You should have lived my life as an employee at the University of Iowa living in the center of Iowa City. It was a huge nightmare. The whole mid-western world is a place I had to live in, as a foreign languages and literature professor, for a few years. I just tried to survive avoiding using English. Stuck around with my Spanish-speaking pals. Until I escaped. Disguised as a Spanish speaker, I was actually better off. Otherwise, I spoke English, to be humiliated by higher-ranking administrators with their smooth, mid-western neutrality. So many times I had to hear about how my accent was just a matter of the forgetting of the letter R. Thankfully, I found a job back East, in Boston, in fact.