Day 8: The Getting Used To

Prompt: I will never get used to...

This writing assignment should be so easy. A stranger in a strange land, there must be dozens of things I'll "never get used to." I thought about it all day. I thought about it through breakfast. I thought about it while hanging the laundry. I thought about it through Hushpuppy's nap, when I normally would be writing this post. I thought about it through grocery shopping and yoga class. I asked Partner-in-Crime. He said, "tell them you'll never get used to my antics." I told him if he wanted someone to write about him, he should start his own blog. Then, I got back to thinking, and thought about it through dinner, Hushpuppy's bedtime routine, cleaning the kitchen, answering emails, and baking muffins for breakfast.

What an ordinary, average, could happen anywhere sort of day I was thinking through. Maybe that's why I found it so hard to come up with something worth writing about. Oh, I thought of things that I will definitely never get used to, but none of them seem to warrant an entire blog post:

• Vegemite
• Not using the serial comma
• Saying "nappy" instead of "diaper"
• Having to go to 10 different shops to find what I need when I could just pop down to Target at home and get it all

And, moreover, there were certainly things when I moved here that I was certain I would never get used to, but did:

• The price of everything. OK, hearing about housing prices still makes me shudder, but for the most part, I mostly now think, "yes, $22 for a movie. That's normal." and "$10 for a sandwich. Seems reasonable." As one of my friends likes to say, it all becomes funny money, at some point.
• Aussie slang. I held out the longest on saying "brekkie" for breakfast. I don't know why, but that sounded especially stupid to me. Now, it rolls right off the tongue. Today, I asked for a pair of "sunnies" in the store and suggested I'd be going out this "arvo."
• Did I mention that I was hanging my laundry. Yeah, thought I'd never do that!
• I was dead certain I would never accept Christmas in the summer. But, even that I found a way to negotiate. (I wrote about it in more detail here).

What I've taken away from this arduous mind exercise is that there's not much of real import that I haven't been able to get used to. I think that's a combination of having an adaptable personality (so it would seem) and the relative similarities in Aussie and American cultures. I have no doubt that this would be quite a different post if I were in an American expat in, say, China, or Ethiopia, or Armenia, or any country with significant cultural differences. I think I would have a lot to say about not getting used to things in a country that subjugates women, has terrible infrastructure, or operates on bribery to get anything done. But here, our differences are little, and on most things we see generally eye to eye. It's not America, for sure, and - sorry about it - I'm never going to take up eating yeast based breakfast spread no matter how much Vitamin B it contains, but that doesn't seem to matter much in the big picture.