{"id":521,"date":"2021-04-08T14:32:08","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T14:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/?p=521"},"modified":"2021-04-08T14:38:31","modified_gmt":"2021-04-08T14:38:31","slug":"audio-bio-julie-heaney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/?p=521","title":{"rendered":"Audio Bio: Julie Heaney"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/1019775334&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;inverse=false&amp;auto_play=false&amp;show_user=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"20\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_522\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-522\" style=\"width: 336px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-522\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/me-us-u.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/A8CA3962-5644-43D7-98AD-E8C237F870FF_1_105_c.jpeg?resize=336%2C252&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Julie smiles at the camera. She stands in a parking garage and there are buildings and cars in the distance.\" width=\"336\" height=\"252\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/me-us-u.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/A8CA3962-5644-43D7-98AD-E8C237F870FF_1_105_c.jpeg?resize=300%2C225&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/me-us-u.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/A8CA3962-5644-43D7-98AD-E8C237F870FF_1_105_c.jpeg?resize=768%2C576&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/me-us-u.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/A8CA3962-5644-43D7-98AD-E8C237F870FF_1_105_c.jpeg?resize=373%2C280&amp;ssl=1 373w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/me-us-u.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/A8CA3962-5644-43D7-98AD-E8C237F870FF_1_105_c.jpeg?w=1024&amp;ssl=1 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 336px) 100vw, 336px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-522\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Julie smiles at the camera. She stands in a parking garage and there are buildings and cars in the distance.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>(Thunder sounds) Hello, my name is Julie and I&#8217;m from Upstate New York. Well, actually I&#8217;m from central New York. Well, no, upstate&#8230; <em>central<\/em> upstate. Whatever. It&#8217;s a gray area, and if you\u2019ve lived in the Northeast you are plenty familiar with gray areas. And if you&#8217;re from anywhere within a stone&#8217;s throw of the region, you&#8217;ve probably never heard someone talk enthusiastically about living in Binghamton.<\/p>\n<p>Urban Dictionary&#8217;s top definition for the word Binghamton is:\u00a0\u201cImagine how then make it cold\u201d. It also defines Binghamton as a depressed city, and\u00a0my favorite,\u00a0\u201cthe place that will make you glad to be anywhere but there for the rest of your natural life.\u201d\u00a0When it&#8217;s used in a sentence,\u00a0Urban Dictionary provides the example, \u201cI may have a debilitating brain disease, but at least I don&#8217;t live in Binghamton\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I definitely don&#8217;t feel this intense hatred as strongly as others do, but\u00a0Binghamton\u00a0definitely tends to be a grayish city.\u00a0When I&#8217;m talking about the Gray, I&#8217;m talking about the weather.\u00a0It\u00a0sucks\u00a0most of the time.\u00a0I&#8217;ve lived here my whole life and sunny days are few and far between.\u00a0The lack of sun here means that more people here than not are taking some sort of vitamin D variant, myself included. And unfortunately, when sunny days come, you don&#8217;t even notice the sunshine because of the suffocating humidity.\u00a0The humidity is the bane of my existence in the summer, and what&#8217;s even worse than the humidity, is the sweat.<\/p>\n<p>Central New York, or upstate whatever, has so many breweries and they&#8217;re cool! Most are rustic and they look like great places to work. Recently I held a position as a food runner on a local food truck that was connected to a brewery in order to wash the shift dishes. Employees were required to navigate through the cold Binghamton weather to the other side of the brewery building, find the company&#8217;s water hose, pull it through the parking lot, snow, let it run into the food trucks water tank for five minutes&#8211; never more unless you wanted a Moat to form around the truck&#8211; and wind the hose up all the way across the snow and back into the other side of the brewery. It was awful. Between being covered with dishwater in freezing weather, and never wearing gloves, I&#8217;m surprised I never caught hypothermia. Every day was a battle against the Binghamton weather. Working during the summer meant a lot of sweating. Every humid summer shift my body caramelized into a mess of sticky skin and<\/p>\n<p>Isn\u2019t that appetizing, don\u2019t\u00a0you love\u00a0a\u00a0little bit of sweat in your food?\u00a0I got a lot of\u00a0\u2018you\u00a0poor girl, you need to cool off\u2019\u00a0from customers,\u00a0but you couldn&#8217;t escape the heat that\u00a0easily.\u00a0The only cool place on the premises was the\u00a0walk-in\u00a0freezer which was perfect for screaming into after all of the frustrations you had after a long shift.<\/p>\n<p>We spend so much time fighting against the weather to carve this comfortable human path in the world.\u00a0It&#8217;s the ultimate foe, really something that&#8217;s scary because it&#8217;s great power means that we don&#8217;t have control.\u00a0Yeah, that&#8217;s an intense thought.<\/p>\n<p>During this pandemic, I feel like I&#8217;m noticing and reflecting on the weather more.<\/p>\n<p>It might be because I&#8217;m more sensitive the way the weather feels on my skin\u00a0combined\u00a0with the feel of a mask or that my finally seems to be slowed down enough that I can actually look outside.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m studying remotely right now, stuck in Binghamton.\u00a0By choice this time.\u00a0And from what I&#8217;ve gathered, the one notable thing I can tell you about this place from the past few months has been how crazy the snowfall has been this winter. 41 inches in one day to be exact, and it was pretty heavy, but I think it would be worse if the colder this winter wasn&#8217;t accompanied by the snow.\u00a0It&#8217;s a welcome distraction from the fridge, despair and isolation of this winter.<\/p>\n<p>But coated in Binghamton&#8217;s cold Gray blanket of\u00a0doom\u00a0isn&#8217;t the worst way to spend a semester.\u00a0There are some cool things here, like\u00a0Spiedies,\u00a0a local delicacy of marinated meat cubes that are char grilled and served on a long roll,\u00a0and\u00a0there&#8217;s a few niche\u00a0coffee\u00a0shops that charge me way too much for a cold brew.\u00a0And there&#8217;s the gloating aura of my former high school just miles away.\u00a0But I&#8217;ll survive.<\/p>\n<p>And as I&#8217;m recording this, I can see that it started to snow again.\u00a0The pine trees in my\u00a0parents&#8217;\u00a0backyard have the prettiest dustings of white.\u00a0I can feel cool air is seeping in through the insulation\u00a0fallacies\u00a0in my bedroom that I&#8217;ve got to get fixed.\u00a0My dog is looking up at me with huge\u00a0brown eyes.\u00a0I know he wants to go outside, but I also know that means that he wants to munch on the\u00a0bunny poop out there, so I&#8217;m not\u00a0gonna\u00a0let him.\u00a0He needs a bath.\u00a0After a whole year of living through a global pandemic, I think we all do.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s to upstate, Central or whatever New York,\u00a0and wherever you live,\u00a0and seeing the beautiful or even just the doable in the Gray.<\/p>\n<p>Music and sound effects for this audio file were provided by\u00a0\u201cWaves of Indigo,\u201d\u00a0by Daniel\u00a0Burch and &#8220;Thunder\u201d\u00a0by Michael\u00a0Koenig\u00a0 from Partners in Rhyme, all licensed under\u00a0CC\u00a0By.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div style=\"font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc; line-break: anywhere; word-break: normal; overflow: hidden; white-space: nowrap; text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-weight: 100;\"><a style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" title=\"Me\/Us\/U\" href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/user-410222527\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Me\/Us\/U<\/a> \u00b7 <a style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" title=\"Audio Bio: Julie Heaney\" href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/user-410222527\/audio-bio-julie-heaney\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Audio Bio: Julie Heaney<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Thunder sounds) Hello, my name is Julie and I&#8217;m from Upstate New York. Well, actually I&#8217;m from central New York. Well, no, upstate&#8230; central upstate. Whatever. It&#8217;s a gray area, and if you\u2019ve lived in the Northeast you are plenty familiar with gray areas. And if you&#8217;re from anywhere within a stone&#8217;s throw of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,104,103,102,105],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-bio","tag-audio-bio","tag-binghamton","tag-home-town","tag-pandemic","tag-remote-student","missing-thumbnail"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":527,"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions\/527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/me-us-u.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}