Not a light post, this one...

This may be controversial.

This past Sunday, my lovely Anna and I went to the Imperial War Museum, finishing an emotionally-exhausting day at the Holocaust Memorial Exhibit. It was the the first such exhibit I'd ever been to, and I reacted pretty much as one would expect to react when faced with images of bulldozers plowing towers of emaciated corpses into a ditch. I left in shaky tears.

But I have to confess something: my tears were not because of history.

In the western world at least, we hold up the atrocities committed by the Nazi party as the absolute pinnacle of human inhumanity. How could the German people - they who gave us Nietzsche and Goethe and Johann Sebastian Bach - allow such a thing to happen? Why did so few people DO anything?

Anna, who is German, described how it is illegal to display a swastika in Germany - even in a historical context, such as the one painted on the original aircraft hanging from the roof of the museum. German war dead are not allowed to be honoured: the 17 year old conscripted to the front line is just as evil as Goering. As children, they have shame and guilt pummelled into them for the crimes of their parents and grandparents.

This bothers me. It bothers me because I don't agree that that 17 year old conscript is the same as the masterminds. It bothers me more that, by focusing on the condemning of the slaughter of 12 million people by one group of people, we appear to be fooling ourselves that it was an isolated incident that we are all somehow better than.

I was in tears when I left the Holocaust Memorial on Sunday not because of Auswitz but because of England. And the US. And Canada. Andandandandandand.

1930s era anti-Jewish propanda described Jews as a pestilence, destroying the very fabric of German society. They were flooding into Germany, taking over, spreading poverty and sin. They spat in the face of German custom and tradition, threatened the very existence of the German people.

In the exhibit, we all clucked our tongues and shook our heads at the horror of it all. Imagine! Such ignorance!

Just now, a comment on an article about the expected spike in the population of England due to immigration states: "This will be the end of Britishness as we know it. Pressure is already on us to describe Christmas as something else and we become more and more like America every day. The problem is that we all have to live and work together and we have already seen the spread of ghettos around the country around the country and are constantly reading of the problems they create. I cannot understand why people want to come here to improve their life and then immediately try to impose the habits and cultures of the land they had left behind on us."

In the same article, an anonymous commenters fights back: "I'm an immigrant! I came here not being able to speak a word of English. I managed to get straight As throughout high school and am in my penultimate year of a law degree, thank you very much. Celebrate diversity! We're not here to be clones of one another." That comment currently has a rating of -162, which is almost 20 lower than when I first read it 15 minutes ago.

A third commenter on another article takes it there: "This is frightening. Thanks to this government we, the indigenous population are being overwhelmed. It must be brought to an end now!" (Comment score: +72) The other 400 commenters agree, with only two exceptions. There is mass agreement on these boards that the British National Party should be voted in at the next election.

(Caveat: I am not exactly referring to The Guardian here, and I am guessing - hoping - that the average reader of the publications from which I have gathered these quotes are a vocal minority. That being said, I'm not sure how confident I am that the minority is so small. Back in the 90s, when I lived in the north, I often heard people talk about the "Paki" overflow and how "those people only look out for themselves." And a dear friend recently told me that "not a single Muslim spoke up against September 11th." And a colleague told me she would never wear traditional Indian clothes to work because it wasn't worth the hassle. So.)

We need to wake the hell up. There is something really scary going on and we are all too busy patting ourselves on the back for not being Hitler to notice it.

The way the media and the man on the street talks about Muslims today is almost verbatim to those propaganda posters in the Holocaust Memorial exhibit. It is a very VERY find line between what those evil Nazis were saying and what these ignorant Daily Mail assholes are saying. The Muslim world overwhelmingly believes that they are under attack from the West because THEY ARE. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us. And this wave of hate flowing from both sides - Us and Them, who's the evil one? - has the potential to lead to another memorial exhibit.

It only takes a couple good, strong catalysts, you know? If greasy, chinless Hitler and his crew of overweight/limping/almost blind generals can lead an educated, philosophical nation into pursuing an ideal of broad-shouldered blonde health, someone else WILL come along eventually to light a fire on one side or the other.

I don't believe we have learned from the Holocaust. I do believe it could happen again, if the people wanting to do it could somehow subvert the all-seeing eye of the internet. I am quite confident right now that it WILL happen again, in some way, and that we may very well be witnessing the early stages right now.

And THAT is worth crying over.

Feels like home to me

My laminate list has, for some time, remained constant: Alan Cumming, Javier Bardem, Robert Downey Jr., Hank Azaria and Gary Oldman. (Me? Type? NAH.)

(For those not in with the lingo: a laminate list is that list of five celebrities you're "allowed" to sleep with if you get the chance, regardless of your marital status. I used to call it the Five Exceptions list, but stole the concept of the list being laminated off a sitcom. It's alliteralicious.)

On Sunday night, I went to see the closing night of Mr. Cumming's one-man vaudeville show here in London's glittering west end. I laughed and I whooped and I yelled Falsettos! and Chess!, and at intermission I bought the cd being hawked in the hallway because his love song to his husband was still ricocheting around in my head and my soul. I was totally charmed by his mischevious impishness, all the while contemplating an article I had read years ago in which he had admitted that his stage persona was a complete act and wondering who the real Alan Cumming was, were there clues in the songs he had chosen?

It was a fun show and a good night up to that point, but then wonders of wonders, my friend Meg realizes she knows Alan Cumming's collaborator - the lovely and talented Mr. Lance Horne - from band camp back in the day. Before you can say "Erika's head explodes into a reddish puff of total cellular happiness," we've been invited to the wrap party.

On the way, we get to talking about laminate lists and celebrities we'd like to meet, and Meg mentions that the one actor that would cause her head respectively to explode would be Stephen Ouimette, a Canadian stage legend that I also just happened to have done Oliver with back in 1993. I tell her this. She is amazed. I am a bit amazed in turn that sweet, down-to-earth, salt of the earth Stephen could arouse such fan frenzy. Not that he isn't deserving of it, to be fair, because the man is stupidly talented, only that he's... well, he's Stephen!

And then I meet Alan. It takes me all evening to work up the courage to talk to him, though my stomach makes great leaps for freedom every time I catch sight of him sitting right. over. there. But, swallowing the nerves, I saunter over and I say something devastatingly, utterly cool like: "Um, Alan? Hi, um, yeah. We met earlier. Um, I've been trying to think of something to say all evening, something that would be interesting to YOU, but I have nothing, so I just wanted to say that your show was great and you are great and I have adored you since Cabaret and look, I bought your cd, can I have a picture with you?"

Hey look! Erika's a fangirl!

He was lovely - he signed my cd and showed me the picture of his dogs and hugged me hard when I told him he was on my laminate list (because THAT is not at all a weird and uncomfortable to say to someone: "hi! did you know I'm allowed to sleep with you?"). He was truly truly lovely. As I was leaving, he kissed my cheek and I blushed for an hour afterwards.

But now, five days later, I'm all skeeved out by my behaviour. Why was that necessary? Since when do I need proof of an encounter in the form of a photo?

Worse is the realization that, 16 years ago, my friend's dream-date was "Oh, Stephen..." to me, and now I'm just one of the great unwashed, the great squeeing fangirls who lose all sight of the fact that Stephen Ouimette, Alan Cumming, Graham Norton (who was sitting in our row) - these are just people, normal people, doing a job that just happens to put them in the public eye. Four years after leaving theatre as a career, I am reduced to breathing deeply in the presence of the gilded few, trying to absorb a little of their stardust in order to validate my reality as a person, a normal person, doing a job that just happens to have me stuck behind a desk.

In another world, in a world where I had the intestinal fortitude to withstand the ego blows of being a theatre producer, Alan Cumming and I may have crossed paths professionally. And then I could have smiled as I recalled somesuch witty thing we said that night when we did the thing, and we both would have looked at each other as people and laughed about it as people. Or perhaps we wouldn't have met before, but we'd have met on Sunday as fellow professionals, and we could've chatted about the people we know in common (we do know people in common, actually) and what we're working on and do that theatre-thing of "darling, we HAVE to have coffee and discuss that project, you'd be PERFECT for it." No squeeing, no celebrity, no false expectations.

I love my job and my life here in London, so none of this is to be taken as Erika contemplating a return to her previous incarnation. It's just that, Sunday evening, surrounded by wardrobe mistresses and actors and musicians, shmoozing and networking and sharing trench stories, I was a fish let loose into water for a few minutes. And, from the outside, looking in, it felt more like home than ever.

Hey Alan, good show. I have a script I'm working on again, finally, after years of letting it sit dead in my harddrive. Let's do lunch sometime, hey?

The glass wall

There were times when the immense different-ness of Mexico got to me. Continually fighting your long-developed patterns and expectations can be exhausting and, yes, upsetting. I would become exhausted, irritable, snapping at everyone around me for having the audacity to speak Spanish or insist on tortillas with dinner.

Two weeks ago, now safely ensconced in the cultural familiarity of my own country's motherland, I became exhausted, irritable, snapping at everyone around me for having the audacity to analyze their food intake for caloric content or comment on my hair's shrivelled ends.

It took me a few days to put the two experiences together. That I could be experiencing culture shock in a country so very like my own seemed an impossibility to me, yet there it was, clear as day, Erika hits the culture wall like a ton of bricks.

My mother has a saying, paraphrased here as I don't know the exact quote: "Pity they who leave home past the age of twenty, for they shall belong nowhere." My mom relates to this quote as, having met my father in Paris in her early 20s, she moved to Canada at aroundabout 24 and now spends her days wildly contemplating her Scandinavian home with utopian awe. She doesn't feel Canadian, because she is Swedish, yet she knows she would feel anything but Swedish were she to return, having spent almost 40 years now in Canada. A soul lost in the purgatorial inbetween of our small world after all.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I have lived, in order but avoiding duplicates, in: Edmonton (Canada), Uppsala (Sweden), Ottawa (Canada), Edinburgh (Scotland), Leeds (England), Toronto (Canada), Mexico City (Mexico) and now this monstrous wonder that is London. And, in contrast to my mother who belongs nowhere, I belong EVERYWHERE.

It is to my very great delight that I realize that my current bout of culture shock is not coming from a Canadian in London, but rather a Canadian accustomed to the life and priorities of Mexico now living in London. In some way, I am tri-cultural, perhaps more.

It is my learned Mexican-ness - a Mexican-ness that I never took the liberty to assume had absorbed into me - that rebels against Britain's obsession for deconstructing every little thing to point out its good and bad elements. Life in Mexico means having more important things to think about than what it the sugar content on that package of tomatoes (which are wrapped here oh-so-carefully to avoid any bruising or blemishing), or whether my hair is having an adverse reaction to British hard water. No Mexican ever looked at me at me and mused whether my wardrobe was pub- or club-worthy.

No, in Mexico the biggest concern was personal safety or money. Who cares what blouse you're wearing if you're going to get mugged on the way to club, you know? (Not that I was ever mugged, not in three long years, for the record...) Who cares about a split end as long as you have money for groceries?

And, okay, sure, I am aware that a large percentage of Mexicans perceive a connection between skin colour and opportunity, a white is right, a pale is... good...

And, okay, sure, that was a struggle I never had to deal with, or, perhaps, inherently benefited from to an unknown degree, as my skin is the colour of skim milk: so pale I am vaguely blue.

It is, therefore, extremely possible that Juan Mexico spends far more time deconstructing his freckles than I was ever aware of. I leave ample room for being schooled in this regard.

But one thing I can tell you is that, in three beautiful years, I, personally, lost the habit of deconstructing every damn thing.

(My ex-roommate will choke on his milk here. Seriously, P, I did. What you saw there? Was BETTER. Was calm. Was laissez-faire, anything goes, living my life kind of freedom, really it was.)

And, people, in the absence of all those nudges and pokes and whispers and hints, the amount of work I got done on sorting out the junk closet that is my heart, mind and soul was impressive. I left Mexico in May ready to be Happy Erika, Positive Erika, Moving Forward Erika, Erika 2.0. I was going to burst into the world as a radiant sunbeam of love and light, anti-perspirated against the small stuff. It was going to be a blinding, spectacular definition of self as the very best self I could be.

It hasn't worked.

And it's not that I'm not happy or positive or moving forward, it's that, all of a sudden, I have noticed that moving forward is much, much more difficult. It is slogging forward, fighting upstream against a massive, culturally-created swamp-river of over-analysis and self-destructiveness.

I don't care about the sugar content in my tomatoes!!! They're tomatoes!!!!!!

I don't care about the calories in my cottage cheese!!! Or my curry!!! Or my ice cream!!!

I am not a better person when I'm going to Fitness First every day!!!

The pressure to pick apart is staggering. The continual stream of comments I hear from those around me is irritating. The pressure to re-link my breakfast foods and which neighbourhood I live in to my personal self-worth us unrelenting. Life is very easy here, you see, so people have the luxury or worrying about the DUMBEST FLIPPING THINGS!

AAARGH!!!

I am experiencing a bit of culture shock.

And, damn it, I refuse to concede the distance gained. Bring out the tequila, ladies and gents, I'm going upstream.

London calling

I may well have to change the name of this blog to "Who Needs a Net?" in a cheap tactic to shake off the fear conveyed by the original name without having to change the URL.

It's been two months of London life now, having stepped, bleary and ecstatic, off the plane at Gatwick Airport on 2 June. Mexico I said a mostly-dry-eyed goodbye to two weeks earlier, tearing a path across Canada in a vain attempt to see everyone and do everything in ten days following.

Two months. Wow.

I look back on Mexico now in much the same way that I reflect back on love affairs long run their course - with great warmth and fondness, yet with a sense of gentle finality. Mexico has not left me, oh no: I listen to Cafe Tacuba and Mono Blanco on my iPod regularly, and lustily translate the lyrics of Paquita la del Barrio to anyone who shows the faintest curiousity, and I have on more than one occasion been nearly consumed by a craving for a tamal or pozole. I look at pictures of tiny turtles and mountain paths and grinning friends with roaring gratitude that that country, those people, took me in and allowed me to share their culture, their history, their reality with me. Ah! It makes me catch my breath just to think of it all. What did I ever do to deserve such an experience?

London was a tougher sell. In the weeks after receiving the job offer in London, I frequently heard some variation on the same refrain: "London! You must be so excited!"

I wasn't.

Not really.

It wasn't anything against London per se - one of the great cities of the world, yadda yadda yadda - as much as it was that London felt just too damn much like home after three years in the sublime surrealism of Mexico. London would be my language, my history, and, as a colonist, something very similar to my culture. I'd grown up with Fawlty Towers and Yes Minister, I'd lived in Edinburgh and Leeds, I'd been called Erik-er by my English grandmother my entire life - how was London going to surprise me?

London has surprised me.

London has enthralled me.

If Mexico is the nostalgic reminiscences of a past love, London is the dashing new love on my doorstep with a bouquet of sunflowers and a poem he composes off the top of his head.

London is random blue plaques on historical points of interest that most other countries would write operas about, but which London, in its oversaturation, can only be bothered to notate half-heartedly.

London is eating lunch beside Tower Bridge, mightly dismantling the glass skyscrapers on the north side of the river in my mind to reveal the city that Elizabeth I would have known.

London is attempting to look suave and undeterred by the heat and the crowds on the Tube in the morning, cheerily fanning myself with my tube pass and counting how many stops to go.

London is getting off a Canada Day cruise up the Thames and **sha-BAM!** there is Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. (Well, ok, fine, the third construction of it, but STILL...)

London has won me over. I am madly, passionately in love with this city. Head over heels in love with this city. Filled up by this city in a way that no city has filled me up before.

I am happy.

I am so incredibly, indescribably, undeniably lucky, and so very very full of love and gratitude right now.

Mea culpa

I just finished reading an article on how they still don’t know why the swine flu is killing people in Mexico City, while victims in the US and Canada are taking two aspirin and going to work in the morning. There are theories, but no one knows for sure.

Except me. I know EXACTLY why this virus is centered in Mexico City.

And it has nothing to do with the city’s alleged lack of sanitation (other than not being able to drink the tap water and wishing recycling was a bit more common, I have no complaints) or lack of health care (private hospitals in Mexico have world class health care, and the Universidad Nacional Autonomo de Mexico is one of the few hospitals globally recognized by the World Health Organization).

No, the problem is me.

It’s my fault.

See, my family has this history of leaving trouble in our wake. The most recent wave of the Middle East conflict exploded mere weeks after my dad and stepmother visited Israel. They also forewarned the shooting of tourists in Egypt – to the extent that they had brunched into the hotel the day before militants burst in and killed everyone – and my father had a leisurely walk through Tiananmen Square in weeks prior. It’s also possible that the tsunami in Indonesia was their fault, although I’m not completely sure of the dates of their visit.

I’ve had better luck, in that disasters seem to happen to cities I love once I’m long gone. I fell in love with New York in 2000, New Orleans in 2002, and was contemplating returning to a life in London in 2005. (Edinburgh, luckily, has remained untouched. So far...)

But (and I am loath to admit this but it’s necessary to admit this for the story arc), I’ve always been mildly peeved that I never actually got to be involved in anything noteworthy. I didn’t want to be in the World Trade Centers by any means, but I listened to the stories of my friends in New York City, about how they had been affected and changed by the events of that sunny Tuesday, and I felt a pang of jealousy that my life was so darn boring.

(That sounds even worse now that I’ve written it down.)

Now, preparing to leave yet another city I’ve grown immensely, I cautioned my friends. Things happen when I leave, I said. I’ve been keeping you safe as long as I’ve been here, I warned. This city is due for a major earthquake or something, and it’ll happen after I leave. I am a precursor to doom!, I bellowed.

But, silly Erika, how long will it take you to learn not to taunt the universe? You wished out loud that you weren't stuck with your homicidal cat for another 15+ years; mere weeks later he died from eating string. You wished you had an ulcer like your friend's to excuse you from class for a few weeks; a couple months later you were in the hospital having abdominal surgery for an angry gall bladder. You wished for something exciting happen to the city you were in; now you're weeks away from starting your awesome new dream job in London and the British Embassy is holding your passport hostage and they're talking about shutting down the airports and refusing people coming from Mexico.

See, it's my fault. It was bound to happen anyway, given my family's curse, but I challenged the universe to do it sooner! now! make life interesting already!

And it did.

Sorry about that, everyone. When the food runs out and the zombies are at the door, feel free to throw me to them first.