Don'cha Know?!

"Are you from Minnesota? Or Canada?" I was asked yesterday.

Eh?

The asker: an otherwise quiet Kenyan man who takes my 5:30 a.m. class twice a week. And all I could do was respond with my own questions:

• Do I seem kind enough to be from Minnesota? Because I am not.
• Do I tolerate extreme cold like the Canadians? Ask me in February.
• Do I elongate my Os and lose the ends of words? No-o-o weh.

The culprit, I think, is one of two things: I'm at a loss for words when coaching exercisers at oh-five-thirty ("Go-o-o!" Pause. "Go-o-o!") or, more likely: my California accent is colliding with my Wichita one.

Now, I hold firm that Californians don't really have accents (Valley excepted, of course, but that's a caricature. And all teenagers totally sound like that, BTW.) Indeed, don't Californians have the intonation and cadence that newscasters strive for? If anything, we might be a little free-flowing with slang and, perhaps, a little relaxed.

Wichita, on the other hand, has the most indistinguishable - and incredibly wide-ranging - version of an accent. Sometimes it's just a "y'all" peppered into a conversation. No biggie. Warm and inclusive, actually. But in its most extreme form, it's like a slow, mumbled Texas-light.

Has my relaxed Californian mixed with mumbled Texan to give me never-ending vowels?

Eh, since a lot of Wichitans sound just like me, maybe I just need to have one more 5 a.m. cup of coffee to keep my words nimble. And varied, for that matter. 

Either way, I'll keep ya posted. Here's to a relaxing three-day'er ahead.

P.S. Speaking of relaxing, Roman found a great use for my resistance band today. Better here than around my legs, no?!