The strangest thing happened to me today while I was home for Columbus Day weekend. I noticed it when my mom said "wicked." Of course I always realized that people said "wicked," but I never really thought to myself that someone just said it. It was just kind of there, like the word "very." Just a word. That's thing thing about going to college not only out of state, but where people from all over come to. There are the "Lawnguylanders," the New Yorkers, and the Californians, and I even know people from Washington state and Virginia. You begin to really notice how you speak. The first few days were amusing with people asking me to say "coffee" and the infamous "pahk the cah in Havid Yahd" (For those of you that don't speak Bostonian, that's "park the car in Harvard Yard"). And I don't even have a strong accent! Sometime I feel like it gets worse at school because I notice it and when I hear people talking from different places, I identify with those that speak with a Boston accent and speak like that. Because at home, everyone speaks that way. My accent definitely comes out when I'm tired and I don't have energy to speak, or when I'm talking really fast and the r's just get in the way! All in all, I'm wicked proud of my accent -- because everyone knows, if you're not born with it, you can't imitate it! And once you lose it, you can never get it back!