This Week in America - The Ordinary Tuesdays You Don't Think About

What happens to friendships when you live overseas for years? This week, I’ve been thinking about the people and everyday moments we slowly lose touch with — the ordinary Tuesdays we once shared without realizing how important they were.

But this is This Week in America, so things don't stay reflective for long.

I'm also talking about Georgia surviving an intense week of dance auditions, the American obsession with neighborhood swimming pools, why I suddenly miss Saturday morning cartoons, my continuing war with Tennessee squirrels, a suspicious-looking slot machine in a gas station, and the Mexican restaurant conversation that somehow ended with rattlesnake as a traditional cancer remedy.

Just another week of noticing the strange, funny and occasionally meaningful little things that come with being an Australian living in America.

From Down Under to Down South — an Australian perspective on everyday life in the United States.

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Thanks for listening. Hoo roo maties.

Transcript

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This week in America, it's been one of those weeks where absolutely nothing seems connected. I've been thinking about how much life changes when you've lived overseas for years. I've discovered that apparently I now miss Saturday morning cartoons. The squirrels and I may have finally reached an understanding over my vegetable garden, and a completely innocent dinner conversation somehow ended up involving rattlesnakes and cancer. You better take cover. I've been getting plenty of encouragement from listeners here and viewers over on YouTube about Georgia and her dancing lately, which has been really touching. And this week was a pretty big one for her. She just finished five days of intensive dance training and auditions. That's four hours a day for five days with auditions every day and then a solo audition at the end of it as well. At 10 years old, 20 hours of dancing. And that's before you add the pressure of knowing you're being watched and assessed for next season's team. Now, I dance myself, I train several days a week for a couple of hours each time. So I have a pretty good idea what several hours of serious dance training feels like. And I'm telling you, that's a serious workload. I finish a hard session and I'm very aware that I've had a hard practice. And these kids apparently finish four hours, go home, recharge overnight, like someone's plugged them into the wall. Then they come back the next morning, ready to do it all over again. Where are they getting the energy from? Because I'd like to place an order. It wasn't just the dancing. One thing that struck me was that some of these kids have already been doing so many other things over summer. Some of the girls have also been doing intensive theater camps, others had basketball camps, softball, other dance intensives. Sometimes one thing finishing and the next starting almost immediately. And I kept thinking, where are you actually having summer? American kids seem to have this whole other calendar that kicks in the moment school finishes. Camps, sports, theater, dance, training. There's an entire summer industry devoted to keeping kids busy. I don't know how they fit it all in. Actually, I don't even know how their parents fit it all in either. Because there's presumably an entire population of American parents that are spending June and July driving around with water bottles, dance bags, baseball gloves, and children eating dinner in the back seat. But for Georgia, all that work paid off. She made seven dances for next season, including a trio, and she got her solo. So I'm incredibly proud of her. Obviously, I'm proud of the result because she wanted that solo badly. But I'm even prouder of what she put into getting it. She genuinely loves dance. And as someone who loves dance myself, I understand that part completely. Now, speaking of the girls, summer in America is almost over. But one thing I've really noticed this year is just how many neighborhoods have their own swimming pools. Now not individual backyard pools, but community pools. You drive into these subdivisions and there'll be clubhouse, tennis courts, playgrounds, swimming pools, basically a small resort that happens to have 400 houses attached to it. Now, our neighborhood naturally doesn't have one, but a lot of the girls' friends live in neighborhoods that do. So they've still spent plenty of the summer swimming. Brianna in particular seems to have done very well out of having friends who live in neighborhoods with pools. Apparently, the secret to surviving an American summer isn't owning a pool yourself. It's choosing your friends wisely. I actually really like this part of American suburban life. The kids meet their friends at the neighborhood pool. They spend a few hours swimming, come home exhausted and hungry, and presumably recover just in time to ask if they can go back tomorrow. It still feels very American to me. A community swimming pool right in the middle of your neighborhood. Although inevitably there's always one kid who believes it was specifically constructed for them to perform cannonballs three feet away from everybody else. I guess every pool has one of those. Something else has been on my mind this week, though, and it's one of the stranger parts of living overseas for a long time. You lose touch with people. Not necessarily because anything happened or there was a huge argument. I don't think anybody dramatically announced that the friendship was over. Life just tends to move. And I've been away from Australia for years now, and there are very few people back there that I regularly talk to anymore. And I don't mean that negatively. Our lives are just very different now. When you first move overseas, you're still very connected to the life that you left. You know what's happening, you know who's doing what. You speak regularly. Then another year passes, and another, and another. Eventually, your everyday lives barely overlap. And I think that's the part that changes friendships more than anything else does. It's not that you suddenly stop caring about someone, you just stop knowing all the little things about each other's lives. You don't know the people they're talking about anymore, and they don't know the people that you're talking about. Someone mentions something that happened at work and you realize you don't actually know where they're even working now. Eventually, a conversation that once would have lasted two hours becomes, How are you? Yeah, good, you? Yeah, you're good. Excellent. We've successfully covered eight years in approximately 45 seconds. The things happening in my life are here now. My kids are growing up here, my routines are here, and my friends are here. And I always thought we'd have far more visitors than we've actually had. When you tell people that you're moving overseas, everybody says that they'll come and visit. Oh, absolutely, yeah, we'll be we'll come over. And you believe them. You imagine people staying with you, you show them Nashville, take them around Tennessee, maybe do a road trip somewhere. Eight years later, you're beginning to suspect they may not have actually booked the tickets. I'm starting to think we'll definitely come and visit. Might be the international version of we should catch up sometime. Nobody is technically lying. We're all just being wildly optimistic, and I understand it. International travel is expensive. People have jobs, children, their own lives. And Australia isn't exactly around the corner. You can't pop over to Tennessee for the weekend. In fact, we're almost on the opposite side of the planet. But it's one of those realities of immigrating that I don't think you really understand until you've done it for a long time. Home doesn't stop being home, but it doesn't stay frozen waiting for you either. People move on, you move on. And eventually you realize you're not quite as connected to that old version of your life as you thought you'd always be. Because you haven't necessarily lost those people, you've just stopped sharing ordinary Tuesdays with them. And it turns out ordinary Tuesdays are a much bigger part of a friendship than what you first realized. You better take Enjoying from Down Under to Down South. My Buy Me a Coffee link is in the episode description. Because apparently talking this much requires funding. Oh, and coffee. Quite a lot of coffee. So speaking of things that aren't quite the same as I remember them. Saturday morning cartoons. Now I was lying in bed the other day and I could hear Brianna watching some of her favorite YouTubers. And suddenly I thought, I'd really like to hear Roadrunner. That's it. That's apparently where I am in life now. Children today wake up and have access to effectively every piece of entertainment that's ever been created. YouTube, Netflix, Disney, streaming services, millions of videos available instantly. We had a coyote attempting to murder a bird with equipment purchased from Acme. Saturday morning cartoons were an event. You didn't choose exactly what you wanted to watch. You watched what was on. And more importantly, you watched it when it was on. There was no pausing it. There wasn't any watching it later. If mum wanted you to go somewhere halfway through the Flintstones, well, that was it. You'd never know how it ended. Although, to be fair, there was probably a pretty good chance that Fred would get in trouble with Wilma. You get up, you'd sit in front of your TV, you'd probably still be in your PJs. And that was your little window of cartoons for the week. If Roadrunner was on, you settled in to watch Wiley Coyote spend another morning violating every name workplace health and safety regulation. And somehow, despite falling off cliffs, being crushed by boulders, blown up with dynamite, and repeatedly purchasing products from a company with an absolutely appalling safety record, he'd be back next Saturday, still ordering from ACME. At some point, you're going to question the consumer. There was something wonderfully simple about it. No algorithm, no endless scrolling through 400 options before deciding there's nothing to watch. There was no don't forget to like and subscribe. Although, admittedly, if Wiley Coyote had been a YouTuber, his channel would have been amazing. Today I'm testing the new Acme Rocket-powered roller skates. The thumbnail of a big shocked coyote face. The title, This Went Horribly Wrong, 6 million views. And somewhere in Tennessee, Brianna would probably be watching him. Now, an important update. Regular listeners may remember my ongoing agricultural conflict with the Tennessee squirrel population. Apparently, the squirrels believe my vegetable garden is less Michael's garden and more community buffet. But I have discovered something really important. Squirrels don't seem to like bell peppers. Now, I see this as a victory. I have plenty of bell peppers coming through right now, and several are almost ready to pick. So apparently I found a vegetable that doesn't meet the exacting culinary standards of the local squirrels. It's just pretty ridiculous when you think about it. I grew up in Australia, we're constantly telling the rest of the world about our snakes and spiders and crocodiles and everything else that's supposedly trying to kill you. I moved to America and my great wildlife nemesis turns out to be a squirrel. Not that they're particularly threatening, they're pretty cute, I guess, when you think about it. And yet somehow they're capable of generating genuine resentment in a 52-year-old guy standing in the backyard looking at a half-eaten tomato. But the bell peppers have remained untouched so far. I don't know whether squirrels genuinely dislike them or whether they're simply leaving them until they're perfectly ripe before they steal them as well. Like because I don't actually trust them. They're probably sitting on the tree watching me check the peppers every morning. Yeah, not yet, Dave. Give them another couple of days. But for the moment, they're all mine. After everything that's happened in that garden this summer, I'm counting this one as a win. I also saw something this week that genuinely confused me. A slot machine in a gas station in Lebanon, Tennessee. This caught my attention because gambling is one of those areas where Australia and America can feel completely backwards towards each other. Because in Australia, poker machines, or pokies as we call them, are everywhere. Pubs, clubs, hotels, entire rooms full of them. But here in Tennessee, gambling is much more restricted. So imagine my surprise when I walked into a gas station and tucked away towards the back near the toilets, there was what appeared to be a slot machine, and there was a guy sitting there playing it. Is that legal? Because hiding a slot machine at the back of a gas station doesn't exactly scream heavily regulated and attainment venue. It has the same energy as someone opening a door and saying, Come on in, the dentist is just there behind the freezer. So I went home and I looked it up. And apparently this is actually a thing in Tennessee. Machines that look very much like slot machines have appeared in gas stations and convenience stores. And they're sometimes described as skill games or no chance games. And the argument has been that they're not traditional slot machines because there's supposedly some element of skill involved, which sounds suspiciously like someone looked at a slot machine and said, What if we add one button and call it a sport? Tennessee courts have been particularly impressed by that argument. And in one case, a court found the machines involved were illegal gambling devices. Now, I don't know whether the machine that I saw was one of those, but I didn't exactly walk over and check it out. But suddenly the fact that it was tucked away at the back felt a little more interesting. I mean, it was literally there behind boxes. What fascinates me is how backwards my reaction is as an Australian. Because in Australia, I could walk into a suburban club and find an entire room containing dozens of poker machines and barely notice them. But here in Tennessee, I see one hidden in the back of a gas station, and immediately I feel like I've stumbled onto an underground casino. I half expected someone to whisper a password before letting me buy Meg Petrol. It's just another one of those moments where something completely ordinary in one country feels slightly illicit in another. And finally, we went out for Mexican food. And somehow I ended up discussing rattlesnake as a cancer treatment, as you do. I jokingly asked our server if they had any snake on the menu. I don't know why. Sometimes words just leave my mouth before the appropriate government agencies have approved them. And instead of simply laughing and saying no, he started telling us about his grandmother in Guatemala. And apparently, when she had cancer, rattlesnake was used as a traditional remedy. Well, I wasn't quite expecting that. One minute I'm looking at the menu deciding what to have for dinner. The next minute we're discussing his grandmother, Guatemala, and traditional rattlesnake remedies. So naturally, I went home and started reading about it. And it turns out this wasn't something our server just made up on the spot. Rattlesnake has been using traditional medicine in parts of Latin America for various illnesses, including cancer. Now, before anybody heads outside with a pillowcase, no, I am not recommending rattlesnake as a cancer treatment. I'm Australian. We're generally taught to move away from snakes. But I did find the whole conversation fascinating because if I'd simply ordered my dinner like a normal person, I never would have heard that story. And that's something I've noticed again and again since moving to America. Some of the most interesting things that I've learned haven't come from museums or tourist attractions. They've come just from talking to people. Someone at work or someone in a shop, maybe a neighbor, or apparently a server in a Mexican restaurant, after I've asked whether there's a snake on a mini. Sometimes curiosity takes you somewhere interesting, and sometimes it takes you to a rattlesnake. So that's been my week, and looking back at it, I guess there really wasn't much connecting any of it. Dance auditions and swimming pools, old friendships, Saturday morning cartoons and squirrels, slot machines hidden in the back of gas stations, and somehow rattlesnake. Actually, that's probably a fairly accurate description of my life in America. But I think that's what I've come to enjoy about doing this podcast. Because some weeks you go looking for stories, and other weeks you just pay attention. Something your kids are doing, or a conversation with a stranger, or something completely ordinary that suddenly reminds you how differently you see things after living in another country. Those little moments are usually the things that you remember. And apparently they're also how you end up with a podcast. That was this week in America.