Since we're talking about regionalism a lot lately....

[RandomKoolzip]

I'll give you my own personal take on this stuff...like it matters, right? But it seems that GD is all up in arms about regionalism. Anyhow.....


II'm from Branford, Connecticut, a small suburb of New Haven. My family was working class. My dad grew up in a trailer park. My mom was a librarian, my dad worked for the post office. We never had much in the way of amenities as kids, my brother and I, but we put up with the class disdain we were met with from the other kids who lived in our town who were much more affluent. When you buy all your clothes at thrift stores while every other kid has Ocean Pacific t-shirts and Banana Republic gear and 100-dollar sneakers, you tend to stand out in a crowd. I've had to deal with being the brunt of some class hatred my whole life. It's not fun to grow up poor in a rich town.

But then I moved to the South: New Orleans, to be exact. When I told people that I was from Connecticut, immediately they'd start in with the "butler" jokes and japes about "summering in the Hamptons." Many people assumed I came from a rich family just because I'm from Connecticut; I've been called an elitist by Southern coworkers (who made more money than me!) simply because I didn't have a Southern accent. When I moved to Nashville, TN, it got a lot worse. The fact that I was a working class atheist living in Nashville made life almost intolearble. I was called "rich boy," ""carpetbagger," you name it. You couldn't talk politics with people because they'd immediately discredit anything a "northerner" would say...as if being from "up north" meant you were excluded from ANY discussion that had to do with the South's politics.

I live in Chicago now, but even here, I get jabs about "Connecticut elitism" from people who oughta know better.

This is what gets to me: assumptions about INDIVIDUALS based on their regional background, not blanket dismissals of the regions themselves.


(I posted this on a thread in GD that'll surely be forgotten...)

[BigMcLargehuge]

1. Rare illustration of RandomKoolZip's time in the south

:hi:

[RandomKoolzip]

2. Six years on top of the Nashville Tennessean Bestseller List!

I was so high when I wrote that book, man.


(I love that graphic, BTW. :hi:)

[djeseru]

3. Okay, that sounds vaguely familiar...

...I was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas by my single mom, who divorced when I was a year and a half. She remarried and her new husband moved us to Northern California. Things didn't work, he left, and I moved back to Fort Worth. I had to start school in mid-year, seventh grade...and the assumption was that since I had been living in Northern California, I must be a lesbian.

Unreal. I was 12 and had no clue as to what a lesbian was. I had to go through the same routine when I moved to an even smaller Texas town in my junior year of high school.

I suppose it taught me to stay away from labels, assumptions...it gets hard at times in this "unreal atmosphere" of this nation today, the way it's so divided.

[ZombieNixon]

4. I was born in Maryland, raised in New Mexico and now live in Chicago...

how would I get grossly overgeneralized?