Eeeeeeed. Iiiiiiiiit. Iiiiiiiiiing.

So for the past few days or so, I've been hiding out at a speech therapy seminar in Roanoke, VA. If you've never been here, don't worry. Remember that scene from 'Ghost World' where they show the huge street filled with nothing but strip malls, Jiffy Lubes, and McDonald's? Then you've seen Roanoke, VA.

Anyway, those of you that know me know why I would be at a speech therapy seminar. I spent the T-Day holiday with family, then trucked a bit more westward and ended up here. I got lucky enough to get free room and board, and living off Subway and bottled water really isn't as bad as it might seem.

I'm not sure if Roanoke, VA classifies as being "The South", but if it is, then the reputation of the people here is definitely true. No, they're not all voting for Bush for a third time while fucking their sisters - what I mean is that they've all been really nice. Good old Southern hospitality, I guess. Anyway, they haven't been assholes. Yet.

The seminar's been pretty cool so far. What they're essentially attempting to do here is to completely re-teach me how to speak. It's a formidable task, but it actually might be working, now that I think about it. I'm much more conscious of the way I hold myself while speaking, right down to the way I say certain letters and even of how I breathe while doing it. It's weird to stop and realize how little you think about something you do every day, and pretty much on a consistent basis - speaking. I mean, I probably think about it a hell of a lot more than you do, but still - a lot of people take the gift of perfect, fluent, understandable speech WAY too much for granted. Stop what you're doing right now and go talk to someone for five minutes. Hell, make it ten. Did you enjoy yourself? Be happy about that.

However, whatever Southern hospitality I may have received over the past few days has been pretty much nullified by the method in which I'm being focused to communicate with my fellow seminarees. Like I said, I'm being completely re-trained on how to speak, and thusly, I've been made to break words down into their syllables and sub-syllables in order to re-train my brain on what it means to actually make them. It's difficult to explain to someone that doesn't have the condition I have to understand, but basically, imagine having to pre-think about what words you plan on saying at any given moment in the day. My words don't just pop out of me the way they probably just pop out of you. Every sentence I choose to speak has to be accompanied by a pre-ordained plan of attack. Should I start with this word? No, that one always gives me trouble at the beginning of a sentence. This other one can't work either, because it has that pain-in-the ass middle section of repeating hard vowels that I hate so much. You know, like the word "editing". Can't stand that goddamned thing.

But anyway, all us dum-dums who can't talk pretty now have the opportunity to not only make complete asses of ourselves in public, but with people we've never met before in our lives. Whenever we want to talk to one another while at the seminar, we have to do it in a slowed down, stretched out, ridiculously over-enunciated fashion. You know how long a syllable is, right? Pretty quick. Get this - we have to slow down every syllable we speak so that it is exactly 2 seconds long. Try it - say the word 'farm', for example, and time yourself on a stopwatch so that it takes you exactly two seconds to do so. I'm sure you'll be surprised at how long 2 whole seconds actually is.

I bitch, but I know that in the long run, it's going to be worth it. It's just that the journey is turning out to be pretty damn embarrassing. I had to talk on the phone with a giggly 15-year-old girl today, and the three sentences I said took me about 9 minutes to complete. Ugh. And I thought my high school memories were scarring.

More tomorrow. It gets better, I promise. Or at least I hope so.