Why can't the English?

"There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years." -- Alan Jay Lerner, from My Fair Lady

Though I often fall in love with things I don't and can never have, a regional accent isn't one of them. I am the proud owner of a bona-fide Brooklyn accent, and though it tends to fade when I'm away from my family for long stretches of time, it never completely vanishes. It's so much a part of me that it took me 3/4ths of my life to realize it even existed.

The New Yawk dye-uh-leckt is so mundane in my neighborhood that I didn't know I possessed it until I was seventeen, when I went shopping in the mall at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. I was perusing racks of sneakers and a sales associate came over to help me out. We started chatting, then she asked what part of New York City I was from.

"How'd you know I'm from New York City?"
"Well, you have an accent."
"No I don't!"
"I'm afraid you do."

Sure, I'm a New Yorker, but it never occurred to me that I actually sounded like one. The New York accent was reserved for Barbra Streisand, Fran Drescher, gangsters, and the cast of My Cousin Vinny, not a Catholic school girl of above-average intelligence!

I thought that saleswoman was absolutely insane until I started college at the melting pot of the Ivy League and discovered that everyone could spot that I was a city native after only a few words. (Well, other native New Yorkers couldn't tell, but that's expected.) Three years later, my closest college friends told me that they had written me off as unintelligent when we first met because of my accent, and were honestly surprised when they realized that I was a skilled writer and competent engineer!

And though (or, perhaps, because) I speak with the most unabashedly uneducated-sounding dialect imaginable, I'm completely obsessed with the elegance of the British accent. Who knows, maybe I watched too much Heckle and Jeckle as a kid and enjoy British TV shows starring dashing Americans a little too much now, but to me there's something intriguing about the contrast between British English and Brooklyn English. I tried to write a short story about my feelings on the matter when I was a senior in high school, but failed miserably. You know why? My inner monologue speaks in Brooklynese, therefore I can never make my British characters sound as graceful as they should.

Take tonight, for instance. I was standing around eating hors d' oeuvres after a seminar, and paused to note that the piece of chicken in my hand was prepared strangely. The British man standing next to me seemed to think along the same lines.

My remark: Did they put the bone back in after they cooked the thing?
His remark: It is a bit dodgy, don't you reckon?

I wouldn't trade my r-dropping, dipthong-riddled, dental, nasal pronunciations for anything, but oh, to be able to speak, write, and think with such poise!

For all time.

"It will be a love story, for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name is Viola." -- Tom Stoppard, from Shakespeare in Love

I am Ashley, a writer, illustrator, scientist, and innovator. I'm all of that in my own head, at least; in reality, I'm an overextended engineering student with no time to draw and a case of writer's block so debilitating that I've started to wonder if the impulse has vanished for good. I'm a blogger in both realms, but due to changing tastes, my aforementioned lack of inspiration, and the last incarnation of this blog getting deleted by my host because I had all but abandoned it, this will be my fourth stab at it.

My writer's block is still in full swing, but since I'm taking a fiction writing class and need to generate a good sixty pages of original material during the next three months, I'm forcing myself to get over it. That means journaling, that means recording my dreams, that means going with whatever inspiration strikes regardless of how infuriating it is. Henry Roth had his writer's block for sixty years, and I'll be damned if I go down the same way.

Only one thing in life seems to be inspiring me, so, in accordance with my new philosophy, I'm working with it. If you were wondering where my Quote of the Day came from, I tried to cure my writer's block by watching movies about writer's block. One of those was Shakespeare in Love, in which William Shakespeare meets a woman who inspires him to write Romeo and Juliet. They love the first and last kind of love, then she marries some other bastard and sails off to America. Yeah, it's an unhappy ending, but though he and his soulmate couldn't live happily ever after, Shakespeare ends the movie by saying that "She will be my heroine for all time. And her name is... Viola." He then starts writing Twelfth Night.

This story has a point. Though I thought I had written myself out of wanting to write about the closest thing I've ever met to my soulmate, he keeps begging me for the chance to make him my hero for all time. Ergo, a character I've been sitting on for five years, Bryan, is no longer a struggling actor with daddy issues. He is now staring down at a name tag tacked to his shirt as he serves people drinks. He keeps casting glances at a woman across the room, wondering if she notices that he's wearing pink because she once suggested it.

She doesn't notice, but maybe, secretly, she does.

Stay tuned, and wish me luck.