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I don't know whether it's me being me, or me being French, but as I wander on this American-oriented web world, sometimes the cultural gap feels so huge and I feel so...on the outside.

It's quite baffling, for instance, that birth control can still be an issue and cause debates in USA but it's possible to buy sperm on American websites or pick features for your future baby in certain clinics -- something that calls eugneics to the mind -- while, over here, birth control has been settled for a while -- and nobody would even thought of bringing it on -- but we have bioethical laws that forbid many things or try to restrict what we can do with biological stuff (sperm donation has to be free, donor must be anonymous, etc.) and the potential debates precisely focus on that moral ground versus the economic side.

And there's all the religious talk (I don't mean preachy posts but general notes on personal faith, use of God word, or church going comments) that I can't avoid, and that I find sometimes so...overwhelming. What sounds, probably, so commonplace and normal for many people, looks weird to these French eyes.

I don't think it's because I'm an atheist, myself, it's just cultural. I'm sure there are several people around who aren't as godless as I am (I know for a fact that a few of my friends do believe in a higher being, and I'm even the godmother of one of my friends's daughter and I know that my friend send her kids to catechism), but we live, here , in a secular society, in which faith -- or religious practice -- is something very private, completely pushed into the inner world, so intimate that it has completely deserted public speeches or conversations, even between friends, and all the more with "strangers". It wouldn't occur to anyone I know in RL to express religious feelings or casual talk about going to church, unless it's an ad hoc conversation. I might shock some people if I said that it would be like sharing favourite sexual positions or telling about going to partner-swinging clubs, but the analogy would work because it's THAT private.

So sometimes, surfing the Internet is very exotic and feels a bit like watching an American tv show!

Most of the time, it feels like I'm...different.

But, of course the world is more interesting if it's filled with people who are not like me.

Speaking of American tv shows, I'm still rewatching BSG (but have been too lazy to write posts!)and enjoying it a lot. I was so right to be crazy in love with that show when it was on. The finales of s1 and s2 were terrific, the beginning of s3 was awesome. I adore Saul Tigh more than ever (he started breaking my heart at the beginning of season 2 and I have loved the old bastard since then); I have warmed up to Lee, whom I used to find dull and lacking in character until the end of season 3; I keep flipping sides between Roslin and Adama; I cried  a lot at the end of 'The Passage", and Helo is my hero (re-watched " A measure of Salvation" and "Rapture" yesterday, and "The Woman King" today). So good, so beautiful, so tall.

The show was so good at dealing with moral issues and at trying to define what being human meant and what it takes to remain "civilized" (something that The Walking Dead with its poor writing and idiotic characters fails to do). It was so good that it allowed the viewers to overlook some flaws, or plot holes, here and there.

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A few remarks concerning BSG miniseries that I have re-watched. I hope fragrantwoods  will share her take on it.

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