2003-04-16 - 5:54 p.m.

Are Americans Exposed to Other Cultures

I work people born in: Iran, Nepal, China, India, Burma, Italy, Korea, Spain, and the U.S. And that is just my immediate group of engineers. When I look at the engineers who used to work in my group, the list grows to include: Vietnam and Sri Lanka. Then when I look at people whom I have less interaction with, but work on my floor, the list now includes: Ethopia, England, and Iraq. I've not even talked about the planet-weirdo-space-cadets I work with. Tons of them.

Anyway, it really pisses me off when I hear the generalization: Americans aren't exposed to enough other cultures. Like hell we aren't. I hate seafood, and yet some of the food my co-workers eat day to day makes my stomach turn. I let it slide all the time, but when I tell a Star Wars joke (I've got tons of them), I've always got to explain the damn thing, because a large enough fraction of my co-workers don't even speak English at home.

I don't mind not having people understand me. I'm not that interested in having legions of followers. And the odd lunch smells ... well, that is just life. As long as my co-workers don't complain about my ghosts and what not, I'm not going to tell them what they should and shouldn't make (even when the smell makes me gag).

But I do like the idea that I can steal the good and shiny parts of cultures, to use as I see fit. While it is true that I pick around cultures, and instead of eating the full dinner, I take a small sampling of everything, and then devour the yummy parts. It is really is a big mistake to mislabel this as a failure to sample a culture.

Maybe if people would think about sampling cultures the way they think about music. If you pick up a CD sampler, of course it is going to feature mostly popular songs from a variety of artists. But if you had to make your first decision on whether or not an artist produces music you like based on any one random song, what are the chances that you'd listen to more? Even my favorite bands have some pretty lame songs. If that was all I ever saw, I'd probably not have explored further. But at the same time, when I go to a club, I don't want to hear songs from just one band all night long.

And with that in mind, I prefer to pick and choose and "listen" to samplers.

LISTENING TO: Klinik End of the Line

-=-

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