- You start a conversation with the smelly homeless drunk who is sharing your park bench. You find him interesting and articulate. You save his best stories to retell at the next reception.
- You can't borrow anyone's bathroom without looking in the medicine cabinet.
- You can use any bathroom or bathroom-like facility with aplomb, no matter how different it is from the one you grew up with.
- You can't help asking most of the obvious immigrants you meet how they got to the US, just because you love to hear their life stories. You don't have to ask where they came from; you can tell.
- You will eat anything. After all, if a few million people like it, it must be good.
- When a group of people starts doing something you don't understand, you run over to see if you can do it too.
- You enjoy and have no trouble dealing with mind-blowingly complex multi-person chaos that would send a political officer straight to the bottle and a closet that can be locked from the inside.
- You firmly believe that a day in which you don't learn something surprising is a day that wasn't worth getting up for.
- You will give a dollar to a panhandler and absolutely not care what he might spend it on.
- You find non-American traffic patterns interesting and efficient, not weird and What the heck is wrong with these people that they don't know how to drive?
- When people burst into gales of helpless laughter at your mangling of their language, you laugh with them.
- You would not be at a loss for words if you met the President unexpectedly. You would probably ask him how the toe of his shoe got scuffed, and offer him half of your cookie.
- You don't mind knowing that any local eight-year-old in rags, shoeless, bugs in his hair, never spent three seconds in school, is infinitely better at life here than you are.
- A day in which you don't laugh at yourself is a day in which you suspect you weren't paying attention.
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