exhausted
I just came back from a three-day trip (really, more like two days) to NCarolina, where I presented on new literacies at their state ed tech association conference. The hotel was very nice, the teachers and tech folks extremely interesting and the trees already in bloom. I had a nice talk with a Canada goose roaming about downtown that I named Ted, but this was the most exertion I have put myself to lately and my body is just plain tired and put me through a migraine last night that the meds couldn’t stop.
It was also my first trip down South since leaving Vanderbilt nearly four years ago, and there are many things I had forgotten but that came rushing back to me once we touched down in Charlotte, like how openly religious people are there. It had been a while since anyone had told me to “Have a blessed day.” It also took me a while to convince folks I was Dr. Anyone, given how young I look (does my gender play a role? I wonder — I mean, I am in the field of education, where women are anything but rare). Everyone is very sweet down there, and the accent just slides from one word to another — almost running them together in a honeyed drip. Yet I noted that the Black teachers and tech coordinators kept to themselves for the most part; just like Nashville, people tended to stay segregated when they didn’t know each other.
When you have a country as large as this one, the differences between regions tend almost to create countries among themselves. So far, I have been born and raised in the West and then lived for a short time on the West Coast, for four years down South, and now in the Northeast. Each has its own flavor and issues, and at least right now, I don’t know that I could choose one over the other to spend the rest of my life. Would you know? Where would you go, if you could?