Coming home after a year-long absence is weird. It is nice, but it is weird, and it is sad. It’s sad because I know I’ll be coming home a year from now, but I’m not sure if I’ll be home in between, now that research wants to take me far across the ocean. It’s sad because people get older and things change. Every time I visit my parents there are things in the house that are different, just slightly, and there are things in the house that are exactly the same, like, for instance, my bedroom, largely unchanged since I graduated high school.
I find myself clinging to this time at home in a weirdly desperate way. I need it and I want it, and it’s so painful sometimes that I can’t have more of it. Have I ever told you about how sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and start panicking because I can’t remember the last time I talked to my mother, only to realize that I’d talked to her earlier that evening because we always talk on the phone on Sundays and Thursdays? So very many times. And it’s funny because I know that I’m not that much further away from my family than my LA friends who have their families on the east coast, but somehow the physical reality of border-crossing makes it seem further, or at least gives it an added level of anxiety.
But I’m here now, and it’s good. My littlest sister seems impressively maturer and is going to be a graphic designer and told me all about her typography class, which makes me slighly sad that I never went to design school (which was something that was on the table for me, once upon a time). My other sister, well, she lives with my parents still, and just got a pug puppy, which manages to both be cute and to look an awful lot like a weird, deformed guinea pig at the same time.
I spent a week in Toronto visiting people and seeing faces and, sadly, grading, but mostly the time was happy and refreshing. I miss my friends and I miss living in a city that feels close-knit. I love LA, but sometimes its distances exhaust me.
I spent two days with my grandmother in London, who had me out shoveling out her driveway at 10:00 at night, which reminded me that I am allergic to winter. Also, we had an excellent chat about booze, which went as follows:
“I read in the German magazine that you should soak raisins in gin and eat ten a day for arthritis. And I bought gin and it was so expensive! $16 for such a small bottle!”
“That seems about par for the course for gin, though. What kind did you get?”
“Oh, some Mexican kind.”
“They don’t make gin in Mexico. This is Sauza. This is tequila.”
“Really? Well, I’m sure it will do the same thing.”
“I don’t know about that. Gin is made out of juniper berries. Tequila is made out of a cactus.”
And that is the story of why my grandmother has a jar of raisins soaking in tequlia on her kitchen counter.
We’re heading up to the frozen wilds of Northern Ontario on the 23rd, and until then I am reading lots fiction and doing research on Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and teen idols that I am actually going to get paid for. Dreams really do come true!
Also, I have figured out how to make Christmukkah into Dinosaur Day, but more on that later.