Going up in the world

I moved offices. The Albanian cleaning lady thinks that I am going up in the world because she likes my new view better than my old one. Since my firm's annual client party about two weeks ago I have added a few people to the list of people with whom I have superficial conversations. I even got invited to order in dinner and eat it in one of the conference rooms (pathetic, but a big change from two meals a day in front of the computer screen...) with a couple of associates. My favorite new "friend" is a jovial, overweight mid-level associate, C., with a doctor wife, a suburban home in New Jersey - and no "wanderlust," as I found out earlier today. As we were eating the free Chinese food oredered by the firm in honor of the newly announced partners, the conversation turned to holidays. C. is going to Puerto Rico next week and he asked about my travels around South America. As I started explaining him and M. (my oldest friend) about Bolivia and the origins of the bowler hat craze among Bolivian women, I noticed that our side of the long conference table suddenly turned quiet and everyone (including my main boss) was listening to my description of La Paz and the bowler hat ladies with a mix of horror, incomprehension and awe on their faces. At that point I could not stop and started telling them about the slums of Rio and getting robbed in La Paz and how I hadn't planned anything at all, which prompted the "no wanderlust" comment by C., various questions about how come I was not scared to death the whole time from M. and others and, one of the paralegal's story about a backpacking trip around Europe with eight girl-friends after colllege (which, was considered highly adventurous by the others, especially after she told us that she had even visited such god-foresaken places as Budapest and Prague).

I have managed to get through to some of my colleagues and got them to realize that I was not the standoffish, aloof, strange girl that some of them claimed to think I was. This will make my day-to-day interactions with them more pleasant, but it does not change the fact that I basically have nothing in common with pretty much any of them. My world and life is so alien to them (and they don't even fully understand that I am really Hungarian, which means I actually grew up in a country that they probably know nothing about); they are so "American," and I quote from a New York Times book review on two books on the recent surge of Anti-Americanism and George W.'s role therein: "'[Americans in general have] an inattentive self-centeredness unmindful of their country's deepening linkages with other countries'...In other words: We're not obnoxiously evangelistic, just obnoxiously self-involved."

I tend to agree with the author. I don't think Americans, on the whole and unlike their leaders, necessarily think that they are better than others or that everyone should be like them. They just fundamentally don't care to contemplate much outside of the life that they know and don't care to ask questions. Of course, this is not true of everyone. Some do care. Others, actually think that they are better. Here is a conversation I had with a partner at the fancy client party:

Partner 1 (describing the law firm he had recently left to join this one to two other partners and me): "Yeah, they had offices all over the place. And it was hell, they just don't do business the way we do and then they have to worry about what someone thinks in Bratislava, wherever the hell that is..."

(I am, at this point, pushing my one remaining shrimp back and forth from one end of the plate to the other.)

Partner 2, sitting next to me (laughing): "Yeah, where the hell is that?"

Partner 1 (also laughing now): "Some Slavic place, but who cares about them anyway?" He turns to me and asks: "So, where are you from?"

Me: "Hungary."

Awkward pause. I did not break the silence. I let him be be slightly embarrassed for a split-second for the wrong reason; for offending another "Slav."


(This is a link to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/books/review/14wright.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1)