October 16, 2022

We were on a road trip through the middle of America and we stopped by the highway to look at a giant rock formation in the desert. My cousin’s friend was re-registering her iPhone as we sat at a picnic table. The process required her to not only set up face and and retinal scans but also provide some form of photo ID. She set a huge cardboard replica of her California driver’s license onto the table to take a picture of it.

Upon closer inspection I noticed that all of the text was backwards. “Where did you get this?” I asked. She said that she had a friend in the DMV who helped obtain one for her. There was a sticker in the corner that said it was free for all license holders. Further down the license there was a red box with text that warned people who were receiving benefits from a disability were not eligible for tax refunds.

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I was sitting in a Starbucks sharing trivia about vowel shifts and the pin-pen merger. It was challenging but felt nice plumbing the depths of my memories from linguistics classes to demonstrate how “bag” could be pronounced as /bæg/.