bless yo ha-aht!

"There's a lot of people in the world don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern."

-George W. Bush

I've been unmotivated to update the journal lately, partly because I've just had so many other things going on in my life that sparing time for writing seems, well, self-indulgent. As a result, events in my life have piled up to such an extent that I'm now so far behind, catching up seems an impossibility.

So I won't try.

I spent three days last week in Tennessee: two days travelling, one-and-a-half days working. For those of you who can do math, this will add up to three-and-a-half days instead of the three days I laid claim to. The three days I laid claim to are the days I'll get paid for. The 'half' is the day I have to make up in sleep somewhere.

Tennessee is, without a doubt, full of some of the nicest people I have ever met. Nice, charming people, Tennesseeans -- what are they called, anyway? Tennessites? Tennessans? -- albeit with a drawl that I had to fight off with all the powers at my disposal, lest it creep through the ears and take up residence on my tongue. Indifferent though I am to the feelings of others in my normal state of mind, in Tennessee I became morbidly sensitive to my own Yankee-Asian accent, free of twang and replete with nasality. It was beyond tempting to hop into a Tennessee accent and take it for a spin: so mellow! so exotic! so foreign! In the middle of a conference call with our Tennessee customers the Friday before, I was appalled to discover that I came away with a sort of "Tennessee-Light" whine to my conversation.

Convinced they would think I was mocking them if I succumbed to the temptation of twang, I bunkered down behind the determined shortened vowels of my Northwestern blandness and waved a defiant "R" at the enemy.

There's not much to say about my trip; it was business, the town was tiny, and the combination of the two meant my free time was spent either in the pool or sprawled half-conscious on my bed. Not a bad state of being, I have to admit. Still, hardly meat for the narrative buffet.

The most notable thing about Tennessee has to be, I think, the colloquialisms. At some point, I started keeping a list, tallying each unexpected, hitherto unheard phrase, and the number of times I heard it.

1. "Bless yo heart!" or its variation, "Bless her heart!" - 23 times.
   
2. "Y'all." - 19 times.
   
3. "Sugarbutt." - 3 times.
   
4. "Laws!" - 2 times.
   

There was also something obscure that took place in a restaurant called the Cracker Barrel; sadly, I missed it in an appalled exploration of my plate. It turns out that there are restaurants that actually aspire to be as good as Denny's. Who knew?

I have instituted a new rule, stolen shamelessly from John Scalzi: no entry shall, in the future, take more than half an hour to write. Like all my rules, I'll probably break it in under a week; still, given a deadline, it's possible I'll make more of an effort to write entries. It's not the lack of subject matter that's daunting, usually, so much as it is the knowledge that sitting down to write an entry will consume a considerable amount of my free time.

Given an egg timer, surely the new rule will be an improvement on my nonexistent old one?