And in the height of the Australian summer, on the eve of Australia Day, that’s what I’m basking in – all things Australian.

When we moved to Britain in 2005, I made the mistake of hanging on to lots of trappings of ‘home’. I took comfort in things American. I basked in my very different-ness. And I spent three of the four years we were there hating the place. In that last year, I finally sought what made Britain so, well, Great. Just as I figured it out and came to love the place, it was time to go.

So, this time around I’m leaving all that American nonsense behind. Yes, I am an American. Never try to hide it. But barring anything unforseen and earth shattering, I’m going to be an American living in Australia. My boys are going to be raised as Australians and I’m going to do my best to insure that they get the best of that.

We’re Australians.

And every day that I listen to the news from the country of my birth, I’m more convinced that this is a good thing.

Like tens of millions of other Americans, I got infected with Obama fever back in 2008. Full of his particular brand of Hope™, I bought into the idea of a transformative politician that would take my creaking country forward into a new progressive behemoth. Tears rolled down my cheeks when his victory was announced. I walked a little straighter as an American abroad after that, full of hope and pride in my country.

A year later, I feel worse that I did at the height of the Second Bush Dynasty.

Worse, because I’ve come to realize that Obama, like Clinton before him, has chosen to govern as a “pragmatic” centrist. That despite all the high flying rhetoric, he has to deal with the same right wing opposition that Clinton had to deal with and as a result, nothing truly transformative is going to get done.

Worse because I now realize how nasty some of my countrymen can be. Worse because I realize that despite massive majorities in two of the three branches of government, real change is not an option in American politics. Worse because I see the vitriol becoming more vitriolic, the polarization becoming more polarized, the black becoming more black, the white becoming more white and the gray? What gray?

I feel worse because I know that any kind of real health care reform is dead. That the system is rigged against real change. That banks and insurance companies and investment firms are more important to those who govern – Republican or Democrat – than you are. Beautifully illustrated by the Supreme Court granting huge multinational corporations the same rights as you and I. And guaranteeing America’s fate as an oligarchy. “Jennifer Government“. Read it. It’s our – well, your – future.

I feel worse as I realize that the nasty, hate infused post-9/11 nationalism wasn’t just a passing trend. That it has blossomed into a particularly vicious sort of populism that loathes the ‘elite’, the educated, the thoughtful, the well-spoken. A sort of populism that feeds on sound bites and half truths and ignorance.

I feel worse because nothing ever changes. Because Barack Obama is no different that George II, Slick Willie, George I or Crazy Ronnie. Because the system is rigged.

I feel worse because I can’t go ‘home’ again. That I’ve had a taste of the alternative and it’s too sweet on my palate to give up. I spent 33 years as an American in America, becoming more and more frustrated and disillusioned. Feeling more and more powerless. Now every day I’m gone, I feel lighter. Happier. I can watch American politics from afar with mild amusement. I can enjoy it for it’s entertainment value. It’s the best reality TV show that nobody has thought to produce.

When it doesn’t affect you.

Go ‘home’ again?

Nope, I’ll take my adopted Antipodean island. I’ll take her languid climate and her blithe people. I’ll take her byzantine cricket and her bizarre ‘football’. I’ll take her dotty, drunken politics and her genial socialism. I’ll take her genial patriotism and inflated sense of international importance. Hell, I’ll even take her unfortunate penchant for mullets and coupe utility vehicles. Because it is summertime in Australia and the living is easy.

I’ve probably managed to piss off my American readers and offend my Australian readers. Ah well, what the hell. I’m going to the beach before the cricket starts and I have to fire up the barbie.

Happy Australia Day.

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John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” is available from .

I certainly wouldn’t have mentioned Adelaide, Australia as a possible future home. Like most of my fellow countrymen, I had little or no interest in the world beyond our national borders. After eight years of Reagan administration propaganda, I was fully convinced that the only thing available abroad was danger and communism and filth. I lived happily that way for the next decade or so. When I went back to school in the mid-90’s and to grad school a few years later, I began to socialize with foreigners. I found them interesting, and a nice addition to a potluck dinner, but still had no real interest in traveling abroad for any period of time. I even met a few Australians – a jovial race, hard-drinking, loud and comical. I knew a bit more about Australia than what I had garnered from the two Crocodiles – Dundee and the Hunter – but no overwhelming desire to visit the place, nevermind live there.

Then, one frigid February night in mid-Missouri, I met a stunning Irish-Australian post-doc at a party.

Nothing has been the same since.

Within a very short period of time after meeting Dr. O’C – roughly two hours (that penchant for fantasy didn’t go away at 17) – I had formulated a life in Australia in my head. It took a little longer – about eight years – but today I have a remarkably accurate reflection of that fantasy life. Who says an overactive imagination is a bad thing?

We’re a year in Australia today. We walked off the plane into the balmy Adelaide sunshine on April 24, 2008. I was jet lagged and exhausted beyond what I thought was possible and thrown into a huddle of effusive Irish relations of the good doctor. The luggage, Boy Z (then Baby Z) and Dr. O’C were whisked efficiently away. I was shepherded into a waiting Jeep-ish thing and driven down to our new ‘home’.

If I’m being 100% honest, as we drove down through Glenelg I was wondering just what the hell I had done.

In fact, I spent the first couple of months wondering just that. Everything was complicated – finding my way around, finding a job, getting the dog here, getting our earthly belongings here, sorting out an internet connection. There was more than one day that I found myself ready to give up, to chuck it in and go back. Where?

Each time I jumped one of the little hurdles that my new home had erected in my path, I felt a little bit stronger and more comfortable. A little more at home. A year later, most everything has fallen into place. A year later,  I’m as happy as I can ever recall being. I’m not entirely at home in Australia yet, but I don’t really know what that means anyway.

So maybe I am.

There are a lot of things that I don’t care for about Australia. A lot of the politics. The utter lack of environmental responsibility despite being one of the most ecologically fragile places on earth. Holden utes. Boy racers. Pies. The ubiquitous anti-Americanism (though this isn’t an Australian phenomena). The distance from Australia to anywhere else in the world. Some days it’s harder than others to be 10,000 miles away from my parents and extended family. The accent.

But there are more things that I do like. The people. I was right about the people – they’re jovial, hard-drinking, loud and friendly. They’re certainly more welcoming than the Brits. In fact, a year in I can go through most days without that alien feeling that I carried around with me in England. The beaches. The empty spaces. Medicare. Sushi. Good Italian food. ANZAC biscuits. Golden Gaytimes. 

But most of all – these people (and animal):

I know that they could be around me anywhere in the world. But they’re here. And that’s what it all  comes down to. And as we make room for an addition, it is these people that are going to make wherever we are feel like home. 

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Grey Anne is Portland-based singer-songwriter Amy Adams. She released her debut LP “facts and figurines” back in November on Greyday Records. This track is about a girl named Adelaide, not my new home, but it’s gotten into irretriavably into my head this morning. “facts and figurines” feature stripped-down, whimsical folk-pop. A little bit cryptic, but utterly charming. Buy it from .

There’s a song on “Grave Dancers Union” that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for roughly the last four years. It’s a handful of lines from the chorus of this slightly cheesy track that keep bouncing their way around my old auditory association cortex…

And oh, I am so homesick
But it ain’t that bad
Cause I’m homesick for the home I’ve never had.

It isn’t just since the beginning of this expat adventure that this song has taken its place in the soundtrack of my life. The first time I heard Pirner’s woeful voice, Seattle 1993, it hit home. Home – that’s the key. I didn’t (and don’t) really know what the word means. At the time, I was 3,000 miles away from the closest approximation of ‘home’ for me – my parents’ house. By that point in my life however, that didn’t correspond to ‘home’. Seattle wasn’t home, as much as I had hoped it would be, I was restless there and morbidly confused.

I’ve spent some part of the last fifteen years trying to figure out where ‘home’ was, what it meant. With my expatriation four and a half years ago, the concept became even more confusing. Quite literally I had ‘withdrawn’ myself ‘from my homeland’.  Over the years, my definition of the word has made the transition from wherever sleep found me on a given night through wherever my paycheck got sent up to wherever my budding family is at any given time.

And that’s where it stands today. Home is where Dr. O’C, Boy Z and I are at any given time. On a good day, that works for me. But I’m less than a year in Australia and on a lot of days I just don’t feel at home. In the course of a day, a simple thing – a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car, a nasal Aussie twang, bone dry hills – can serve as a vivid reminder of the utter foreignness of my ‘home’.

This post is going all over the place, but so is my mind right now. All this thinking and writing about home has me thinking about my national identity – something that is starting to fade the longer I’m away from my homeland. I catch myself getting sucked into the stereotypes about Americans that I encounter on a daily bases, despite knowing better. In one of the Q&A’s that my Interview 2009 has generated there was talk about keeping up kids’ national identities in international relationships. That was something that’s always been very important to me – I made sure to get Boy Z his U.S. citizenship, I stock his toy box with tokens of America. Hell, I dress him in American flag inspired shirts that would embarrass me if we were living in the States.

But what I’m beginning to wonder is whether or not it is important for Boy Z to be aware of his national identity as he’s growing up. I was keenly aware of and reveled in mine. I was of Italian descent. I was born of Canadian parents. I was a New York yankee in King Cotton’s court (or King Tobacco’s more accurately). But all this awareness of where I came from only served to make me feel ‘different’ from my Anglo-Saxon, American, southern fellows. I took that sense of being different and ran with it in some pretty stupid directions. I got great ‘pleasure’ out of feeling different (read superior) to those around me, but it didn’t ever get me much other than a sense of futile alienation. In fact it is only when I started to look for similarities with those around me that I started to feel happy with life.

Chances are that Boy Z is going to grow up an Aussie bloke. I don’t see another trans-continental move in the cards for us any time soon. Does it really matter that he was born in England, that his Dad is an American, that his Mum is Irish? Or would he be better served to settle in amongst his Antipodean brethren and just fit in? Would he be better off accepting that he’s like his peers – going through the same things at the same time. I don’t know the answer to these questions, but a lot of times I think that life could have been easier if I had run with the pack more rather than sitting in the corner feeling like…

We are not of this world
And there’s a place for us
Stuck inside this fleeting moment
Tucked away where no one owns it
Wrapped up in a haste,
And by mistake got thown away
And oh, I am so homesick

Maybe it’s time to stop listening to Soul Asylum…

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I shouldn’t be hard on Soul Asylum. I’ve been listening to ‘Grave Dancers Union’ while I write this one and even sixteen years on it sounds damn good (if a bit earnest). Check it out on .

But I’m pretty used to this kind of thing. As an American expatriate this is a common – and in this case, rather innocuous – type of exchange. My co-workers, colleagues, friends and random acquaintances often forget that I’m an American. I endeavor to be, with apologies to Graham Greene, a quiet American. Having made the decision to be a permanent expatriate – a migrant – I try hard to fit in to the culture that I’ve chosen. I don’t fit the caricature of the typical American that most of my colleagues have in their heads, so it’s easy for them to forget my citizenship and to express their true feelings about we Yanks in casual conversation.

A question I often get from my readers when describing these sometimes frustrating encounters is “Is that really what they think of us?” I always try to make people feel better. “No, only some of them. It’s not really that bad”, I soothe. The grim reality is that, in general, people in the countries which I have visited or lived  do not like Americans. There are exceptions – the occasional Americanophile, the folks that have lived in the States or met a number of American expats – but most of the rest of the Western world have quite strong feelings of antipathy toward us. The exchange I described at the beginning of this post is a mild one. The worst are when I’m faced with a strong-willed local and asked to justify American culture – one that I’m not really that happy with myself – or lectured at length about the wrongs perpetrated on the world by the U.S.A.

This is based in large part on our nation’s behavior in the last eight years. George Bush’s sledgehammer-as-diplomacy has alienated many of our allies. But it runs deeper than that. If you read the comments on my last post, a lot of non-Americans recoil at the spread of American culture and consumerism. This new brand of commercial imperialism has been more pervasive than Bush’s military incursions in the Middle East. The rest of the world is angry that there are probably only two or three countries in the world that lack a McDonalds, the fact that American chain stores have moved into Europe and Australia – cutting down local businesses in their wake. People in Perth, Manchester and Galway are disgusted that most of their television and movies now come with an American accent. Folks in Aberdeen and Adelaide are angry that American-style privitization of public services has gotten them more expensive and lower quality services.

Unfortunately it’s not just our political and economic policies. If you asked someone on the streets of York, Darwin or Christchurch what they thought of when they thought of an average American they would use words like fat, obnoxious, close-minded, high-maintenance, and – above all – ignorant. If you asked that same person how many Americans they knew, how many were in their close social circle, they would likely say zero to two. So where does this impression come from? TV, movies and tourists.

You see, we are doing ourselves a disservice. By exporting our crap television and our increasingly derivative movies, we are presenting an image of ourselves to the rest of the world that does not reflect reality. The bilge that we’re spewing into the world – and not just the environmental toxins – are a source of a lot of resentment from the rest of the world. Are Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Brittany Spears typical Americans? What about Bill O’Reilly, Neil Cavuto, Keith Olbermann and Ann Coulter? What about George Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin? Are any of these people like you or me? The tourist thing is a tricky one. I find a lot of my fellow Americans annoying when I run across them as tourists. There seems to be something in our psyche (the British are guilty of this as well) that demands that when visiting a foreign country it be as similar to our home as possible. What this means is that we get the reputation, fairly in my experience, of being loud, intractable, demanding and

But enough self-loathing. Here’s the thing, the thing that you (if you’re an American reading this blog) and I already know – we’re getting a bad rap. There are Americans that fit the stereotype – absolutely. I’ve met them. I’ve seen them in the Wal-Mart, yelling across the shop at their kids, waddling through the aisles filled with giant bags of potato chips in “No Spin Zone” or “These Colors Don’t Run” t-shirts, clinging desperately to their jiggling mounds of fat. You see them on the news – the media loves the extremes – you see them parodied in films and on the TV. But stereotypes are a dangerous thing. For example, if you based your opinion of Australians on what you’ve seen on films and TV you may think that Steve Irwin or Mick Dundee or The Sheepherders were typical Aussie blokes. Based on TV and movies, the streets of London would be populated with Mr. Beans, Edwinas and Pattys and Simon Cowells.

And this is what I find frustrating about living abroad – stereotypes. I’ve got as good a sense of humor as anyone, and if I’m talking to someone who has spent time in the States or has American friends, then I’m happy to play around with the stereotypes and throw them right back in their face. We used to have a great time in my lab in Oxford teasing each other about cultural stereotypes. With people from seven or eight different countries (depending on whether you consider Scotland a country) there was ample material to work with. But, when confronted with people that have never set foot in the United States, have never spent time with Americans yet have firm ideas about what we are like and who we are – that’s not in good fun. That is dealing with ignorance and ignorance is something for which I have very little tolerance, regardless of citizenship. I had a friend in Oxford who used to say that when you found something that you didn’t like in another person – “if you spot it, you got it”. In other words, we dislike in others what we dislike in ourselves. I think that this applies to this whole national psyche debate. Australians are getting fatter – blame the Americans pushing McDonalds down their throats. Brits are getting irrevocably into debt – blame the loose American-style credit regulations.

There is an old cliché about familiarity breeding contempt.  I think the converse is true here. Dr. O’C said it well in her comment on the last post – her experience in America gave her greater respect for Americans. My experience in Britain gave me greater respect for the wealth and depth of British culture. Meeting, working with and making friends with normal people from different countries has helped me transcend my personal stereotypes and prejudices about those nationalities. The only way to get past a stereotype or a prejudiced opinion is to get to know the people about whom you’ve formed a false opinion. That being the case, I’m like a frickin’ cultural ambassador for the U.S.A. – traveling the world showing just how mild-mannered, thoughtful, intelligent and modest Americans really are. I think that the State Department should consider giving me a stipend for spreading the truth about Americans – that we’re not all that different than anyone else – no better and certainly no worse.

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Image credits:

Typical American

Typical Aussie

Typical Brit

Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” is available from .

After one whole grueling day of work, today was Papa and Boy Z party day. Rather than letting my little terrorist destroy the family home, we hit the road for a visit with the Family Arizaphale. Lunch by the pool and then a trip south to Port Noarlunga was a perfect way to spend an absolutely gorgeous summer day.

Arizaphale’s become one of my favorite people that I’ve met in Australia – charming, gregarious, and an easy conversationalist. Despite her Pommie heritage, she’s characteristic of the friendly Aussie. After four years spent struggling to crack the iron veneer of the painfully reserved English, I find myself almost suspicious when I’m bowled over by affable Aussies strangers. But in general, they’re just genuinely good natured and friendly, much more like my fellow countrymen than their former colonial masters.

In fact, in most ways Australia is more like the U.S. than the U.K. There’s room for the suburban sprawl characteristic of American cities rather than the claustrophobic crowding of British city centers. Once you get into the countryside, the wide open spaces are reminiscent of parts of the American West. The Aussies love their cars and their sports and their road trips. And their donuts. They are often individualistic to a fault and fiercely nationalistic – like their American cousins. We’ve got all the American chain stores, all the American TV (or Australian imitations) and based on the news coverage during the election you would have thought that Australia had a few electoral votes at stake. Now that the Aussie twang sounds normal to my confused ears, sometimes I forget that I’m 10,000 miles away from my birthplace.

A little while before we departed for the Antipodes, I read a comment by The Prettiest Denny’s Waitress describing going to Australia as “like going to San Diego except the people use some funny words and the snakes are more poisonous”. I bristled a bit at that – surely Oz would be more exotic than a medium sized California city full of retirees and uniformed servicemen. But you know what? If you unfocus your eyes a bit while driving through parts of Adelaide, you could easily be in SoCal – San Diego with the occasional wandering marsupial and fewer Marines.

If Australia had been my first expatriate experience, I think I would have been disappointed. When I left the States in 2004, I was looking for something foreign. I got more of that than I expected in Britain, so much so that I was almost completely overwhelmed for the first couple of years. But four years into my expat adventure, I relish the familiarity that Australia offers. I’m looking for a home and on days like today – with my son, in the company of friends, basking in the sun and surf – Australia’s beginning to seem like just the right place for that elusive home.

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Badly Drawn Boy’s “One Plus One Is One” is available from .

A lot of the expat bloggers who I read have written lately of the things that they miss from “home”, of the visceral homesickness that often strikes  fast and dark like a midwestern thunderstorm. I’ve found that the longer I’m away the less I’m affected by that storm – the fewer the things that I miss from the States. Most of the day-to-day bits of life can be replicated abroad. The world is a pretty small and increasingly homogeneous place these days. If I want a Big Mac, I go and get a Big Mac. If I want to watch a bad American TV program, chances are that it, or an Australian replicate, is on Channel 7. There are a few things that are so much a part of me that I think I will always miss, but they are mostly trivial – things like comfort foods and secret places (most of them no longer existent in the form in which I remember them).

And my family. This yearning is getting worse rather than better. Australia is incredibly far away from anything else, moreso than I really understood before I got here. The sense of isolation is tangible here, even the distances between Adelaide and other cities in Australia is daunting. Britain always felt cozy and tight. If worse came to worse I could hop on a flight from Gatwick and be back on the East Coast of the States in six hours or so. The trip back to North America from Adelaide is a journey. Both Dr. O’C and I occasionally question our decision to move here, when we think about how far away family members are.

But it’s the decision we made and the die is cast so to speak. We are in Australia for the long haul. I wouldn’t say I’m never coming back to the States, never say never. But after four years away in two different countries it’s becoming clear to me, at the risk of being labeled one of the G.O.P’s “fake Americans”, that for me the American dream is increasingly more accessible from outside of America. I find it difficult to imagine living in the U.S. now, raising my son there. Right now, Australia is the Land of Opportunity for my family.

Which leads me to that second significant date – six months in Australia. I can not complain about how things have gone for us in a short time in Oz. Let me rephrase, I should not complain about the state of things in Oz. I’m not thrilled with our living situation and in self-pitying times, complain voluminously about it. But with a sane attitude, things have gone incredibly well for us Down Under. Both Dr. O’C and I are employed and making more money than either of us ever have. Despite having two jobs, I’m about to cut down to four days a week and have an extra day free with my son every week. I have a beautiful son and a beautiful partner, both of whom bring a smile to my face when I see them after a day at work. Boy Z is happy and healthy and loves to be outdoors in the balmy Australian sunshine (I’m told it gets a bit less friendly come January and February). We’re on the verge of buying the first new car that either of us have ever owned. A home of our own is not too far out of reach. We’re  a short trip to either the beach or the country while living in a manageable urban area. We’ve made friends easily and reasonably quickly.  Australia is offering me a life that is beyond my wildest dreams.

The homesickness – no that’s the wrong word, my home is here. My home is where I and Dr. O’C and Boy Z are on the day. The inborn tie of blood, the almost painful longing to be in the same room of my family – that is something that I just have to deal with on a daily basis, that I have to accept as a consequence of the lifestyle that is available to me here, one that I firmly believe would not be in Britain or America. Skype and e-mail and phone calls are great, but they always leave you hungry for more, sometimes even makes the longing worse. I guess this just gives us more motivation to save money for those long trips abroad.

I try and focus on the day at hand and to appreciate all the wonder and beauty that surrounds me. It’s springtime in Australia and even though actuarial tables would put me more at midsummer, I feel like it’s the springtime of my life.

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Damien Jurado’s latest record, “Caught In The Trees”, is out on Secretly Canadian. Jurado’s an exceptional artist and one who doesn’t get the attention that he deserves. He makes stunningly crafted Americana with lyrics that just make your jaw draw open with their  Both Jurado and the oustanding Secretly Canadian label are blogger friendly, so if you like this track then buy the album here.

Well, for the last 370 days I have been plotting my vengeance. But alas, it is not to be. The Vol Abroad, despite being a graduate of the University of Tennessee, is not a fool. She’s demurred on my challenge to repeat last year’s bet, so the world will have to wait to see Buddy in glorious red and black. She has agreed to write up a guest post, attempting to sing the praises of the hapless Tennessee Volunteers who have a date for destruction in Athens this weekend. 

Visitors get the first shot here, so let’s see what The Vol Abroad has to say in defense of her hillbilly orangemen:

My grandfather was one of the finest men I ever met.  He believed in temperance and civic duty and going to church on Sunday (and Wednesday) and looking a man in the eye.  And he believed in the Tennessee Volunteers.  I’m not so much on the church going or the temperance, but I managed to absorb the love of the Vols. And this is something I’m passing on to my sixteen month old son.

As a third generation graduate of the University of Tennessee on both sides of my family and with both my degrees coming from that hallowed institution, there was never any other place for me to put my fan love.  Cut me, and I do bleed orange.

But my British husband, who’s described on my blog as the Vol-in-Law, is merely a Volunteer by marriage.  He also has a family tradition in higher education.  He’s a third generation graduate of Oxford University.

So Buddy has inherited rival traditions.  Oxford on the one hand, and Tennessee on the other.  But what kind of love can a boy have for Oxford? As far as I know, their only major sporting event is the Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Go Dark Blues? Beat the Light Blues?   Sure, I guess it’s ok to dress up and stroll around the Thames with a Pimms in hand.  But that hardly compares to joining almost 100,000 fellow fans dressed in orange and singing Rocky Top, over and over and over again in a manner guaranteed to raise a migraine in the skull of any opposing fan.

But of course, as an expat, I don’t have the societal reinforcement of SEC football fandom, but I’m doing my best to raise him right. Dressing him in orange, teaching him to say ‘Go Vols’, trying to lull him to sleep with Rocky Top (bad idea), giving him little Smokey toys to play with and ensuring that he gets sufficient doses of Vol Network internet radio coverage.  He may be the only boy in the world whose baby album features a picture of the baby of a Georgia fan dressed in Tennessee Orange because his daddy lost a bet.  Before he attends his first football game at Neyland Stadium, he’ll know every word of Rocky Top, he’ll know about running through the T, and he’ll understand the Volunteer grumble in a bad season.  And he’ll hate, hate, hate Alabama, Florida and Georgia.

Yep, I’m raising my boy right.

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Maybe this isn’t the best year to be laying down the smack talk about football.  My beloved Tennessee Volunteers don’t seem to be having their finest season.   But as our fearless leader said only last week, we’re still a work in progress and I’m sure all the fine recruiting and two-a-days in the Tennessee heat will come to fruition this Saturday when Tennessee thumps Georgia. Again.

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And in reply, speaking for the home team, your underwhelming correspondent:

Like John McCain and the economy, you’ll note that The Vol Abroad doesn’t want to talk much about football this year. Taking her cues from the G.O.P. playbook, she’s trying to turn the discussion to family values. Well that’s just fine, I think we all know what’s going to happen on the football field this Saturday, so let’s talk about family.

My family is a wandering one. I always felt a kinship with gypsies growing up and held on to the dream of dropping out of mainstream society and running away with the gypsies until about the 274th time that some wild-eyed gypsy woman tried to bully me into buying a sickly geranium on the streets of Oxford.

My point is that my family hasn’t spent three generations in the same country, never mind manning the same moonshine still on some mountain side.  So for me, the University of Georgia was a choice that I made with clear eyes and a clear head. I wanted to attend the finest educational institution that the South had to offer, so there was no real decision to be made when I received an acceptance letter with an Athens postmark*.

Now, we’re half a world away from Old Georgia and chances are that Boy Z may not follow in his father’s educational footsteps in the same way that I didn’t follow in hos grandfather’s.  Boy Z may never walk under the Arches as a student, may never study in the shade of the oaks on North Campus, may never sit with his classmates in Sanford Stadium sweating in polyester gowns under the brutal June sun.

But I will guaran-damn-tee you two things. First, he will be the biggest Georgia Bulldogs fan in Australia, at least until he gets old enough to rebel. Even then as long as he doesn’t cheer for Tennessee or Florida, it’ll be OK**. Second, one day he will walk into Sanford Stadium with his Dad and watch the glory of the Georgia Bulldogs between the hedges. He’ll hear the roar of the crowd, the sound of 90,000 plus voices barking a kick-off, he’ll hear the Red Coat Band play “Glory, Glory”.

And on Sunday morning he’ll sit with me as we listen to the Georgia Bulldogs dismantle the Tennessee Volunteers.

Now, let’s talk just a little about the real issue: the game. It’s personal after the beat down that The Vols put on us last year and the humiliation that was visited upon myself, my son and my dog. Fortunately for A Free Man’s honor, it looks like a good year for revenge. Tennessee is 2 – 3 on the year with losses to a hapless UCLA team, a sub-par Auburn team and an overrated Florida team. Their wins have come against UAB and, in a squeaker, Northern Illinois. The Vols offense is ranked 107th out of 119 Division 1 teams. Now, admittedly, Georgia was not impressive against Alabama two weeks ago, but the boys in red and black have had two weeks to stew in their embarassment. Tennessee has taken us apart for the last two years and it’s time for revenge. If the Dawgs can’t get up for this game, then they just can’t get up full stop.

We’re doing all we can for the Dawgs from half a world away. As you can see in that photo above, Boy Z and I went out and made a sacrifice to Nemesis, the Greek goddess of revenge. That kangaroo was the closest thing we could find to a fleabitten, mangy coon hound. And if you listen carefully on Saturday afternoon, you’ll hear us singing:

Glory, glory to old Georgia!
Glory, glory to old Georgia!
Glory, glory to old Georgia!
G-E-O-R-G-I-A.

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Tennessee at Georgia kicks off at 3:30 p.m. Eastern (6:00 a.m. Sunday Adelaide or 8:30 p.m. London). It’s televised on CBS in the States. CBS offers the game for free online but ONLY IN THE U.S. Damn you, CBS! The Vol Abroad was working on a hack, perhaps she’ll let us know if she sorted it out. Otherwise, it’s internet radio for the expat fans.

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Ryan Adams’ “Demolition” is available from .

Vol fan in horror borrowed from Hey Jenny Slater (excellent Dawg site).

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* For sticklers for the truth, this is actually a longer story and thus not strictly true. The whole, longwinded tale can be found here.

** If he ever cheers for Tennessee or Florida or becomes a vegan, I’m kicking his ass out.

Maybe now that I’ve voted I can ignore the rest of this train wreck of an election.

Yeah, probably not.

All this mess, Nathan’s comment the other day and this post by We Be Toys reminded me of the last uncontrollable force that I had to try and control. My Siberian Husky, Timmins, is now the very model of a well behaved pooch. Hold on, I’ve just got my tongue stuck here in my cheek. At any rate, he’s certainly an easier animal to deal with than when we were still living in the States. When he was a younger dog, Timmins was virtually impossible to keep contained. With a running start, the dog could clear a six foot fence with not too much trouble. He used to sit by the front door just waiting for a failure in vigilance and then bolt. Once loose, you got the dog back when he wanted to come back. No matter how accomplished a dog tackler you were, Timmins would leave you cursing in a cloud of dust.

Part of dog ownership for Dr. O’C and I was chasing our dog around the streets of Columbia, Missouri as he terrorized cats or whatever other small mammals he could find, chasing him around as he occasionally glanced back at his pursuers with a look of brazen disobedience. We never held a party in which part of the festivities didn’t involve some of the guests wandering around our neighborhood trying to catch our wayward dog. We tried everything to keep the damn dog in the yard and nothing worked.

Somewhere along the way, and I really don’t recall whose idea this was, it seemed like a good idea to try to electrify the fence around out backyard. “It seemed like a good idea at the time” was kind of a theme of the first thirty or so years of my life, so one spring afternoon I came home from work early with some contraband fencing and a few curiously willing work colleagues. We spent the remainder of the day drinking beer and wiring my backyard for electricity. For a house near the center of town, we had a remarkably big yard and so the details are pretty hazy but I do remember Nathan, who actually grew up on a farm, was particularly helpful. What I can’t remember for the life of me is who tested the fence. I do recall one of my work colleagues, who in hindsight I suspect of sadism, trying to convince me to force the dog onto the fence to show him what it was.

I couldn’t cope with watching my dog hit the fence for the first time, so I went inside and waited. I didn’t have to wait long for a shrieking yelp followed by a long, low mournful and angry cry. I hurried out the back and Timmins was in the exact center of the yard looking as if he had just come face to face with his maker. He didn’t move from the center of the yard for hours and that was only to come in to the house to go to bed.

Lest you feel too much sympathy for the dog or are inclined to judge me harshly, that fence only kept the dog in for about a month before he figured out how to avoid a shock and still escape.

I never hit that fence, so I couldn’t tell you what it felt like. Dr. O’C did, at least once, despite knowing it was there. She wasn’t the only one as various people, again at parties, would forget it was there and rub up against it to their surprise. There may have been a time or two that I neglected to tell people that we had an electric fence, just because they annoyed me.

To try and tie this meandering post together, I’d like to give you my best Sarah Palin impression:

Well Katie, to fix this economic crisis, such as, I would suggest putting all of the Congresses together in a pen with a, you know, electric fence and ok, I mean, obviously out there for God and everyone to judge. Then there will be reform, such as with mavericks and lipstick. And we’ll say thanks but no thanks to that bridge to nowhere. Katie. Obviously.  They’re not waiting to see what Barack Obama is going to do. Is he going to do this and see what way the political wind’s blowing? I’ll try to find an electric fence and I’ll bring it to you.

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The New Pornographers’ “Electric Version” is available from .

-The Dead Milkmen – “Everybody’s Got Nice Stuff But Me”

As our bus pulled away from Oxford on a cold late-March morning, Dr. O’C uttered the phrase that I knew would define the next month or so of our lives:

“We’re homeless with too much luggage.”

And that was the case as we trundled our way down to Oz, via family visits on the way. Living out of a few suitcases, going places but nowhere fast. It wasn’t easy, but it was manageable – especially with an end date, a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I was delusional, but I figured most of the stuff that we shipped from Britain would get to Oz shortly after we did. I assumed that I’d be reunited with my computer, the bulk of my clothes, my books, my kitchen knives, and so on. If you had told me that four months after leaving Britain we would still be living out of the same suitcases, well, I certainly would have packed more socks.

But, nearly four months to the day that Simpsons Removal and Storage came and collected our worldly possessions I’m still cycling through the same handful of underwear, still staring at blank walls in our new home, still cursing at the creaky old Mac laptop. I’m still shivering my way to the bus stop in the morning in a completely unsuitable jacket (that I nearly threw away when we left Sweden). And Z has grown out of all the Georgia Bulldogs clothing that we brought with us. At least that’s what Dr. O’C tells me.

Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, how long does it take for a container full of personal itemes to get from England to Australia? Is four months a long time? Average cargo ship takes 32 -40 days – less than six weeks – to make that voyage, which begs the question – where has our stuff been?

Well for the first two months, it sat in the Simpsons Removals and Storage* warehouse in Kent. You see, when Dr. O’C negotiated the deal with Simpsons (this was during her “Don’t Get Done, Get Dom” phase) they neglected to point out that despite being a moving company, they actually suck quite badly at moving things. This lapse in providing us with accurate information sort of foreshadowed the remainder of our experience with them. Customer service is not Simpsons Removal and Storage’s strong point. They neglected to let us know anything about our shipment, they neglected to let us know when we owed them money, they neglected to let us know when payments didn’t clear properly.

To be fair to Simpsons**, as uninspired I am to do so, it’s not all their fault. They finally got our container to Melbourne in late June. For the last month it has been sitting in Customs in Melbourne waiting for inspection. It was inspected and contraband was found in the form of a stupid little wooden seagull, common in seafood restaurants all over the Atlantic seaboard. Australian Customs prides itself in protecting Australia’s borders from the entry of illegal and harmful goods, potential terrorist threats and unauthorised people. And apparently tacky sculpture. The best part? We had the option of paying Customs $90 to destroy the seagull or $260 to irradiate it and make it safe for Australia. I guess you’ve got to pay for all that protection somehow. To add insult to injury, we had to wait another week or so for the customs agents to come back and burn the damn bird.

Barring any unforeseen circumstances the 36 boxes containing the physical trappings of our lives will be on our doorstep by Thursday.

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* I’m repeatedly naming Simpsons Removals & Storage, the shipping company from Kent (UK), because I’m hoping that when ‘Googled’ this post will be available for people who are thinking of using Simpsons Removal & Storage for their move. Don’t do it.

** That was Simpsons Removal and Storage.

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The Dead Milkmen’s “Beelzebubba” is available from .

A fellow American in Adelaide who stumbled onto my site wrote a post the other day that got me thinking about immigration. Her point is that most expats (and other people for that matter) relish and toss around the word ‘expatriate’ but ‘cringe’ at the word immigrant. ‘Expatriate’ carries with it images of glamour, worldliness, champagne on the Seine and first class round the world flights. ’Immigrant’ conjures images of huddled masses in steerage, midnight dashes over the Rio Grande and closed doors.

I prefer the word ‘expatriate’ myself but the Australian government, probably rightly, would use the word ’immigrant’ to describe me. Maybe it’s time I started to use that word as well. Both Dr. O’C and I come from a long line of immigrants and maybe it was natural that we followed in their footsteps. Dr. O’C’s family emigrated from Ireland to Australia when she and her sister were quite young in the hopes of making a better life for their family. My great-grandparents emigrated from Europe to Canada in the early part of the 20th century to escape a continent that seemed to be in a state of endless war. My parents moved from Canada to the U.S. in the late 60’s to ride the tail end of the post-war boom. And I emigrated from the U.S. through Europe to Australia in the early part of the 21st century in search of a life that I didn’t think was available to me in the U.S.

I suspect that all of the immigrants in our bloodlines had the same goal when they picked up and left their  home – a better life for our families. All of them achieved that goal - they succeeded beyond what they thought possible in the Old Country. Now, with the unemployment rate in the Free Man household reaching 0%* we’re well on the way to that better life that brought us Down Under.

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* We’re going to give Baby Z a few years before including him in employment statistics. 12 or 13 maybe?

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Led Zeppelin’s III is available from .