The Farms of Ohio Have Been Replaced by You-Know-What

Every blog needs a mission statement, but mine is more of a mission question:

How the hell did the aliens take over this country without my noticing?

True, I spent a lot of years abroad, and by "abroad" I mean Italy, of course. That's where all young blonde American women go when they want to become expats. I'm not young anymore, except by Italian standards whereby 70 year-olds can describe themselves as "ragazzi" with impunity, but I'm still blonde. Ish.

Have you ever wondered about the glam life of an expat? Basically, it amounts to working shit jobs for no money which involve taking seventeen forms of public transportation, all of which are on strike on any given day, and combing the local supermarkets for peanut butter and tortilla chips. Another favored pastime is to date and eventually marry Italian men, because the boy expats are too dorky, or gay, and besides it would be missing the point entirely. Why slurp BP coffee when you can have cappuccino instead?

I'll tell you why. These Adonises, these Michelangelo's Davids, these Marcello Mastroianni look-alikes, seem to miraculously transform from cute to demonic in the time it takes to say "I do".

It's true: if the baggy pants and bedhead inspire tenerezza and even lust today, tomorrow you may be shocked to find a sneer playing at the corners of your mouth. You can try to pretend it's a facial tic, or better yet, your liver (in Italy, the liver can be blamed for anything, including genocide), but deep inside, you may find yourself longing for a man whose pants fit correctly.

And so what do you do? You hang out with other expats, of course, who are the only ones who can understand about Luigi's personal hygiene issues and Stefano's obsession with his mother and Giuseppe's refusal to put the toilet seat down.

No matter how embedded you are in the local culture, you will feel a longing for home. For clean air, and the dollar store, and twelve packs of beer, and men, as a friend of mine once said, "who care about your orgasm". Whether American guys really care about your orgasm is another kettle of fish (sorry, but some puns just will not be denied)--the point is, they know they have to at least pretend. Why else did our foremothers burn all those bras? (Well, not my foremothers, but somebody's. Mine took advantage of the political climate to shop for Warner's on sale).

And then Alessandro's mother comes to stay in your one-bedroom basement apartment for three months and you just want someone to talk to--someone who will understand about the toilet seat, and the effect of Rome city water on blonde hair (not good) and the next thing you know you're standing around sipping bad wine in conference rooms at the meeting of the "Rome Purple People Eating Professionals" or some other such silly name, and you're back home, and you're happy.

Except that it's not really home, because it is, after all, Italy, and the home you remember no longer exists. It's not just the farms that are now Giant Senseless Malls (in Ohio, we need malls to put the foreclosures out of our minds). It's the human beings, supplanted by automated answering systems, and parks, overrun by the cell phone jabber of people who have nothing to say, and the kindly family doctor, replaced by an android whose dearest wish is to get you out of his office as soon as possible so he can hear his favorite song again, the Credit Card Machine Lullaby.

Our beautiful American kids, at the age I was learning to say "cappuccino" correctly, are getting blown up in a senseless war, our lands and waters are being gang-raped, and it's all ok, as long as I personally have a giant screen TV.

So I'm home at last, in America, except it's not really home anymore, and it sure as hell isn't America. At least, not my America.