Bipolar Nationality Disorder

This weekend I found out I'm bipolar. I don't know if it's the kind of thing people generally self-diagnose, but it is what it is.

All of Saturday I ate American. I was excited about it. The local grocery store promotes a different world cuisine each week and last week was American Week. I bought beef burgers, burger buns, pancake mix, Caesar dressing, and some sort of wing sauce. These are all things I haven't eaten in a while -either because they don't really exist here or when they do, it's some sort of a bootleg version of the dish. I'm in the nightmare situation where 'a good burger' in this city is found at McDonald's.

Anyway, I made the pancakes for breakfast and we ate them with butter and maple syrup (an earlier souvenir from Canada), and then at night it was burger time. Yum! I guess the eating is one thing, but there was also something akin to the pleasure one gets from visiting an old friend. In fact, I was excited to be able to share an authentic culinary tradition from 'my country'. But which one? Romania is also my country, and when I lived in Toronto I thought it was a huge deal to prepare and share Romanian dishes with friends. It gave me the same sort of excitement that I felt this weekend.

That same day, my girlfriend and I were talking about our upcoming trip to the seaside. She asked me if I have swim trunks. Of course I have swim trunks! They made the trip overseas with me exactly for this occasion. I put them on to show her, very proud of myself.
"Won't you be hot in those?" she asked after a few moments.
"What do you mean?"
"They're kinda long and big, I thought you'd have some like your underwear."
I almost fell over laughing.

At that moment I realized that I'm truly bipolar. Split personally right down the middle. I may be Euro at heart, but it's also pretty obvious that twenty years of growing up in North America shaped some of my core beliefs among which is an aversion to wearing booty shorts at the beach. I love living in Romania and I'm glad I came back, but a part of me is well and truly Canadian, undoubtedly so.

I have a feeling that in North America they would actually give this thing a name, something like Bipolar Nationality Identity Disorder, just so that I don't feel like some sort of freak. The fact remains that, labelled or unlabelled, I'm stuck with a foot on either side of the Atlantic. The Canadian part is triggered by things that don't make sense to me here, just the same way my Romanian anti-PC personality would display itself when I lived in TO. My life is one of comparisons in the guise of normative and positive statements depending on my mood and the situation. I'm not complaining though and I know I'm extremely lucky to have the capability of understanding two very different world views. But I hope I can handle being the weirdo walking around in the long swim trunks.

Comments

AnonymousJuly 18, 2012
I wonder what do you mean with Cluj being Romania's Silicon Valley? What did they've gotten there? Computer manufacturing?
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MattJuly 18, 2012
Lots of software companies & technical talent
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