Accent Soup

I’m not a Southerner. As much as I want to love sweet tea and argue with Yankees about the War of Northern Agression, I just can’t do it. When I moonlight as a steak waitress in my small North Carolina suburb, I often wait on people who immediately ask me where I’m from; I think they assume I’m a Yankee by the quick pace of my nasally voice. To a Southerner, a Yankee is anyone from above the Mason-Dixon line, usually east of the Mississippi. I think they’re all still mad that the North won the war and the South didn’t secede from the Union. “I’m from Idaho,” I explain, “It wasn’t even a state during the Civil War.” “Y’all are Yankees anyhow,” they respond, “All uh y’all.” I proceed to ask them if they would like a sweet tea. They always do. 

My accent has raised questions about where I’m from for years. Having the privilege of living in three regions of the States and a brief stint in the U.K. during my 22 years, my dialect is a conglomerate of many English accents. If I were to categorize it, I’d call it something like Pacific North-Midwestern with bouts of Canadian and Southern slang. My accent is a melting pot of English-speakers. I speak way too fast and have the Southern Californian filler word “like” perfected. My voice, excruciatingly loud as a result of years in musical theatre, comes out directly through my nose. Too many years of watching Degrassi has turned my “about” into “aboot” and I’m guilty of ending a sentence in “eh” every once in awhile. Throw in some Southern slang like “y’all” and you’ve got me, a woman with no place for her dialect to call home. 

Sometimes my unique accent helps me, but mostly it just confuses people. I speak so fast that my poor grandmother has started to read my lips rather than listen to my words. I’d make a good auctioneer and I can respond quickly on my feet, but more often than not, people respond with “What the hell did you just say?” after I finish a long-winded paragraph. My voice makes me unique and clearly a traveler of sorts; I’ve picked up slang and dialects from most of the places I’ve lived or visited. My brain is always constantly persuaded by the language that it interprets. 

As a writer, I don’t worry as much about how my crazy dialect affects people. Just be glad I don’t have an accent on paper. 

Experience: The Way to Gain Experience

There was a point in time, about halfway through my senior year of college, when I realized that maybe I should have majored in chemical engineering instead of English Literature. While my friends were being wined and dined by high-profile companies in Manhattan, I was serving overpriced steak to unappreciative yuppies in the suburbs of Charlotte, struggling through my last semester of college.

In the spring of 2012, half of recent graduates were underemployed, or not employed at all. The country was working its way through a serious recession and jobs for inexperienced graduates were hard to come by. It’s an age-old dilemma: how are you supposed to gain experience if no one will hire you without any? And it seems no one has a good answer for this. Of the people I knew with definite job leads, they all seemed appalled that I didn’t have an internship and 1,500 connections on LinkedIn. But alas, three months before college graduation, I figured I should go ahead and start applying for full time jobs.

Considering my part-time job as a server was literally soul crushing, I refused to be a waitress forever. In just a few months, I would be the only person at the restaurant with a Bachelor’s Degree and I wasn’t going to live with the embarrassment of being way overqualified for a position that I hated.  In order to save what little self-respect I had left, I had to at least try to secure a future for myself. Don’t get me wrong—I applied for a number of jobs: junior copyeditors, assistant editors, even legal secretaries. It just seemed as though the jobs weren’t there. Not for an inexperienced 22-year-old steak waitress, at least.

This blog serves as a mash-up of my life as a liberal arts enthusiast, my triumphs and failures in the real world, and my search for employment after graduation.