Ex-Pat Life

This story's going to get old soon, but it's still burning a bit spicy in my throat. Ex-pat life in its unexpected twists.

So the other night -- the same week as Super-Tuesday, when I was actually deeply engaged in the US election for the first time ever -- we went out to dinner with some colleagues of F's. Nice enough people, celebrating a Big Work Achievement. The guy hosting us was someone I quite like. The first time I met him, his sister made a much greater impression on me. But since then, I've come to know and like M. He and his wife included us at a very Martha Stewarty thanksgiving this year. They're friendly. Nice. Very straight.

So D -- M's wife -- asks me how I'm doing with the drive between here and TO. I say it’s much better since I got a sturdier car, she asks what kind, I say a little mercedes and the chinese post-doc across the table from me, trying to make a badly englished joke, says, “oh, fancy, how do you get a car like that?” and M — sweet, most self-effacing surgeon ever — says “Oh she’s married to — well with — a famous scientist.”
...

Like I DIDN’T BUY MY OWN DAMN CAR!!!???

There's this book about 6 word memoirs making the rounds, and they're doing a 6 word love story version of it on CBC. Apparently mine is “Dyke settles for male meal ticket.”

Sometimes the ex-pat aspects of this life really do leave me gawping like a fish flopped on the deck. The assumptions and role stuff threaded through the simplest interactions, like nearly invisible strands of mercury. Not all that generative in a week when I'm already weighed down by a kinda blah birthday, horrible weather, trying to slog through the next huge chunk of the dissertation. The moments of joy are a little thin on the ground mid-february.

F and I did go dancing after the dinner, hurrying through the grim cold to a cheesy bar in a mall, where a heaving mass of women all wearing nearly identical black stiletto heels, many very big-haired, danced while men in running shoes watched. We had fun dancing, then went home and watched the late showing of Torchwood, cuddled, laughed. So we beat on, boats against the current.