Notes from a Small Island

Sorry Bill Bryson.  I can't help it if your book title is an apt title for this update.
It's funny, the rhythms that get into my head: words and phrases tripping across the wrinkles of my brain like music notes tripping down a staff, up along scales and arpeggios.  My effusive mind overflows with music: a kind of intuitive remastering of dialogue, the sounds of birds, airplanes flying over head, footsteps shuffling across cobblestone memories that eventually reaches up into my consciousness, into my heart, and is made manifest in my emotions.  I've been accused of being sensitive, overly so, but I've never found a way to NOT feel everything.  It's a gift, albeit one I'm still learning to master.

And as my cups run over I find myself in stark contrast to the British attitudes that I honestly cannot adopt.  After living here, truly among British people and not as some glorified tourist, I've noticed that the British waste very little and that includes emotions.
It's a kind of social and emotional economy that utterly baffles me.  Words are not wasted on hyperbole or exaggeration, there is no such thing as wishing out loud even though you know your wish is impossible.  No verbal or emotional flight of fancy.  Not even the so-called British sarcasm spares any extra emotion: friendly jibes are delivered with such dead-pan that, to the untrained ear, sound like serious insults.  It's more than just "stiff-upper-lip" here - emotions beyond "fine" and "happy" are carefully controlled and compartmentalized and forgotten about with little more than a cup of tea to mark their occurrence.
It sometimes makes me feel lonely.  Among Americans "I want a puppy" is just a way of saying "That puppy is so cute!  It would be nice to have one."  In that statement there is an understanding of the feasibility of this desire: if the wisher has a small, cramped apartment with no money, it's a given that it will probably not happen until the circumstances change.  In Britain, however, saying "I want a puppy" more than three times to your British boyfriend and you are taken seriously: a situation that not only increasingly aggravates your boyfriend but makes you seem irresponsible and out of touch with reality. Do you see what I mean?  An economy of emotion.  And I can't adopt such an economy because I've always had emotion to spare.

Although, I could be stereotyping/generalizing.  It's entirely possible since the sample of the British population on which I am drawing these conclusions is quite small.  Besides, there are those British people that, even if they still have a sense of emotional economy, are not afraid to reach out and ask "Are you okay?" when my emotions are tumbling through my face.  Those Brits make things easier and make me feel less alien and I thank them.

Still, I am homesick for the States a bit.  Not for the loud, boisterous, 'MERICA world but more for a place where saying "Al-U-min-um" is "correct" (rather than "Al-u-MIN-ium"), you're not constantly told "You don't speak English, you speak American", and your accent doesn't mark you out as a "foreign" person.
Living in the States I always felt sort of alien, like my attitudes marked me as something other than American.  I thought that in coming to Britain that would change and I would feel at home here.  In some ways I do.  I love London more than any other city and even in the worst parts of that city I feel safe.  What I didn't expect was being singled out.  Somehow, the attitudes that made my British boyfriend tell me I was born on the wrong side of the Pond are not enough.  I need to assimilate more than I want to in order to honestly belong.