Yesterday, I was listening to an interview with David Byrne, and he was talking about the artistic benefits of living in America as a young immigrant (Byrne was born in Scotland, and moved to Canada and then Maryland when he was 8 or 9).

Even the small things…the fact that I’d go home and my parents ate with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other hand, instead of doing the American thing of switching hands around…[I knew there was] more than one way of doing lots of things, which I think gave me a slight outsider’s perspective.

In many ways, living with a woman as a partner has given me that perspective — that revelation that there’s more than one way of doing things, more than one way of thinking. She’s constantly coming at things from different angles, blowing my mind with her insight.

Anyways, the cool thing about life is that you’re always an armchair anthropologist. And when you live in such close quarters with someone, when you share so much, you get to watch this other specimen in action.