southernisms

What are stickers?

2008-03-27T13:59:45+00:00

I just had a discussion with my fellow IT workers, and I just dropped a southernism they don't recognize. I stopped to think about it for a second or two, and realized that I don't know the 'real' name for what I'm describing.

Growing up in Arkansas, we were careful about where in the yard we went barefoot, because there was a certain type of grass we called 'stickers.' It was grass, but it has small but definite thornlike parts, and they stuck in your skin (thus the name) and made it very uncomfortable to walk barefoot on grass.

Anyone know the real name of what I'm describing?

Even I got THAT hint

2008-01-15T15:52:09+00:00

Dateline: New Westminster, BC.
(Note to self: Go see the old one sometime.)

As I've retold this story countless times in the time since I've returned, I figured the least I could do is share it here as well. I suspect it loses some of its boozy, imperative nature when committed to the written word, though; I think it's probably far funnier in person.

A cultural difference worth knowing: I was raised to hear pretty words, but not to take all of them at face value. An invitation to come stay with someone, if not repeated or mentioned again, was very likely someone just being polite -- not something to be acted upon. It turns out this is not true of everyone: some people issue an invitation only once, really hoping you'll take them up on it, and then shut up if you don't act on it. Ah, North versus South, are there any gaffes this cultural divide can't inspire?

Fast-forward.

Several drinks into the night, I was remembering exactly why Brad and I always got along so well, and marveling at how much in common Alice and Melly and I seemed to have, when Alice crooked her finger at me over her Mug Of Tasty Beverage and said, "Come back to the back. We need to talk."

I thought, "Oh, boy. I don't know what I've done, but clearly I've done something wrong here." When an outspoken woman with a drink in her hand and deelyboppers on her head tells you to do something, you do it; obedient, I followed her to Melly's bedroom for A Chat.

Most of the conversation—well, that's suitable for a private entry really—is probably best not repeated. The part worth retelling, though, was when Alice set down her drink, leaned over to me, stared me straight in the eye, and said slowly, deliberately, and very emphatically:

"Amy, we have not seen you in about five years."
(Pause.)

"We live IN HAWAII."
(Longer pause.)

"WE HAVE A GUEST ROOM."
(A pause with a very direct stare.)

"Do you understand me?"
(Followed by a very impish grin.)

Shortly after coming home, I said to Jeff, "I think we should go to Hawaii for our birthdays this year."

See? I can be taught.

ro-tel?

2007-11-19T22:16:49+00:00

While I wait for today's Godot -- Adobe CS3 -- to attempt (yet again) to reinstall Adobe Acrobat CS3 (of which install, I might add, there are several known problems, especially regarding upgrading) ... well, guess what, kids, you're stuck with me for a little while.

If you want to know how to keep a webmaster from getting anything done, deny her access to her email and her web browser. After a few tumultuous minutes of foaming at the mouth, she will subside into quiet, trailing whimpers while she waits for the pain to stop.

I've been meaning to ask this question for a couple of years, and just have never gotten around to it:

Is Ro-Tel just a Southern thing? Are we the only people who have access to this instant creator of college food cheese dip? Or is this goodness available for all?

While talking with a friend a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that an easy way to contribute food to a gathering would be to do Ro-Tel cheese dip. He had no idea what I was talking about, so I explained: it's one can of Ro-Tel, juice and all, combined with one small block of Velveeta cheese (cubed) and then heated and stirred until the cheese melts and everything suddenly looks like cheese dip.

It's simple, really. I think the can only contains diced tomatoes, diced chiles, and the juice they both came in. Oh, and I'm sure salt and some sort of nitrate and then many chemicals whose name lengths are inversely proportional to how much of the chemical is contained in the finished product, but eassentially it's canned tomatoes and chiles, with a tiny touch of heroin. (For the freshness and flavor, you see.)

Ro-Tel cheese dip is ubiquitous down here. It's the party food that even college-aged males know how to make. It's the food you make when you've only got ten bucks to pacify fifteen friends over the course of a movie. You make the dip, you tell someone to bring chips, and remind everyone to BYOB and you're set.

I have to admit that I don't even know another way to make cheese dip (though Misty does, and hers is awesome). I wonder what people unschooled in the goodness of this stuff manage to make cheese dip with?

Could be worse. You'd better hope I don't have to try installing again. Otherwise I'll have to find something else to write about, and that just won't end well for anyone.

External Independent Familial Unit™

2003-11-27T09:44:32+00:00

Three hours and fifteen minutes into Thanksgiving, I'm playing a nearly-inaudible set of songs over Winamp, cursing my nocturnal habits, and wondering just when the heck I'm ever going to grow up enough to have holidays at my own house.

Southern families have rules. Nobody bothers writing them down, because why waste paper writing down the obvious? These things are all on the same level of obviousness:

Left shoe goes on left foot. Right shoe goes on right foot. There should be no leftovers, either of shoes or of feet.
When someone dies, don't send flowers. Send casseroles.
You're coming home for the holidays, and don't give us any lip about it either.

So what's the dividing line, exactly? What causes the change in stature from Scion Of Existing Family to External Independent Familial Unit? When is it not just accepted, but expected, that your holidays will be spent under your own roof?

I thought it was kids, but maybe not; I have too many memories of truly riotous Christmases spent running rampant with my motley collection of cousins. Within reason, everyone came home for Christmas (and, to a lesser degree, Thanksgiving). Maybe it's kids + distance from the Original Familial Unit.

After all, as Kara will attest, no matter how good the munchkin, they don't adapt well to cross-country air travel.

Who knows? Either way, Jeff and I aren't at that point yet. We're still doing the holiday-splitting dance; it's like a bad game of Go Fish, except with lots of driving. ("I'll give you a seven-hundred mile drive for Thanksgiving if you'll give me the hundred-mile drive for Christmas...no? Go fish!")

We're bucking the trend a bit this year, and spending Thanksgiving with absolutely no one we're related to. Want proof of how ingrained Southern Family Rules are on my psyche? Know this - it was our decision to take up Brian & Suzan's offer of a "refugee Thanksgiving" and I still feel a smidge of guilt about not spending it with either family.

Mind you, it's the kind of guilt that makes me stay up an hour later than usual, and makes me make a note to call my mother tomorrow to wish her well. Not the kind of guilt that makes me call Brian and Suzan up in the middle of the night, confess my sins against the Southern Nuclear Family, and hie the hell home tomorrow morning in time for the noonday familial bingefest.

No, I'll go to Atlanta, eat the turkey, consume the alcohol, have a smashing good time and not regret a moment of it. How can anyone regret accepting an invitation worded this way:

1) Some of you can't go home for the holidays ... you have to work, your grandmother took the turkey recipe and ran off to the Cayman Islands with her yoga instructor, that restraining order won't let you within 500 feet of Uncle Ted.

2) Some of you would rather not go home to visit the family due to the fact that your family is there. No problem … Jerry Springer made it acceptable to come from a dysfunctional family.

3) Many of you have never had a Thanksgiving that involved a properly cooked turkey … a nice, juicy bird that didn't require 16 ounces of gravy and 12 ounces of beer to rehydrate.

We will eat. We will drink. We will game, and we will rejoice, even if we have to beat each other senseless with the nearest vodka bottle to do it.

As families go, that'll do.

An aside to the fellows in California: if I don't talk with you again before then, have a most excellent trip. Get those new memory cards for your camera broken in, 'cause we're gonna have to take a few photos while I visit....

cotton bale, pumpkin October

2003-10-23T06:20:12+00:00

As days go, not bad.

Fall has awakened the cotton gin near our house, and tipped the edges of a few early-adopter leaves with gold. Each day brings a different number of bales of raw cotton piled up near the side of the road. Bales, not in the sense of man-sized or tractor-sized, but eighteen-wheeler-sized; one enormous bale per truck.

We drove off to dinner, Jeff and I, and he cocked an eyebrow toward the field of bales and wondered aloud how the owners of the cotton gin moved the bales from field to truck. In the four years we've lived here, I've never seen a bale loaded from the field onto a truck, and only in the past couple of days have I seen a bale being deposited onto the field in the first place. They simply appear during the quiet of late morning or late night, when no one is around to see their arrival.

By such things are the seasons marked.

Birthday season is over; Jeff and I have turned the digits of our respective ages and awakened feeling absolutely no different. The stores unknowingly celebrate our birthdays in pumpkin tones; I've come to accept that within two breaths of my birthday, the store colors shift from birthday orange to Christmas red, but find myself strangely cranky if they jump the gun and proffer Christmas wares before I can manage to turn a year older.

The time of leaving approaches.

The words are so calm; rendering them into text takes away the ripple of excitement that comes when I say them. In person, it's rare to find a conversation of mine that does not touch on the subject. Normally I indulge my wanderlust the week of my birthday, but events and happenstance and respect for friends' schedules has contained my wanderlust for an additional month and a half.

I'll whet my appetite on northern Atlanta, where I'll spend about a week's worth of days over two trips, first helping a friend with a major house project, and later joining up with other friends to celebrate my first non-family Thanksgiving in my life.

I will race home after Thanksgiving to pack, to pack, to dash about the house in the throes of mad list-making only to dart away once again. What could not happen in October will happen in December: time in Arizona, California, and Colorado.

One by one, my tasks find themselves sorting-hatted into befores and afters; of plans to stock up the freezer before I leave, to wait on repainting the master bath until after I return.

Most of the 'befores' are mundane, existentialist almost. Finish the costume for the All Saints' Day party I'll be attending this year (the costume: a modified Italian Renaissance dress, with more skirts than this jeans-wearing geek chick knows what to do with). Work on some quarto code changes for Chris. Keep time in the laundry dance. Remember to make dinner every now and then. Answer the phone when it rings. Feed the cats.

...and while I'm driving, not start daydreaming about the delightful minutiae that is a packing list for a three-week trip until after I'm past the cotton gin. Wouldn't want to have my eyes stuffed full of daydreams on the off chance I might actually find out how those bales get offloaded into trucks.

Earthquake Hits Sock Capital Of World. World Yawns.

2003-04-29T15:43:42+00:00

News agencies (and my husband) are reporting that a 4.9 earthquake delicately nibbled at the toes of northeast Alabama just before four a.m. local time. Initial reports from news agencies contained the phrase "seismic event," prompting many sleepy Alabama residents to call 911 to inform the local police "There weren't no size-mic event - would you please tell my neighbor to quit playing with those damn explosives he stole from work last week? If he don't stop I'm gonna shoot his redneck ass."

According to Misty, the messages scrolling beneath this morning's Today Show included the simple phrase "Do Not Call 911."

Comforting, isn't it?

Those of you who think I'm kidding should check this news report from the Knoxville News-Sentinel:

Huntsville police answered 115 calls within the first minutes of the tremor, including one from a person who thought an intruder was breaking into the house, The Huntsville Times reported.

"I think ever[y]body in Crossville called," said police dispatcher Al Clemons. "I didn't keep count but we have 1,400 people here and I think every one called."

CNN proved yet again that it was incapable of publishing the name of any small Southern town unless it was flattened by a F5, citing the epicenter of the quake as Fort Payne, Alabama. A check of a more local news site indicates the epicenter was actually Mentone, Alabama. However, it's easy to understand how news agencies could get these two illustrious cities mixed up in news reports. Let's have a breakdown:

Fort Payne
---------------

Population: 14,000
Elevation: 850-900 feet above sea level
Nickname: "Sock Capital of the World"
Slogan: "Alabama CD free with purchase of socks!"

Mentone
---------------
Population: 467 (down seven people since 1990 - seriously)
Elevation: 1700-1800 feet above sea level
Nickname: "Alabama's Only Ski Resort"
Slogan: "Oh God. Send snow. Please."

Now true, Fort Payne is the county seat for (oh hell what IS the name of that county I drive through so quickly on the way to Atlanta) County, but as anyone who has ever been here can tell you, Mentone is not just a lap dog for Fort Payne, oh no. Fort Payne may have the county governmental offices, but by God, if the residents of Mentone ever wanted to secede from the county, they could. All they'd have to do would be to barricade the one road that leads up into Mentone and they'd have their own little fiefdom at the top of the mountain. Fort Payne could keep all their museums and honoraria for local-band-made-good Alabama. Mentone would keep … whatever it was that they had.

Oh. Yeah. An earthquake, and a ski resort that doesn't get any snow.

I wonder if they'll replace their city signs with new ones that say "Epicenter of the Great Alabama Earthquake of 2003." That's a little long for a sign, though, especially on those high and twisty roads Mentone specializes in. (Better suited for the flat straight roads of Fort Payne.) Perhaps they could just tack on hand-written signs that say "We've Got Your Earthquake Right Here!"

Every little town has to have something to be proud of. While I'm fairly sure this isn't what Mentone should latch onto, the fact that Fort Payne has latched onto "Sock Capital of the World" tells me that there's not much good for the latching-on around that side of Alabama.

Me, I'm just disappointed that I slept through it. Jeff said the bed shook, and the house (and its contents) rattled, but that might just have been my snoring. There is, however, one bonus: for once, Alabama has had a natural event that did not create vertically-challenged trailer parks with half-awake Southerners standing out front, insisting for the camera that "it sounded just like a freight train."

That's scheduled for next week. Spring in Alabama is always interesting. Stay tuned.

(Gareth gets credit for the entry title and reminding me to post on this subject in the first place.)