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.

Tep, yep, that's fine.

Visitors to Atlanta often say, "Everyone was so friendly. They all smiled at me."

how much the Civil War shaped the psyche of the South

We are deeply fucked up and that's why I love us.

::and GC and Susan::

I do identify southern, despite having a very,very northern 1/2 geneome. Though it's mostly about the resiliency, the pace, the hospitality, and the tendency to do silly things with curtains. And the writing/storytelling. Also, the serious lack of anything resembling sleet.

It is most certainly not about the racist and classist bullshit that is the shame of more places than just the South, though some (fools) would like to stick a flag in it and claim it their own.

As Sparky said (and if we'd been boys, there would have been more guns than there were. I guarantee. Just ask the youngest boy: Sue, who has a bunch of them.).

Still, I loves my northrun relations.

Boy still can't get over how much we smalltalk over here. I hadn't noticed until he pointed it out, but I do chat with virtually everyone I have some kind of interaction with - people on the till in shops, train conductors, the delivery guy. Mostly about the weather, it seems like. He finds it very strange, which now I guess might be his New England stoicism coming through.

most people can break it down to fractions and usually know when a relatively close ancestor immigrated

I've had those conversations, enthusiastically. However, no branch of my family has been big on preserving the ways of my ancestors: I never learned to speak Russian; my Italian recipes that were handed down to me by my (not Italian, married into it) grandmother came from cookbooks; the branch of the family that we thought was Scots appears, after much research, to more likely be English, etc. Sometimes that makes me sad, losing heritage and all, but we also shed a lot of fucked-up-ness. Making way for new and different kinds of fucked-up-ness, but that's what progress is all about, right?

Edited for punctuation

Sigh. I hate hate hate when students don't do well on a test I give. I offered study sessions all last week because I know how hard this stuff is (creation myths/Genesis stories), but it looks like a lot of them are bombing. I thought I taught it pretty well, but maybe not. Dammit.

But it's fun chatting with strangers!! One of the most interesting people I've ever met was a NYC cabbie, who fit the old stereotype of the older lifelong New York resident, complete with the NY accent and living in and raising his family in an apartment and stories about how life is like there. Fascinating stuff. My mom and sister (who were sitting in the back seat of the cab while I rode in front due to no more room in back) were wondering what we talked about, and were very surprised that I had such a great conversation with him.