Be Careful What You Wish For...

So there was a fire down the street on Wednesday.  Biggest blaze this side of town has seen, and I happened to be sleeping soundly in my bed when it happened.  Was it my fault?  Probably.  I have strange influence over these kinds of things.

After Monday I just sort of gave up on trying to live it up in Glasgow.  I didn't have much class this week, so I basically sat around my apartment, wrote a lot in my journal, read books without reading them, called my parents a bunch of times at inconvenient hours.  It wasn't until last night that I pulled myself out of my rut and went out with some friends.  We went to the cider festival currently going on at a local bar.  I got blueberry cider.  It tasted like blue, but I suppose that's what I get for ordering blueberry cider.

After drowning my blues in blueberry cider, I went to the QMU with Sarah, Vu, and couple of Sarah's friends from Dartmouth.  The union was hosting an open mic night, which mostly consisted of pre-pubescent-looking boys performing acoustic versions of songs by The Killers.  Sarah noticed a guy who kept looking over at me from across the room.  I didn't pay him any mind until the guy came over, sat down, and asked me my name.  He was from Quebec, and we briefly spoke in French for a minute before he launched into a series of questions, asking me where I was from, what I was studying, what I was writing, etc.  He seemed pretty nice, but boy was he taking liberties with the whole "stupid American" stereotype.  The first question he asked me when I told him I went to school in Wisconsin was if I was inbred.  Cute?  I thought he was just making a really bad joke, but later when he introduced me to his friends, the tactlessness persisted.  He kept telling them that I was from Wisconsin, and by the third time I corrected him, telling him I was from D.C., I actually wondered if he was making up facts about me on purpose just so I could meet a stereotype.  He told me D.C. wasn't a real city because it has "so many rich people," obviously basing his vision of the average D.C. residential neighborhood on Pennsylvania Avenue.  I asked him if he had actually ever been to D.C. and of course he hadn't.  He also mentioned that "I was better than he expected," and when I asked him to extrapolate, he said, "You're a smart American."  I said, "For someone who has rarely visited America, you seem to have a lot of opinions of what we are like."  He sort of laughed, but I knew at that point that I was dunzo with him.  If the dude actually liked me, wouldn't he be flattering me, rather than criticizing my nationality?  And praising me for being a "smart American" does not count.  I could tell that I was disappointing him because I wasn't living up to his baseless generalizations of American culture.  He and his friends wanted me to be a ditzy American, easily persuaded into the arms of an ill-intentioned Francophone.  Everything I said was met with a smirk or an eye roll.  I told the Quebequois's  German friend that I've always wanted to see Berlin, and the whole table just sort of snickered, as if I had no idea what I was talking about.  When I mentioned in passing that I was also a Sociology major, all of them seemed very interested, but I could tell it wasn't interest in my views so much as interest in telling me what their views were.  They wanted to tell me about my country, they wanted to tell me what my government was like.  Obviously, the election came up in conversation and Quebequois man's Indian friend asked me, "Some people think Obama will move the country in a more socialist direction," (novel idea), "what do you think?"  I could barely get a word out before he started telling me what he thought of Obama's policies.  I could have just sat there, filing my nails and talking to myself, and it would have been the same as having a conversation with these people.  I guess karma reared its ugly head because I accidentally (?) knocked my glass of beer into the Indian's lap.  For once, the regrettable inhertance of my father's motor skills (or lack thereof) has come in handy.

Anyway, this probably counts as yet another disappointment I've had trying to live in this country, but at least I got out last night.  My cold feels worse today (oh, did I not mention that?  Yeah, I got sick this week), and something tells me it's going to get even worse before it gets better.

Please send me positive thoughts.  I could use them.  Counting down the days is losing its savor and I'm not sure it's making anything go by faster.