Geek Rant vs The Immigrant Condition.

  Greetings Geekranters!

 I am sorry that it has been so long since the last of my epistles graced the glowing screens of the electronic super-highway. I have been distracted, of late, the pressures and stresses of work, relationships and life in general combining to limit the desire I have to continue my blog. I could leave the subject of the distance between each blog post at that. A small, badly constructed sentence, with too many commas, about vague stress and life. That would be to do you a disservice, dear readers, to become, if you will an unreliable narrator, which I never want to be.

All of the existential stress and angst that I deal with has an impact on my writing, on the very reason for this blog. If I'm to talk about the differences between the U.S.A and the U.K., at some point that will affect my mental state.

I must make a confession, at least to myself as much as anyone else. I am an immigrant. A title that has been in the news for much of the past ten years or so. I am not the sort of immigrant who makes headlines on television, with “waves” of me waiting at border posts. I have not fled atrocities in my native country, I have not struggled across rain swelled rivers, raging seas or burning deserts to get to this place. There was no great human bravery in my journey here, other than the basic human bravery that we can all partake in which allows us to step out into the unknown.

I treat this that as "a confession" of sorts because so often I think that I try to ignore and hide from that simple truth. For most of my life, this has not been true of me. For most of my life I lived less than a mile from the hospital that I was born in. I emigrated to the United States when I was 32 years old and until that time I had never before felt what it means to be separated from the society that I came from and, by extension, the society that I now live in.

I can act with bravado, as if my exposure to the culture, literature, products and politics of America prior to my moving here somehow make my adjustments to this life, inconsequential. When I do that, I am invariably acting against what my heart is actually feeling.

Living in a country other than the one that you were born in, can at times be both unbelievably wonderful and impossibly difficult in equal measure. The subconscious cultural shorthand of what we see as our "own people" that we have developed through sheer osmosis, is no longer present.

I am not a child of this culture, no matter how much I may like Hollywood movies and Mcdonalds burgers. That is not to say that America is a culture that is lacking in some way, but simply that it is not the world of my youth and therefore always somewhat alien to me.

I am an immigrant and sometimes that status can be a source of great joy and sometimes of great loneliness. I came here following the call of my heart and the love of my life and it has never failed to be the right decision. Still, as Robert Frost noted "I have taken the road less traveled by, and it has made all the difference."

I write my blog, a lot of the time, to try and speak about the differences between one culture and another. My blogs have, upon occasion have been many things, but most of all, they are about a man miles from the place of his birth trying to make sense of it all. Now it is certainly true that we all experience these feelings in part, if we only ever move to the town next to the one we were born in. 

Somehow, however, the distance between all I was and all I am, can make this feeling even more disorientating than it would otherwise. 

It can be tempting for all of us to believe that the Internet has made the world so much smaller than it once was. That borders are no longer barriers, barriers to nations that are unimportant now, the preserve of old men who can't move on with the rest of the world. We are a global village, they say. The problems of this world are not mine to solve, or to comment on for that matter, still I would speak on what little I have experienced.

It seems that the closer we get online and in an electronic world that sometimes seems more real than the one that we spend each day living and working in, the further away we get from each other in that physical world. 

In the same moment that the Internet has given me a wonderful life here and an equally wonderful wife to live it with and all the technology to keep me in touch with home, it has also failed to make it any easier for me to adjust to this place with all of its complexities and simplicities.

As such the technology both unites and divides. It helps us find our voices but does not bring with it the wisdom and saving actions we need to change the world. We are all experts in our own lunchtimes, we are in community but still separated by culture and expectation.

So I write these words to make some sense of all of these things and sometimes I run from writing them for the same reason. I don't intend to make definitive statements, yet many times I do. I can write as if I am oblivious to the world's tragedies, as if I the only person that matters and I can be broken to tears by an internet video. I am a walking contradiction, after all, just as this whole, crazy, human race is one huge contradiction. We are separate but we are also one.

So I'm thankful that some of you are still reading what I write and I apologise for my absence. I also apologise if I ever say anything that offends.

Next time, I'm sure I'll get back to something humourous and interesting that happened to me recently.

 Until then, I hope that this explains some of the feelings many immigrants must feel deep down.

 Goodbye Geekranters!