{"id":57,"date":"2005-03-25T10:18:39","date_gmt":"2005-03-25T14:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/03\/25\/accentuate-the-pothitive\/"},"modified":"2005-03-25T10:18:39","modified_gmt":"2005-03-25T14:18:39","slug":"accentuate-the-pothitive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/03\/25\/accentuate-the-pothitive\/","title":{"rendered":"Accentuate the Pothitive"},"content":{"rendered":"

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After work yesterday I met up with Matt to lay claim to some of the things he’s selling in his apartment. After poking around Matt’s General Store, I came away with three cases of iced tea (Lipton, Nestea and Snapple), two stools, an autographed photo of Debbie Harry, a nice abstract painting, a movie advertisement for Annie Hall, and a realistic fake-plant*<\/P>
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Realizing that this was too much to carry home, I called Rich to see if he was interested in taking anything and if he could give me a lift. He and his 19 year old brother, Carl (who is visiting from Illinois), drove to Matt’s and helped me load up the stuff (Rich got some rare Barbra Streisand movie posters out of the deal). <\/P>
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Feeling hungry, Rich, Carl and I headed into the North End to find some grub. After eating on Hanover Street we started walking back to my place. We overheard some locals talking in their thick Boston accents so the topic of our conversation turned to accents. I commented that despite being raised on Cape Cod by a Boston-bred mother and a native Cape-Codder father, I didn’t think I developed the accent. To my relief, Carl said he agreed. But then he finished his sentence with “but you do have the gay accent.”<\/P>
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!?!?!?!?!?!?!<\/P>
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What the hell? Apparently, there is a universal gay accent that straight people are aware of. Of course I begged to find out what the charactersitics were of this gay accent. Is it lisping? Is it the use of exagerration when making a point? Carl said he couldn’t pinpoint it – but said it exists….and I have it. He said it also usually involves the use of hands when speaking (which I do).<\/P>
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Now I’m paranoid. I’m not sure if I should be upset, though. It’s funny, about 8 years ago I worked as an office manager for a telemarketing company. One day, this man called because he wanted to speak with one of the telemarketers that had left a message on his voicemail. He didn’t know her name but told the supervisor that she “sounded black.” The african-american employee and her african-american manager were livid. Absolutely fuming. I never really understood their anger at the time.<\/P>
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I think I have an idea now. <\/P>
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Don’t get me wrong – I’m not angry with Carl. But I always thought I didn’t stand out in anyway – whether it be overtly gay, or overtly white, or overtly New England, or overtly anything. But knowing that complete strangers can peg me as a certain type of person is a bit unnerving.<\/P>
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 <\/P>
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*I only seem to be able to keep fake plants alive. Even scarier – I’m not even good at that. On the way from Matt’s apartment to Rich’s truck, I dropped the plant and it fell apart. I did manage to reassemble it the best way I could.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After work yesterday I met up with Matt to lay claim to some of the things he’s selling in his apartment. After poking around Matt’s General Store, I came away with three cases of iced tea (Lipton, Nestea and Snapple), two stools, an autographed photo of Debbie Harry, a nice abstract painting, a movie advertisement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}