Oh how I wish I had time for a long post on Southern identity! Alas, I am already behind this morning. Short version: We are deeply fucked up and that's why I love us.
t nods
It's weird. I don't plan to ever live in the South again. (There's some possibility we'll move back to Oklahoma, where DH grew up, but that's not really the South. Or the Southwest, or the Midwest--it's a little bit of all three.) If money and family weren't an issue at all, I'd either stay here or move to England. But I will always consider myself a Southerner. That's where my roots lie. It's strange, but it's gotten stronger since my father died, that sense of connection to that one little corner of the Appalachian foothills where my family has lived for generations. I've left, I love the life I have now, and I don't share the politics and worldview of the majority of Alabamians. But still, I am who I am because I come from that place and those people.
I don't do the whole not meeting each other's eyes thing if I am actually having a conversation--that really only applies with strangers, at least for me.
Yay dress for GC!
I'm giving tests all day today; hence, lots of posting.
Susan is totally me. I love the South am damned proud to be Southern, but I don't think I can go back there, much as there are things I love about it.
Kristin, can I e-mail my address to your profile addy?
I need a style advisor
a-hem.
and some expendable cash.
Can't help you there.
Susan, I deeply identify as Alaskan even though I don't plan to ever return. I love the wildness of the place, the fact that you feel like you're somewhere no one has ever been before. The pressures that living there put on people make them some of the more interesting characters I've ever known, and also creates a need to build a circle of friends/acquaintances quickly, because you never know who you might need to call to dig you out.
I'm very ambivalent about the South. I'm not from there, though, I just lived there for half my life.
I used to say that DH and I had mixed relationship, he's Jewish and I'm Californian, because that's the most dominant piece of my cultural identity. Fortunately, they are in no way mutually exclusive.
I've lived in Utah for nearly twenty-five years, but I don't think I'll ever call myself a Utahn. A former-Easterner, I guess. Maybe I'd call myself a Westerner. I've got a deep feel for water issues and open spaces that aren't quite the same as they'd be if I still lived in Pennsylvania--though I grew up in the country, which may inform my identity more than East or West.
Growing up in Chicagoland, ethicity is always a big conversation starter. "What are you?" is one of the first questions asked while chatting with someone, and most people can break it down to fractions and usually know when a relatively close ancestor immigrated (I'm half-Irish, quarter-Swedish, eighth-French Canadian and eighth-English, and my great-grandmother came over from Ireland in the late 1800s and my grandfather came over from Sweden in the early 1920s).
Talking with ChiKat, whose family is pure Southern, gave me a completely different take on the subject. When she moved up here, she was flummoxed by everyone's obsession with ethnicity.
Visitors to Atlanta often say, "Everyone was so friendly. They all smiled at me."
