Culture Shock Advice

Some advice about culture shock from a letter I was writing: ----- If you have not lived overseas before for an extended length of time, you might find it helpful to have read this book before going over there:

http://www.amazon.com/Survival-Kit-Overseas-Living-4th/dp/185788292X/ (Survival Kit for Overseas Living: For Americans Planning to Live and Work Abroad)

It's a good introduction to being an American and living overseas, dealing with stereotypes and culture shock, and knowing about them ahead of time, so that you are more prepared to understand them and deal with them more positively.

If you are unlikely to read a 200 page book (even though it is a great one), the main point to know is that there are usually a couple low points emotionally for anyone living overseas. The first one, which is relatively minor, comes around the end of the first month, after the newness and excitement has worn off. The second one, comes close to halfway through one's time overseas, which is funny in a way because, if you are going for two years, it tends to hit close to the one year mark, but if you are going for six months, it will hit close to the three month mark. If you know it's coming, and know that most people do get through it, it can be easier to manage. (The few people who don't get through it tend to fly home at that point, even though they would have done better to stick it out a few more weeks till it passed.) Culture shock is to overseas living what Wednesday is to the workweek.

I certainly went through it during my year in Costa Rica. At a certain point I just felt separate, even judged, for being an American everywhere I went. Then, one day, I realized that the only thing that all Americans have in common, the only thing that makes them American, is their citizenship. There is nothing else that all Americans have in common. From then on I no longer felt any of the pressure I used to feel as the representative of all things American, because I wasn't. I was also able, then, to get closer to the Costa Ricans in my life, because I realized they weren't some monolithic foreign other, either.

There are also some quite good books out there on culture and etiquette for each country. Those are enormously helpful to read before going, and while there, too. Different country, different rules, different views of life. It is always helpful to learn about these ahead of time!

I used to work at an exchange program here for students who came from Spain and Latin America, and it drove the Spanish students nuts that the host family would pick them up at school, drive them home, and then stay in all afternoon and evening. They were used to going home, maybe hopping on a scooter, and going into town with friends. Quite a number of them smoked, too, though that has probably changed quite a bit in the past 25 years.

-----

Nemnanait

Wishing a happy Chinese No Internet Day to one and all:

We will never tire of repeating it: The freedom of opinions about doctrine has never been fatal to any people, but all the events of modern history substantiate, down to the last piece of evidence, the dangers and risks that nations have run when some faction has succeeded in taking control of the press, has dominated the government, and by taking advantage of this, has silenced through terror those who could have enlightened it.

But governments never learn, in spite of so many repeated examples. Always stuck in the present moment, they neglect the future….

We conclude our reflections then, recommending to those entrusted with power that they be persuaded that, when they raise opinions to the status of crimes, they open themselves to punishing talents and virtues, to losing their way, and to making illustrious the memory of their victims.

—José María Luis Mora

And we'll be saying a big "Hello" to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere, and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together guys!
—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The NRA's War on America(ns)

This has to stop:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/25/us/santa-barbara-shooting-victims/index.html?hpt=hp_c3

Natural seasonal allergy relief

I used to have horrible allergies to grass pollen that lasted through all of June and most of July, requiring me to begin with pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) for the early weeks, then adding loratidine (Claritin) when the sudafed alone was no longer enough. (Beginning with claritin meant having it lose its effectiveness just when I needed it most.) I am not a doctor, but that is my experience over many years of being miserable.

Two years ago, I had no allergies beyond a manageable sniffle on a couple days. Last year I had one bad allergy day (down from the normal 50 days) when I made the mistake of eating lots of chocolate (and a few other things, like cheese, and oil-and-vinegar salad dressing), but I knew that I was going off the list and, sure enough, the allergies did come back with a vengeance, just for that one day.

If you are tired of pounding down medication for weeks at a time for your seasonal allergies, there is another alternative. You can just not have allergies in the first place.

I found this out when, for other reasons, I had to follow a low-histamine diet for a time. If I made the mistake of eating something that was high in histamine, like an English muffin (yeast), or Grape Nuts (yeast), my heart would race, so I had a built-in histamine detector. Rather than rely on stressing my heart, however, I looked for information on foods to avoid in order to keep my histamine levels low. There are a few lists out there, but many are incomplete, confusing, or vague, which caused me to restrict my diet unnecessarily or just left me confused about whether I might be able to eat something.

The best list was one I found at this website: http://www.histaminintoleranz.ch/en/introduction.html (http://www.histaminintoleranz.ch/) It lists close to 400 ingredients and individual foods along with their likely effects on your histamine levels (0-3 scale).

The unpleasant thing about a low-histamine diet is that it means completely eliminating an unbelievable number of your favorite foods, at least for the duration of allergy season, such as hard cheeses, almost any canned food (no vinegar, no flavor enhancers, almost no preservatives), yeast breads, tomatoes, avocados, alcoholic beverages, chocolate, black tea, coffee, citrus (oranges, lemons), most nuts, shelled beans, mushrooms, soy sauce, mustard, tofu, sausage, smoked or dried meats, pizza, etc. In effect, any food that is made by allowing or inducing something to spoil in some way (fermentation, drying, curing, preserving). It still leaves a lot of food you can eat, but you will definitely feel the loss of your favorites, it will be close to impossible to find foods you can safely eat at restaurants, and it will seem like 80% of the grocery store is suddenly off limits. To be fair, you can probably eat a certain number of items marked with a number "1" on the list without much trouble (with the possible exception of most yeast breads). The trick is always to keep your histamine levels low enough that you avoid having your histamine "cup" running over when allergens provoke your immune system. (Again, that is my non-medical understanding. For medical questions and advice, consult your doctor.)

Following a low-histamine diet is a sacrifice, but to be allergy free and medicine free (and side-effect free!) is worth the effort! Your friends and family will also find you kind of annoying during allergy season, but just do your best to supply your own food needs, and to not talk about it much (steer the conversation away from it), and they may just be able to tolerate that you are not joining them in whatever they are eating (or drinking) at the time.

My own diet during grass pollen season consists of:

• Whole grains (oatmeal, white rice, brown rice, whole grain cereals with vitamin E as the only preservative)
• Quick breads (muffins, pancakes, waffles, cake donuts), heat-and-serve flour tortillas (without preservatives)
• Apples, potatoes, blackberries, blueberries, grapes, carrots, celery, cucumbers, melons (not watermelon), yams, fresh artichokes, broccoli, corn (maize), bok choy (pak choi), green beans (all vegetables fresh, not canned)
• Milk, butter, water, and dulce de leche ice cream
• Instead of my usual hot beverages at the coffee shop, steamed milk or hot apple cider (non-alcoholic)
• Occasional eggs or chicken

It is not an exciting time of year culinarily, but I am not miserable, I can be outside, I can take walks, I can garden, I can open the window on hot days (coincidentally high-pollen days); in short, I can actually enjoy some of the best days of our short summer in this land of nine months of clouds and rain that is western Washington (state). And I don't have allergy symptoms or—not any better—allergy medication side effects. It does take some sacrifice, but it is worth it to be able to enjoy the summer!

Doing your best on the SAT or PSAT

Approach it like the game it is. I don't mean that in any disparaging (i.e., insulting) way. The fact is that "the name of the game" is to maximize the number of questions you answer correctly. Preparing for the SAT or PSAT means, then, doing everything in your power to make it more likely that you will answer more questions correctly. Period.

The humorist, Dave Barry, once wrote that the secret to losing weight is diet and exercise, but that no American is going to exercise, so that leaves diet.

Similarly, the secret to doing your best on the PSAT or SAT is preparation and strategy, but no American is going to prepare, so that leaves strategy.

If that's you, and it's not too late, reconsider!! The best strategy for these tests—or for anything in life—is preparation.

Ideally that means that you do all of the following things: do your best in your algebra, geometry, and English classes (read ahead, have regular study groups with 2 or 3 classmates); always be reading high-level writing (not teen romances) or journalism (national-level newspapers and news or literary magazines); and take practice tests (ideally ones published by the College Board, the actual publisher of these tests) and use them to learn how you make mistakes and what you can do to not make them on the real test.

When I tutor kids in the SAT, the American (or Americanized) kids don't do any studying in the week between tutoring sessions. The children of Asian immigrant parents have completed an entire 3.5 hour SAT test by the time I come back the following week (and sometimes even two of them!!). So while I go through every single problem with the American(ized) student, including the ones that are easy and don't really require my presence, all the while trying to catch them up to the studious students (never going to happen at the rate each is going), with the studious student we are spending our time working only on the questions they didn't understand, focusing all my time with them on improving their abilities in just the areas where they need improving.

The secret, of course, is you don't actually have to be Asian or have Asian immigrant parents to study this way, or to reap the benefits of studying this way. You just have to decide to do it, plan to do it, and do your best to keep sticking to that plan.

This is the book I use with all my students:

It contains 10 complete SAT tests from previous years. If you did all ten, including the essays, under timed testing conditions, that would be about 40 hours of practice. In reality, probably quite a bit longer. Even if you do less than that, the advantage here is that these are actual SAT tests!

There is so much that could be said about doing your best on these tests, too much, and so much of it depends on each student and where they are with the subjects and with test taking in general. But there are a few quick things that can apply to just about anybody, even if you are reading this the night before or a couple days before the test.

For the ESSAY:

In the first two minutes, write down what you are trying to prove, or to convince your reader of (i.e., your belief, your theory, your point, your argument, your thesis) in one clear sentence, then write down two or three examples that will support your point. For example:

THESIS: There is a right way (and a wrong way) to make a root beer float.

I. Ingredient quality
II. Proper preparation
(III. The RBF experience)

See that? One clear sentence. Two (or possibly three) supports for your argument. You should be able to think of a few things to say about each support, but you only have 25 minutes, so save them for the essay itself.

Next, write your essay, but do your best to leave yourself five minutes at the end!

In your introduction, imitate news and magazine articles by starting off saying something that will make someone curious, or interested in reading more: "Humans have been making root beer floats almost since the discovery of fire."

Maybe not true, and you might want to insert "Just kidding." (Not "jk.") or some disclaimer in sentence two, but now that you got their attention, make your point by writing down the thesis from earlier. Now, in this same paragraph, make some mention of your supports.

For your first body paragraph, talk about your first support, and bring in details that will convince the reader that your thesis (opinion) is right. For the second body paragraph, do the same for the second support. If you have time for a third body paragraph, go ahead with that, but for many or most students it would probably be better to just skip it and do the concluding paragraph.

In the concluding paragraph, make sure to mention your thesis and your supports again, then move on to something a little more general, then something even more general: "As we have seen, there is indeed a correct way to make a great root beer float. Soft serve ice cream and a warm bottle of cheap root beer, mixed into a paper cup, may cost $5 at the fair, but for the real RBF experience, nothing but the best quality, hard vanilla ice cream and cold root beer in a chilled glass will do. Even junk food, if prepared properly, can still be good; it does not have to be garbage! Anything worth doing—or eating—is worth doing well."

In your remaining five minutes (or three, or one, or ten), use all your time to look over and carefully read your essay. The more errors (spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.) that you can find and correct, the better your essay score will probably be. This is probably where you will pick up most points, so do your best to leave a few minutes for this editing work.

In short: Plan (Thesis and supports), Write (Intro: Thesis and supports, Body: supports with details, Conclusion: Thesis, supports, and more general statement to end.), and Edit (look for and fix anything that is wrong).

For the MATH:

Know that a line is also a 180 degree angle, and that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees (and that a circle has 360 degrees). That is why, when someone turns their life around, we say "He did a 180." and why, when someone does "donuts" in a parking lot with their car, we say "She was doing 360s."

It's also helpful to remember C=2πr and A=πr². C is circumference, which is the distance around a circle (think of taking a "fer"ry around the "circ"le). A is the area inside a circle, so it makes sense that the r (radius) is squared in this one, because that means the answer will be in "square meters" or "square inches," just as an area should be.

If you have a week to go until the test, learn to recognize and manipulate the numbers in 45-45-90 triangles and 30-60-90 triangles. Worst case, that information is included at the beginning of the math test, but it helps to have understood it before the test. If it's the night before, then getting more sleep will do more for you than staying up to learn this, since it probably only shows up in two problems tops, anyway.

If you finish working a math problem, don't just mark the answer you got. Check the question again first! True, it may have taken you a lot of work to find out that "x = 12," and it is tempting to just mark "12," but that is a horrible idea if the original question was "What is x + 2 ?"

On the math, take notes on the diagram or in the test booklet the first time you read the problem. The more you can pull the information out of the "story problem" format and into something more visual, the better your chances of solving the problem.

Don't trust your brain. Use the calculator. Or at least double check every thing as you do it. I can't count the number of times I have seen smart students solve a difficult problem by doing everything right except, somewhere in the middle, saying to themselves "2 x 3 is 5."

For the math, and all other sections really, my joke is that the three things to do are "1. Be careful. 2. Be careful. 3. Be careful." A better way to put that might be "1. Be careful. 2. Double check everything. 3. Do everything you can to be certain your answer is the right one." A corollary to that might be: "Don't rush. Use all your time." Ideally, you will want a few minutes available at the end to re-check your answers and maybe to try answering any problem that was taking too long (so you circled the problem number in the test booklet [not the answer sheet] and moved on in search of easier points).

For the READING:

For reading comprehension, yes, you really should read the whole passage and think about what you read as you read it. (If you are a super slow reader, then you can just skip to the questions and jump to lines 12-15 or whatever they tell you to read for each question, but everyone else would do better to read everything before answering the questions!!) If you know that the answer has to be A) or D), don't just pick one; go back to the reading and figure out which one is better, A) or D), then pick the better one.

For the vocabulary questions, cover the answers and do your best to use the clues in the sentence to pick out the kinds of words that should go in the blanks. Once you have thought of some words (or at least tried to), uncover the answers and see which one jumps out at you as being the right one. If one does, that's probably right. If not, then process of elimination to eliminate the ones that are obviously wrong, then your best guess of which of the remaining ones is right. [BIG HINT: If you do not know what a word means, DO NOT eliminate it! "I don't know that word, so that can't be the answer." sounds good, but makes no logical sense, if you think about it.]

For the WRITING:

For the sentence error questions, watch out for things like:

"the camels of the other school was..." (dumb example, I know)

"the other school was..." sounds great, but "school" is part of the prepositional phrase "of the other school," which describes the camels. The subject of "was" is not the school; it is the camels. "the camels (of the other school) was..." should be "the camels were" not "the camels was," so the sentence should have been "the camels of the other school were..." If you understand this and watch out for this trap, it should earn you lots of points.

For these same questions, try to notice when you read them if there is any point in the sentence where you slow down. That is usually your brain's way of telling you that something is wrong there. If you slowed down where the B was, the error is probably B.

BIG HINT NUMBER TWO: If you get to the end of the sentence and you did not see any error, DO NOT PICK "NO ERROR"! There are just two reasons that you might think there is no error. Reason number one: there was an error, but you did not see it. Reason number two: there was no error. So if you think there is "no error," instead of marking "no error," read the sentence carefully one or two more times. If you still think there is no error, then by all means, mark "no error," and chances are you will be right—just don't mark that after only the first time through the sentence!

For the REWRITING questions, just know that the vast majority of the time the correct answer is either the shortest answer or the next-shortest answer, so look at those answers first. Obviously, that won't always be true, and it is best to consider all of them and think everything through, but it still can be very helpful to know this.

For the test generally:

Go in psyched up to do your best and to get as many points as you can.

If you can eliminate even just one answer choice, it is probably worthwhile to put down an answer, even if it is a guess. It is better, of course, to narrow it down as much as possible; if not to one answer (ideal, especially if you have a way of knowing that is right), then at least to two. If you can eliminate only one, still go ahead and guess and mark an answer (because you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket). If you can not eliminate any answers, though, you are better off skipping that question without answering it (because the odds are against you at that point instead of even, or in your favor).

If you finish early, use all the time you have left to double check the problems you circled or marked with question marks. Why not get more points if you can?

Make sure your answer isn't just the one you agree with most. Instead it needs to be the best answer to the question, based on the information in the test (not based on your own personal beliefs).

In math and reading comprehension, make sure that the answer you pick is the answer to the question you were asked.

On the open-ended math questions (no A, B, C, D, E to choose from), there is no penalty for putting down a wrong answer.

Rack up as many points as possible by doing everything you can to answer as many questions correctly as possible. Do the reading, do the work, narrow down your choices, double check everything, be careful, be careful, be careful, and use every minute and every opportunity you have to try to improve your score.

If you find this really helped you a lot, and you have a couple dollars you want to shoot my way, you can at PayPal using the e-mail chris@spanishpronto.com Appreciated, of course.

Buying the SAT book through the link above will not add anything to your price, but will earn me a modest commission, which I usually just spend with Amazon anyway.

So, get a good night's rest, get to the test center early with your registration information, calculator, and sharpened pencils with erasers, and GOOD LUCK!

And remember, all anyone can do is their best, after you are admitted to college no one really cares about your SAT score ever again, and worst case you can always take the SAT test again and do better next time if you have to.

Do your best!

The joaquimoly diet

Unfortunately, it's not as delicious as that sounds. It is, though, what has always worked for me.

1) Stop drinking things out of straws. Even diet and no-calorie drinks have ingredients that are not the most natural or best for you, or at the very least they get you accustomed to a sweetness that you then seek out in everything else you drink or eat. On the extreme end, there are those 400 calorie drinks that do nothing to satisfy your hunger, and which overwhelm the 25 calories you burned walking a quarter mile round trip to get them. (Oh, you went to the drive-thru? Never mind.)

2) Learn how to cook, or at least how to stir-fry vegetables. Meals out are designed to make you crave them. The reason tomato soup made with cream tastes "just like restaurant soup" is, well, because restaurants have no qualms about dumping as much cream/butter, fat/oil/grease, salt, and sugar as necessary to make you think their food is "the BEST!" If you must eat at a restaurant, do it no more than once a week, and stop eating when you have eaten half the food on your plate. Eat the other half tomorrow for lunch.

How to stir-fry vegetables: On shopping day, buy lots of several kinds of vegetables, especially bok choy, but also things like carrots, celery, new potatoes (thin-skinned, not baking), onions, garlic, possibly mushrooms, broccoli, summer squash (thin-skinned), anything you like, really. That day or the next, chop up enough to fill a big bowl into small enough pieces that they will find the bottom of the pan when you are stir-frying them. Keep the garlic and the leafy parts of the bok choi separate from the other chopped vegetables. Make a big batch of rice.* Whenever you are hungry, warm the rice, and get out the vegetables, the oil (preferable sesame oil), and a pan. Put the pan on high heat, put in 2 to 3 tablespoons of oil, add vegetables (keeping heat on high), and stir like mad (at least constantly). When they are starting to show signs of being cooked (approx. 3 minutes), add the chopped bok choi leaves and chopped garlic and cook for another minute, possibly two. Remove from heat. Turn off burners. Quickly put some rice on the plate, the stir-fried vegetables on the rice, and sprinkle some ground ginger and some salt over the vegetables until it tastes good to you. Return uncooked chopped vegetables and, when cooled, the rice, to the fridge until time for the next 10-minute-or-less meal.

3) Start breakfast with a really good piece of fruit, fresh fruit. My favorite is a really ripe mango, but watermelon, canteloupe (muskmelon), strawberries, a banana, red bananas, a good pear, or almost anything will do. Alternatively, hot oatmeal poured over a sliced ripe banana or over thawed, crushed blackberries with a little sugar, but no milk (see point one about liquid calories), is also delicious. After the fruit, then go ahead and have a home-made muffin (see point two about commercially-prepared foods) or two or three, preferably also with fruit in them (apple, raisins, blueberries, cranberries).

4) Don't go to bed until you have walked for at least 30 minutes (in addition to the walking you normally do during the day), preferrably 45. Sixty (60) minutes is actually too much to do everyday (in my experience, anyway). If you are considering doing that much or more, you really need to talk with your doctor and/or your psychologist, or you could actually do yourself some real harm. (You are not your weight, and you are good enough already.) Alternatively, run for 15 to 22.5 minutes. You can do this first thing in the morning, at lunch, after work, or right before going to bed, but do it sometime before going to bed on at least five out of every seven days.

5) Garden. If you have never done it before, just get a pot that is at least one-foot deep (this is important, so roots have enough room!), get a tomato plant (at the right time of year for your location—when there is no frost) and some good potting soil and a tomato cage, and put it all together somewhere where it will see the sun most of the day and where you will see it every day, to keep it watered enough to not dry out, and to remember to fertilize it maybe once a month, if it looks like it could be doing better. If you want to expand beyond a tomato plant, do a cherry tomato plant. Then maybe a zucchini plant. Stick to the easy stuff so you will have success until you start feeling like being more adventurous. For true maximum show for little work, plant some "mammoth" sunflower seeds, in the ground, in a sunny location where you will see them frequently and water them.

6) Don't eat on the couch in front of the TV; otherwise, you will tend to mindlessly eat way too much of the wrong kinds of food.

7) If you won't be able to resist it, leave it at the store. Don't buy it. Don't bring it home. If you want ice cream, make yourself get up and go out to the ice cream shop, and then get a single scoop. It's more social and more fun, anyway.

8) Tell yourself the truth. Don't believe that "these calories won't count" or whatever other excuse (lie) you usually tell yourself. Tell yourself the truth, and then either act accordingly, or just be truthful about what you are doing.

9) It's O.K. to be hungry sometimes. If you are never really hungry, you are probably eating more than you need to for your activity level. I am not advocating anything drastic here (or in any of these points). I am just saying that it is not the end of the world to be hungry now and then throughout the day, say for an hour or two before eating. It's also not the end of the world to not be absolutely full, or even a tiny bit hungry, when heading to bed. If you are really hungry, though, by all means eat something, just not too much. I remember reading that the Okinawans follow the practice of "hara hachi bu" (80 percent full)— eating only until they are 80% full. I don't follow that, exactly, but when I know that eating more would, truthfully, be eating too much, I usually stop right there (and maybe just eat any remaining pieces of tomato on the plate; too good, and not particularly fattening, anyway).

And that, my friends, or my Russian blogviews-spam bots, is the totally non-extreme, non-commercial, non-celebrity-related, non-advertised, and rather common-sense way to be healthy (or healthier). Basically it boils down to this: A) give priority to fresh fruits and vegetables, B) avoid liquid calories and commercially prepared drinks and foods (cook at home), and C) walk 30 to 45 minutes most days of the week.

Fresh produce, water (or black tea or coffee or mate), home cooking, and exercise.

It's almost too simple and too easy, and it is, and that's because I am not trying to sell you something. If anything, doing what I suggest here will also save you a lot of money. If it does, just start a new habit of socking most of it away at the beginning of the month, or every week, and then pretending you have to live on the rest. Then, when you are healthier and richer, let me know—and spread the word. :  )

Brought to you by bok choy.

The usual disclaimer: Not intended to be taken as nutritional or medical advice. For that, talk to a nutritionist or a doctor.

*For rice, 2+ cups water for every 1 cup rice. For white rice, bring to a boil then reduce, covered, to warm (simmer) for 15 minutes. For brown rice, do the same, but simmer for 35 minutes. It is better to have too much water than too little. (Easier to pour off excess water than to scrape burnt rice off the bottom of the pot.)

Totally spaced (absolutely forgot to add) this last point:

10) Don't eat red meat, and eat eggs in moderation. Both have recently been closely tied to hardening of the arteries, which is a main cause of heart attacks. There are other negative health effects, too, which you can read about elsewhere, especially on sites with no ties to the USDA, the U.S. government generally, or to ranchers or egg farmers. (WHO sites, EU sites, or Canadian sites tend to provide less biased, more scientific, information.)

When do I think of you?

When do I think of you?

Mostly when I am getting ready for bed. And when I am waking up. Sometimes, during the day. More often than I would expect, when I dream. In church, virtually every time.

What do I think about you?

A far, far greater variety of things than you would imagine or think possible.

What do I wish you knew?

In short, everything. More than you will ever know.

What do I wish for you?

That you will be happy where you are.

And that some day you will understand.

C