I am home from my 2,000 mile driving tour of the Urban South, with a mountain of research, an allergic reaction to moldy documents, and quite a bit of exhaustion.
Friday my boyfriend met me in Atlanta and we toured the World of Coca Cola... or, as we like to call it, the shrine of American economic global imperialism. It was kind of like Disneyland, only all about Coke. Then we drove to Memphis, and let it be known that Atlanta traffic is worse than Houston (not sure how that is possible, particularly since Atlanta is a quarter of the size).
We spent the weekends visiting with friends who may as well be family, that I hadn't really seen in 2 years. We went to the zoo, Beale Street, and the Civil Rights Museum, like any good tourists.
I remembered at the beginning of my trip that one of my research subjects has papers in Little Rock, so we stopped there on the way home. There was a gold mine of correspondence, in particular.
My brain is still swimming from everything I encountered and thought about on the road, particularly in regards to how I need to better connect the "ivory tower"-ness of my dissertation project with the actual reality of daily life. If race and gender issues are what I'm trying to uncover in my research, I need to do me more intentional about being a part of the process of unification and equality. More on this later, I'm sure.
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