my number one regret

Recently a friend wrote me a letter and asked me what my number one regret was. I mean, that's not what the whole letter was about, but that was one part that stood out to me because I hadn't really thought about it in a while. And there are probably a lot of things that I could've told him that would've made sense, I couldn't really bring myself to settle on one thing or another because I've started believing that everything happens for a reason. Even when we make mistakes that God wasn't meaning for us to make, we still are given opportunities to learn and grow from them.

Tonight I realized what I should've told him. My biggest regret is not that my seventh grade haircut that was supposed to make me look like Sarah Hughes, who had just won the gold medal in women's figure skating in the 2002 winter olympics, made me look like a boy. It's not that I was never a cheerleader, although that was one thing I always secretly wished I could be. It's not that my GPA is currently somewhere between 2.9 and 3.1. It's not that I got a cavity this summer. My biggest regret is really a lot simpler, but a lot deeper, than all of those things combined.

When I seven, I remember going to a cousin's house, and my aunt told me I had the cutest Texas accent. Being the kind of child I was, not wanting to be particularly cute, especially if it involved accents, I started practicing my vowels before I went to bed every night, along with my multiplication tables, in the hopes that I'd lose the accent. I'm almost 20 now, and I'm pretty sure my biggest regret is that I lost that accent. And I can't just start using one now. People will think I'm crazy.

I guess that's why I hope I get to raise my kids in the South. That way, they won't get to being 20 and wishing they still had accents.

To hear me reading this post in my accent that I wish was really mine, just press play...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dYIl58U28M



I would like to blame the weirdness of this post on my diet as of late (refined starches and sugar, emphasis on sugar) and the fact that I can't wait to go home (5 DAYZ) and the FACT that studying drives me literally insane.

But I do still wish I had an accent. Even just a slight one.