Reader question #69: The guy who lives upstairs from me wants me to be his…”friend.”
Posted: July 1, 2011 | Author: JenniferP | Filed under: Cultural Differences, how to say no, manipulation, Manners, neighbors, Personal Safety, saying no | 17 Comments »Dear Captain Awkward,
I’m sure there there have been similar questions, but I feel mine has an added complication. It is, I shiver to say, an “unwanted advances” issue that I’m having.
Background: I am a female in my lower twenties who recently graduated from a university, and I’m living in a small two-story apartment building in a larger complex of similar buildings in a small US city. I am sharing this apartment with my mom and stepdad for economic reasons.
Problem: A few weeks back our building was having the plumbing redone and from about 9am to 5pm the crew was in our apartment tearing up walls and such. I waited outside on the steps one of these days for 30 minutes or so until the crew had left. An older man with a heavy foreign accent came out of his upstairs room and talked to me. I’m not sure why, but I tend to have rather automatic sympathy for the more obviously foreign-born people living in the US. Maybe it’s racism, and maybe it’s because I treat everyone in that situation like a foreign exchange student. As it turns out, this guy is Pakistani and he lives in an apartment upstairs, apparently alone. That’s the entirety of the things he said that I understood… More specifically, I didn’t understand what this guy was saying to me partly due to his accent, and partly due to the fact that the ideas he was throwing out did not seem to connect. He was asking me if I wanted to be his “friend” and
at the same time he was saying “My wife is in Pakistan.” Confused, I kept saying him things like, “Oh, is your wife moving here eventually?” Just as it was dawning on me that he probably meant for me to be his mistress or fling or whatever while his poor wife is back at home, he left, before I could express my horror in any way.
Now it gets weird. I have not spoken to him since then- perhaps a mistake. But, I did start noticing he follows me.
Reader question #64: I have a hard time understanding accents.
Posted: June 22, 2011 | Author: JenniferP | Filed under: Cultural Differences, Culture, Reader Questions, Work | Tags: accents, listening comprehension, Work | 29 Comments »Dear Captain Awkward,
I’ve had a problem for a while that has always been an issue with me, but is now beginning to affect my work and professional standing: I have a hard time understanding people strong foreign accents, and I don’t know how to address the issue without making it super awkward.
So here I am!
About me: I’m a 26-year-old software developer, US citizen living in the US, male and white. I feel blessed that I get to speak my native language at work and out in the city, but having lived in a foreign country, learning the language as I went, I understand how frustrating not being a native speaker can be (and not really, since I was an exchange student, and most people would assume at worst that I was a dumb tourist rather than “xenophobic enemy of the moment”).
But I can’t help that I have trouble understanding thick foreign accents speaking English, and recently, it’s been a problem for me at work.
My boss is Indian. She’s very intelligent and knowledgeable, but sometimes I have a hard time understanding her English due to her thick accent and sometimes quirky sentence structure. The reason this is becoming an issue is that I sometimes don’t understand my work assignments. Asking over and over for clarification clearly frustrates her, and makes me look stupid. “I don’t understand what the problem is, this isn’t hard to understand!”. Only it is!
Reader Question #14: Spiritual abuse, maybe. How is a church like a high school Dungeons & Dragons game?
Posted: January 28, 2011 | Author: JenniferP | Filed under: Abuse, Cultural Differences, Geek Social Fallacies, Reader Questions, Social Interactions | Tags: Advice, Commander Logic, Geek Social Fallacies, Spiritual Abuse | 4 Comments »Dear Captain Awkward:
I appreciated your advice regarding being open to the possibility that two siblings can grow up in the same home but have completely different experiences and interpretations of the environment.
As I was reading I found myself identifying with the sister, whom the question-asker describes as still being stuck in the abusive situation but not seeing it as so. Last year our small and close-knit church community went through a very painful split, with a handful of people leaving with claims that the head pastor was spiritually abusing them. It’s a very (VERY) long and complicated ordeal, but I found myself wondering what sort of advice you might give to the “sister” who is still connected to the parents (or in my case, authority figure/pastor) whom other people have experienced as abusive. In my personal interactions with this pastor I’ve actually felt very well cared for and respected. He did our premarital counseling and has provided a great deal of encouragement, mentoring and advice to my husband and I in the first 4 years of our marriage.
Because my experience of him has been so different than theirs, I find myself really struggling to know how to connect with them in a healthy and productive way. The feeling I get from these friends who’ve left is that the only version of reality they accept is their own, and any other possible explanation is just a symptom of the abuse. In their eyes I am a naive automaton, enabling an abusive and evil man. It’s really quite insulting and saddening.
Any advice for the other side of this question?
The Other Sister
Dear Other Sister,
Intern Paul and I have been Googling spiritual abuse, and it’s taken us to a dark and scary part of the Internet. Can you help us define the concept and be a little more detailed about what your friends say happened?
Midwestern Manners: “I cannot eat the last cookie unless I offer it to you first.”
Posted: January 7, 2011 | Author: JenniferP | Filed under: Cultural Differences, Social Interactions | Tags: manners, social rituals, the midwest | 13 Comments »Until you guys write me letters, I’m just going to keep posting about weird social interactions, okay?
I grew up on the East Coast, but have lived in the Midwest (Chicago) for the last 10 years, and there are some distinct cultural differences. Once I went out on the world’s most boring first date, and we discussed some of these.
Him: “I went to Massachusetts once. They called it ‘soda’ instead of ‘pop.’”
Me: “Yes. And we call water fountains ‘bubblers.’”
Him: “Wow, that’s so weird.”
Sadly I did not have a ninja smoke bomb handy to make my escape, so there was like 90 more minutes of this crap while we dutifully masticated our Thai food and agreed blandly that we should totally do this again sometime.
Anyway, what I want to talk about here is the Midwestern practice of offering other people the thing you really want before you’ll let yourself have it Anyone who lives here and who has been to any kind of baby shower or other LadyParty has watched Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox enacted on a plate of brownies knows what I’m talking about. “Do you want the last one?” “No, you take it.” “Let’s cut it in half.”
When I moved out here, I didn’t know about this.
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