Home and out to Dry

So I've been home for 11 days running around throwing my resumes at various universities while hanging around the house. Unfortunately the prospects of finding something to do in cross-cultural psychology over the next six months seems to get slimmer every time I log online. I've gotten to the point of writing random professors in the field of cross-cultural psychology asking for what to do next. My senior psychology capstone was focused more with the feel good talk on values instead of giving us direction and goals. Really though its not so bad aside from the fact that I'm not really doing anything with the Middle East or psychology.

I've been starting to catch some flak from some friends of mine about the whole job thing because they face greater obstacles than I do when finding one. When I was in Lebanon, many people were really preoccupied with the idea of moving to the U.S. and making money. The idea became this grand fantasy and was put on a pedestal. Then enter me, this twenty-something American kid who is really close to a B.A. in psychology who choices to come to Lebanon when I could easily stay in American and have a decent job. Needless to say it blew a lot of people's minds. Even my good friends were at first trying everything in their power to persuade me to go back to the States and finish my studies there before coming back many years down the road. Although the more they got to know me, the more they supported my desire to stay in Lebanon. However, what I was doing was destroying a lot of people's fantasies. After all, if America has everything, then why is someone like me trying to go to great lengths to stay in Lebanon?

Of course fantasy isn't reality. Sooner or later everyone will have to face up to the fact that their fantasy isn't what they made it out to be during the long time they spent pursuing it. Though many of my friends thought they would just want to live in American, some of them would probably get sick of the differences and miss their friends and family back home. Even in America you still have to pay for stuff, you have to deal with rude people, you still get rejected by the opposite sex sometimes, you still have to deal with violent crime, there are still generally bad days, stupid people, and the list goes on. The real problem is that over time problems become externalized and projected onto these fantasies while the root of the problem is not dealt with. Fortunately, most people realize this sooner or later.

Khalas, bitti, done

Well this is my first time writing here for awhile because now is the first time I got free time to write on this blog. However, the program is over which is what is giving this free time. Beirut has also been very quiet since the prisoner exchange so I have really had anything that I urgently wanted to right about. At least until now. First some reflections on the program. My professors were great and in the in-class time was great and really helped but the amount of homework assigned left me feeling a little cheated. It was enough busy work that kept me from seeing more of beirut, making more friends and hence kept me from interacting with more locals (granted some of my friends are from places like Jordan and Saudi Arabia but you get my point), and the homework left me feeling so drained that I didn't want to learn anymore arabic or speak it. Granted it is incredibly difficult to run a program like this and learn a lot of arabic in a month but still I was hoping for something more like my turkish program last year even though that was four months.

The other thing I was thinking about a conversation I had with a teacher and a friend of mine yesterday. We were talking about being pride and being self-critical in the Arab world. Despite the image Americans have of all Arabs only criticizing the U.S. for anything bad that happens in their lives, the majority of my friends spend the most time blaming themselves sometimes I think unnecessarily. What also happens is they think I am way to self-critical of my country. My teacher put it best when he explained the pride that exists here and criticizing your own country is like criticizing family which can make you look really crazy. As long as my friends understand that I love my country its fine but otherwise its bad. In most cases it was pretty minor but I had a friend who when he heard I wanted to study in AUB for my masters in psychology he passionately tried to dissuade me from studying in Lebanon and tried to get me to study in the States until he realized that I was firmly and genuinely committed to studying cross-cultural psychology in Lebanon. I'll be writing more over the next couple of days as I unpack my whole experience here in Lebanon to make up for the lack of updates during the program.