About: RD

Name:Marie
2008-01-22 16:18:02
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Posts by RD:

TCKs in Paris

Hey just wondering if anyone is in Paris/the region or would like to have a get together anytime from now until the end of august :)

July 26, 2008 | Filed Under General Forum, Meetup | 5 Comments 

Graduate School Advice?

So, I’m VERY weird and already looking up graduate school (although I won’t be going for at least another two years or so) and figured this would be the perfect place to get opinions from!

I want to go into conflict studies, dev’t econ (or econ in general), diplomacy, IR (pretty much what you expect from a tck) and as for location am up for anywhere in the world aside from the US.

Any thoughts?

June 26, 2008 | Filed Under General Forum | 4 Comments 

Une page en Français

Je sais qu’il y en a déjà un mais je ne le trouve pas donc j’ai décidé de commencer une nouvelle page en français pour deux raisons:

1. J’ai un peut envie de parler français et je me sens mal quand je mets les trucs en français dans les autres discussions parce-que tout le monde parle anglais mais pas français

2. J’ai envie de voir combien de personnes sur TCKid parlent français :)

En bref, j’ai rien à faire donc on peut dire que c’est “Ze Un-Officiale Off-Topique Trede en Français” :) (ou franglais ou franspagnol ou autre chose!).

C’est bizarre…mon correcteur d’orthographe n’as pas corrigé le mot “franglais” mais a essayé de corriger le mot “franspagnol”….c’est un mot “franglais”?

Bon…voila…BONJOUR TOUT LE MONDE :)!

June 11, 2008 | Filed Under General Forum | 42 Comments 

Facebook and the Family

Soooooo I don’t know if anyone else has had this happen, but I officially have my entire family (including parents, siblings, and some aunts and uncles) on Facebook. I would like to attribute this in part to the fact that we are all (parents and siblings) TCKs or ATCKs/ expats from….well we’re not sure which country and that we all live at LEAST 2 time zones away from each other (literally each of us)…..but I find it pretty funny regardless… we speak more through facebook than through anything else now….how lame ;)

Just felt like that was a necessary statement….

March 26, 2008 | Filed Under General Forum | 6 Comments 

At what point do you become an ATCK?

At what point do you become an ATCK? Someone in another discussion one day talked about their inability to bring on responsibilities, and another about the “delayed adolescence” thing. For me, there are two aspects to the delayed adolescence. First, it is wrong. My whole life people have always said I was more mature than my age, that I’m an “old soul” or whatever they want to identify me as. All my friends have always been older than me and I’ve never really been interested in the same things as people my age (except for those things which really defy age like playing on a “soccer” team when you’re 10). But in another sense, it’s completely right. There are many ways, especially socially, in which I’m WAY behind all my counterparts of my age. It might be cultural differences (with every culture) but in any case I don’t feel like an adult, even if (sometimes/most times/whatever) I might act like one. So when do we become adults? And even more, when do we become ATCKs? What determines an ATCK? Do we all of a sudden stop growing up and stop being changed by the impacts of our nomadic lives? Is it when we finally (if we finally) decide to settle down in a place and live like “normal” people with “normal” jobs and “normal” family and social lives? Are these just stupid questions of someone who’s in between adolescence and adulthood and who has absolutely no clue of what society views them as? (ugh, god forbid I be viewed as a “college kid”). The truth is most of the time I feel like a child, like I’m 5 or 6 years old and I’m pretending to be an adult to avoid the reality that I really don’t fit into the whole society thing, kind of like how I move every few months or find a completely group of people to follow around so that I don’t have the overwhelming feeling of being completely stuck in one place with no where to go and no freedom and no control. A lot of people have been talking about the post on the tckkid website (which resembles unsurprisingly this website to the point that when I first clicked on it I changed it because I thought that facebook had bugged out again); the post from the girl who said that being a TCK sucks. She’s right in a lot of ways, it does sometimes suck. It sucks not feel like there’s any place you really fit in (except, of course, on this or some other discussion board or with friends who grew up like you). The truth is, we’re a force soon to be reckoned with. People like us are the future, we’re the ones who are going to be working in international organizations, we’re the ones who are going to be telling other people’s kids that we get what they’re feeling when their parents are still confused about how the world has changed and whether or not there will be a global homogenization of culture (no). So really, my answer to that post is simple. While yes, it does suck a lot to be a TCK, no, I wouldn’t trade if for the world. I wouldn’t be me. I’d rather be a screwed up weirdo who doesn’t seem to fit into one place (but rather into this thing we call “earth”, although most people 60 years ago who said that were probably sci-fi freaks waiting to see aliens come down with the obvious “weee comme in peeaaccee” as if they would be able to speak English off the bat). The benefits outweigh all of that, all of the crap you get every day when you try to explain where you’re “from”, why you can’t answer or whatever lie you make up to make it easier on you, whatever rejection you feel, it’s all worth that one moment every so often where, without warning, you run into this person who for some reason smiles when you answer “ummmm…well do you mean where I was born, lived, went to school, feel culturally, or my passport?”, who you just know without words that they understand something about you that you might not have even known until they bring up this term that you’ve never before heard but then there’s this book and you open it and the first word makes you sit down because for the first time in your life, someone’s talking about you. Not a little bit, not just something you can associate yourself with, but you only you and completely you. That was probably the scariest day of my life. No one ever got me like that before.

I’ve gotten completely off topic (I don’t think there’s a bigger tangent than that anywhere), so I guess here’s where I come back to my original question. What is adultness? How do you make the transition from TCK to ATCK and better yet does being a TCK impact your transition from adolescence to adulthood complicating comparisons to those around you without those peculiar experiences? How are you supposed to know? Do you all of a sudden wake up one morning and find out you’re an adult now? I think I’ll always be a child, running around in my house with my blanket on my back pretending I’m a princess/superhero/reject who saves all the other rejects from the big evil people who threaten their freedom and livelihood, running around with a home made out of cardboard because that’s the life of a superhero like me.

I guess this will be my introduction.

January 23, 2008 | Filed Under Blog, Introduction | 13 Comments