Just for your information, I think you are all Northerners and you probably don't know very much about Southern accents, but there's not just one Southern accent. And I did not actually discover that until James Earl Carter Jr. was elected President of the United States in 1976. There was an article in a Newsweek Magazine edition shortly after his election talking about Southern accents. This article quoted an expert linguist who has spent a lot of time studying Southern United States accents, and the linguist concluded that the state of Georgia actually has four different types of Southern accent. I do not remember which one it said that President Jimmy Carter speaks, but I do remember that one of the four Southern Accents in Georgia is called Gulf Coastal Plains. And that means it stretches from somewhere in the central area of Georgia, where I live and was born, and goes all the way down through Southwest Georgia to the Gulf of Mexico. I believe that the accent that you're hearing in this recording is a Gulf Coastal Plains accent. I have often been told that I sound like our former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

My brother recommended that we go to New York City and I agreed. And then before I know it, after all these years, thirteen years at that point of deciding I was never going to go to New York City and it never really came to mind, uh, we found ourselves in a car going to New York City one day later. And I'm not sure if I've ever felt more empowered in my life. I'd been on certain trips in my life. I had flown to the Bahamas and I had been to Texas and gone on a road trip with a friend to South Carolina and, you know, these like things that just seem like there's these reasons for going. There's family there or there's friends or you have a main attraction that you want to go see. I had done that type of traveling, but never in my life had I tapped into this revelation that, if there's a place I wanted to go, technically I could go there whenever I wanted so long as I had a day off and a car that worked. And so I went from thinking I'd never had a reason to go New York City. I didn't know anyone in particular there that would pull me into that region. I went from just being like, "Okay, yeah. I'll never go because why would I and plus who knows what could happen?" to suddenly like "All right, well. We're ten hours away, and let's make it happen. Let's drive straight to Midtown Manhattan." And so that's what we did.

Something I've always said, I like people who – I can't say I like them, but I prefer people who are just rude and mean, and are just really flat out about it, rather than people who try to hide behind it or hide behind the pretense of being nice or being honest or anything like that. Of course, I don't like rude or mean people, but I’d rather you just outwardly be, like, a rude person rather than – I like to call it nice-nasty. I didn't make up that term, but people – I don't like people who are nice-nasty. Like, if you've ever seen Mean Girls – I love how I'm saying “you” as if, you know, this is just a random person who's just talking, but like if you've ever seen Mean Girls, the way Regina George goes, Regina George is pretty nice-nasty a lot of the times. Like, when Regina George is like, “I like your skirt,” and then ((the girl's)) like, “Oh my God, thanks,” and she walks away. And then she goes, “That's the ugliest effing skirt I’ve ever seen.” I hate that. Like, what, like? Or like in middle school, the mean girl who isn't ever, like, outwardly mean or rude, but just like does little off-the-wall little mean stuff and like, goes, “Wow, like, I love your pants. Where'd you get those? Oh, wow, they’re sure, like, unique I guess, hahaha.” And then they go and, like, giggle with their friends and like, “Hahaha, oh my God, Gretchen, look at her pants. Those are so cute, hahaha.” And it's, like, just hearing the words you say, “Oh, that's not – that's not rude.” But, like, you know, you know you're being mean. Like, you know, you're trying to, like, make fun of them. I hate that.

I did learn once that -- I was on a team that was working with a team in India. Programmers. And I didn't experience this personally, but I had like a training module for business communication internationally, that it's more customary in India for them to like, have a short personal conversation before getting down to business. Like, "Hey, how's it going? How's your day going?" Or even getting to know you, like, "What is your hobby?" or something before starting work. Which in my experience in the United States, that is not as common. It's just like, "let's get on this call. Let's go through the agenda. Let's do what we're here to do." And the message was that if you do that, some people in India might perceive that as rude. Just goes to show that it's a subjective thing. Tough, tough thing to navigate. And so, what I took away from that is just be extremely patient. It'd be valuable to be generally aware of what's considered rude or not. Cuz you know, the goal is to not be rude. It's not constructive to a relationship usually. So yeah, you sometimes gotta -- sometimes instead of saying, "We got a problem," sometimes you gotta frame it as a challenge or an opportunity and that's just part of collaborating with people, I think.

So when I was in second grade, we went on this field trip to this weird museum and I wish I knew what it was called, but I have a feeling that if I describe it enough, somebody who's lived in Michigan their whole life will know what I'm talking about. But it's this museum where the basement is a whole town and it's a very mid-western town, you walk through and it's all these little storefronts and it's very quaint and cute and it's fairly big for being a town-based basement in a museum, like it's a very strange experience. So we were there in second grade and the upstairs had this rock-climbing wall. And there was also a bunch of -- there was a Warheads, like, dispenser, little candy dispensers up there too. And so, you know, my classmates were all surrounded by the -- we were all surrounding this Warheads candy machine and we're getting just an outrageous amount of them. And all of a sudden, I hear this bang and I turn around a kid in my class was climbing up the rock-climbing wall and had absolutely ate it, like slipped and hit his head on the rock-climbing wall and fell all the way down to the ground and he wasn't that far up, but it was still a fairly big fall. And I just remembered looking over and seeing he had hit his head and so he was bleeding, like he had a huge nosebleed. And I remember looking over the rock-climbing wall and it's covered in blood from where he landed. I shouldn't be laughing but it's like it's so traumatic for me. Like I literally thought, I think everybody in my class screamed. And my mom was supervising the field trip, so I ran back to her, and I was like, "Oh my God," and then everyone got to leave class early and they had to close down the museum. Or at least that part of them museum for the rest of the time that we were there at least, to clean it. But yeah, it was definitely a museum experience that left an impression on me.