hey Thecatamites I'm pretty sure even within America we kind of dumb down various regions/have this ridiculous TV picture of them in our heads. Like NEW ORLEANS before all the floods and stuff I just had this ridiculous idea of what it was like from a bunch of movies (moviemakers were obsessed with New Orleans in the 90's). Also I've never been to California and I have a probably mostly false/exaggerated impression of that place too. I think Youtube and whatever will make life kind of weird in the 2010s 2020s if we're not all dead by then. I mean like all I know about Minnesota is like FARGO the movie and I know nothing else about this place other than it's fucking cold and they talk funny, but maybe people will be regularly watching videos of ordinary people from Minnesota and it's just pretty normal over there otherwise and I mean you can already talk to a person from Minnesota through the online and I think there will be less sort of random mythology about places like that. Or just a very multifaceted picture of that place where the sort of fun popular view seems very middling and insignificant
I can't decide if I overemphasize how generic the world and the people in it are. I don't mean that in a bad or good way, I just mean that beyond stuff that is affected by actual natural and physical conditions in whatever area, that the people are going to be the same, chasing the same things, and everything will be a lot more normal than you think. That holds up really well and simply for the countries that follow the same template as the UK (and that's my baseline only because I grew up and have still spent most of my time here) - USA, Canada, Australia, most of Europe, and etc. This stuff is obvious because the cities are all the same. I go to places in these countries and they are all basically the same and the people are the same and they are spending their time doing the same stuff.
I wonder how similar places that AREN'T supposed to be the same at all are, though. I always find myself in this weird gray area between acknowledging that you never make assumptions about anybody based on this stuff - that is effortless for me, it's IN ME, now, and it's not even an interesting question anymore - and then there's this wider idea of the 'culture' of a place. Individually people are the same all over the world and you'll find the same jokesters doing the same crap in friggin kent and mexico city or seoul and cleveland or tweed's head and polokwane and blah blah - that stuff is pretty obvious and clear cut.
I guess my attitude is just that whatever the culture seems to be, it doesn't actually apply to any particular individual, unless they decide to internalize that for themselves, so I just take everyone as totally blank and places as totally blank and probably overcompensate assuming that the things an area has a reputation for are emphatically NOT true at all.
Scotland has a reputation for being kind of violent and drunken, which are actual social problems the are kind of worse here than in some other places. That's just a result of some especially shitty treatment from the top on down though, I don't think it really constitutes a quality the place has. I dunno. Also, I've always strongly rejected any idea of self-identifying as Scottish. I overcompensated when I was younger and tried my very best to just pretend I was about to move to Los Angeles at any moment and paid as little attention to what was around me as possible. I don't know why I was so grossed out by it (look - grossed out - people don't say that here, I say that. Why? Well, I like it. I like it because it was something I picked rather than the way people talked, but the reason I picked it are maybe dubious ((But Maybe I Really Don't Give A Damn, Either.), but for whatever reason I have always rejected the idea that I am Scottish, beyond it being an identifier of where I was born/where I grew up, and I definitely don't feel any particular loyalty or affinity to this place, even as like a 'home'. The house I grew up in is my home. I don't give a shit about touching down in Glasgow airport and hearing Scottish accents again. It doesn't make my spine tingle.
So, I feel like I'm nothing, really. Just a guy. Something to do with that rather seeing myself just as a person who moves around and figures my own stuff out independently. That's the way I like it. I want to go all over the place and see all kinds of things. I've only been, for the most part, to western style countries. I guess the reason the world probably seems really generic to me is that I've never actually had much exposure to real deal different places where everyone is muslim or something like that. Does that matter? On the surface of things I guess...I just don't know. I need to go see.
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What's on your mind 2010 the Next Generation
