Yep. It's Kari.

Follow Friday

delgrosso:

So, who are the three Twitter people who aren’t currently following you, but who you wish were?

FWIW, mine are @warrenellis, @hodgman, and @lonelysandwich.

Your turn.

That’s easy: @haavoc, @michaeljnelson, and @kwmurphy.

In the past that list would have also included @BillCorbett and @nostrich, but surprisingly enough both of them actually follow me now. They were the two that made me do a double-take when I saw the follow email, just to be sure I wasn’t misreading it. It’s always exciting when someone follows you back, but it’s especially awesome when it’s one of those people you’ve followed a long time and would’ve never expected to notice your tweets.

Telegraphs should make a comeback

I’ve never received a telegram. However, I used to watch a lot of old movies (and still do), so there’s something kind of exciting about the idea of getting one.

I imagine I’d have an extremely hard time living in a world without instant communication, like email or cell phones, but at the same time I think these things also make you take others for granted. Back when you had to wait weeks for a letter or a telegram from someone, you probably appreciated what they had to say a lot more when you finally heard from them. Now, I can just jump on Instant Messenger or send a text if I have something important to say. This often leads to me blurting out the first thing that comes to my mind, as opposed to taking a few minutes to actually think about the best way to approach a situation. I’ve screwed up many times because of this. If I had to take the time to actually plan out a hand-written letter (another tragically abandoned artform that I wish was still popular), or to condense my message into a few words in a telegram, I would have been much more articulate and to-the-point, and I would’ve had the extra few moments to really focus and think things through.

You always hear or read about dramatic “urgent telegrams,” with the man who knocks on your door at midnight and hands you the envelope, which you read and faint or jump around happily or give a somber glance off into the distance. Seems pretty exciting to me. I don’t recall doing any of those things with the emails I’ve received lately. But I’ll keep the smelling salts close by, just in case.

Just for the record, here are a few other forgotten things I wish were still around and/or popular: letter-writing, steam trains, fancy hairdos for women, dressing up to go on an airplane, not being forced to smile in photos, men wearing suits/hats/gloves, proper cursive handwriting, cassette tapes, typewriters, those Crazy Eddie commercials from the 80’s, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and the Newton MessagePad.

Louisville, KY made me homesick

One of the last conversations I ever had with my grandfather on my dad’s side of the family is one I remember vividly. I was sitting in the living room of the house I’d grown up in, happily planning my trip out to St. Louis, Missouri, to start college. I remember him asking me why I’d chosen a school out there, and I gave him some bullshit about how it was a better school than anywhere “down here,” when all I really had to say was “It gets me out of East Tennessee, which gets me out of the South, which gets me into a ‘better’ city in a ‘better’ part of the country.”

He laughed and said, “You’ll be back. You won’t like it anywhere else but here.”

I told him I wanted the experience and that I planned on living somewhere up north or even staying in the Midwest after I graduated. He just said the same thing, that I wouldn’t like it there, and that I would want to come back. I didn’t take him seriously. I figured he was talking jibberish, since he was sick and I knew he wouldn’t be around long.

It has taken me 24 years to really learn how to appreciate where I’m from. I’ve lived in a few different states since I first left for college, but it wasn’t until I went to Louisville, KY, that it really became clear to me how much I wanted to be back home. Louisville is a nice town, it really is. And I really like Kentucky. It’s beautiful, the people are nice, and it would be a great place to live. But Louisville is not Kentucky. It’s Indiana’s toenail. Or “Kentuckiana,” as the locals love to call it.

My boyfriend and I had every intention of staying in Louisville, too. We bought a condo, both had great jobs, and things seemed good. But I think we both felt the same way about the situation deep down: we weren’t happy. We wanted to go back home. So after a year, we moved back to TN.

Our current situation isn’t exactly ideal, but we’re home. When I get bummed out thinking of how things could’ve been better if we’d just stayed put back in Louisville, I remind myself how I felt up there, and how much better I feel down here. Here we can drive to Knoxville in no time, where he’s from and where we first met. Within an hour and a half we can be in the middle of some of the most beautiful mountains in the world. And every morning when I drive to school, I go around one particular curve on the highway and get the most perfectly gorgeous view of Chattanooga you’ve ever seen, with Lookout Mountain and the river in the background.

I’ve been here my entire life, all my earliest memories are here, yet I despised this place with a passion as a teenager. I wanted nothing more than to get as far away as possible, as soon as possible. But being away made me understand how amazing it really is. We’ll have to move again soon, when I go off to grad school (hopefully in Nashville, which is a place where I could easily see us being happy), but I like to think we’ll be able to come back home and stay someday. Things are just better here.