On Friday I turned 21. 20 years of living in Ohio, although I've been doing it part time for 3 years now. I went to get my license renewed last weekend, and the woman at the BMV asked the standard questions: criminal record, driving impediments, etc. When we got to state of birth, I said I wasn't born in Ohio. Which is true; I was born in Philadelphia. The woman said she'd thought my accent sounded strange. The next question was how long I'd been living in Ohio. Well, 20 years. The woman's response? Must have come from my parents. I let it go. Not worth pointing out that my mom is from Maine, and my dad was born in Akron and grew up in San Diego.
But it did get me thinking. I don't always sound like an Ohioan. Especially since I've been spending 3/4 of the past three years in Maine. I've picked up a few dialectical specialties from Maine: "ayup," for example. When I work at the campus bookstore, I don't talk like a Midwesterner. One of my friends consistently thought I was from New York/New Jersey, which I don't know how to explain; he just thought I seemed like a person from that area. Another friend insists that I'm from Detroit, but that's more of a joke.
Telling people I'm from Cincinnati - which I do because no one remembers Mason - is always an adventure. I get the usual questions about how I found Colby, about being so far away from home. Occasionally I get questions about where Ohio is. New Englanders are nice, but their sense of the geography of the rest of the US is fuzzy at best. After a while, I get tired of these questions. Easier to let people make assumptions about where I'm from.
Huh. This was intended to be a post about being 21. Looks like it turned into something else. I'll save the "holy shit I'm legal" talk for some other time, I guess. Well, here's some music in the meantime.
