Ouch! My ego hurts.

The other day at the road race, I suddenly felt something that I’ve never felt before, and it sure as heck is an emotion I never thought I would know. With 500 meters to go in the race, for the very first time in my life, I was really, really embarrassed at being an American. Right now I can sense my grandmother steaming and going through the roof, so I best explain.

Everything in China is on the metric system. Temperature is in Celsius. Everything here is exactly the way the rest of the world is with respect to units of measurement. As an American, the metric system, military time units and Celsius temperatures might as well be Martian languages to me (as in, from Mars). In addition, who the heck thought it was a good idea for me to be fluent in just one language?

I take flash quotes in a mixed zone with a two-man crew from EuroSport that speaks nearly every language on the European continent like it's nothing... and I stand around looking like a huge doofus waiting for them to translate their interviews for me. And my personal favorite is when these athletes speak multiple languages. That really makes me feel accomplished, "Hey, I'm an Olympic champion, and I speak four languages. What do you do?" Or how about on the subway when a 10-year old has a full conversation with me in English and then translates it to his parents while I sit there hearing, "Rubble, rubble, rubble."

Amongst an international crowd in such a foreign place, I feel alienated by my own culture. I am the one translating 500 meters into “about five football fields or so” every time someone talks. And let's not even get started on that tangent. Of course football is football in the rest of the world, as well it should be! They use only their feet to play it!

From this point forward, my ethnocentric vocabulary is done. Soccer is dead to me. Football and American football shall be distinguished. Track and field is simply “athletics.” I want to be fluent in metric associations. I want to familiarize myself with Celsian degrees. Ask me the time, and I will respond on the 24-hour clock. If I have the mental capacity to learn another language at 22-years old, then bring it on. We Americans have been slighted by our own small-mindedness, and I firmly believe it will continue to separate us from our world if we don’t wake up and recognize.

America, I love you, and I miss you. But you have caged me into believing it wasn't important to know how everyone else operates, and it has made me feel quite small on the international stage. It's not wrong to have our own ways, but it is straight ignorant to neglect the others'.

XOXO