on history, being middle class, writing a blog, everything in the history of mankind!

I've been reading a book of essays by Sarah Vowell that my roommate lent me called Take the Cannoli. It's an interesting enough book, one I like but don't love, and only occasionally does her writing hit a nerve. I will say that we don't have too much in common in the way that we live our lives but it's cool to read about someone from Oklahoma who lives in (or has lived in) Chicago and wrote a lot in the 90s.

Regardless, this quote in particular piqued my interest and I thought: this is it. This passage is the impetus for me to write the definitive Blog Entry about Identity and History in the United States as a White Middle Class girl aka The Search for Authenticity.

In one particular essay Vowell writes about a road trip that she and her sister took following the route of the Trail of Tears. They went on the trip because they are part Cherokee. At the end, they meet up with their aunts and uncles in their hometown in Oklahoma. Vowell talks to her uncle Hoy about this life, a man who fought in WWII and never received any education past the third grade because he worked on a farm. During this conversation she thinks, "All these historical forces bore down on him, but he did not break. Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it" (p. 156).

Ah, the idea that we are free from history. I wrangle with this concept a lot. Sometimes I feel like such an unspecified mass that who's gonna bother with me? I'm a person who is not unlike a million other people, in that I have a college education and pierced ears and I like to shop at Urban Outfitters. As a member of the educated upper middle class with a family that came to America generations over generations ago, I feel no ties to any particular place. When I go home to North Carolina I hate driving and love the heat. When I come back to Chicago I love the public transportation and hate the cold. When I tell people where I'm from they ask why I don't have a Southern accent. Every time I go to my grandfather's home I find myself searching through photo albums, looking for images of people that preceded me, searching for a narrative of life before myself.

All of these examples are supposed to illustrate the fact that I feel like a tweener: can't stay here, can't go there, don't feel connected anywhere. Sometimes it feels like I'm supposed to aspire to the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. As a pop culture fiend I'm constantly inundated with images of consumerism. I want to travel everywhere, I want to buy everything, I want a big ass house with like, a gigantic venetian glass chandelier. I want to see the entire world anonymously, fitting into every culture like drops in the great flowing rivers of cultures in the world.

But I also just wanted to feel rooted to a place. I want people to know where I am from by looking at me, by the way I talk. I want to feel rooted to a time. I want histories that affect me, causes that inspire me. Fuck, I want to be like the hobbits in Lord of the Rings: constantly dreaming of my ideal place, the shire of the human race, if only I could return there after I dump this ring in that big fiery volcano.

This issue is something I've discussed with my brother before, perhaps more eloquently. What it boils down to is that sometimes I feel like I'm on a gigantic quest for Authenticity. When I'm outside of the South I like to talk about North Carolina barbeque because it makes me sound like someone who is rooted to a place, who knows her background. But the truth is that I rarely eat barbeque. And that one of my earliest memories is barfing barbeque all over my grandparents' floor because my stomach couldn't handle all the meat. And I don't know that much about the Civil War, although I do know where Stonewall Jackson's nickname came from (kind of). I'm free to drift the waves of the internet, of culture, of place, and of time, but all I find myself doing is wistfully hoping that someday I'll find a place where I want to be permanently.

I understand that this feeling is a romanticization of time and place. Do I really want to grow up in a culture where all of the men I know are shipped off to an unfeeling trench war? Do I want to have deal with Prohibition? With slavery? With famine? With even more serious misogyny and sexism?

All I can really say is that I'm too poor to spend the rest of my life globe trotting and too rich to stay in one place without suffering from some sort of unhappiness in relation to the fact that I never "escaped" my hometown, so I'm stuck jumping around until something smacks me in the face and tells me to stay put. Oh, the trials of a poor little rich white girl. I know I sound pathetically privileged but it's the truth. Can any of you relate to this feeling?