Remember Me?

I had a friend who was dismissive of my blog way back when I actually blogged. He thought that blogs were self-important drivel or something like that. He was on facebook though, and I had no interest in facebook since I thought it was just drivel. People updated all the time to tell all of their "friends" that they were eating a can of spaghetti Os or whatever (of course, now there is twitter which contains every thought that crosses anyone's mind --remember back when we were glad people couldn't read our minds and know every selfish, spiteful or stupid thought we had?). I had said at the time that the blog was a way for me to communicate with all my friends spread across the country and I didn't have to worry about fake friends etc because only people I really considered friends new about my blog.

With how well I've been at updating my blog, and how well facebook has been about getting EVERY PERSON ON THE PLANET hooked, I think I've just managed to lose touch with everyone. I am convinced this blog post will just go out into the great nothingness and unless someone has subscribed via google reader and forgotten to take this "dead" subscription off, no one will know I am still alive :).

It makes me kind of sad that I miss out on pictures of friends babies etc. cause they just post them to their facebook page and I have still refused to get a facebook page. I read over fifty blogs a week though, I just cannot handle one more internet related obsession. Besides, my boy has a facebook page and I hate seeing numerous quizzes and pokes and whatever other random stupidness ends up on his page.

There was no real point to all of that discussion about facebook pages etc. It was just something I was thinking about when I thought about a blog post (the fact that no one reads this blog anymore :)).

The post I had in mind wasn't brilliant, really just selfish drivel, so there you go, Ben was right. I was just thinking about how homesickness increases exponentially with how close to home you are. I was really dismissive in college of all the girls in the dorms who would cry about being away from home when they lived less than two hours away -- just drive home for heaven's sake. I always figured living 10 hours (a two hour drive and an eight hour plane ride) away if things got bad enough I could always go home. The thing is, 10 plus years since that freshman year, every visit home makes me wish I could just stay there -- and that's saying a lot since I didn't manage to get along with my sister for more than 15 minutes at a time this trip and we were only in the same city for about two days.

Walking through our neighborhood the last night, I kept imagining buying a house there in that neighborhood my father refers to as south, south mountain view (read, that as an anti-gentrification project). The street I grew up on was the street my dad grew up on, and the same is true for about five other homes on that same block. Children buy the parent's home and raise a family there in the heart of the "big city" in a much bigger state boasting of its frontier feel (see, you get the amenities of a city and you can easily visit the great outdoors, isn't that convenient?!).

I don't know if it's because every flight out of Anchorage seems to be late at night and that makes one even more prone to emotional outbursts. But it seems like every time I leave I have to fight back tears. I think I may have posted this on my blog before, but one of the sweetest things my boy ever said to me was about a week after a trip to Alaska. We were in the grocery store and he said, "I've been thinking about it [by it I think he meant my crying jag where I said I didn't want to leave Alaska], and at first I thought you'd miss all your friends here in Boston if we moved, but I realized that most of them could afford to come visit us in Alaska. So if you want to move, we can." Of course, at the time it had been a week back in Boston, with good friends, a church and a home I don't want to have to pack up so I was fine with living in Boston again.

This trip when I was getting weepy again, I asked my boy if he gets homesick every time we visit his family. Turns out he does. So is that how all of you (my loyal readers) feel too? Is it homesickness you think, or simply fighting against the "you can't go home" feeling?

My friend Emily posted on her blog this week about the emotional turmoil there was when her mother sold the closest thing Emily had to a family home growing up (her family was military, so there wasn't a lot of staying in one place). She talked about how her father used to say, houses are just buildings, it's the people who make a home. Regardless of what's pulling me, today, I just want to be home. . .