The American Life

America is just as I imagined it would be. Parking lots of malls are just as I imagined as they are: full of cars, shitty hot, soulless, and somehow lacking. The highways are big and wide, with cars everywhere, the people big and white, and friendly, because  this is Boston.

I was told I would not eat rice for months. I have been living on rice, chicken curry, and chocolate chip cookies for the last week. It's not that I am not open to experimentation-- just that I am still not a cow-eater, and for an untrained eye, every non-chicken meat is just as likely to be beef as any other. I am told bacon is pork, and that it's religiously permissible for a hindu to eat porks, but I have not checked, so I couldn't care more.

The Americans can sometimes seem like alien creatures, P once told me. Perhaps I'll see things that way soon someday. At the moment, I feel like an alien creature myself, unable to understand a lot of their conversations, slow in getting puns, and very awkward when it gets to ribbing and ribaldry. English is my second language, but I have always been very comfortable using it. Speaking it in a different cultural context feels like speaking an entirely new dialect, and that kind-of makes sense. The point here is, I think, that it's no one's fault, and time will take care of things, if I pay enough attention to people talking.

Sometimes, people get awkward, and things get awkward, and there's nothing much to talk about. But you have to realise that there's not such thing as that. Bu taught me that. She was like ohh, dude, we are soo out of things to talk about, what do we do now, so goodbye, go now okay, cuz it's time to go, and don't lemme bother you anymore and then she'd come up with something, and then I'd respond, and then we would go on for some more time. I don't know if I can make small-talk: I suspect I can't, but when people want to talk, they will, regardless of whether there's something to talk about or not. Unless they are really awkward. In which case, god, the non-existent entity help them. Things can get awkward sometimes, but they will go back to unawkwardness soon, so I shall fear not.