Glad to be Home

I'm glad to be home. Don't get me wrong- London was amazing. So much more amazing than I ever could have imagined it would be. It wasn't even really the city so much, but more the people who were with me, that made it so amazing. But that's beside the point. London was incredible, yes. And Houghton was great too. I have enjoyed my months out and about in the world. But finally, ten long months later, I am glad to be home.

I am glad to be back at home, sharing my tiny bedroom in our tiny condominium with my nagging older sister. I'm glad to be home picking her hair snarls out of the drain in the shower. I'm glad to be home doing my laundry in a room that's only two yards from my bedroom, with my favorite laundry detergent, and getting to pick it up whenever I want. I'm glad to be home eating food with salt in it again, drinking Poland Spring Lime flavored seltzer water and Nantucket Nectar Lemonades and eating Greek Salads from the town pizza house with Cape Cod Potato Chips. I'm glad to be back eating dried pasta out of the bag. I'm glad to be able to give myself a pedicure: nail file, nail polish, remover, and Bath and Body Works walnut foot scrub included. I'm glad to be back home catching up on episodes of Glee and watching my roommate's Netflix and listening to Kimbra and Michael Jackson and Kaki King.

I'm glad to be home where we put cream in our coffee and I can go buy cosmetic products at Lush. I'm glad to be home spending nights in my friend's hot tub or around a campfire doing absolutely nothing. I'm glad to be home smelling the smell of wet dog- invading my bed, my blankets, my pillows. I'm glad to be home, following asleep with her curled up under my arm every night. I'm glad to be home doing book inventory for my old high school English teacher, squashing bugs, sleeping without air conditioning, trying to watch So You Think You Can Dance on a TV that doesn't get cable, listening to crap local radio. I'm glad to be home where there's internet access in my bedroom and the sun in Boston beats down on your shoulders and the people are obnoxious and the people are fast and the coffee is plentiful.

I'm glad to be home, where there are always peanut M&M's, but you can never find the hand held phone, and where I can tell you the name of someone who works in every building down the main street. I'm glad to be home where the smell of the salt sea fills the air when it rains and we never run out of coffee mugs and I can hug my best friend and spend all day with him and his freckles and still miss him when I get home. I'm glad to be home where the only thing you can do when you're eighteen is vote and everything closes by 9 and my parents try to impose curfews on me and I'm absolutely dead broke.

I'm just glad to be home.

I Am Not Dead

Hello, hello, hello-

I am not dead. I am not even really close to dead. I just have so many things vying to pull my time away from schoolwork that blogging, sad to say, often gets pushed to the end of the list. That's right. You're a distraction from my other distractions. How does that make you feel?

February break starts Friday though THANK THE LORD. I am flying back to Massachusetts where, upon arriving, I will promptly take a bubble bath. I'm also getting my next tattoo and spending a few nights at Wheaton College where one of my very best friends goes. She'll be doing schoolwork. I, will not. The only thing I will be doing is living it up, wild college girl style. It, will be awesome. (Honestly, I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just excited to see what a college that isn't Christian, in the middle of a cow field, and covered in ice and snow like our very own pre-Aslan version of Narnia is like. Also, a place where there is something to do past eleven o'clock. Maybe even somewhere to go that isn't on campus. In other words, a place that is not Houghton.)

I'm really freaking excited for break, which actually completely sucks, because whenever you're really excited for something and you've built it up a lot in your mind, it always always lets you down. I really don't want break to let me down.

I don't think it will though: I don't know how it could. My best friend is easy to be with and even when we haven't seen each other in ages, we've known each other so long that we can fill in the gaps in moments and it's like we saw each other yesterday again. Also, I'm psyched that she's coming with me to get my tattoo, and getting her belly button pierced. I love it when friends go with me to get bodily mutilations. It just makes them that much more meaningful.

I am also psyched to see my parents; I should probably mention that. Or, just to be in my house really. And most especially, to see my dog, aka Holly, aka the coolest animal on this entire planet. I miss that dog, so very much. I plan to get my fill of her over this break.

I also plan to eat steak. Hopefully. If I can convince my parents to take me out to a steakhouse because, as always, I am next to broke right now.

And you know what else I plan to do? Blog. I know. You should be super grateful that I am willing to spend my precious free time blogging for people like you. It's because I love you, Dear Readers. I love you lots for putting up with me and my laziness and mood-swings and weird obsessions every week.

It's very possible one of these blog posts will be about tattoos (FINALLY). Since I'm getting my new one, it seems appropriate to finally address the topic and my personal (obviously positive) feelings on the matter. It's also possible that one of these blog posts will be the short story that I promised (if you read it) on my twitter account last week or so. You know what I just did there? I just promised you two blog posts next week. What the frigidaire was I thinking?

So, there you go. I just have to make it through the next five days alive and then I will be living it up and telling you all about it. Save some free time next week to read my lovely ramblings.

Until then.

P.S.
This week, I did four things I have never done before. I watched Shutter Island, which freaked me out, in the best way, and I liked it a lot. (Even though the people I was watching it with TALKED THROUGH THE WHOLE THING NOT TO POINT FINGERS OR ACT LIKE I'M STILL ANGRY ABOUT IT OR ANYTHING JED. MAYBE YOU WOULD'VE UNDERSTOOD IT BETTER IF YOU'D BEEN ABLE TO SHUT UP FOR FIVE SECONDS.) (It's ok, he doesn't read this blog. He has no idea I even have a blog. No worries.) Uhm, where was I? Oh. I played pool for the first time, and I immediately realized there is a reason I have been avoiding the pasttime all these years, and I stopped playing pool. I finished a 38 oz. bag of peanut butter m&m's. Not by myself. Don't worry. AND I made pottery at a real live pottery wheel, and it was awesome, and I plan to do it again, maybe more than once. It's really awesome when your future roommate is an art major and you've just always had all these deep, hidden, unfullfilled dreams of being artistic buried inside of you. It's really very awesome.

P.P.S. That was a really long P.S. Sorry. That's all. See you very soon. I hope. Wish me luck this week!

With Apologies to the People Who Expect Quality Posts on a Regular Basis

It's early Sunday morning, which means technically I missed updating this week. But you'll have to forgive me, it's been a terribly, terribly busy week. I've been doing lots of things and every possible moment of free time has been spent, well, napping. Deep, all-consuming, really restful kind of naps.

The kind of naps it takes a while to recover from. So that's my excuse, pure and simple. Also this weekend, a friend from Mass actually came and visited me, which is really insane, and cool. She goes to RIT, and she's friends with one of my friend's girlfriends. I think it's pretty crazy that I can go to school eight hours away from home, in the middle of nowhere, and meet up with a friend, who just happened to befriend the girlfriend of a guy I just happened to befriend. I love when life works that way.

Anyway she came and visited, for just about 24 hours, which was nice, just to see her and catch up, so far away from home.

Um um um, that's not what this post was supposed to be about though. I don't have a whole post's worth of thoughts regarding my friend's visit.

Let's compromise okay? This isn't a cop out, I promise, but it is the Christmas season, and it's also finals week, so you've got to cut me some slack and let me just post a list of my top ten Christmas movies ever. That way you can go out and watch them while I study my butt off (who am I kidding, I think I've studied my butt off maybe once in my whole life) and then we can reunite next week, when I've flown back home to good old Massachusetts, and I catch my breath, and I have something interesting and worthwhile to write about again.

...

Who am I kidding? I am the most indecisive person ever and as a result of that I don't that I've ever been able to successfully make a top ten list. So just go, go on, put in A Muppet Christmas Carol and drink egg nog while you set up your tree and think of me being hungry and wanting to put my head through a wall for the next five days.

Until we meet again my friends.

I Didn't Wash My Hair

I want to write tonight about home. Home is such an abstract concept and I don't even really think I understand it, or have the words to describe what I think it is.

I actually feel very conflicted about the concept of home right now. I've just returned to my little town in Massachusetts for the first time after leaving for New York three months ago. We drove in around nine o'clock last night. Everything was dark and sparkly, the lights were on and there were cars were on the road, lots of them actually. It felt nice to feel, I don't know, like I was in the world again. I love my college, but it's easy to feel like you're lost there sometimes. Or like the world is rushing on and leaving you behind. Maybe that's because I'm young. I think when I am old, I will like the feeling of being tucked away somewhere, untouched by the world as it goes faster and faster and faster, like the Tucks in Tuck Everlasting (a movie which, let me tell you, absolutely broke my thirteen-year-old heart the first time I saw it).

I looked at all the familiar road signs. The stretch of highway I'd seen before, my father's white beard and the driving glasses he's so proud of, the fast food restaurants in exactly the same location I'd left them. That ugly mustard-colored house that sits across the road from the complex we live in. The sight of my little dog in the headlights, because my mom was walking her to the mailboxes when we pulled up.

And then we got into my house and it was exactly the same but exactly different. The living room, so comfortably messy, as its been as long as I can remember. I went to my bedroom, and it was...empty. My nightstand was gone from my bed, and there were new fancy pillows on the sheets. I set down my laundry bag and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at my sister unhappily. "This feels wrong," I said to her. "This feels all wrong."

"It's the same old room," she said and settled right into her bed like she'd never left it for a second.

Today I saw friends. I went to my old high school, and saw how it had changed. I visited my old band teacher: this man was like a second father to me, I don't know that I would've survived high school without him. He sat at his desk and I told him not to judge me because I'd slept through my alarm and hadn't had the time to wash my hair that morning: he showed me pictures of his daughter, who is one now, and has teeth in her head and blue eyes like him. I hugged people, people I never used to hug. We were too familiar to hug, if that makes sense. But today, I hugged them all.

I watched my best friend step off a bus and walk toward a car, where his girlfriend and his best friends were waiting for him. His girlfriend couldn't contain herself, she flung the door open and climbed out of the backseat and toppled into his arms. It was really like those reunifications you think only happen in the movies. They were so happy to see each other. They stopped hugging and kissing finally and he gave me a big long hug. We never used to hug much, only one or two notable times in high school. It felt good, but strange.

"What's wrong?" he asked me when he pulled away.

"I didn't have time to wash my hair this morning," was all I could say.

We talked a bit, but it was freezing in the wind and every time he'd catch sight of Lindsey again, he'd grab her, pull her back to him, like he couldn't stand to be away from her another second.

We went to school then, and I saw my old best friend from forever. I don't really know what to call her now. Our relationship used to be too close and then too far, and then just confusing. We've had a lot of hurt and misunderstanding and that sort of thing between us: we've been through everything together, and I don't really know where that leaves us now. I don't know what to do with it now. It was good to see her, she didn't care that I hadn't showered. She hugged me and told me to save time for her before I left. I mean to.

I walked through the hallways of my old high school and remembered what it used to be like to go there. All the things that happened to me there. All the things that changed me there. I thanked God that I didn't have to go there anymore. It had changed, and I felt an intruder, but I didn't mind that. I don't want to be familiar there anymore.

Anyway. This is just a lot of recounting and I don't know exactly what the point is. I don't have much to say about it. I just, wanted to write it down I guess, maybe to figure out how I feel. I'm not sure. It's just all surreal. It's strange.

It's strange not to know where your home is anymore. I've lived in this little town in Massachusetts for my entire life. My family's never even moved houses, not once. Suddenly, I left, for three months, and moved to New York. And now I come back here and everything has changed. I miss being home. And by saying that I don't mean in Massachusetts and I don't mean in New York.

I guess, I mean, I miss that comfort. I miss being certain of my life, certain at all, of anything. I miss feeling like I knew where I was going. I miss feeling like I wasn't scared of where I'd end up. Growing up has many lovely aspects to it, that's for sure.

But I'm frightened too, I won't pretend.