'stina

From the old livejournal .
I have to give a presentation in a couple of days to a bunch of reporters. I've been doing a lot of it in my head while I've been walking around, waiting for copies, waiting for the elevator, and I've noticed that my accent is coming out when I do it.
I don't know why, but for whatever reason when I do public presentations my accent becomes more pronounced. I like to think I got rid of most of it when I moved to California for college. I used to amaze people that I was from Texas, because apparently Texan kids were exempt from growing up listening to accentless Californians speak on television.
But it'd come out whenever I got drunk or tired or hung out with other Texans or forgot that I was trying to sound less like I actually came from some place.
Mine is a weird, environmentally triggered accent. Because I didn't speak English until I was three, my sense of speaking was fucked up until I ended up in speach therapy classes in fourth grade. Happens a lot to kids who flip back and forth from one language to another. My particular problem was a lisp, and to this day, if I think about it too much, my tongue feels too big for my mouth and my esses get all caught up in my teeth.
But if I'm around a bunch of native Spanish speakers, my English accent tends to develop a sort of Latin flair, and if I'm around a bunch of Texans who avoided corruption by television, then my vowels tend to be drawn out and my speach is a bit slower.
And when I speak publicaly, it seems that the latter accent tends to come out and show itself. I have no idea why, and I don't really try to control it anymore. I figure at this point, they're going to listen to me or they're not, and whether or not I have an accent doesn't really matter.
So here's hoping that the reporters find it quaint or endearing or whatever, and not annoying, because they're going to be stuck with it.