Jeet Yet?

As I sit here with a bowl of cookies and cream ice cream before bed ...

I am a generally quiet person unless I feel I have some established type of relationship with a person. I don't like to be the snarky, sarcastic person that my family and close friends like (or don't like) unless I feel they know most of the weird things I say I usually don't mean. So I have this feeling out process whenever I am around new people. It was like that at Marshall and it is definitely like that here in New York at NYU.

What is making the transition even weirder for me when it comes to just chatting with people I meet is the fact that one of the first things they bring up, warranted or not, is the idea that I have an accent. Not just any accent, but a thick Southern accent. This thought grows whenever I tell people I hail from West Virginia. They automatically think that is the South, and I always feel I have to clarify myself.

For background, I grew up in Marshall County, West Virginia. Technically, Marshall is above the Mason-Dixon line that was thought to separate the North from the South. It's just a county and a few miles away from the line, but Marshall County is above it. I love it and I miss it as I am quickly finding out that it will always be home. There certainly are individuals who live a "good ol' country life" but I am not one of those people. I never hunted, I never fished, I don't drive a 4-wheeler. None of those things. Plus, I live minutes from Wheeling and less than an hour away from Pittsburgh.

If anything, I have grown into a Pittsburgh accent, but this is hard to get through to people considering my native state. Pittsburghese definitely has its own flair of the language with its "Yinz" (You all), "Fir" (For) and "Wir" (we are). I never says yinz, but I have been working on clearing up the latter two. Check out this glossary for other weird terms. 

I guess it is an insecurity of being different on a first impression when I have never really had to deal with that before. I know I don't have a New York accent (which can be just as grating as a Southern one when the right person is speaking), but I will fight tooth and nail that I avoided picking up a Southern accent while living in Huntington, WV for four years. I even listened to a playback of my broadcast of NYU volleyball from this weekend, and I can't hear anything too Southern though my co-workers said it was nice to hear a down-home flow to the broadcast as it is something not often heard in New York.

Plus, I've met, been friends with and worked with people from Kentucky, Tennessee, and even Mississippi who have true Southern accents. No way I compare.

Future goal ... let everybody important to me know how much I care for them.