I'm confused

All this time in England, I've been telling people that America is the land of convenience. A land where anything private runs smoothly and where good service is paramount. A land where a public gym is like something out of Dante, yes, but a land where you can refill your prescriptions on the phone or online and pick them up an hour later at your 24 hour pharmacy. In England, I was dismayed at the NHS prescription refill process. I was not only dismayed, I was in disbelief. "I have to BRING a piece of PAPER to the doctor's office, wait TWO days, and then go back and GET the piece of PAPER?" After a while, I came up with the idea of mailing my refill request and enclosing a self addressed stamped envelope, but it still seemed terribly inefficient and backwards, and I never quite accepted it. I was always looking forward to being back in the US when I pondered these matters. In my mind, it remained the land of late-night shopping every night, of 24 hour supermarkets, of supreme customer service and of easy commercial transactions. Now I'm back and I'm confused.

You see, in England, I haven't used my checkbook in years. Everything's online. I've paid my rent by direct debit, which means my money goes straight out of my bank account into my landlord's account. No paper. Nothing in the mail. No fee. I've used the same system to pay all my bills. Even if the bill was different amounts each month. I've even used the same system to pay a friend back when I owed her money. My mother-in-law had used the same system to give me a birthday deposit. No checks. No fee. It's easy and it's efficient.

So my husband and I expected the system to be the same or better when we got here. He expected it because I have been telling him that this is the land of convenience. Me, I guess, because of some kind of romanticized nostalgia for my homeland coupled with a lack of real experience in such things, as I left when I was 20.

I bank with HSBC in the US now, a big international bank which I would expect to be modern, green (at least to pay lip service to the consciences of their customers) and efficient. Instead, I find that paying a bill online merely triggers the bank to mail the company I'm paying a check. I'm sorry, but this is totally stone age as far as I'm concerned. There is also no way to make an online payment to a friend or family member or anyone else. The only system is the above mentioned bill pay system. Which we found out when my husband tried to make an electronic payment to my account (different accounts, same bank). You see, he had the money to pay the rent in his account but no checkbook. I had a checkbook but not enough money. So the payment was made from his account to mine. I received nothing. My rent check bounced. Then I received a bank check in the mail, reading "Please accept payment from our mutual client." What a farce!

I expect public things to be shambolic here. I have experienced bureaucratic nightmares aplenty. But I am really confused as to why the world's most enthusiastic free-market economy is so backwards in its day-to-day financial systems. Or is it because I'm not rich? Maybe it's easier for them- in that either Gold accounts or Business accounts come with special privileges, or in that the fees mean little to them. Or maybe the British banks are too generous and have failed to extract every penny they can from their customers, while their American cousins are taking their customers for everything they've got. Heck, most commercial banks in England abolished their ATM machine fees years ago due to public outcry. Now I'm traipsing all over the place looking for an HSBC branch everytime I want to take out $20, and no one seems to think this is weird. I guess this is the hard lesson of advanced capital. Well maybe not THE hard lesson, I'll leave that to Naomi Klein. But perhaps the US banks figure why make things so easy when you can charge extra for them? Here, if you want to make a truly electronic payment, you have to pay a hefty wire transfer fee. So I guess I've figured it out. But I'm still pissed. Maybe I should re-title this post "The grass is always greener." Maybe getting my prescription refills so easily is more about the drug industry maximizing profit than providing a convenient customer experience... Oh.

"Your blog is malnourished." -R

So, what's been going on since my last post? I'd like to answer this with a tag cloud. "visa. flight. wedding. find apartment. move. job search. manifest new life where I am very crafty creative industrious and bloggy." Well the last one might not really work as a tag, but you get the idea.

So we moved to New York! We love it. And now, after two years in London and one month in New York, I'd like to give some initial thoughts:

This country is litigation mad! I guess I knew this but I never experienced it before. I mean official bureaucracy, yes. I have had my share of that- (see my previous post). But you need a credit check to get an apartment here. You need to sign non-disclosure forms and tax forms and authorize background checks on your "character" when you go to a job interview! It's madness.

Free stuff everywhere! New York is like a living garage sale. There's free stuff on the street, curb alerts on Craigslist, all kinds of impromptu street sales, stoop sales, and community swaps. Now mind you when we held a sidewalk sale on our street in Hoxton and advertised up and down Kingsland Road, to get rid of some stuff before we left London, we were met with everything from a lack of enthusiasm to total fear. English people don't really seem to get the concept of self-organized sales; they're more comfortable with a car boot or a jumble in a designated area. I do find it something of a paradox that the land of free market capital is also the land where commerce can easily get back in the hands of the people. But they probably just look at it as trying to make a buck. I'm the one who walks down the street past a lady selling some old baby clothes on the front stoop of her brownstone, eyes shining, and murmuring about anarcho-syndicalism.

People talk to each other here! Strangers! The other day I was in Williamsburg, which is pretty much like Shoreditch only a bit scruffier, waiting for my friend to meet me for brunch. Meeting for brunch at the weekend, with a Mimosa (Buck's fizz) or Bloody Mary, seems to be very New York. It's not much different from meeting for brekkie in London, except there's no beans or tomatoes or decent tea, and you're allowed to get a bit tipsy. So as I was standing on the corner in front of a diner, I saw a lady with a dog pass a man. He asked her if that was a beagle. She said... I'm gonna go to quotes here:

LADY: "Yep. He's a beagle. Pet a beagle and you'll have good luck all day!"
MAN: "I won't get bit, will I?"
LADY: "No, no. He won't bite."

Then they get into a conversation, which goes on for about 10 minutes. This lady tells the whole story of how she found this dog. The vet says he's about 8. She thinks he's a retired hunting dog. Sometimes he just sits on the sofa a looks at her and she wonders if he's happy. The man suggests she takes him to a park or wood, and gives him something to smell. Then she should hide the item and he can hunt it.

MAN: "You see, there's a big difference between what makes us happy and what makes them happy."

Turns out this guy is like a dog whisperer. I love how people in New York just start talking to anyone randomly, and this story also leads me to another observation:

People in New York are CRAZY about their pets. First of all EVERYONE has a pet. Everyone has a cat or two and a dog. When we were apartment hunting, we started out looking at sub-lets, but it was soon clear that that wouldn't work out because everyone had a pet, and I'm allergic. The people across from us have two cats who eye us through the kitchen window whenever we get something out of the refrigerator. The neighborhood is full of pet salons, doggy day cares, and professional dog walkers. Yes, that's a job here. People give their pets birthday presents and christmas presents. People send their pets to pet resorts. It's like a child substitute for people who are too busy or selfish to have children. I don't mean to sound judgemental. It's just weird that so many people treat some animals like their own children and don't afford the same sense of kindness to the animals on their plates. But hey, I guess it's better than living in a country where ALL the animals are treated cruelly. Here it's just most of them.

Food! The food here is so freakin good. I mean there is good food in London, and in our neighborhood we were especially spoiled with great Turkish food and Vietnamese. But that was it. Decent pizza and more recently Mexican can be had in London, but you have to seek it out. Here, it's everywhere. There are so many good places everywhere. There are thousands of pizza places all over this city where you can get a slice for $2.50 and it's unbelievably good. Tacos. Deli sandwiches. Eggplant parmigiana. Any time I eat something here I pretty much reaffirm that we made the right decision.

One thing I miss about London, among many, is the free museums. Museum entry costs a fortune here! There's a real class divide; high culture is a luxury. Luckily you can get free tickets to fringe theater and off-broadway shows on Craigslist. The other area where New York clearly falls short is parks. There are two big parks we can access here, Central and Prospect. But neither really live up to London parks from what I've seen. So what's the conclusion of my research so far? Strangely, or maybe not strangely, I am dazzled by New York, but I don't feel it's my city yet. I'm presently still loyal to London, but a few more slices of pizza and a free blender off the street might turn me into to a true New Yorker.

The Trials

American bureaucracy is a nightmare! I can't believe how piece of cake getting an English passport was compared to this. Funny how that was easier than RETURNING TO MY OWN COUNTRY. R and I really underestimated this. We knew it wasn't going to be as easy as it was for my great-grandparents, catching a boat from Bremen and turning up at Ellis Island with $50 in their pocket and some distant relative's address scribbled on a piece of paper. We knew it wouldn't be like that, but Jeez. It's been a stress-a-thon.

The main hurdle now is that I have to prove the USA is my real domicile. Never mind the fact that I've lived in the UK for 12 years, have a British passport, and feel pretty much half and half. No. I have to "sever my ties with the UK," provide tax records, property records, and get microchipped. Well, the latter is made up but feels very plausible after the crap they've thrown at us. The lady who interviewed R was a real sourpuss. My mom's asking me "Did you tell them your flights are booked and your wedding is all planned and you have to be there in a week?" Bless her, I didn't have the heart to tell her that these people are not interested in human concerns. It's papers that matter, printed papers in black ink in duplicate, and lots of small green ones.

decade of my birth

Sometimes I can't really connect with the fact that I was alive in the seventies. Ok, only for the last couple years. And I was obviously too small to engage with the realities of 1970's America very deeply. But still.

It seems to me that everything was somehow more authentic then. It seems like that was the real America. I mean, we had the method actors, De Niro and Kaitel and Streep, we had Coppola and Scorcese at their peaks. Sure they're all still around, but when I look at Meet the Fockers, hell, when I look at Charlie Sheen... it's hard not to think that those were the good old days.

Vietnam was there, I mean the war, the cause. The dawn of health food in California was a joke for a Woody Allen film. The TV was big and convex. There were woods all around my suburban town, enough for my uncle to have a salt lick for deer in his backyard. The bad economy. The population explosion. Crime-ridden NYC. Lines for gasoline. And big cars! Why does all that sound so great? And not just great, but somehow more durable and tangible than anything I can say about life now?

As for London, I guess London was full of wooden buses and buck teeth, bad plumbing and bad food. Jellied eels and the like. Right? I don't have the references for the UK that I have for America. Obviously. I mean I have a skeletal framework. But basically London didn't exist before 1997 as far as I'm concerned. When I arrived there, on my twentieth birthday, I expected it to be like Ab Fab. That's why I was there darling.

I wonder if my kids will look at old pictures and laugh at my haircuts, as I did. ("That was the style!" my mom insisted.) I wonder if they will be disappointed that I haven't done some of the things or been in some of the "scenes" that they will later come to associate with the nineties and the first decade of the 21st century, just as I never forgave my parents for living in upstate New York in 1969 and not going to Woodstock.

I wonder how long this retrolicious, all the past is for sale, hey remember when, I love 19childhood-memory-of-our-target-market thing will go on? I feel like buying up everything about the seventies before they run out of stock. I feel like connecting with the reality of the decade of my birth- which is clearly impossible, and exactly what some man in a board room came up with, smoking and laughing evilly, circa 1986.

what’s happening to me?

There’s quite a lot of variables you see. Let’s look for a moment at the constellation that is now. I'm listening to a song which is stylistically locused in 1970’s America, but it might just be a very convincing pastiche. Browsing the web I find a page for the Catholic school I attended from ages 5 – 12. The uniforms are the same and two of my teachers are still there, as is the school nurse, who must be in her sixties by now. I look at the map on the wall, and realize how far away I am from the world that made me. I scan the school calendar- “Saturday February 10, ziti dinner!” And even more heartbreaking- “Friday February 9, set up for ziti dinner.” So many layers of nostalgia, like the most sorrowful filo pastry in the world. I guess that would be a burnt one, or one with a not-so-tasty filling.

It's hard to define that suburban American world, which I left ten years ago now, on what sometimes feels like an extended vacation from my real life. Impossibly cozy and mildly oppressive. There's a certain brand of feel-good philosophy which is ceaselessly forwarded like a garbled e-greeting-card, willfully upbeat. It's the kind of world where, when faced with difficult news on the television, one only smiles gently and says “I just don’t like to believe that things like that really happen.”

There’s my laptop, which I have named and personified, and feel attached to. I feel like she (Periwinkle) is an individual, that she is different from other Compaq Presarios, and if something (god forbid) should happen to her, I would not only feel a distressing sense of disconnection to the world, but I would not be able to replace her. She’s different because she’s mine.

There is the kitchenette in the corner of my apartment in the East of Turkey. In an apartment building erected 50 or 60 years ago, it has the feel of an even older apartment in the States. One that an old person has been living in for an awfully long time, without making any changes. I like to think that, like Neal Cassidy in the beginning of On the Road, I’m living in a “cold water flat.” Of course there is a hot shower, but the other taps are indeed cold water only. And my shower at the moment is cold, too. I’ve run out of gas and I’ve forgotten to order another canister. Ok... I didn’t forget. It’s just I don’t know how to say canister in Turkish, and I don’t want to sound like a fool.

I did call the water company. I’m an old hand at that, since I was in Istanbul. Most people in Turkey order these big containers of water for their homes, about the size that go in water coolers in offices. But here, instead of a stand, you have a handy pump which you stick into the cooler, like a straw for a really big, really thirsty person. Of course it’s nearly impossible to gage the amount of pressure needed to fill a small glass of water without overflowing. But it's become a kind of game.

I called them up and delivered my lines: “Good evening. I’d like one container of water please.” The man here replied just as they do in Istanbul- “Buyurun,” which means lots of things, like “go ahead,” or “help yourself,” or “can I help you?” I gave him my four digit code. I'm pretty sure I said all this correctly. And yet because of the speed, maybe because of the accent, the man stopped me and said “new teacher?”

“Yes,” I said. There was a silence, words in the background, and then a new voice on the phone.

“Hello. Gutten’tag.”

“Hello,” I said.

“Specken zie deutsche?”

“No.”

Silence.

“My number,” I said slowly, “is 6 4 2 7.”

“2?”

“6…..4…..2…..7”

Then I listened while the two men I had given my number to compared notes in the background. Satisfied with the non-falsifiability of their results, the second man got back on the phone.

“Ok!” he said.

“Ok!” I said.

What pleasure every mundane yet successful transaction of life can bring! I’m not feeling waves of melancholoy anymore; maybe it’s the upbeat nature of the song I’m listening to now, or the knowledge that I’m about to launch this little reflection onto my blog, where everyone can read my thoughts, and I can feel validated. God Bless My Blog. And you my friends. And you strangers; or should I say "friends I haven't met yet"? I’m off now. I’ll be tucking myself in bed to reflect on my dog-eared copy of "Chicken Soup for the Soul."