I just sent my roommate from Hawaii a surprise package containing The Castle, Strictly Ballroom and Muriel’s Wedding.

The note I included says “MANDATORY VIEWING for your continuing education in Australian culture.”

Doing my bit for the world.

(I also sent her a link to Looking for Alibrandi on Youtube. I’m still smarting from when she asked me if I knew what a panini was.)

The problem with the best music - especially the best albums - is that you listen to them again and again and again when you find them. Maybe you’re going through something, or you’re in a certain place. Inevitably you stop listening to that music for a little while. When you return to it, the music is indelibly marked with that place and time and stirs up so many feelings you’re not sure that you can handle it, or that you want to, on an everyday morning.

What I’m really saying is that I would like to listen to Miike Snow without feeling Hawai’ian sunlight on Kalakaua Avenue, warm ocean water, and typhoon rain in Tokyo.

Not always, but sometimes.

I’m an idiot.

I don’t know if anyone remembers but one of the things that continued to astound me in Hawai’i was the propensity for men I didn’t know (and one man I bafflingly mistook for a very butch lady) to ask me out.

When I mentioned this to other Americans they usually put it down to the fact that I was white and had an Australian accent.

But the explanation put forward by Kat George in the article linked above makes far more sense.

My teen years were so saturated with American culture (teen movies, books, music, and my old guilty secret of reading U.S. based dating blogs from the ages of 15 to 19) that it never occurred to me that those rules and customs did not necessarily apply to me, as I was living in an entirely different context.

I don’t often get ‘asked out’ on dates from complete strangers in Melbourne, but that’s because in Melbourne ‘asking someone out’ is a bit of an uncomfortable idea, and the equivalent of a first date is a party you both happen to be attending. Directly asking out a person you don’t know is considered much more absurd and awkward than it is in Hawai’i, where it was not uncommon for a bus trip to the beach to end with some guy having obtained my phone number (or not, seeing as I didn’t have a phone, but sometimes they got my email).

Before actually going to Hawai’i and spending time with (mostly interstate) Americans I brushed off U.S. and Australian differences as the ignorant (or at least exaggerated and outdated), patronising archetypes of broad accents, kangaroos in the backyard and an idea that Australians are sun-bronzed, laid back white guys who say g’day and just wanna put another prawn on the barbie. I thought they were stupid, and not particularly representative of my culture, as I understood it.

Why do we talk about those silly differences when what really matters, especially if you’re going to visit the U.S., is that how we conduct our relationships is completely different - from what we say in order to sound funny*, to how we seek out people we might want to be involved with?

I think I prefer our rather more casual, ‘dating’-is-kinda-weird ‘culture of introductions’.

But how did I not know there was a difference?

*I thought I’d already mentioned this, but apparently not - my sense of humour was so different to my Californian roommate’s that she thought I hated her. I only ever thought she was wonderful.

“American TV ads play like parodies of American TV ads”

- andwhenithappens

But it’s true! I remember being most taken aback on hearing ads for breast enhancement on the radio, right in the middle of the day, when I was in Hawai’i. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Australia didn’t have ads for plastic surgery.

Now I’m glad.

What I found interesting about this article was Gina’s argument that she and other billionaires are “doing more than anyone to help the poor by investing their money and creating jobs.”

This is the exact argument I watched Jay Shidler, founder of a Hawai’ian real estate investment group and namesake of the business school at the University of Hawai’i, make during a discussion of the ethics of capitalism.

But he said it while waving around an Apple iPhone and talking about all the jobs that have been created in China.

The self delusion of the staggeringly rich continues to blow my mind.

23.5 hours.