So I’m back in Atlanta for a few days to visit friends and go see my mother … oh, come off it, I’m here for Dragon*Con. But before that started, I had a whole day to recharge my Atlanta batteries – yes, visiting with several friends and hitting old haunts, but also seeing places that appear in the Dakota Frost series like the Flying Biscuit:
But I had a few chunks of downtime and a lot of work to do, so I dropped by Georgia Tech, browsed the bookstore – I love visiting college bookstores and browsing the textbooks: I like to know what universities are recommending students should be learning – and then plopped myself down in the embedded Starbucks to answer some email and try to push things forward.
But I found myself facing an odd sense of familiarity on the Georgia Tech campus. Of course, I recognized the buildings I was seeing, and I didn’t recognize anyone specific that I knew. But a lot of people looked very … familiar. Not the students: the professors and researchers and general population of people milling around at Georgia Tech.
I lived in Atlanta for 18 years; fourteen of those were spent on the Georgia Tech campus and since then I’ve visited the campus regularly to see friends or browse the bookstore. So it’s possible that many of those familiar people are people I’ve seen, but don’t remember.
Or it’s possible that the culture of Georgia Tech – the clothes, the styles, the mannerisms – is something that newcomers pick up by osmosis, so even if I hadn’t seen them before they’ve become like the people who I was formerly familiar with. And that’s what made the sense of familiarity so odd: it was sufficiently vague I couldn’t really tell the cause.
Interesting … I wonder what I would look like if I had spent 18 years somewhere else.
-the Centaur
