Who are you?

This one's all about culture.  Mostly, anyway.  Who we are, what we do, and how we do it.  Give that definition to an anthropology professor and they'll run a strip off of you.  But with all of the 6-billion-plus people on earth?  Seems to me like that's a pretty good definition.  Who we are depends largely on where we were born.  Blood is thicker than water and all that.

Me, I'm a mutt.  A European mixture, a stew, a mishmash of things.  Scottish, Irish, British, French, and German.  My friends all joke that with a background like that, I should be able to drink them under the table.  Truth is, I'm not much of a drinker.

I wish I was more of something in particular.  I wish I could be enough of something to really claim it and call it my own.  As it is, I don't have much of a culture.  I'm Canadian, but for me, that has more to with citizenship and less to do with identity.  I wish I was Italian, or East Indian, or something else like that.  I've always been somewhat jealous of people who do have that kind of identity, even if a lot of people try to fit in rather than really accept it.  Think about it.  You have something so solid, so real, so definite, in the way of who you are.

For me, it's kind of a gray area.  I can't say anything is really mine.  I'm not quite enough of anything I am to do that.

I'm mostly Scottish and Irish, but that doesn't mean I can necessarily wear kilts and talk in a brogue and eat haggis.

Come to think of it, I don't really want to eat haggis.  Or black puddings.  "You ever think about how a black pudding is basically just a giant scab?"(Danny Bhoy)

Anyway.

I'm not East Indian at all, but my aunt is.  She's told me stories of India and I've always wanted to go there.  I have saris and salvar khamees suits from my host family in Thailand, but I have nothing I can do with them.  I'd wear them, but Prince George is too small for that.  Too small for what?  I should use delicate wording here.  Too small for a non-East Indian girl to wear a sari or salvar khamees suit for no special occasion at all, just because she can, I guess.  Please don't alert the firing squad.

That's part of the reason why I'm so looking forward to Nanaimo and the island in general.  There are so many people there, doing so many things, that nothing really appears as strange as it does here.  I can be anyone.  I could wear a sari if I really, really wanted to.  Now, just a matter of getting the guts to do it.

Hasn't anyone else ever wanted to belong so strongly to some culture that isn't theirs?  Haven't you ever gone to some cultural event and wanted it to never end, just because it was so different from what you were used to?

I think I was born in the wrong country.