Hot on the heels of the busiest three months I've had in a while, I'm finally taking a huge - HUGE - breather and escaping to the Pacific Northwest with the hubby. YES, two months after tying the knot, we are finally going on our honeymoon!! For the first time in a long while, we are really getting a chance to spend some together outside of the shroud of familiarity in which we've wrapped ourselves...no kitties (sorry, Grundton & Nicholas), no Philly students, no stifling summer sweat of the east coast - hell, even the beer is different up here.
Actually, lots of things are different. There is an undefined, unsettled quality about experiencing a city like Seattle when you've just come from a place as stereotyped and easily labeled in the collective American mind as Philadelphia. My subjective, uninformed impression of Seattle is limited to a few key facts - rainy, near Canada, setting of Frasier, and birthplace of Starbucks and grunge - that are limited in their connotative reach, paling in comparison to the public impression of Philadelphia as dangerous, rough around the edges, blue-collar, and unrefined. Granted, Chris and I spent a handful of hours in a limited part of the city, after an exhausting day that began at 4:30am eastern time and ended with a three-hour time difference; nonetheless, as powerful as first impressions are, I certainly came away from our first day in Seattle distinctly lacking one.
Atop the Space Needle yesterday afternoon, the presence of the groups of teens loitering around Seattle Center prompted a discussion about identity that Chris and I had left off over a year ago, at a time when I was struggling with my own religious identity (or rather, nonreligious identity, as I had previously identified as atheist). The process of learning relies on the honing of extremes - we take in the rules of the world first by polarizing complex ideas, and only as they become more familiar to us do we learn the exceptions that add nuance to our understanding, in effect creating more finely-grained bifurcations of what we take in. I believe that the process of self-discovery follows this pattern. As tweens and teens we take on oversized personalities and try on the costumed labels created by society to see what fits. We clumsily turn outward to begin that attempt at finding ourselves, leading to those cringe-worthy phenomena (and lucrative commercial niches) like black lipstick, spiked chokers, and, on the other side of the hill, pink polo shirts with the collars popped and plaid shorts (both unisex looks, natch). As we mature, the identities we try on become less clownish, but I still believe there is a very fine line at which we stop looking to external dictates to tell us who we are, and actually start examining fully inward. Truly, I think this is a difficult journey requiring a lot of self-awareness and courage, and as weak creatures as we are, no doubt there are many who are never able to fully get to cross this line in their lifetimes.
(To be continued...)
Actually, lots of things are different. There is an undefined, unsettled quality about experiencing a city like Seattle when you've just come from a place as stereotyped and easily labeled in the collective American mind as Philadelphia. My subjective, uninformed impression of Seattle is limited to a few key facts - rainy, near Canada, setting of Frasier, and birthplace of Starbucks and grunge - that are limited in their connotative reach, paling in comparison to the public impression of Philadelphia as dangerous, rough around the edges, blue-collar, and unrefined. Granted, Chris and I spent a handful of hours in a limited part of the city, after an exhausting day that began at 4:30am eastern time and ended with a three-hour time difference; nonetheless, as powerful as first impressions are, I certainly came away from our first day in Seattle distinctly lacking one.
Atop the Space Needle yesterday afternoon, the presence of the groups of teens loitering around Seattle Center prompted a discussion about identity that Chris and I had left off over a year ago, at a time when I was struggling with my own religious identity (or rather, nonreligious identity, as I had previously identified as atheist). The process of learning relies on the honing of extremes - we take in the rules of the world first by polarizing complex ideas, and only as they become more familiar to us do we learn the exceptions that add nuance to our understanding, in effect creating more finely-grained bifurcations of what we take in. I believe that the process of self-discovery follows this pattern. As tweens and teens we take on oversized personalities and try on the costumed labels created by society to see what fits. We clumsily turn outward to begin that attempt at finding ourselves, leading to those cringe-worthy phenomena (and lucrative commercial niches) like black lipstick, spiked chokers, and, on the other side of the hill, pink polo shirts with the collars popped and plaid shorts (both unisex looks, natch). As we mature, the identities we try on become less clownish, but I still believe there is a very fine line at which we stop looking to external dictates to tell us who we are, and actually start examining fully inward. Truly, I think this is a difficult journey requiring a lot of self-awareness and courage, and as weak creatures as we are, no doubt there are many who are never able to fully get to cross this line in their lifetimes.
(To be continued...)
