Here at the lieberry- where everybody likes to tell the person who calls them, "I'm at the lieberry," I am typing on blogger instead of speaking text-to-speech.
That means I'm correcting capitalization and using punctuation other than commas and periods... although I noticed yesterday that when I said "dot dot dot," text-to-speech knew what I meant.
The lady next to me on a computer told her caller, after she told them, "I'm at the lieberry," that she was looking at books. I think she thought that sounded better than "I am using the computer." She also told the guy, or person calling, that she was at the lieberry; "a place I know you don't know much about." That was particularly awesome.
Today I went into Rainbow Food Store and it was like a store in a foreign country; say Egypt or Greece or Hungary, that was trying to look American, or else like a Dollar store here (not Dollar Tree) owned by a non-native.
The products were American but the display and the close aisles and the food freshly cooked and the clientele just aren't within my cultural milieu at all. They kind of look like people I know, and they speak English, and dress like people I know, but the "other side of the tracks" was apparent. I can see how a few decades ago "those" people and "our" people despised one another. There's no need for that, but since so many Americans dislike foreigners, and that's how they seemed to me, kinda.... well, there you go.
Assimilation is something some people try really hard to do. And some people don't. But, interestingly enough, if someone stays on one side of the tracks their whole life, they can certainly feel assimilated with the community they know so well; so I guess it's a really good idea that busing happened.
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