Homish

I'm prolific, when I want to be. Or I'm on a roll, but prolific sounds better. Anyway, I thought I'd mention that I'm not actually in the minor outlying islands of eastern MA right now. I'm actually back in my adopted home, Portland, OR. This is where I want to say I'm from, when people ask me that question, but honesty and a funny compulsive attention to minor details keeps me from omitting all those other years when I lived in other, less fond places. (It'll come up eventually, I think, so why bother pretending?)

I think we underestimate how much places define and shape us. I cannot tell you how foreign I felt yesterday. You see, I took up running while in vet school. This is in general a good thing, since I mostly enjoy it (this, coming from someone who failed the presidential fitness test in school every year, with pleasure), I think I need to stave off the circling vultures of my mother's metabolism, and vet school is designed to make you hideously chair-shaped. But I never once ran in the six years I lived here. My friends all looked at me funny as I pulled on my running shoes.

I find in myself some strange mix of New England definitions of daily life and comfortable old Oregon habits. I don't really like where I'm living now. No, let's be candid and say I can't wait to get the hell out of there. But I can't say I dislike all the things I've collected (image of myself, rolling through space, attached as if by velcro to new crumbs and dog hair and books labeled 'obscure facts about goats') in my new habitat. But every time I return places, it's a bit like that hole I left and now re-enter has been closing over, scarring a little, and a little the wrong shape or size. I feel this way often at parties, when people with non-medical lives talk about their day and I'm not sure they want to hear about the prolapsed uterus I helped replace that morning, and that I learned that cheap rain gear is a really good idea in this situation.

However, I'm coming to accept this new feeling as something I might just have to live with. Maybe my two selves will learn to merge. Or maybe I'll be a Clark Kent-like figure, or some kind of secret agent with a top-secret identity: a life of danger, a life of mystery! One self runs while the other eats too many sweets! One self holds forth on the cultural wonders of opera, while the other is covered in blood and uterine juices! So glamorous...Isabella Ninja (another story that's really a you had to be there kind of moment) strikes again. Who was that masked man who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men...yes, I know I do get carried away.

But I have no complaints at all about seeing all my lovely friends and my lovely city. And because I am thinking of them, and I told my friend who henceforth shall be called "Goatcheese" (believe me, his idea, NOT mine) about this blog, and he noticed my penchant for the parathetical and suggested a format which will require me to have a website which I'm not quite ready for but considering, I decided to post the charming example he put up for me here. I have another dear friend who many years ago started her own tarot deck, a project I secretly thought was doomed to atrophy into disinterest, but it turns out it didn't, and I mention this because I was blown away by how beautiful they are. See for yourself. Hooray for homey cities peopled with funny quirky friends.