[ transplanted ]

I finished listening to S-Town today, the new podcast spearheaded by This American Life producer Brian Reed. As anyone reading this knows by now, it's set in a tiny, rural town called Woodstock, in Alabama. I know this place, although not well. My appearance in Woodstock, or anywhere in Bibb County for that matter, would certainly seem out of place. I was raised in Hoover, a suburb of suburbs, just outside Birmingham. Now I live downtown in Birmingham. Woodstock is about a 40-minute drive from here, but it still seems pretty close. When I was little, my dad would take me for rides on his motorcycle. We'd always drive through the country, where there was fresh air and open, twisty roads and distance. No mall traffic, no stop-and-go, just riding. Even though Hoover, like I said, is a textbook suburb town, full of strip malls and chain stores and subdivisions and one large indoor shopping mall, it really doesn't take you long at all to find the country. Woodstock was one o...

I am glad that dictionaries still exist, and that people at my library still ask for them. They're not exactly practical, so I can't quite say why it is I'm glad about this, but I am. For the past few weeks we've kept one on the desk next to the hole punch and staplers because people were asking for it so often. It occasionally gets reshelved, and even though just now I had to get up and pull it from the shelf, the big heavy heft of the thing, I was glad to have to do it. I, myself, haven't used a real dictionary in so long I can't remember. Likely it was back in high school. I look up words often, though, on my computer, on my phone. Any time I'm reading and come across one I don't know I pull out my phone and search it. When I was younger, I'd make lists to take to the dictionary later. I get words sent to me by email every day and I know a lot of the words-of-the-day I receive already, but I honestly have trouble making use of all the great word...