i gonna live next? what about after im married? who will i marry? do i want my kids to be lonely tcks? why when how?” ok that covers the w’s. and h. they really should have just spelled how with a w so that w’s principle would make sense. kinda like how everyone hates the “y” because it isn’t really a vowel. AEIOU! …and sometimes y. and why does february have only 28 days?! thats so annoying! its even phonetically spelled weird, like feb-brew-ary. and wednesday too. switch the n and d for petes sake. this is the ending of my blog now. kinda hope no one thoroughly reads this, but enjoy anyways!

I like photo screensavers. On my newest laptop I never bothered to set
one up, however, because of its comparatively lower hard disk space.
Now that I have a massive external though, I can easily afford to store
stuff there and keep one here.

So I set up a folder
specifically for screensaver pictures and, it turns out, video as well.
And as I was putting it together, and every time I see it, I realize
that it’s almost Ten Years of Me.

I had started taking
pictures with friends seriously one night in Jakarta when I was 16 or
so. Well, we had. One friend had thought to bring a camera with him to
a friend’s house party. It was still the old kind of film which needed
sending to a studio for development. Nevertheless on Monday and for the
coming weeks we loved to see those pictures. They’re probably lost now,
it was so long ago. But it started, at least for us, the idea of taking
pictures on our nights out. This became a lot easier with digital
cameras, but up until we were leaving those were still kind of uncommon
and expensive. There was no Facebook, Photobucket or any of these tools
either, so what we used to do was bring the photos in on a flashdrive
(which was new then too) and crowd around a laptop to go through them
together and laugh at what got captured.

I
think nights out run a little differently when you’re taking pictures.
Suddenly there’s EVIDENCE, so everyone’s behavior tightens up a bit.
It’s also on record. Particularly for us in Jakarta there was an
ever-present feeling that these were our golden years and we could see
the end on the horizon. We wanted to record it, so that it couldn’t be
entirely forgotten.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures in
Michigan. They weren’t my best years, and for most of it I didn’t have
a camera. But I still think about and care about the friends I made
there. I included my leaving pictures in my screensaver, and you can
see how it wasn’t the highest point of my life.

In Switzerland
we went a bit overboard. Everyone had cameras by then, but Facebook
only went international in my second year or so. And suddenly every
night was affected by what someone might put up on Facebook the next
day. And before long, there were a LOT of pictures floating around the
web of us getting trashed together.

And when my time in
Florida came up in pictures, I realized that since I’m turning 25 this
year, it’s almost 10 years since we first started. That’s 10 years of
documented pictures of me and the friends I’ve made over the years.
What a treasure, if anyone were to really care but me. Most people
don’t care too much about what they’re not actively participating in:
they like the pictures of themselves and people they know, but why
should they care about people they don’t?

It is, nevertheless,
always a guilty little fantasy in my mind to bring all these people I
love together in my life. Utterly impossible, but I always enjoy the
rare chance to introduce friends from one of my worlds to one from
another.

It was a bit tempting to make a video project under
the same title as this entry, but it would be oddly self-serving.
Instead, there’s this blog.

“To think nothing of one’s self, and always to think well and highly of others, is great wisdom.” Oh to be like Jesus who was a servant of all! Who wants “this” holiness?? For truly this is the depths of holiness and death to self to consider others better than ourselves. Where the love of Christ abounds in us to all men. – Words from Thomas A Kempis as quoted by Greg Gordon of sermonindex.net

It took a great breaking for me to finally realize how I had considered others better than myself. God smashed my pride into the dust. Now I am certainly less than the least of God’s creatures.

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners–of whom I am the worst. 1 tim 1:15

If you say, “I am the worst sinner” then I should say, “Yeah you are.” Right?!

Excerpts from Open Performance on Jan. 6, 2010 from Alaine Handa on Vimeo.

Has anyone posted a blog on British English vs. American English yet? I haven’t found one so I shall start one 😀 My interest in the two dialects started when I came to America with a very ‘British’ accent and vocabulary. My friends would laugh and tell me, “Say wohteh and tomauwtow and dungarees” and then they would hoot with laughter when I did. In order to survive I had to learn to speak ‘American’ – “wahder and tomayto and overahlls” – although I stubbornly refused to give up a lot of my ‘native’ vocabulary and I now use it whenever I think someone will understand. If anyone would like to add to this list please do, because I never actually lived in England and my British English was learned from my non-British parents 😀 so, it’s by no means an exhaustive list and sometimes I get the two mixed up.

American English vs. British English

Bandaid = Plaster

Stroller = Pram, pushchair, carriage?

Cart = trolley

Elevator = lift (or is it the other way around?!)

Sweater = jumper (I once told a guy in America I liked his jumper; he had no comment)

(Sweater with buttons) = cardigan

Jumper = some sort of (jean) dress with no sleeves

Overalls = dungarees 😀 (does anyone else use this word?)

Closet = cupboard/wardrobe

kettle/pot = pan (at least in my vocabulary)

and the list goes on… help me out, I don’t even know all my British vocab 🙂

Hmmm…I just talked to my uni best friend about our accents today, so I thought
that I would write a post about an accent
My accent is hybrid, mostly filled with (almost) neutral American and Korean accents, with dibs of Southern (though it’s more of an ‘ghetto’ accent) and probably even European accents
Lots of Americans have pointed out that sometimes I have an Korean accent, because while I still talk (or at least try to) in neutral American accent, but I say ‘z’ words in ‘j’ words a lot
I still have a hard time saying ‘x’, so I always end up saying ‘s’ when I really mean an ‘x’
In fact, when I was forced to talk in English language to one of my friend’s friend during the visit to Korea
over the phone, I was told that I sound like an Korean-American (which is the first time that someone has said that I sound like an American…funny how majority of the Americans think as in an opposite way)…one more funny thing was that he didn’t respond anything out of intimidation while I just said “Hello, Who is this?” in English
Two of my friends have told me that I kind of talk or have few tendencies to talk like a Southern people
(example: the queer way of how I say ‘notice’…I tend to say “naw-tice”, not “noh-tice”)
My uni best friend has concluded that the reason is that I listen to lots of hiphop music
In fact, most (if not, a lot) of the western music that I listen to are hiphop music, which are sung by
blacks with so-called ghetto accent
It was a big shock to me because I had no idea that the taste of the music can even influence
people’s accent
European part…it can be just my assumption…but if it’s true that I have a dip of an European accent,
I’ll have to have someone answer it for me
As for Korean, once a while I catch myself saying words in an American accent, but mostly
I completely change an accent to Korean when I have to say English words in Korean
Some Koreans have told me that they thought that I was from Kyungsangdo, a province located
in southern part of South Korea, which is weird to me because I grew up speaking Korean in
Seoul accent and dialect
Other than that, I have no idea unless Koreans, especially Korean TCKs, can point out how
I speak Korean to me in long details lol
Overall, I am destined to have an hybrid accent because I was 11 or 12 when I truly became
fluent in English, which means that there’s at least 10 years of gap between Korean and English
in my life. Also, I grew up having to switch between two languages depending on the environment
and I had almost 3 years of gap of very limited English usage during my life in Korea

P.S.: My uni best friend is domestic TCK and an immigrant. She also has an hybrid accent, but
she can cover it up to outsiders (the only time that she will reveal those are when she is angry,
which a little bit of an Asian accent will come out and when she talks with me), unlike me.
She told me that with her school (Thailand, her passport country, teach Thais English in British ways)
and her grandpa, who got masters in Europe, she had to learn and use British English
while she had to learn and use an American English with her father.
She also had English teachers from multicultural background in Thailand.

I’m starting to embrace my hybrid accents more and more because it is a solid proof that I
grew up in truly multicultural background and I know that English is one of my two primary languages.

😉 Okay, maybe not entirely, but you know what I mean. Originally, I wrote this in a letter to a friend this morning. But later, after I thought it over, it’s a perfect illustration of the difference between a TCK and their adult ex-pat parents. So to “ease your pain”, I want you to know I really do get it. Sometimes, it’s really hard to talk to our parents. Their way of seeing the world, and functioning in it, is entirely different. Here’s something that happened between me and my mom just this week. Two days ago to be exact.

My parents are on a cruise in Mexico right now. So, I send my mom an email asking if she would mind picking up 2 boxes of contact lenses for me, and I type out the prescription, brand, etc. She was really happy to do this for me, because she knows I don’t have the money right now to spend on another eye exam and prescription in the States and I will just reimburse her when she gets back. It easily costs double to triple what it is in Mexico and I don’t have vision insurance. She knows she can buy these contacts for me, much cheaper than in the States, with no Rx. She’s the “family nurse”, so she loves to be involved in our “health care.”

So in the email I advise her to ask her cabin steward to find out where the cheapest “farmacia optica” is in Puerto Vallarta and to just buy them from there. I’ve always gotten the best deals that way, by coming off the high horse, and talking to “real people” — they always know the right place to go, where you’ll get the best service, the best prices, and all that. All good, right?

Here, she has a great opportunity to get off the beaten track and go hang with local medical people in beautiful paradise, Puerto Vallarta. So what does she do???? She gets off the ship in a FANTASTIC colonial Mexican city, with all kinds of interesting places to go….she wanders down the pier and finds a taxi and tells the taxi driver to take her to Walmart!!! That’s right!!! WALMART!!! She’s in a city that has a 600 year history of Spanish conquistadores, museums, and fantastic places…AND SHE GOES TO WALMART.

She ended up spending TWICE per box of contacts. She spent MORE at Walmart in Puerto Vallarta, than she would have if she had just gone to a local farmacia optica.

That’s the difference between the adult ex-pat and the lifelong TCK. The adult expat heads for the expat community (other Americans/westerners). The TCK heads straight for the “heart” of any community and wants to “blend in” and do “as the natives”. True story! ROFL!

As an aside I asked her what Walmart was like. I was really curious to hear about this excursion. What would Walmart be like in a developing country like Mexico??? Here’s her response via e-mail. I have not edited it. Note the wording she uses very carefully. 😛
From her e-mail:
“WM is just like home, except 1) has 2 rows of Mexican souvenirs, and 2) slightly smaller.
Wherever Americans live, WM is there!”

That’s it??? That’s all you noticed?? If it were me (or any other TCK), they would have noted the brand names sold, whether lines were long, what kind of people shop there, did they have any outside vendors, etc. A TCK would probably have looked at the souvenirs and would be able to describe them.

So yeah. It’s not you. It’s THEM. ;P

My question: Do I tell her she got “taken” by Walmart and spent double what she should have paid? Or do I just keep my mouth shut and laugh quietly, while I reimburse her the money? I have no problem either way, I ‘m just curious to know how you would handle this?

This is one of those stories that one person writes a section of the story and submits it and then someone else …. The story will be a Harry Potter buy with non of the actual Characters and NOT the same plot but the same setting and everything else.

The wind was blowing and the rain beat his face as Michael climbed the hill to the entrance of the the castle Hogwarts. He was wrapped in a large traveling cloak with the hood up and the his hands tucked into his pockets. He strode into the Dinning Hall and took off his hood. He seen it many times but it always amazed him, the immense hall with the great ceiling that changed with the weather out side,witch was dark and stormy, and best of all the food piled hill on the four long tables. He slowed to a slow walk as he entered headed over to the sixth year’s part of RavenClaws table and took his seat.

I like to blog so writing bios is something I have done for quite awhile. But I never really realized until recently, just how important that has been in dealing with issues of identity. Until I discovered I was a TCK, I was sort of like a kite, flapping in the wind, blown this way and that, with no real direction. And the deep shame of it, was that I’m 43 years old! People expect that from you when you’re young, but when you’re in your 30’s and forties, it gets to be a little embarrassing and you start thinking that there is something definitely “wrong” with you because you can’t seem to “know thyself”, the way all your friends do. You look around and it seems like you are the only person you know who doesn’t have a firm grasp on who they are, what they like, don’t like, what their talents/strengths and weaknesses are.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been in and out of counselor’s offices, clergyman’s confessionals or living rooms, and you’ve driven everyone in your life crazy with your inability to “settle down and just be yourself.” Everyone has been telling you that since you were little : “Just be yourself”. Yeah, okay, but who is that??? Who is “myself”? There doesn’t seem to be any help for this, and if you were to run a search on amazon, about finding “identity”, the choices are quite slim. Unless you have had a problem with some sort of other social stigma (mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence, etc.) the issue of dealing with “identity crisis” is hardly even mentioned, if at all.

For us TCK’s the problem of identity is less about defining ourselves as it is about “identifying ourselves”, and learning where we “stop” and others “begin”. For the TCK, the answers of learning who you are often comes at the price of self sacrifice. In other words, we seem to over-identify with others, at the expense of ourselves, and often have difficulty drawing and keeping boundaries. We give up ourselves, in order to blend in, and to “accept” other cultures, and the individuals who make up those cultures. How often have you been accused of “going native”? How often have others told you “NO, I want to know what YOU like/enjoy.”

I have struggled with this my entire life, and it was a real joy to be able to write a truly definitive bio, just this morning! To help you in your own journey, take a look at mine as an example of what I am talking about : Suzanne’s New Bio

Writing a bio has always been, until today, a dry, boring list of facts about myself, without really understanding just who I am. I’ve had to write them for professional reasons, often as an accompniment to a resume, or to be included in a company newsletter. For my artwork, it’s always been about the influences in my art, or whatever facts about me make me an artist. Now, for the first time in my entire life, I feel like I’ve written not only a valid, and accurate bio, but it’s also become more than that: it’s become the answer I’ve searched for my whole life.

I really encourage anyone to do this for themselves. Here’s a few things that I think might be helpful to you, but feel free to disregard everything I say and do it entirely in your own way.

1. If you don’t enjoy writing, just say to yourself, “No one will ever see this.” You’re doing this for YOU, not for publication/critique.
2. Set a word limit. Try to do it in 500 words or less. That way, you won’t feel like you’re being forced to write a memoir.
3. Start, continue and end with humour. Laughing at ourselves is healthy and WISE. It will keep you from getting discouraged and from taking yourself too seriously.
4. Don’t just list facts. Find a way to list your favorite foods, books, whatever. Maybe your favorite travel destinations.
5. Have fun with this. You’re not using this for a resume — this is a personal exercise for yourself. If you want to make fun of your boss, or poke fun at political parties, whatever, DO IT. That too, is part of who you are.

When I came to England from Nigeria for the last time, I remember putting together a collection of different things, a little box of memories. Bizarrely not of things from Africa but of holidays and events that had happened since. Initially I had put together things like a compass, protractor, cellotape, paper pencil and a few other items together in that small wooded box and told my Mother I was going back. She told me I was better doing some studies and getting a job abroad so I changed my mind. However, that box soon became a repository for memories, museum and bus tickets, a feather I had found, shells from the beach and the likes. Perhaps I felt the need to collect them in case once again I was to lose my past once again.
Sadly after my move I had so little to remind me of my childhood abroad, all that remains are the pictures my father took, or those taken by others and put onto facebook. No wonder my memories of my childhood are gradually fading.