snapping back to life
Wow. A week is a long time. I'm currently sitting in Terminal A at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International airport where they charge a lot of money for wireless, but it's worth every penny since I'm killing two hours and I've been without internet for so long. Evidently, they're charging for internet in order to pay for the mechanical, trash-compacting garbage cans all over the place that look like robo-cop and sound like a dump truck every time somebody throws in a Starbucks cup. The kids seem to love them.
Anyway, I feel about as brain dead as I could feel after two weeks of family and terrible food. I mean, the food is tasty, but it's food I would never in a million years choose to eat in my normal life. Meat at every meal, white-flour, grease, everything fried, vegetables boiled unrecognizable. Wow. How do they stay alive so long? I guess Portland has made me a snob in more ways than one.
It'll take a few days to shake the South off me. First of all, I have to re-lose the accent. It's like slipping into an entirely different state of mind: I come down here and I become a different person, and the accent hits first. It's like all the muscles in my mouth relax and sounds come from a different place. This doesn't happen in Florida, only in Georgia with my dad's family. And it's not just the *way* I say things, it's the things I say. All the idioms and figures of speech, the dipthongs and tripthongs and all the extra words that get put in just to make a simple point. I feel like I need to drink a mouth full of something tart to tighten everything back up again, so I can crisply articulate words without rounding them all off at the edges.
I had this idea that I would write blog notes in my word processor all through my trip and then just paste them into the blog when I could, but it felt inorganic, so I dropped it. There's something about the immediacy of the way I've been doing it that works better. Not sure why. And while I'm addressing the medium, I want to say how excited I am to see comments on the blog. It thrills my little heart. Granted, at least half are from some guy advertising his horoscope website, but whatever. The rest are legit and that's pretty exciting.
Now, off to catch up on email in my last hour in the airport. And I'll write more as soon as my brain settles a bit.
Anyway, I feel about as brain dead as I could feel after two weeks of family and terrible food. I mean, the food is tasty, but it's food I would never in a million years choose to eat in my normal life. Meat at every meal, white-flour, grease, everything fried, vegetables boiled unrecognizable. Wow. How do they stay alive so long? I guess Portland has made me a snob in more ways than one.
It'll take a few days to shake the South off me. First of all, I have to re-lose the accent. It's like slipping into an entirely different state of mind: I come down here and I become a different person, and the accent hits first. It's like all the muscles in my mouth relax and sounds come from a different place. This doesn't happen in Florida, only in Georgia with my dad's family. And it's not just the *way* I say things, it's the things I say. All the idioms and figures of speech, the dipthongs and tripthongs and all the extra words that get put in just to make a simple point. I feel like I need to drink a mouth full of something tart to tighten everything back up again, so I can crisply articulate words without rounding them all off at the edges.
I had this idea that I would write blog notes in my word processor all through my trip and then just paste them into the blog when I could, but it felt inorganic, so I dropped it. There's something about the immediacy of the way I've been doing it that works better. Not sure why. And while I'm addressing the medium, I want to say how excited I am to see comments on the blog. It thrills my little heart. Granted, at least half are from some guy advertising his horoscope website, but whatever. The rest are legit and that's pretty exciting.
Now, off to catch up on email in my last hour in the airport. And I'll write more as soon as my brain settles a bit.
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 12:54 PM
2 Comments:
Hey, Blogger, I don't have a horoscope site or anything cool like that, but I'm glad you're back.
no. but you do have your own cool site which i very much enjoy. thanks for reading.
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