my very first time

A semester abroad is a magical time in the life of a college student. Some kids savor the opportunity to study another culture up close, which mostly involves learning about the strange things that foreigners put on their sandwiches. Other kids focus on meeting new people by getting drunk and boffing locals.

Some kids speak with embarrassing fake accents, which makes patriots like me marvel at the mysteriousness of a universe in which someone can be so self-conscious, yet so oblivious to their own ridiculousness, at the same time. With each stilted syllable, they seemed to say: even one-dimensional nightmare people contain multitudes. Believe.

The world becomes wider, and in taking it all in, we learn new things about ourselves.

My own semester abroad was just such a reflective time. It was, for example, the first time it occurred to me that I might be a sociopath.

That autumn in London was my first real taste of urbanity. I was twenty years old and deeply impressed with my own savvy. I took the train to my internship at a film studio’s outpost, where I sat around and watched movies. I shopped in grocery stores with ethnic foods. I smoked Silk Cuts and paid for household goods in an unfamiliar currency, a real international woman of mystery in my own mind.

I also learned about beggars. (In the South, I guess homeless people are too dignified to beg.) I think, before that, I imagined the homeless were like modern-day Dickens characters--dirty and mischievous and charming. And the real ones were dirty, all right, but also really fucking annoying. Homeless people are one thing in the abstract, when they have some kind of story; they’re quite another when you’re stepping over a huge steaming puddle of hobo barf when you’re running late for class.

The thing is, in London, many (if not most) beggars have pet dogs. Sweet sad tired-looking dogs that plead with their eyes from the depressing cardboard nests they share with these unpleasant humans. To me, their canine despair was much more stirring than the human variety. Deeply moved, I would watch these blighted creatures eat debris from the sidewalk and dream about ways I could help them have a better life.

I remember devising a plan to hand out bags of supplies to all these homeless dogs. My college boyfriend, who was more compassionate than I, raised the question of helping their owners. What about the other creature in that cardboard nest?

It’s bad enough that it didn’t even occur to me that handing out special treats to homeless dogs while expecting their human companions to continue to subsist on actual trashcan garbage was sort of fucked up. What’s worse is that even after this oversight had been called to my attention, I really didn’t give a flip. It was very similar to the way I feel about sports--on an intellectual level, I understood it was something that people care about, but in the place where my heart should be, I couldn’t make myself feel it too.

Of course, back then I was in college, so instead of admitting my faults I revised my (totally imaginary, it should be said) Feed the Homeless Dogs of London campaign to include, like, cheese sandwiches for the dogs’ human counterparts. Which didn’t really convince anyone of my humanity, except maybe me.

These days, opportunities to reflect on my own sociopathy arise with alarming frequency. But I have come to believe it’s more of a spectrum than an all-or-nothing affair. (For one thing, I’m pretty sure that True Sociopaths don’t worry about that kind of thing overly much.) Some years ago I realized I might be a little autistic. More recently I have started to accept that I might be a bit of a sociopath. Basically I am a super special nervous cranky snowflake.

It’s hard to say if this is just the autism or the sociopathy talking--or maybe it’s just the old misanthropy flaring up--but I also believe that my place on those spectrums is not only a bad thing.

Also, I stab hobos.

But seriously, part of what has me thinking about all of this has been watching all the footage from the disaster in Japan and finding myself especially moved by this video:



To some degree, I can trace that reaction to a different set of causes; namely, that footage of the tsunami looks so much like CGI that there is a certain unreality to it. Did anyone else feel that way as you watched the wave roll in? Like the fact that the water was on fire made me feel like I was watching a movie. Basically, The Day After Tomorrow has killed my capacity for empathy, and now all the most terrible things in the real world feel like another thing I’m watching on TV.

(That is an exaggeration, obviously. Truly, I am very sad and worried for the people of Japan, and I would very much like to give them all lots of cheese sandwiches.)

The truth is that there are a lot of terrible things going on in the world, and there’s nothing more emotionally exhausting than thinking about them too much. So now, whenever I feel sorry for a dog, I’m going to assume that’s how I actually feel about people somewhere beneath all the static.