peripatetic (ramble)
Most of my writing comes from my 1.7-mile walk home from work at night:
stacey-marie | 28 | Athens, Ga. | photographer / zine-writer | selenographie | about | ask
Most of my writing comes from my 1.7-mile walk home from work at night:
"To survive in this fascist police state, … you gotta always be able to come up with a name, your name. At all times. That’s the first sign they look for that you’re wired, not being able to figure out who the hell you are."
Philip K. Dick, from A Scanner Darkly
So my job is somewhat mindless in the sense that I have to sit in front of a computer and transcribe voicemails. This is a service Important Business Professionals pay for so that they don’t have to write/type their own Important Notes. One of the reasons that I like this job is because I’m getting paid (and occasionally complimented) for a lot of seemingly-useless skills that I’ve acquired over time due to Having Interest in Things. For example, it’s really helpful that I have a good grasp of English grammar. & I have a personal interest in things like etymology so I’m good at transcribing medical terms or uncommon last names because I understand about Latin roots and cognates and all those kinds of things, so that makes me feel really useful in a way since I can process dictations with few errors and question marks. (We have special question marks to use for when we’re uncertain of spelling — and we have no Internet access to look that stuff up because presumably no one would get any work done if there was Internet…)
But my favorite secret prideful moments are when I know how to spell the names of different locations — and I don’t have to put little sp?s next to them because I am totally sure about spelling Bryn Mawr & Kedzie & Cicero because I rode the train in Chicago, and I know that the Parish should be capitalized in New Orleans locales and Marigny and Tchoupitoulas still sound like incantations. Names of streets and neighborhoods and rivers and cities all sound magical and I know how to spell them and where they are because I like to travel when I can and I like to read and I like to look at maps and figure out how to pronounce things.
I love getting a dictation from a client in Pittsburgh because I know all of the places he’s talking about and I know the proper way to type out the addresses and streets. Part of my job is also reviewing/correcting jobs that were pre-scribed by others, and sometimes I can tell before even listening to the dictation that the message is from Pittsburgh and the neighborhoods are misspelled in a valiant attempt to phonetically depict some crazy Polish names. Then I listen as some anonymous client talks about all the meetings he went to all over the city and I can picture all of these places in my mind and start to feeling very homesick.
Colby said he loves going to Pittsburgh with me when we visit because seeing my family interact makes sense to him, witnessing the background that made me (and then I wonder how I got to be a thousand miles away). I came from a big family in a small house & we were always fighting to fiercely protect personal space while sharing bedrooms. Also I came from a long line of Putting Up With Shit Because Nobody Said Life Was Fair and this is a useful life skill, most times.
We go to Pittsburgh and visit my friends and family all over the town, and Pittsburgh is huge compared to Athens (where downtown is about five blocks squared). We’d take the bus or trolley or a car ride to all these different neighborhoods and Colby would keep asking, is this still Pittsburgh? Are we still in Pittsburgh? Because you can spend an hour going across town and still be in the same city and county. And it’s real strange to think that when I left the city six years ago I felt trapped, riding the same bus routes to and from my job and my house and the coffeeshop… sometimes when people find out I’m from Pittsburgh they’ll ask me if I know so-and-so or if I’ve been to a certain bar and most times I haven’t, because it’s not that kind of town, even though all the neighborhoods feel like their own little towns so I could see how it would feel like that to a visitor. So each time I go back to visit I find all these new things I never saw when I was younger and angsty and I always how it would feel if I went back there to live, if I would feel small or the city would feel small.
