This is a guy who is still embarrassed about jokes and quips he missed twenty-five years ago. He remembers them, what they were intended to mean, what he thought they meant, how he answered, how long it took him to get the jokes, and how he tried to make up for having missed them. This is a guy who has to keep a close watch and a tight reign on the paranoid factor.
Now put this same guy into a culture he has admired for decades, a language environment that he kind of gets, but doesn’t really, and a social context that is so responsive, so teasing and witty, so volatile and unpredictable, that his head is always spinning even when he fools himself into believing he’s keeping up with it all. Then crack a joke. Watch him respond seriously. Watch him get the joke really, really late. Watch him try to formulate in his caveman Italian a witty retort that keeps the attempted, and very welcome, rapport rolling along. Watch him fail, not just with an inch or two of clumsy timing, but by miles – or rather, kilometers. Watch him do this everyday at least a dozen times. Watch him write about it on his blog.
However bewildering the experience of adjusting to a new language and culture is, it is also the most exhilarating, remarkable, challenging, threatening, life-altering experience this guy remembers having. And you will recall that he remembers jokes he didn’t get twenty-five years ago. And twenty-five was a random number, he remembers jokes he didn’t get forty years ago. Maybe more. At some point it’s better not to count. So if a parallel to these past few months cannot be remembered by this guy, it never happened.
Okay, one possible parallel for you theatre types. These months have been like getting-off-book week with a really huge role in a really complicated play, over and over and over and over and over again, without ever getting off book. Take a minute for that to sink in, then we’ll continue.
Got it?
The joke that precipitated this particular blurt of writing was a simple one, which of course, makes the humiliation in missing it even worse. This guy went out with a bunch of people, people he likes very much, and their combined five little boys. They went to a new place on Piazza del Popolo, very stylish, very good, very quirky, very noisy.
Now, if you know this guy well at all, you know that smiling and pretending to hear is a skill he has honed to… well, let us say, he has been practicing for a long, long time. So, the two-plus hours with these wonderful people and their even more wonderful little boys (and really, no ironic subtext there, he adores them all) was also spent trying to hear not only words spoken, but Italian words spoken, and sentences that were broken into pieces, and conversation that was torn into segments by the clamor of little boys.
And if that were not enough, this guy drank a beer.
The whole gang then left the restaurant. It was quiet on the square. The troupe of adorable boys ran into the piazza, glorying in their little boy-ness. One of the fathers turned to this guy, and he’s a guy this guy is very fond of, and says, in Italian; you live in the area don’t you. This guy nodded. The father follows, or are you always in transit? It’s actually pretty funny in Italian, hard to explain why. Beat. Beat. This guy says, oh I live really, really close. The father chuckles and turns away. This guy gets the joke. This guy has no idea how to follow. The vocabulary isn’t there, nothing is there, especially not after one beer.
Good dark beer, the waiter said, very good, even though it’s Italian; it’s good beer anyway. It was, too. But this guy is a lightweight. And he missed a joke. And he happily blames the beer, though he also knows that his Italian improved once he’d drunk half of it. The mistake may have been his drinking all of it.
So the point of this ramble?
If you want to feel that your personality has been put into a microwave oven, on high, for twenty minutes, and been put there four times a day every day you’ve been in a place, do what this guy did and go try to live in a foreign land as an outsider on the inside. If you would ask him, he can’t really say that it’s been all that easy – but it sure has been good.
You begin to see yourself as something other than a collection of words, opinions, charm, projects on the resume, and good timing. And every insecurity you have ever protected from the fierce elements of social living is set up for full and scrupulous review every night as you drift off to sleep and more or less instantly upon waking the next morning. And little by little you become indifferent to those insecurities and collections, and turn instead towards the glory of living, the history of the moment, and the mystery of everything – and the fact that outside of mathematics, there is no such thing as a straight line.
This guy is actually pretty happy. Even the relapses aren’t so bad. But he thinks he’ll stay away from beer for awhile, just to be sure.