Saturday, September 15, 2018

A Taste of Spain

Next month, I am starting my first real job in a year. In fact, it has been exactly one year since the accident, although the job starts a few weeks after that. It is difficult to believe it has been a year. Time was crawling quite slowly for a while there, but now I think it might actually be healing all wounds. When you are in the middle of something, it is hard to see anything else. A year later, the picture changes.

In that year, I have taken two serious trips out of the country. I went to Miyajima in May and Minneapolis in July. Next month, I'm going to Barcelona. Like Miyajima, that will be a completely new place to me. Normally, when I go somewhere new, I think about what it will be like. I'm pretty sure we all do. What I really like is looking back after I have been and seeing how different it really was to how I thought it would be.

I worked in Paris a few years ago. I thought I knew a lot about Paris before I went. I know pretty much nothing about Barcelona and I had never even heard of Miyajima before I went there, but I had been to Tokyo a few times, so at least I knew a little something about the country. I had never been anywhere in France before Paris, but of course, I had seen a million pictures and heard all kinds of things about the city and country. Since living in a Paris apartment was absolutely nothing like staying in a hotel for a short trip, I am assuming none of the travel books about Barcelona will tell me much either. I'm actively avoiding doing any research about the city. I don't know if that is a good idea or not, but I know that looking up tourist sights would be pointless. It would be better if I looked for grocery stores.

I think the biggest difference between Paris and Barcelona, other than the language, culture, history and people, will be that I had all of my senses in Paris. The first time you walk around a new city, you take everything in – sights, sounds, smells and tastes. Tokyo is overwhelming at first. It just hits you hard all at once. A city like Amsterdam is much calmer. Paris is an excellent city for all of your senses. Unfortunately, I will never smell or taste Barcelona. I'm not sure how much that will affect this trip.

I lost my sense of smell a year ago. I'm mostly pretty used to it by now. There are a few advantages. Walking through the perfume counters to get into a department store does not bother me anymore. I can go to food stalls that sell durian and stinky tofu. Best of all, I no longer smell the selfish smokers and their vile cancer twigs. On the downside, I would never notice a gas leak in the apartment. But how often does that happen? Rotting food is a more serious concern.

Miyajima is an impressively beautiful island, but I have no real emotional connection to it. Is that because I could not smell anything or because I was only there overnight? The Minneapolis reunion was less nostalgic than I expected. I saw some old friends and we spent some time together, but I never felt like I was finally home after a long absence. There were no familiar aromas to trigger long dormant memories.

When you have anosmia, the doctors seem to focus on how much that will affect your sense of taste. Taste is still technically there, but nothing will ever taste like anything. Instead of saying smell affects taste, they should say that smell affects flavor. Taste incorporates most of your senses. I can still feel if something is hot or spicy, but the spice has no flavor. I can hear if something is crunchy, but in a blind taste test, I would not know the difference between a tortilla chip and a cockroach. When people say that mashed potatoes taste different from chopped potatoes, that is mostly from the tactile receptors in the mouth, assuming all other ingredients are the same. The potatoes will still have that potato flavor either way. I can easily distinguish between mashed and chopped, but they both taste like sterile cardboard to me.

What the doctors never point out is how much smell affects memories. While I could see and hear how much Minneapolis changed and stayed the same, I could smell absolutely nothing. I never walked into anyone's house and smelled the same fabric softener that my mother used when I was 8 or sat beside a lake and instantly remembered that time we all went swimming 15 years ago. I spent some time in Chelsea's swimming pool. It was a standard American backyard pool, but since I could not smell the chlorine or the wet cement around the pool, I never had flashbacks to any of the other million times I was in an American swimming pool. Typing that sentence brings back more memories than actually being in the pool.

I went to the house where I lived at the end of high school. There are a lot of memories in there, but they have since remodeled the kitchen and changed the color patterns throughout the house. Visually, it is not what I used to know. Ryan's mother made me cookies. I want to say that is what people do in Minnesota, but feeding guests is probably the most common practice throughout the world. Her cookies should have brought back a flood of memories. Instead, they were small discs of cardboard. They looked good, though.

I don't doubt that my trip to Minneapolis would have been more emotional if I were not olfactorily challenged. The real question is what Barcelona will be like. If I come back and say I did not like it, will that be because I could not taste the food or because Barcelona was simply not for me?

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

High School Reunion
8. When Bellyfeel Leads to Goodthink

I had almost no time in Minneapolis on my last day, so I spent the morning at my ex-boyfriend's mother's house. I don't know when we will see each other again. It was six years between the last visits. She is always welcome to come out to me, but it is easier for me to go to her.

My flight to Chicago left just after noon. It is only a 90 minute flight, but since it left from an American airport, I had to be there entirely too early. A 90 minute flight out of Hong Kong would board about 15-30 minutes before takeoff. There are other places to check in besides the airport check in counter, but if you go that route, you should get there about an hour before the flight time. Once you have your boarding pass, however you get it, getting through the x-ray machines and immigration can take up to 30 minutes, if it is crowded.

None of that would fly in the United States. The politicians want the people to fear everything and everyone. Paranoia leads to the illusion of security. Actual security would take too much effort. It is far easier to pay some people slightly more than minimum wage and give them a week of half-assed training. The consequence of Americans living in fear, and their elected leaders feeding into it all, is that American airports are the most cumbersome and least efficient of any I have ever seen anywhere in the world. Everyone puts up with it because that's the way people are. You don't like what your government is doing? Oh, well. What can you do? That is not only an American attitude. That is all over the world. Maybe some day people will realize that they vastly outnumber those who claim to rule over them. But for now, I have to spend the afternoon in a shopping mall/airport just to fly 300 miles. If you include airport bureaucracy, flying takes the same amount of time as driving. What can I do?

There was more bullshit at O'Hare to keep the world safe from democracy, but eventually, I was on a Chinese plane headed to China. I felt a sense of relief once that plane took off. Let's think about that for a second. I was glad to get out from under the blunt force trauma of American bureaucracy and felt at peace when I knew I was going into China. The People's Republic of Bloody Communist China. There is more than enough bullshit bureaucracy in China. Far more than enough. But I would rather go through a Chinese airport than an American airport any day of the week.

When I was growing up, we were constantly told that the United States was the greatest country in the history of countries. God himself pointed down at the good part of North America and said, “Let this land have the best systems of education, justice, science and government in the entire universe. It will have superior athletes and better sports than those pesky Europeans. And it will be a shining beacon of freedom for everyone, except black people, women, brown immigrants, poor people, anyone who sleeps with the wrong person … Hell, in the beginning, they will even hate the Irish. Imagine that.”

In my teen years, I realized that the United States had a few flaws, but that was ok. “Are education ain't perfect, but it be the most best in the world,” they told us. “The judicial system is not perfect, but it is the best in the world.” “The (whatever is broken) is not perfect, but it is the best in the world.” For several generations, Americans were told that we have the best of everything in the world. Just like the people of North Korea or Saudi Arabia, we believed whatever they told us. Americans are mostly pretty ignorant of the outside world, so how would we know what they are doing in other countries. And people from other countries are always trying to move to the United States. We must be the best, right?

Then came the internet. Now, you can talk to people who live in other countries while they are sitting in those countries. The funny thing is, the world is not all jealous of us. Many of them know they got a much better education. A few of them live in countries where the police and courts treat everyone equally, regardless of race, gender or income. Most of them have passports and travel around the world. They see what foreign countries are like rather than rely on government propaganda.

Apologists will say there are places worse than the United States. That is absolutely true. There are still countries where it is illegal to be gay or where women are property or minorities are second class citizens. At least in the United States, women, homosexuals and minorities are treated with dignity and respect, right?

So now we have gone from the United States is the greatest country in the world to the United States is not the absolute worst. How did that happen? Is it the president's fault? Is it the media's fault? Maybe it's those damn video games. Or, here's a thought, maybe the United States never had the best of everything. Maybe the United States has always been a paradise for a select few, a nightmare for marginalized groups and an above average society for everyone in between. Maybe it has not really gone to hell in a handbasket. In many ways, the country is better than it has ever been, certainly for most minorities. There is enormous room for improvement, especially if you want to catch up with some of those northern European countries, Japan or New Zealand. There is also plenty of room to slip further behind. Many of our leaders want to go backward, mostly to a point where they could skim more money without getting arrested. A tiny few want to move forward for everyone's benefit. Most just want to cling onto their jobs for as long as they can.

When I lived in the United States, none of these thoughts used to cross my mind while waiting at the airport. I was a good citizen. I did nothing to upset the Party. But back then, going through an airport was quick and easy. It's funny how authoritarianism makes you think about things.