Brown: As college curtain closes, roots remain

“Yinz aren’t from around here, are ya?” someone asked me at a bar last weekend.

Wrong as… “Yinz aren’t from around here, are ya?” someone asked me at a bar last weekend.

Wrong as it may be to stereotype, I’m used to people asking me about my heritage upon taking notice of my large nose or curly mop of hair when I go without for a while without a trip to the barber. But, like Spider-Man facing impending peril, this stranger — more pereceptive than most — could somehow sense my lack of Pittsburghiness.

Then again, it seems that most Pittsburghers can smell sociological differences as if they were bloodhounds.

After living here for five years, I’d felt as though I’d begun to adopt some of the culture. When I go back to visit my family in Ohio, I notice my speech is a little more slurred than theirs, and my pronunciation of hard consonants is a little softer, a little more ’Burghy.

Heck, a few years ago, I even transferred my driver’s license to Pennsylvania. For both legal and residential purposes, Pittsburgh has become my home.

Someone once joked snarkily that I couldn’t write a piece without referencing my native state, but I have only done so to compare the asinine legalities of this city and state to those of its western neighbor because it served as a beacon of rationality for me. In all other aspects, however, it wasn’t my home anymore.

In moving on with my life, I didn’t want much more to do with Ohio other than stopping for a few days here and there to visit family.

Fast forward to two weeks ago when I got a chance to catch up with a good friend of mine here, another educational pilgrim from the Buckeye State. The topic of sensibilities across state lines came up in conversation.

We surmised that three general categories of Pennsylvanians exist — yinzers and East Coast elitists take to the cultural extremes and a happy medium fills the spaces in between. In particular, my friend pointed out her issues with meeting Pennsylvania locals, many of whom she found to have been a trifle more stuffy and arrogant than she expected.

Somehow in talking to her for a while, I began feeling sentimental about my home state and my memories — perhaps from realizing how much simpler life was before coming to the cusp of independence.

Last semester, one of my professors asked students around the classroom why they had chosen to attend Pitt. When she got to me, I simply responded, “Because it’s not in Ohio.”

And to a certain extent, I wasn’t just throwing out a quippy one-liner to get a few laughs. I chose to come here to challenge myself, and to step back from anything and anyone I had ever known to see if I could start over and find success.

Pitt seemed different enough from the bedroom community I had always known in Ohio. I know that some people go to college to hang around their old high school buddies while they have the supposedly best four years of their lives — but I considered that a pathetic excuse and an indirect way of saying “I fear change.” I would never want to routinely run into people from high school here in college.

Five years and a mound of debt later, I think I made the right decision. But a funny thing happened during this past year.

Over the summer, I hosted a few parties at my apartment here. Yes, it’s true that I used to have a sense of fun.

I made sure to invite a few friends from home — for the record, all of them were over 21. I soon realized that I was having more fun with people from my little swatch of Ohio than I had had in a long time — even after four years of infrequent contact.

It gave me an appreciation for something I had grown apart from: my roots. Perhaps it was from remembering fun times like dropping a transmission out of a Nissan 240SX after my senior year of high school at 4 a.m. in my friend’s garage or the various Starbucks runs — but as much as I had initially wanted to all but ditch the first 18 years of my life, I couldn’t.

The more I reflected on those years, the more they seemed better than I had thought — aging like wine or George W. Bush’s presidency. Maybe it just took some time for me to come to grips with that.

At the beginning of the year I wrote a piece reflecting on the plight of the fifth-year senior, who is forced to balance professional prowess against a thinning pool of friends still in college. Now in my last semester, I’ve begun buckling down for another change of pace.

I’ve started to bolster the friendships I have here and focus on whatever might come next. I’ve tried to catch up with the people who have made college fantastic, thanking them as the end of my undergraduate career looms. That curtain will fall in just 12 short weeks.

If I’ve learned anything this past half-decade, it’s that starting anew in a big city sounds compelling, but it’s not altogether practical. While bits and pieces of that are bound to happen as life progresses, it’s important to remember the path you took to get to where you are now.

Jacob really wanted to use some variation of the word “snarky” in his column this week. Email him at jeb110@pitt.edu or visit his blog at thingsthatrhymewithcars.wordpress.com.