Culture is like a muscle; it is strengthened by use

Well, today is June 11th and I am finally writing my first blog. Oh my I feel so guilty! It´s not like the blogging assignment was difficult, but, for some reason, it has taken me a month and almost two weeks to sit down and write this. I was actually one of the first people to arrive at my internship, too; I arrived April 25th. So then, what is my excuse?

I think I was intimidated. Not by setting up a blog and not by the idea that people would be reading my personal and private thoughts, but rather I was intimated by the prospect of defining my culture. Culture is scary. I feel like I won´t be able to do my culture justice. I feel self-conscious about the whole matter; inferior, perhaps.

I read some other peoples' blogs in May and I remember thinking to myself, wow, these people know what they are talking about. I feel silly thinking about it now, especially becase it is not like culture (or being able to talk profoundly about one´s culture) is a competition. I know too that culture is relative, and that the unfamilair can seem superior to the familiar. But there are definitely feelings of inferiority that I think are responsible for my hesitation to bare my culture (and my thoughts therein) to the York Internship world.

If you can't tell, I tend to make things more stressful for myself than they need to be. These blogs are supposed to be fun, aren't they? I don´t need to be such a downer. I may be a perfectionist, too, but culture can´t be judged on a scale of perfection so screw that! Right?

Anyway, on with the culture. So, my culture, eh? What can I say....

I was born in Newmarket, Ontario. I grew up in King City with two older sisters. My mom is Canadian, with parents from Holland, and my Dad is Italian. My mom never had a close relationship with her parents so I grew up in a Canadian-Italian context. I just wish that I didn't have such light features (blue eyes, fair skin), because I would love to look Italian! God, Italians are beautiful people.

I was raised Catholic, like a good Italian bambina, and I ¨chose¨to be confirmed (I kinda had to go along with the confirmation thang because the rest of my Grade 8 class was getting confirmed), which means I took the responsibility of my faith in my own hands. In other words, I didn´t go to church the very next Sunday or any other Sunday after that, in fact, and neither Mommy nor Daddy could force me to go, either. Thanks to this unsuccessful religious upbringing, I am constantly plagued with feelings of guilt; from my experience, Italian Catholics (or failed ones) tend to cling to guilt like it´s a rope that they can use to escape from hell.

I have a Nonna and a Nonno who give me a $5 dollar bill everytime I see them so that I can buy something nice and they speak a broken English mixed with an Italian dialect from a pipsqueak of a rural Italian town. My Nonna works magic in the kitchen and my Nonna works his in the garden. Thanks to their influence, I love eating and I can appreciate the significance or fresh vegetables from the backyard. I also owe my strong work ethic to them, they both worked hard to immigrate to Canada and they continue to work hard, even on pension.

I come from a broken family; my parents are divorced and they ¨dislike¨ eachother. Everybody lives in a different town, everybody has something against the other and nobody remembers what happened in the first place. To this I owe, ironically, my apreciation of family; I admire successful families and I love to be invited over to dinner at friends´ houses.

When my family lived together in my childhood, we lived in a rather big home in a rural town. Now, I live in a small apartment in the big bad city of Toronto and I drink lots of Starbucks and I eat at Tim Horton´s three times a day (when I would really rather eat Nonna´s hand-rolled gnocchi). I also push people to make sure I get on the TTC bus that I have been waiting 15 minutes for.

I have international friends and multicultural friends; Brazilian, Mexican, French, Quebecois, Chinese-Canadian, Italian-Canadian, Portuguese-Canadian, etc. I am able to practice my French, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish on a weekly basis. I am bilingual in French and English (perhaps a minority in a bilingual-on-paper-and-on-the-cereal-box country). My passion is language and literacy. Perhaps I owe this to my Mom, who made me have reading time-outs when I was acting too hyper as a kid.

I am dating a Brazilian who talks to me in Portuguese and who likes to watch the soccer game on Sunday and who, as manly as he is, likes to watch Brazilian soap operas every day. We get together with Brazilian friends on the weekend and eat arroz and feijao and listen to Brazilian funk music.

It´s funny, it seems so odd to be writing this now, now that I have been in Brazil for more than a month and now that I have adapted to and adopted the ¨gaucha¨ culture of the South. I´m already drinking chimarron daily (a type of herb that people drink from a ¨bowl¨ with a metal straw).

More than that though, I feel like a different person. I am not the same Lidia that lived in Toronto a month ago--I could go without Tim Horton´s and I would be O.K. (kidding; a) I am simplifying and b) I really want a Timmy´s). So, what´s my culture now?

It´s one thing to write about my culture on paper and it is quite another to see it in action. I have the same experience when I teach students here about Canadian Culture--I find it so hard to define the Canadian culture. I can talk about it all I want and write about it as I want to, but what is culture? What is my culture?

Culture is transient; stopping it midstream to take a snapshot doesn´t seem to capture anything.