Writing prompt from @redball, as usual, bold part is the prompt

Never more than now have I felt connected to the place where I live. Sixteen years of moving constantly left me with no sense of cultural identity as a child. Now I have a “home” in Virginia Beach—which is odd to say, because I’ve lived in Southeast Virginia for most of my life (but in different houses). The places where I spent time as a child still feel like parts of my distant past, even though none are more than a forty-minute drive away. 

Using Google Maps, I’ve made a mini-map Southwest Virginia. Newport News, where I lived from ages twelve–thirteen is the Northernmost point, while Pungo (the rural southern half of Virginia Beach) is the Southernmost point.

This is not a huge area. Unless you leave during rush hour like an idiot, it doesn’t take more than forty minutes to traverse the map from top to bottom. I still occasionally go to Newport News to visit a cool novelty shop that my mom used to work for, but what amazes me is that Virginia Beach almost gives me everything I could’ve had in Newport News, to where I almost never need to go back. 

Consider; both cities are on the James river:

When I lived in Newport News, summer meant drifting lazily down the James with my brother, on our backs, getting stung by jellyfish and then hauling ass the fuck out of the stupid god damned James. However, despite living right beside the river, I’ve had no cause to go there again in the six years that I’ve lived in Virginia Beach (nor do I want to with all the god damned jellyfish). See, Virginia Beach has the longest pleasure beaches *in the world* so there’s more than enough room to choose another beach to go to here.

It speaks volumes about the size of the world to me that there’s no good reason for me to ever go to Newport News, where I used to live, because forty minutes away, we have everything you can get over there. One store is the only thing that ever drags me to that side of the bridge, and if my family ends up opening “Fantasy South” like we want to, then there will be no reason at all.

Virginia Beach—The Best Place To Visit in the US

After my month-long stay with @ghostlightning in Manila, my dad told him he was free to come stay with us in the States any time. At first, I found this proposition funny because if you were gonna visit the US, would you really waste the trip on Virginia Beach? Wouldn’t you want to go to New York or L.A. or someplace happenin’ like that? But over time, it’s occurred to me that Virginia Beach is actually the perfect place to visit on a US trip.

My original reasoning behind this was similar to the reasoning behind why it was perfect for me to stay in Manila on my Philippines trip—I’d never been to a big city. Everything that I saw in Manila blew me away. Some of the Filipino anime bloggers said that I should go outside the city, since they saw it as a dirty hellhole, and go to a beach or something. What they didn’t realize was that I *literally live at the beach* and am fucking sick of the beach. 

So the inverse would be interesting for ghostlightning. What I’d really love to do is take him for an all-day drive down one of our open highways that seem to be straight lines leading to absolutely fucking nowhere. The endless highways, the weird shit on the sides of them, and the overwhelming sense of mystery that lies across America’s backyard is interesting even to me, and I’d imagine would be moreso to someone who lives in a country where a road couldn’t stretch for anything remotely close to the length of one of ours without hitting a mountain. 

But thinking beyond ghosty, there’s really a lot to offer here no matter where you’re flying in from. Don’t have beaches at home? I’m fifteen minutes from the largest pleasure beach *in the world.* That place is a spectacle, so once I’ve taken you there, I’ll then take you to a more quiet, local beach. Want to go party? You can party your motherfucking ass off all up and down the beach strip. We have famous clubs and shit, and nice restaurants, including one with one of the top-10 highest-rated bathrooms in the US (I shit you not). Want peace and quiet? The rest of the city is suburbs, as well as a gigantic rural area that everyone forgets exists.

Which brings me to the next thing: why visit Virginia Beach if you were trying to learn about the US? Because we were recently called the “best-run city in the US” by 24/7 Wall St. This is the real meat of coming here: if you wanted to come for gonzo “what’s the US like” reasons, this is the place where you can see how the country operates at its *very best.*

The exciting thing about this is that just because we’re the best-run city in the country doesn’t make us some kind of shining city dystopia—we still have our fair share of ugly ghettos and crime-ridden streets. Just yesterday my mom told me how a friend of hers stayed at a hotel in the Lynnhaven area where a guy was fucking a prostitute on the hood of his car in the parking lot and the service desk had a bullet-proof shield, so we’ve got that going on; and then a couple roads over, BEST-RUN CITY IN AMERICA suburbs with big rich houses. You can literally see it all. 

The best part that because I’m a NEET, I can just drive visitors around all day every day that they’re here, until they get burned out. And even if that happens, you won’t be bored. I live in a fucking castle, and the pool’s being built as we speak. CLEARLY I AM THE BEST PERSON IN THE US TO STAY WITH.

Losing My Dialects

Virginia Beach is a funny place; it’s hard to pidgeonhole into one type of people. We’re not city kids, we’re not rednecks, we’re not suburban, and we’re not really in the North or South—we can’t even decide our political slant. As such, it’s no surprise that the way we talk isn’t quite like the way anyone else talks. 

Or rather, it was a surprise, to me anyway. I’d always thought that diverse dialects were only unique to certain areas—everyone knows a Texas accent and a New York accent and a North Dakota accent, but besides that I figured everyone basically sounded the same. I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

The first time I realized my dialect was at all abnormal was on XBox live, when I was being heckled by some douchebag about 4 years ago. He asked where I was from, and I said “Virginia,” to which he replied “no wonder you sound like a redneck.”

…What?! For one thing, I’ve never really considered us to be in the South, and for another, I never considered the way I talk to sound at all country. The thing is, I’ve grown up in several of this state’s cities, but most of the state is country, real old-school, redneck country. And when I thought about it, there are no shortage of rednecks in the city (you can tell just by the cars lol), and it’s not like hearing a country accent is strange to me. As a matter of fact, some of my family members speak with a country accent, and even my grandma has more than a little of that slant to her speech (if you heard her, you’d probably think she was some small-town old lady, but it just sounds normal to me, because people from here used to be small towners). 

I started to recognize the Virginia Beach dialect as a combination of several dialects in one unique mix. Because we have a ton of black people from New York here, there’s a lot of city, and because we have a lot of old white people, there’s a lot of country, so my generation talks in a combination of those, where you’re likely to here urban slang in the same sentence as country slang. 

As for me, my dialect got even more wrecked by other factors. For one, I was always an Internet kid, and was one of the early people to integrate netspeak and memes into my speech (which is now common for this city’s dialect, and still sounds fucking strange and silly to me, even though it’s partly my own fault).

But besides that, I lived in Richmond for a while before coming back here, and went to a school of all black, ghetto city kids. So that ghetto sort of dialect also got integrated into my voice.

For a long time, I would literally cycle through dialects without thinking. One minute, I’d be talking normal, and then for no reason I’d suddenly find I was talking ghetto. Also, I have a tendency to randomly change to another accent while talking, though that’s usually more of a good-mood/being-stupid kind of thing. 

Over time, I started monitoring the dialects to figure out what brought them out. Obviously, the first thing I found was that depending on who I talk to, my way of speech changes to match theirs. I talk loud and silly to loud silly people, very fluidly and carefully to quiet people (especially when giving speeches), etc. I also noticed that emotions could change my dialect. Any time I got angry or was badgering someone, I would suddenly change to the ghetto voice, for instance. 

But now, I find because I don’t talk to nearly as many nor as diverse a group of people, my dialects have started to show up less frequently. To my close friends and family, I use my regular voice, and emotions no longer prompt another dialect because those dialects have gotten so out of practice. (Now, when I get mad, my voice just shoots up in pitch, exactly like The Monarch’s). 

The really “sad” part is that I’ve also started talking more like TV characters (lol Transformers). For instance, after marathoning the Venture Bros., I found myself suddenly impersonating several of the characters all the time. I’ve also started being unable to vocalize certain concepts in English rather than Japanese (as I’ve mentioned before).

But here’s the part that gets me—whenever my black friend Derrick comes over, my ghetto voice resurfaces (though not with the strength it used to have). At first, I thought it was just because he was black, but that isn’t the case because my other black friend, Marcus, doesn’t prompt me to speak that way. It didn’t take much thinking past that, though—Marcus doesn’t talk black. 

Now mind you, Derrick doesn’t talk in full ghetto. There’s a reason we used to call him an “oreo,” as his interests tend to slant more towards white and nerdy, but unlike other oreos I know, he’s retained a decent amount of blackness, and as such, prompts the same amount of blackness from my dialect. 

I find all of this very interesting. It’s also the reason I started paying attention to the way my characters speak and started setting some of my stories in Virginia Beach, because I know that if I write them to talk the way I do, it may confuse unfamiliar readers. 

Virginia Beach is the Perfect Mixture

It seems like there are two halves to my city in every regard. Geographically, the top half of the city (which is fairly large altogether) is all suburban and really wants to be urban, if that makes sense. Our tiny neighbor, Norfolk, is the only thing around which can really be called ‘urban’. There’s a patch with a whole lot of big buildings, giant mall, popular music venue, etc., but it’s like this one standalone piece of city that kinda serves as the urban center of the greater Hampton Roads area (at least insofar as VA Beach, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, and Suffolk.)

VA Beach is a big enough city that you could easily drive around the suburban area for a few hours and think you’ve seen the whole city. However, the bottom half of the city is actually a farm-ridden wasteland called Pungo. I’ve only even been through it like twice (not including leaving the state but that’s on the highway). No one ever ends up in Pungo on purpose. Recently, my brother had his first time getting lost while driving, and ended up somewhere in Pungo. I’ve lived in VA Beach for something like 50% of my life, some of which was the past 4 years, and I have no idea how to get to Pungo. 

Now let’s get into social divisions. Our state is almost perfectly split between democrats and republicans, as was demonstrated in the last election where we became a blue state for the first time. I’m sure this is because there are probably enough people between the northern DC area, central Richmond area, and southern Hampton Roads area to greatly outnumber the rest of the state combined. I haven’t been to rural VA very many times, but I can tell you that it’s a fucking wasteland. I had to go to the Western part of the state to a town called Hillsville once because that’s where my grandma is from, and it was like being in an entirely different world. One full of trees and old people. 

It’s sort of mind-blowing, actually, to think about our state’s geography. The entire western border of the state is on a mountain range, and the entire eastern side is on the ocean. Virginia Beach is flatter than any other part of VA that I’ve been to. I can’t remember ever having seen a mountain up close (I did as a baby since my family toured the country with Lollapalooza twice and saw 36 states, but I don’t remember them.) I mean, I literally live right across the street from the ocean (okay, I live across the street from a naval base, but you get the point.) 

I think it’s because of the overall strangeness of this city’s construction that the people here are a perfect mix between city slickers and classic ‘Virginians.’ 

From my experience, I’d say around 40-50% of the city’s population is black. Back in high school, people always said there were more black kids, but I always saw it being pretty even (and those kids don’t know what they’re talking about anyway.) I lived in a city that was North of Richmond for a while and my school was like 80% white; then I lived *in* Richmond for a while and my school was 95% black - very different experiences, but in both cases, I felt like I was in a totally different mental place than everyone else in the school. In VA Beach, I feel like I’m exactly where I should be. Most of the black population, like in Richmond, consists of migrants from New York, so it’s very common to hear people say they’re from Queens and other places like it here. Perhaps that’s how the gangs got here too, since gang violence increases exponentially every year in the Hampton Roads area (Norfolk often shows up near the top of those ‘most dangerous cities in America’ list in spite of being geographically tiny.)

The white part of this city is the old guard, but the last couple generations have been more city-slicker styled thanks to our rapid urbanization. That’s where we get this strange fjord in the kinds of people here. 

I think the city’s class ratio is almost perfectly flat. There are an equal number of high-class, upper-middle, middle, lower-middle, and low class neighborhoods in the area, and the beautiful part is that we all go to the same public schools. I can’t speak for people before my time, but because of our schools, all of the people I’ve known from each class can generally be trusted to act similar and usually get along pretty well. 

When I was in high school, issues like class and race were barely seen. The ‘scene kids’ were mostly white, though not exclusively, and there were a lot of black kids who generally weren’t interested in the goings-on of white people. However, I never saw things like hate crimes and overt bullying based on race/class. My group consisted of people from every class and every race, and we all got along, and best of all, weren’t afraid to make fun of one another. I call my black friends ‘nigga’, I call my Asian friends any of the vast multitude of names we have for them, I give my good friend a ton of shit for being middle-eastern but looking like a Mexican when his hair is cut, and I let everyone make fun of my Jewish heritage (not that it really matters since I’m not a Jew, but my brother and I still have curly hair and big noses.) I personally think that not being afraid to say these things is exactly what tears down the barriers between the races; we can act like we would around anyone else around those people. 

My friends come from every class, which probably also has to do with the fact that I’ve been a part of every class throughout my life. I live in one of the nicest parts of town in a huge house with a gigantic yard, but you only have to take a few steps to be in the suburbs, and a few more steps to be in the shits. There are two neighborhoods in my city that can be definitively called ‘ghettos’ and they exist in these amazing sort of little air pockets right in the middle of everything. The one that two of my friends live in is literally right off of the boulevard, fairly close to the city center. You just turn and BAM, cracked streets, basketball hoops, people walking around in groups at night, etc.

The political divide around here is astonishing to actually watch in action. The last neighborhood I lived in was pretty upper middle class, and we were one of only 2 houses in the neighborhood with Obama signs on our front yard. We were the first house on the road entering the neighborhood, and right on the other side of that road was one of the more dangerous and poor neighborhoods. My brother and I explored the area a lot, and if you got to a certain part where you leave our neighborhood into a lower-middle class one, suddenly every single house had an Obama sign in their yard. 

It’s clearly a divide not just between classes and races, but between ages. My school was overwhelmingly supportive of Obama, with the few McCain supporters usually neglecting to comment because they’d be outright told that the entire class would be pissed at them if they didn’t support Obama. The young people in this area are mostly hyper-liberal and urban-minded, whereas the old people have been here forever and are set in their ways.

Said old people have very little presence in the city, and I think most of them have gotten used to living in a liberal city. I walk around grocery stores with a 3-foot braid, wearing pajama pants, and I don’t get many weird looks. The people who comment on my pajama pants are usually just intrigued and sometimes complimentary.

Back in high school, I was part of the very large goth/nerd clique, and half of the people there claimed to be bisexual. I promise they did it to look cool or fit in with their friends, and so being bi was something our school didn’t bat an eye to. (I only knew a couple of guys or girls who were actually full-on gay, and they weren’t even really in the stupid goth/nerd clique, though it’s hard to define that clique in general.) I actually had one friend who totally didn’t like it when guys so much as touched him, but he pretended to be bi to impress women, and it worked. 

Now I’m attending an art college in Portsmouth with students from all over the Hampton Roads area, and I swear to God half of this freaking school is gay. And this isn’t the same bullshit as high school - these people are *really* gay. Butch lesbians, flaming queens, and they congregate with the geeks in the break room who of course don’t bat an eye at gay people. 

So what is Virginia Beach, anyway? It’s a little bit of everything. It can be 110 degrees and 100% humidity here on some days, and it can be 30 degrees by the end of that week. We have warm days in December, but last year we had a white Christmas. Earlier that year, it snowed in April. We get the last dregs of everyone else’s hurricanes, but it still floods half of our neighborhoods because they’re actually underwater. We’ve got plenty of beaches, but we have people who’ve only been to them once or twice (personally I think the beach is the most overrated thing ever.) We’re big enough that every band comes here on tour, but small enough that we can say ‘there’s nothing fun to do in this town!!!’ Really, there’s probably plenty to do, but it’s hard to find anything because the entertainment districts of the city are all split up and it takes forever to get anywhere. 

It’s a city where a guy can go through his senior year of high school with his hair in a 3-foot braid and wearing pajama pants without getting made fun of, and instead being a well-respected and well-known dude. It’s a city that’s a little boogie and a little pop, and because of that, I’ve always loved it more than any other city I’ve lived in.