Anonymity and Public Transportation

I take the bus to work daily. Driving a car here, as I have previously documented, is an expensive and ultimately life-endangering experience that one is best to avoid at all costs. My employer is located in a relatively large office park that is serviced by multiple bus lines. In all, it is usually a voluminous yet well-heeled crowd. At peak times during the day it is not uncommon to stand for the better part of my trip, especially given that common courtesy in this country (which is a very haphazard and vexing thing that will be addressed in better detail later) and inherently within myself dictates that an able bodied man relinquish his seat for females or the elderly and otherwise infirm. My old home certainly had public transportation available to me but I hardly used it aside for the convenient train trips from my home to New York City that allowed me to eschew driving/parking in the Big Fucking Apple. It is indeed a strange development this new found reliance on public transportation. Moreover, not being able to understand a good 98% of what is said around me limits my ability to satisfy the normal voyeuristic inklings that help a person stave off boredom in a situation where he or she cannot use his or her IPod for fear of knifing after disembarking. You would think that being amidst a sea of bodies, each stretching and pushing their way into your personal 5 feet of comfort zone, might make someone feel like a regular card-carrying member of the home team.

It doesn't. It's actually suprisingly alienating.

For better or worse I have been groin-grabbed, ass-rubbed, and generally molested both intentionally and unintentionally by a fair cross section of my adopted bretheren over the length of my stay. Yet I still can't shake the feeling that I'm a stranger in a strange land who will never really be part of the clique and this prospect makes me feel indescribably lonely. A mentor of mine once described to me the feeling of isolation he felt as an American bond trader living in Tokyo during the "Ugly American" 1980's. Being gaijin (literally translated to "outside person" in Japanese), even a gaijin married to an Asian woman, with Asian children and a keen awareness of societal expectations and customs, was so overwhelmingly alienating that he found himself over-compensating for this exclusion by trying to shed as much of his American persona as possible. I am not naive enough to think that I can transplant myself into a foreign country, especially a country that for all intents and purposes is not on a level playing field with my home in terms of education, infrastructure or basically anything else besides the production of fresh fruit, and expect to be unequivocally embraced by the general populace. Yet at the same time it is incredibly frustrating to know that despite how hard I try to learn the language and generally embrace the cultural differences as non-relativistically as humanly possible that I will always just be another Johnny Rockets eating, fanny pack wearing Gringo. And this overarching sense of failure oftentimes taints the shimmering moment of inclusion that I feel when I get a complicated sentence correct when speaking to a native or the secret smiles I store away when a pretty girl smiles at me for no reason.

I'll always be a Gringo, Intentional or Not. I can't be on the team nor will anyone ever ask me to be. I came here willingly and with great hope to learn more about the lives of others and to hopefully be included willingly into a few of them but I now see that my assumption that a genuine smile and good intentions would be enough to get my through the velvet rope was both startlingly inaccurate and pitifully disappointing. It is my own fault and I am at least mature enough to recognize this without holding a grudge against those that I expected a favorable reception from. It's just sad, reclining comfortably on a half-empty bus while an unspoiled 7am sunshine caresses my still pasty forehead and a sprawling backdrop of limitless azure sky teases my still-unaccustomed eyes, that I will inevitably be struck back down to Earth once I remember that this sun shines brighter for those dozing quietly beside me and that this sky is not, nor can it ever be, my own.