Virtually Home

For the most part, living in Australia is very culturally comfortable for an American. I'm not sure how to explain the sort of general unease I felt living for a year in France, where every outing for a long time felt like a challenge. Will I know the words for all the ingredients on the restaurant's menu? Will a stranger ask me for something I won't understand? Will I end up on the wrong bus? Am I going to hit my head on the chandelier in my landlady's house again? What is the difference between these three unfamiliar dairy products? Almost none of that is a problem for us here because we speak English and likely because Australia and the USA share descent from a recent common ancestor. Australia is also a young country spun off from Britain and built and bolstered by immigrants. But there are some things. The other day I said "chalk talk", referring to an academic exercise in which someone gives a lecture without prepared slides, and people heard "c...

I used to dread September because it was truly the end of summer, academically but especially seasonally. September was like staring at an oncoming train and knowing it was going to hit me. I resented living in Minnesota, where I cringed to think of several upcoming months of not spending a second longer outside than I had to. Planning my bus trips around ensuring there was no way I'd have a missed connection in a place that left me exposed to the cold and the wind. Darkness when I woke, and darkness when I got home from work. Winter-induced asthma and dry skin were a constant irritation. My social network still largely consists of North Americans. As they publicly lament the end of the summer, Western Australia is in the full bloom of spring, which apparently arrived early this year. Flowers and trees are blooming and the weather is beautiful. Yesterday it hit 90F for the first time, but the highs have been in the low 70s all week otherwise. The arrival of fall in the northern h...

I moved to France during President Obama's first term as President. I was proud of having elected him, but dismayed to find that upon meeting me, many French citizens immediately wanted to me to explain what had been up with George W. Bush. My nation's embarrassing, belligerent recent past followed me across the Atlantic. This is a million times worse. Last night I wanted an Aussie rules football (Australian Football League, AFL) match. During the 2.5 hour broadcast, there were no fewer than three  advertisements centered around Trump jokes. Trump and his party have made us such a laughing stock they're using casual Trump jokes to sell fried chicken, among other things. The idiocy of our leadership and the cruelty of our economic and social welfare policies come up often. Yesterday at lunch, I was talking with coworkers about the interaction between cultural evolution and geography. For instance, countries as large as Australia or USA have very consistent cultures acr...

My friend Christina died last September, on the day we flew to Australia. I found out when I called the hospital to speak to her from Tulsa International Airport. Beginning to mourn her on an airplane over the Pacific was weird in several ways -- we had met on an airplane, for one. But also nothing feels very consequential in transit like that. Exhaustion and jetlag, in a darkened airplane cabin, with a bunch of sleeping strangers oriented in rows, faces glowing with the light of their in-flight entertainment systems. Nothing feels real in that environment. It's continued to be weird, though. I don't know if you've ever mourned someone on the far side of the world from where you knew them, but it's kind of a disorienting experience. I felt disconnected from my memories and my grief in a way that I seem to lack the ability to describe. Before she died, my friend went on this story-telling podcast, Risk!. At their live event in Minneapolis, she told the story of a rel...

Everyone knows what a garbage fire American political culture is right now. Since coming to Australia, I have seen very little in the way of political anything. A few billboards, a few television commercials. But until yesterday, I had never seen a political bumper sticker in Australia. I still have yet to see a yard sign, a t-shirt. The federal election is coming up soon, in mid-May. Yesterday I asked my friends when it was, and no one had any idea. It's some Saturday next month, and voting is compulsory, which means voter turnout will be in the neighborhood of 95% even though few people are even paying attention yet . Meanwhile, the 2020 American Presidential campaign season is in full, exhausting swing.

People drink a lot of tea here, but there is also an 11 a.m. break time called "tea", when people stop for a few minutes, make a cuppa, and maybe chat. In the department, people bring cake to share at tea time to celebrate having their papers accepted or their grants funded. I think it's a good social tradition. It's also a lot of cake, distributed stochastically. One day we had three cakes! But many days there are no cakes. Of late, the "autoboiler" on the wall, which dispenses boiling water from the wall on demand, has been on the fritz. The extent to which this has bothered me is troubling -- I clearly have begun both to drink more tea and also to depend on this novel (to me) technology.

One of my biggest worries when moving here was learning how to drive on the right-hand side of the car and the left-hand side of the road. That idea was both alien and disconcerting. I envisioned myself just barely staving off head-on collisions at every turn. We got here and almost immediately rented a car to facilitate our apartment-hunting, shopping for furnishings, etc. And it's true I did almost immediately scrape some paint off the rental car trying to park it in our extremely tight apartment parking garage, where our assigned space is helpfully next to a giant concrete column. But we had paid for the full insurance coverage, so it turned out fine. I mostly avoided mishaps with looking the wrong direction when crossing the road, and successfully remapped my brain to understand that right turns are now the difficult ones, the turn signal should be operated with my right hand, the gear shifter with my left. Weirdly, watching movies where Americans are driving cars from th...