[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by keep poppin pimples

oh yeah, normal elsewhere is fucked up in canada, i've been living here since i was pretty young but was brought up very differently than most, i think being from two places is a big part of who i am good and bad. i get on well with foreigners most of the time, jamaica has no connection to my background but jamaicans always understand things i say that freak canadian people out, i think maybe there's something about having a different frame of reference that has a bigger effect than being from any specific cultures.

i've been in therapy before for ocd, i do think having that disorder is a barrier to forming good relationships but shouldn't it scare off assholes too lol?

riiiight. i get it now.

i have a similar situation in that most of the people i get along with here-- i mean get along well enough to form friendships-- are foreigners. with gringos it's harder-- not impossible, but there is more of a cultural chasm to bridge. it's not so much about cultural referents ("where were you on 9/11"), but implicit values and behaviors. this makes me a "minority" of a kind. i was born in latin america, but US hispanics are farther away from me culturally than a european, for example-- usa hispanics are more americanized. but not just any european-- things will run more smoothly for me with "continentals" than with british people, for example.

now with gringos proper i've generally gotten along better with catholics and jews than with protestants. why? no fucking idea. it just happens. it's not like i ask for people's backgrounds, but the connection happens. maybe it's having shared values/attitudes/perspectives/traditions (e.g., forgiving "sins", or a love of argument, or a history of guilt). maybe it's that they are also minorities/outsiders of sorts here vs the wasp ethos. this is a statistical thing, not an absolute that applies to every individual, you understand-- just general trends that i don't seek but somehow find me.

now, i'm still a fucking weirdo in my own home country, and therefore a triple weirdo here, which makes me highly lynchable, so to build a friendly network of fellow eccentrics is quite a big fucking task, and often full of disappointments and frustrations, like the myth of sisyphus, but still worth pursuing, one annoying test person at a time, ha ha ha.

with some effort and patience, you'll find your own tribe, but it never hurts to get a bit of help. i had a really good shrink for years, and what i learned from the fucker was priceless-- it helped, of course, that he was a weirdo himself, and had spent some years in latin america, and while he was very much an american he had jewish/european/new york roots, and loved books too, so we could understand each other, and argue like crazy and have fun doing that, until i finally got better.