Suffering

Andrew just walked out from the bathroom and hit me on the back of the head.

"What?!" Things have been my fault all morning--for saying "You might want to get dressed before you go to work" I was prejudiced against naked people, I was a bigot ... no, a smallot, because I'm tiny, and he was determined to end smallotry in all its forms--but the past few minutes, with me on the couch and him in the bathroom, had seemed reasonably peaceful. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to deserve such abuse. That's why I had to ask "What?"

"I've got 'You're My Favorite Waste of Time' stuck in my head, and I thought if I have to suffer everyone else does too!" he said.

"Oh." It was hard to argue. Not because he was right, but because I didn't know what he was talking about. I figured he'd explain, and he did, in his I've-only-had-one-coffee sort of way.

It ended with "I thought because you're American and never had to listen to Owen Paul is no reason for you not to share my pain."

Holly's Big Adventure

My life is a domestic idyll, I told angel_thane today. And it is.

That means it's boring, too. Today I was excited about going to Iceland.

Oh, perhaps I should explain that I mean the Iceland with cheap food, not the Iceland with letters like this: ð Otherwise, it doesn't seem properly pathetic. Going to another country would be justifiably exciting, but buying apple juice is somewhat less so.

The other thing I've done today is buy tickets for a gig Andrew, his friend Andy and I are going to tomorrow night. The band we're seeing is called Misty's Big Adventure.

I stopped at a crosswalk to let a passing bus go by first, as they're much bigger and faster than me. And I glanced at the front of it--which I always do, even though the numbers and destinations mean next to nothing to me--and though I only got to see it for half a second I was pretty sure it said Manchester
Coronation Stwhich made me grin. It never occurred to me that buses could say that!

In other TV-related news ... I walked past this guy and he happened to almost catch my eye a little or smile a little or something like that--some tiny little movement in the arrangement of his facial features, which is quite a big deal here.

British people don't tend to nod or smile or acknowledge other people at all, so I feel all boisterous and Amercan just by having a bit of a smile as I walk down the street; I swear I can feel some people looking at me funny when they pass. Someties it's unnerving and I feel like saying "Don't worry, I'm not smiling at you!" but so far I've managed to restrain myself from that, at least.

Anyway, I passed a guy who looked at me or something, and when he did I suddenly thought, Hey, you look like Dr Who! And he did! (The current one, the only one I can guarantee I would recognize on sight.) I mean, I'm sure it wasn't him and everything, but still I could swear I saw Dr Who today, and it made me all happy and bouncy even though probably wasn't really him and I know this.

/home

Home is one of those tricky words for me.

Home is something that I grew up thinking was a farm in southern Minnesota, with these fields around it and these trees in it and these dogs and this road going to this house here, which is peach and contained my family and my bedroom and all my things. My parents have lived there slightly longer than I've been alive, so it was the only "home" I'd known until I left for college.

Perhaps that was part of the reason Morris felt so strange at first. Even once the summer-camp mentality--the carefully-packed bags, the recicent children glaring at their worried parents until they left, the strange bed to sleep in, the avalanche of activities to keep our minds off all this, the new people that were both fellow inductees and the best distraction from the induction process--wore off and the drudgery of classes and homework set in, even though I was thriving there and had great friends and fun things to do, it still felt a little weird to me for almost half the year.

I was very conscious of my environment in a way I'd never been at "home," which was a place and a circumstance that had, for as long as I could remember, always been there in the background. Almost never interesting or noteworthy or anything other than scenery for the events of my life, but always there.

That feeling went away eventually. It started feeling more unnatural to be "home," with my parents and the TV but little else: no friends, no homework, no concerts or speech meets or late-night conversations or anything. That, I guess, was how I knew that college had become "home."

But I was still prone to calling my parents' house "home," too. The two different things existed with only the one word to cover them. It didn't make sense, but it was the best I could do, and anyway it didn't really matter what I called things, so I didn't think about it.

Then I came to England.

I could hardly think of a thing more alienating than to make my first plane trip, by myself, to another country that didn't seem to want me there, to see someone I don't really know as well as I might like, and stay at his house. So obviously this place seemed weird at first. (A lot of it still does!) And once again, I started off thinking that "home" was a very different place from where I now found myself.

Though now "home" was a bit more vague. Now it encompassed not just my parents' house and not just the small town where I'd been in college. Now when people asked me where I was from, I never got more specific than "Minnesota" ... and Minnesota, I felt, was my home now. All of it. The Twin Cities were mine, farm girl though I may be. "Up North," with the trees and lakes and stuff, that was mine. The prairies and fields were obviously mine. The accent was mine. Garrison Keillor was mine. Bob Dylan was mine. All mine. All me.

And all so far away.

And then I went back there, which was even weirder, because now I felt like I didn't fit anywhere. I was restless and lonely at my parents' house. I visited my friends but felt like a burden to them, or at least a confusion. Everyone was still nice to me, but I didn't feel right there. My bedroom looked different--there was even a new bed there!--and I wasn't even interested in going back to Morris. My friends were mostly out of school or at least doing new things (like starting school again ... or having a baby!). I floundered.

Then I came back here, determined to make sense of the place this time. I've been barraging Andrew with questions all the time and he's been volunteering information, as well, on everything from Kylie Minogue to Margaret Thatcher ... and I think that's helped, actually. I'm a little surprised that increasing information makes the place feel nicer, but when I think about it, the lack of knowledge is a big factor in making me feel so out-of-place. Unfamiliarity makes everything seem cold and prickly.

Still, knowledge is not all. No matter how much I know about the local geography or history or culture or entertainment, I still call other places, faraway places, "home." I think it bugs Andrew a little bit. "This is your home," he tells me. "You live here." I know what he means, and I don't want to make him feel bad, but my attempts to explain that I can't just jump into a new place have not met with much success.

There are things that I more obviously expected would help make this seem like "home" (and what exactly is "this" anyway? the UK? England? Manchester? this flat? I'm not sure), like getting our own place so that we weren't living in Andrew's cousin's house, a definite bachelor pad with two bachelors in it, but instead some place where I can arrange everything the way I want it and take care of it myself.

But it never hurts to reinforce the point with a Visual Aid! Messing around on this computer a couple of days ago, I found myself, just for a moment, looking at the /home folder. /home is sort of to Linux what My Documents is to Windows. Your stuff goes in the "home directory" of whatever your username is; mine's /home/holly. That's the one I look at most; if I go up a level, to look at just /home, I see this:And something about that place called /home, with two things in it, holly and andrew, made me grin. It almost makes sense now.