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However, I truly feel, as someone who has already traveled abroad to Mexico and the UK with parents who’ve been even farther, as someone who can hardly call a night in a gay bar as an intercultural experience and who already enjoys exploring any new restaurant or food or neighborhood I can without qualms or shyness about striking up a conversation with the clerk or the waitress – just today, I tried out this new Indian spice shop called “Spice Corner & Halal Meat,” and just for asking the clerk how his day was going he kept giving me free Indian candies and cookies to try out (it was phenomenal!) – I find it problematic to simply say that my experiences here in NYC (outside of my class work) were somehow more or less intercultural than many of the experiences I’ve had in London or Edinburgh or Dallas or Austin or Monterey or San Antonio or Juarez, Mexico – simply the cultural differences between Texas and New York have been staggering and it has all made me realize just how intercultural America is as a whole and that just speaking with my classmates has taught me more about how to handle and humble myself in the face of other cultures and cultural norms than I ever anticipated. A person could rule this city simply by being polite. I can’t list you all the times I’ve had people thank me or ask where I was from or offer me free things simply for inquiring after their days or for thanking them, talking with them. Also, the pace change is absolutely monstrous. I know I typed a bit about this in a previous blog entry but it really was a relief to hear someone else say what I’d been hoping and wondering and suffering:
The Culture of Rush, of always having to be doing something, is a destructive cycle that is socially reproduced by all New Yorkers – a pressure that if you aren’t constantly moving or checking your watch or doing something or out and about then clearly you are wasting your time and should feel friendless and lonely and pitiable for so sadly pissing away your time.
And having always lived in the South, I suppose, and in the suburbs from the suburbs of Durham in North Carolina to Kentucky to Texas, and with my much more laid back parents and the casualness of SU – I was thoroughly unprepared for this change, even with all of my time spent in Austin or Dallas or London – it very much has struck home to me that urban culture is something that must be lived in order to be felt or understood. It has also struck home to me how and why urban environments seem (and usually are) inherently more intercultural than suburban areas. This is really what my entire course has been over, I suppose. Understanding why cultural enclaves exist within urban centers and why the suburbs remain largely white – and it’s all to do with entrapment, redlining, block busting, inherited wealth or inherited poverty, transportation issues, environmental racism, and – a term I actually came up with myself – ecological redlining (along with a whole score of other systematic prejudices). And in this way, I’ve learned, that my urban experience and my intercultural experiences are really inextricably interrelated.
Tomorrow after class I have a meeting with a literary agent (I can’t wait!!) and then we’re going on a class field trip through some parks and neighborhoods – the details aren’t clear yet, but I’ll absolutely be posting about what happens there – and I’m also planning, at some point, to visit a sex shop because, as Dr. G has pointed out to our Paideia cohort before as well as to her Human Sexuality classes, that can be an intercultural experience all on its own. And, to be honest, I’ve never been in one before because it makes me uncomfortable. So, we’ll see what happens.
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