Oh yeah, I totally get it. In my case, there were a lot of shitty economic factors involved in my string of dead-end or otherwise failed jobs, but there were also a lot of choices I could've made differently if I hadn't taken such a fatalistic outlook on my own situation and maybe honestly just tried a little harder during certain times and not sabotaged myself.
I'll save all that for the post-series analysis episode 😂
That's true for me, too. But I lost jobs because CFOs decided to skirt the law...major suppliers drop my company...4 months later 2500 people were on the unemployment line. Or a sales job...the expansion of the company in AZ was funded by a guy in FL...the guy in FL was doing stuff with another company unrelated to us...that company got nailed by the IRS, so they also froze our backer's accounts (just in case...) and the entire sales staff expansion (15 people) lost their jobs. Or the company with a contract installing cable into schools in South Carolina...told me they had a 6 month contract. They didn't tell me 5 months of the contract were already gone.
And so on...
My blunders didn't help. Getting a degree in History without getting a teaching cert...major blunder. Bothering to apply with CIA....waste of time that took over a year of waiting....not knowing I'd have to send out 300 applications to get 3 interviews...
Isn’t it wild how different the people are in NoVa vs Richmond? Just tens of miles apart and yet worlds apart philosophically (and politically). When I lived in Richmond in the 90s, people had unironic portraits of Lee and Jackson in their foyers. Those old cavalier accents are cool, so different from the Scots Irish accent you hear in the western part of the state.
They're SO different! It's just kind of wild. I didn't expect it. I didn't make the connection between the accent I have grown to hate and the Scots-Irish. Funny because I *am* descended from the Scots-Irish, lol. I just love that old accent, though! I've never heard it referred to as "cavalier," but it makes sense.
When I was growing up in NoVa in the 70s, we used a term to describe the local, less sophisticated kids of working class families (of which there weren’t many - all of us were mostly middle class). We called them “grits”, and their accent — although we didn’t think it was an accent but rather an affected way of talking - sounded something like, “Hey you wanna go smake some dape?” Taken to an extreme, it sounds a bit like the Baltimore accent (check out the movie Tin Men. A delight to the ear it is not). But I realize now that that accent had probably been around for a long time in the area, certainly longer than the influx of government workers which gradually diluted the accent to a minority. Not sure you even hear that accent any more, bc I haven’t been back in a while. But I now realize that these waves of smoother-talking white immigrants to the region are simply gentrifiers of a different stripe. And they have colonized nearly every local region in the country over time and the suburbs spread from their urban core deeper into the rural areas. Even California probably has regional accents and cultures that have wanted and disappeared under the onslaught.
On a related topic, have you read Albion’s Seed? Explains so much about Virginia, settled by a mix of wealthy English “cavaliers”, loyal to the crown, and yeoman farmers if I recall correctly. Farther west, the Scots Irish came down the Shenandoah Valley to settle Virginia’s, and America’s, frontier. People are always a bit surprised when they get a glimpse of Old Richmond society, with its rigid hierarchy and veneration of tradition. It almost feels more English than American.
Albion’s Seed describes US history and its various stages and conflicts, including the Civil War and the internal Cold War we are fighting today through the lens of 4 very different tribes. People think of white America as one monolithic tribe. Not true at all. In many ways America is an alliance between the smart, disciplined, moral, open-minded, pluralistic Puritans and the rough, loyal, more violent and close-minded Scots Irish. The former developed the laws, the institutions, the codes, the technology while the latter tamed the frontier, worked the oil rigs and built the infrastructure and —most importantly, fought and died in the wars. That alliance seems to be disintegrating. We can debate who let down their side of of the bargain first, but the treaty seems to be in tatters nonetheless.
“Temp work 38”
It’s all temp work when you’re doing it
Lmao you're not wrong.
29 jobs since I graduated kawlej in 1998. It’s as much a sign of the disintegrating economy as anything I’ve messed up.
Oh yeah, I totally get it. In my case, there were a lot of shitty economic factors involved in my string of dead-end or otherwise failed jobs, but there were also a lot of choices I could've made differently if I hadn't taken such a fatalistic outlook on my own situation and maybe honestly just tried a little harder during certain times and not sabotaged myself.
I'll save all that for the post-series analysis episode 😂
That's true for me, too. But I lost jobs because CFOs decided to skirt the law...major suppliers drop my company...4 months later 2500 people were on the unemployment line. Or a sales job...the expansion of the company in AZ was funded by a guy in FL...the guy in FL was doing stuff with another company unrelated to us...that company got nailed by the IRS, so they also froze our backer's accounts (just in case...) and the entire sales staff expansion (15 people) lost their jobs. Or the company with a contract installing cable into schools in South Carolina...told me they had a 6 month contract. They didn't tell me 5 months of the contract were already gone.
And so on...
My blunders didn't help. Getting a degree in History without getting a teaching cert...major blunder. Bothering to apply with CIA....waste of time that took over a year of waiting....not knowing I'd have to send out 300 applications to get 3 interviews...
And so on...
Isn’t it wild how different the people are in NoVa vs Richmond? Just tens of miles apart and yet worlds apart philosophically (and politically). When I lived in Richmond in the 90s, people had unironic portraits of Lee and Jackson in their foyers. Those old cavalier accents are cool, so different from the Scots Irish accent you hear in the western part of the state.
They're SO different! It's just kind of wild. I didn't expect it. I didn't make the connection between the accent I have grown to hate and the Scots-Irish. Funny because I *am* descended from the Scots-Irish, lol. I just love that old accent, though! I've never heard it referred to as "cavalier," but it makes sense.
When I was growing up in NoVa in the 70s, we used a term to describe the local, less sophisticated kids of working class families (of which there weren’t many - all of us were mostly middle class). We called them “grits”, and their accent — although we didn’t think it was an accent but rather an affected way of talking - sounded something like, “Hey you wanna go smake some dape?” Taken to an extreme, it sounds a bit like the Baltimore accent (check out the movie Tin Men. A delight to the ear it is not). But I realize now that that accent had probably been around for a long time in the area, certainly longer than the influx of government workers which gradually diluted the accent to a minority. Not sure you even hear that accent any more, bc I haven’t been back in a while. But I now realize that these waves of smoother-talking white immigrants to the region are simply gentrifiers of a different stripe. And they have colonized nearly every local region in the country over time and the suburbs spread from their urban core deeper into the rural areas. Even California probably has regional accents and cultures that have wanted and disappeared under the onslaught.
On a related topic, have you read Albion’s Seed? Explains so much about Virginia, settled by a mix of wealthy English “cavaliers”, loyal to the crown, and yeoman farmers if I recall correctly. Farther west, the Scots Irish came down the Shenandoah Valley to settle Virginia’s, and America’s, frontier. People are always a bit surprised when they get a glimpse of Old Richmond society, with its rigid hierarchy and veneration of tradition. It almost feels more English than American.
Albion’s Seed describes US history and its various stages and conflicts, including the Civil War and the internal Cold War we are fighting today through the lens of 4 very different tribes. People think of white America as one monolithic tribe. Not true at all. In many ways America is an alliance between the smart, disciplined, moral, open-minded, pluralistic Puritans and the rough, loyal, more violent and close-minded Scots Irish. The former developed the laws, the institutions, the codes, the technology while the latter tamed the frontier, worked the oil rigs and built the infrastructure and —most importantly, fought and died in the wars. That alliance seems to be disintegrating. We can debate who let down their side of of the bargain first, but the treaty seems to be in tatters nonetheless.