How you know you've been overseas too long...

Whenever I come home after an extended trip, I always know I've been out of the U.S. for a long time when I have to remind myself that toilet paper can be deposited directly into the toilet. (That, in addition to free refills at fast-food restaurants, baseball, and Tommy Lee Jones, is what makes America great.)

Writing for the Humanitarian Relief blog, international aid worker Michael Bear comes up with a highly entertaining list of 10 signs that you've been overseas too long. Although it's more applicable to long stays in, say, the Congo rather than Western Europe, several of the items really ring true. Among them:

• You've worn exactly three pairs of pants and four shirts over the past month. Though you do take care to mix the combinations according to a semi-complex rotating schedule known to you and you alone.
• Doctors at home are slightly intimidated by your ability to detect the symptoms of incipient malaria.
• You've developed an inappropriate, twitching reaction to fireworks.
• In any debate about copyright infringement, you come down firmly on the pro-piracy side. Unless you're talking about the bastards who simply smuggle a videocamera into a movie theater and then market the resulting product as a clean copy. They can burn in hell.
• The consistency of your stool is a regular topic of conversation.

Check out the rest here.

Filed under: United States