but which theravada country I'm most familiar with Thai Theravada and it's the religion I subscribe to, though my practice is strongly influenced by the writings of Burmese monks. One of them anyway (the other being Gaelic polytheism). It's also the only Theravadan culture I have any firsthand experience with. I'm a part of the local temple life and have been for six years now. It's a lovely experience and I love the community and culture. It's definitely not at all what most Americans conceive of Buddhism as being though. They don't think of money trees or circling the wat three times or those HUGE boundary orbs or the complicated logistics of donations.
i'd pronounce this SAW yer too so yeah it's still "wrong" to me. why loy? it's an a! (not actually serious, just remembering my friends)
I'm not practicing but I had to deal with Cambodian Buddhism all my life since my father was a loc'rue, a teacher/witch/witch doctor/judge/jury/whatever. I need to find the photos of our insane altar. That thing took up more than half a room about 13feet by 15feet. I...don't know much about Thai Buddhism since the Thai side of my family have a homicidal hatred of the Khmer side and ditto the Khmer side. Yay, racist and premeditated WWII reinactments, yo. /sarcasm Cambodian Theraveda Buddhism is...hardcore patriarichal. IE when my mother died I was shoved into a goddamned hallway closet (since technically I'm gay, it was funny for all of 2.5 seconds) whenever my brother needed to go anywhere between where my mother's body was and...whatever is other destination was. It's so I wouldn't "contaminate" my brother while he's mourning. Couldn't breath on, couldn't be in the same room. Yeah, I have a severe...problem, to put it blandly, with Buddhism in general because of how I grew up with it.
Oh no I have remembered a story. So this isn't really a culture shock thing since it had been engraved in my brain for YEARS. It's more a brain fucking up and mixing up cultural rules thing. One day I was at the wat for meditation retreat. It was after breakfast. I had been helping someone with something. I forget what. But I had to bring dishes into the kitchen at some point and I had my shoes on from the earlier helping with things. I walked into the wat with said shoes on. I was caught by the maechi. The maechi who has, despite the language barrier between us, basically been my teacher in Thai etiquette. This was the most singly horrifying thing ever because it took me a bit to realize what I had fucked up. oh nooooo Anne: Ahhhh. I don't know too much about Cambodian Theravada, really. Save outside of some of the stuff you come across in general histories of Buddhism. As far as patriarchal shit goes jesus christ. Thai Theravada gets pretty awful about those sorts of things from what I've read, though I've never experienced any of it personally. My only experience is as a Western convert at a few different Theravadan wats and at least the one I primarily go to isn't fuck awful about those sorts of things. Though notably I'm only there at the temple. Home life is not a thing I experience and I've also never had any personal experience with Thai ruesis and the like. Only Bhikkhus and maechis. Ruesis being the closest thing I can think of that sounds like the loc'rue thing you are describing. Makes sense why you'd not have a good relationship with it. Whereas mine is primarily positive outside of a few people being transphobic asses and such. Mmm let's quote gathas out of context to invalidate the existence of trans people because that is what the Venerable Soma Theri would really want us to be doing.
I got curious and went looking, and there doesn't seem to be a good answer! There is, however, a helpful survey done by NCSU Stat student(s?); apparently "law-yer" is mostly a southern thing? I am having trouble finding the actual project and it may not be online, but there are also maps for words like "caramel", "pecan", and "been". edit: my google-fu is weak when I should be sleeping. Found the thing. ...oddly enough, I do not pronounce "bowyer" as rhyming with "sawyer" and "lawyer"; that one in specific is "BOH-yer," first syllable as in "tie a bow" or "bowstring".
I believe it is because "aw" used to be/is (depending on your accent) pronounced /ɔ/, which is the same as the start of "oy".
I had a big long response to a bunch of stuff typed up, but then it got eaten because my internet did that awful thing where Windows for some reason is convinced it's connected and works perfectly when it is objectively not and does not. So instead I'm just going to say that I'm from Appalachia, and I absolutely get the "TOO MUCH SKY THIS IS UPSETTING" feeling. Plus whenever people talk about nearby places in terms of cardinal directions I do a double-take. Because there is no such thing as a straight road around here any more than there's such a thing as "flat ground," and with that + small sky making it hard to judge by the sun unless it's actively rising or setting, "North" is basically meaningless to me as a local navigation tool. When my grandma came here after living in Arizona for 50 years, she kept being confused that nobody seemed to know which way was north, but like. Unless you're looking at a compass all the time, how would you tell?
I get the "Too much sky!" feeling - usually followed by a panic attack. The sky is green, with needles and leaves and branches. A giant blue hole trying to suck me up and feed me to giant ball of fire is just not something I want to deal with. Arizona - many valiums later we were out of it and I was allowed to have reactions again - that is one nasty place for a forest dweller with a panic reaction to open spaces - it's nothing BUT open space. Sand and malevolent blue sky just waiting to suck you up to feed the fiery beast. No, those sticks with frond wigs on top are NOT trees, and spacing them so far apart that their wigs don't even cast shade doesn't help.
I'm from a region where people will sometimes give direction by cardinal directions and I still can't tell which way is north. I have a terrible sense of direction though- sometimes I'll go the wrong way getting out of a bathroom l:
We don't talk about that time "go left" meant walking into the restroom for the people with pee hoses and I learned that they stand in a line peeing on the wall because left was the other direction.
i actually get a bit weirded out by too much foliage above me, but I'm okay in the more piney forests in our mountains. likely because there is plenty of sun coming through and you can look up and see the sky easily and the branches don't restrict your sight much so you can see birds and small cute animals. i don't like the parts of the state that are really grassy though. we have some highlandy type areas with hills and dry yellow grass peppered with lil prickly pear cacti, and those areas just seem so lonely and vacant to me. not quite dead, but almost dead. pe-cahn, car-e-mal, and a-bowt. also for some reason my brain thinks the pecans in butter pecan ice cream are different than other pecans and i don't know if its another variety of pecans than you find in stores or if its just a weird Me thing.
THIS SO MUCH The most common way directions are given in my experience is "down the valley a ways" or "through that holler then follow the creek to [road name]". Also, the thing where people never give distances in miles, they give it in minutes. "Its about [howevermany] minutes that-a-ways" is so common to hear because with how curvy and winding the roads are, you can't keep up any kind of sustained speed, so miles won't tell you when you'll get where you're going. Side note, driving in Florida was so weird because I kept wanting to adjust my speed to compensate for hills that just weren't there.
I had very much a too-much-sky reaction when I moved from central mountainous British Columbia to Wisconsin. It was very unsettling. I've settled into it, mostly, and now only get weirded out by, like, southern Illinois where everything is pretty much completely flat. Going into the mountains still feels like home, though.
In my experience Portland is one of the better cities to end up in if you started out in a smallish town. It's relatively relaxed (unlike the utter chaos of, say, the SF bay area) and lots of it is very green (so you don't feel like you wandered into a wall of concrete). It's gotten kind of insufferably hipsterish in the past ten to fifteen years, but god, I miss it.
I can say that I'm less wigged out by Too Many Trees than I am by Too Many Mountains. I think it's partly a matter of scale too, and that there are large sections of where I used to live where the entire sky was blocked out by the trees there too.
Oh, and everyone I've met down here measures in time as well. Mostly because if you're city driving it's one time, and if you're highway driving it's another, and everyone's a little too embarrassed to admit they have a 100 mile daily commute. It sounds way better if you just go "yeah it's about an hour away up 75, maybe an hour and a half if you take the bridge."
I went to Australia (Queensland, specifically) for a few months when I was 14, and some culture shocks: Warning signs in Aus are almost hilariously blunt compared to ones here. Ones in the U.S. are usually stuff like "For your and others' safety, please refrain from [thing]," but there's a sign on the railing above the saltwater crocodile exhibit in the Sydney Aquarium that says, "If the fall doesn't kill you, the crocodile will." We once went on a hike that had a sign at the bottom of the trail which bluntly said that you shouldn't do this climb if you had a heart condition because you could die. In the U.S. it'd be a weasely "This trail is not recommended for those with heart conditions." I was surprised the first time I ordered lemonade and it tasted a lot like U.S. lemonade but it was carbonated. I want that here. I'm so glad they're starting to get Tim-Tams on this side of the Pacific, even if the US ones aren't quite as good. I firmly believe that Tim-Tams are one of mankind's greatest achievements. We have wildlife here who don't give a crap, but not nearly the amount that Australia does. The only thing I've seen over here that's remotely comparable to the way turkeys and monitor lizards in Queensland just go about their daily lives without any concern for humans is alligators in Florida. And Sydney's full of ibises which behave not unlike pigeons that live near amusement park food courts.
As far as sky, I guess living between the north woods and the great plains got me used to a variety of sky, I've never really had that too much/too little sky feel My feeling about mountains is about the same amount of mystical wonder and excitement that Bilbo feels. They're a crazy, far-off thing that I hardly ever have seen in my life that are huge and majestic and beautiful *w*
...See, I'm from a pretty Mountains area and intuitively find the cardinals the most meaningful directions. This is likely because my mental map is in fact a Map. Once I have two or three landmarks and know where I am in relation to them I can find north pretty instinctively most of the time?
