You know, one of the weird things for me as a writer is that a lot of my original work has non-Western settings, but hey, white chick. A lot of that comes from living a culturally adjacent life -- a man I lived with in my 20s grew up in Okinawa, for example. There are a lot of cultural habits or awarenesses I have of other places not because they are fashionable or because I'm trying to be a cool white chick, but because they are natural and familiar to me in a lot of ways. But when people read my stuff, they have no way of knowing I'm not just appropriating at random. It's sooooo complicated. Patty goes through this too. She wants to ask the men who work at the bodega downstairs from us where they are from, because their Arabic sounds different from the Arabic she's learned, but she knows what is a natural question for her, won't sound like one coming from her to them, without a lot of backstory they probably don't give a crap about.