My upcoming adventures as a foreigner (yet again)

It took a good twenty years or so of having Maryland as my home base to discover that it is pretty much my favorite place in the world.  

Pretty much the worst thing about Maryland is that everyone here is expected to enjoy eating crab.  I usually do not enjoy eating crab.  Oh, and those roundabout-rotary-drivey thingies (who invented those, anyway?!).  But those aren't too bad, really, considering all the perks.

Growing up, I didn't appreciate my hometown—living in a town less than 50 years old made me feel like I didn't have roots.  But who needs a really exciting past when the present is awesome enough?  When I went to college in central PA, I began to appreciate how lovely Maryland is.  I was very privileged to grow up in a place where the idea of bullying someone because they're racially mixed was totally strange to me.  And I was exposed to people with many different backgrounds, experiences, ideologies, and opinions.  I know the vision of our town was a bit more idealistic than the reality, but it's still an awesome place filled with awesome people.  My town is home to the lovely James Rouse Theatre, the Columbia Mall (and Lake Kittamaqundi), plenty of forested parks, gorgeously tall and slender trees, hills, great public schools, and roads that are so confusing that I don't even feel bad for still getting lost.  And did I mention that our county's public library system was voted the best library system (including public, private, and university libraries) in all of North America by Library Journal in 2013? 

I have recently lived for about half a year each in Ghana, in Greece, and in the Dominican Republic, and while I'm definitely something of a nomad and I left a bit of my heart in each of those places, I am super excited and proud to be a Marylander.  Upon graduating college, I decided that my goal was to live in Maryland forever.

So naturally now I'm moving to Texas.  

I don't know much about Texas.  Mostly I just know that it’s hot, people there say "y'all" all the time, and it's big.  So big that Texans don't care about measley things like hours.  They say things like, "My friend lives really close—she's only about four or five hours away, so it's easy to go see her whenever I want."

I do care about things like hours.  Hours are big things.  And while "y'all" is elegant, I also like to say "you guys."

However, I am excited to start this new adventure!  I've spent much of the last few years traveling to other countries and living as a foreigner, learning new cultures.  And here I go again.  Only this time I don't need a passport.

I'm also entering a foreign field.  I'm a linguist, see, so up until now, things like the wug test (see About wugs) were interesting evidence for innate language capacity, and dialect differences provided data for universal language models.  But now I'm entering the field of speech therapy (more on this later)—so I'm going to start using this data in a clinical way.  I may know some things about language development and the cognitive implications of language, but I know nothing at all (yet) about intervention methods for young children showing signs of language disorders or for traumatic brain injury patients.  So I'm technically a foreigner in this field as well.

Pray for me, friends, as I get ready to embark on this adventure into the lands of Texas and Speech Therapy!