You got a problem with that, honey?

Ok, so I'm sitting here, waiting on it to start snowing. The weather people have been saying its going to snow today all week, and yet there isn't one snowflake in sight. Hell, there isn't even a cloud in sight.

Earlier this week, I was having lunch with Nicole, who is just about the sweetest girl on the planet. She's one of the few people that I've really opened up to about my desire to convert, but that's a different story for a different day. Nicole, like me, had the good fortune to be born in North Carolina. However, her life began several hundred miles west of mine. To hear me talk, it isn't immediately apparent that I'm an NC native. With Nicole, it's unmistakable. I often find myself wishing that I hadn't been brought up in a big, diverse city, and that I don't feel the need to hide my accent when I'm back home, especially at work. But that too is a different story for a different day.

The other day at lunch, Nicole and I were approached by this guy that wanted to know if the table next to us was taken. Nicole politely replied that "Yes, that table is taken, sorry." The guy, apparently unable to understand Appalachian English, made Nicole repeat herself several times before stalking off. Damn Yankee.

Now, I'm not going to turn this into an anti-Yankee rant. First of all, there's no point, and second of all, I don't want to alienate one-third of my readership. But the whole Southern stereotype thing is getting pretty fucking old. To hear some of my classmates/coworkers (who thought I was from Washington State for whatever reason)/customers talk, we Southerners are nothing but a bunch of ignorant, Jesus lovin', beer drinkin', snuff dippin' rednecks, and that there is nothing to do in the South but go to county fairs. Let me point out that I will (hopefully) have two masters degrees five years from now, I am on my way to becoming a JBC, I hate (most) beer and the only tobacco product I've ever tried was a cigarette, and that was just stupid. And for the there's nothing to do part, those people obviously haven't visited downtown Asheville, any part of Atlanta, or Charleston.

My sister-in-law's mom, a Carolina girl if ever I met one, moved up to BFE, Michigan a few years ago with her husband. Upon arrival, she was asked "Don't you just love it up here? This place is really thriving!" My sister-in-law's mom then replied "I'm from Charlotte. It's one of the biggest banking centers in the country. That's thriving. You people don't even have a movie theater."

Maybe, being from Charlotte, I'm not really qualified to talk about stuff like this. Still, it's something I felt like addressing.