In the film He’s Just Not That Into You- which was so far from the book it might as well have been the Bizarro version. Ben and Janine are a married couple. Ben is a spineless dick. (spoiler… for a film from 2009) His many flaws include the fact that he is having an affair. When Janine finds out about the affair she doubles down on her marriage. Then she discovers that Ben has been secretly smoking, despite claiming to have quit out of respect for the fact that Janine’s smoker father died of lung cancer. For this she kicks him out. When I saw this scene in the theater (In my defense, I was in Korea and there weren’t a lot of English options for girl’s night out.) the audience laughed. But I got it. A lot of times it’s the little things that drive you over the fucking edge.
When you move to a new place, be it changing jobs or changing countries, you are somewhat mentally prepared for the big adjustments. You map your routes, research online, talk to people who’ve been there or been through it. In the case of countries you are prepared for the frustrations of a language barrier. Being from the US I’ve been made forcibly aware that we are virtually the only ones who write dates the way we do, don’t use twenty-four hour clocks, and still use imperial measurements. Change is a struggle, but one not unexpected.
It’s things that are *surprisingly* hard that can make you want to scream and break things. Keyboards, calendars that start on Monday, trying to find dry rather than fresh yeast, the difficulty of the seemingly simple act of posting a damned letter.
The hotel in which we were placed for our first couple of months here had pressure sensitive light switches. You couldn’t just click them, you had to do it just right: the right amount of pressure for the right amount of time. As annoying as it was to get the lights to turn on it was absolutely enraging when you were trying to turn the bloody twatter off so you can get some blessed sleep.
In the US and in Korea to put up a tension rod you stretch the rod into place then twist until it is tightly pressed into position at which point you no longer have to think about it. For years. Not so here. Extending the rod took so much pressure I accidentally over extended it. If pulling it out was hard, then pushing it back in has proven impossible. The Incredible Hulk couldn’t force that thing back into position. And even if I could I still have no idea how to make it apply actual tension to stay in fucking place. I am sure that there is a simple trick to it, but is sure as shit isn’t intuitive.
That said, I think that we sometimes lose our shit over the little things because because of the big things. Janine didn’t throw Ben out for smoking. She threw him out because the fact Ben was smoking opened her eyes to what a spineless little shit stain he was. The gods forsaken lights in the hotel and the cock gobbling tension rod were so annoying in part because they were just more crap we had to deal with on top of all the overwhelmingly big stuff.
A few years from now this new world we find ourselves in will be our normal. Yes, it does take that long. But, it goes quickly.