Yeah, whatever, Dorothy.

I'm currently wishing I was anywhere but home. For lots of people that I know, this is a familiar feeling, but for me, not so much. I love being home. I love the family and friends that surround me there, my dog, the green and blue walls of my room, the birdcalls in the temperate rainforest outside my window, the pictures I arranged on the wall in the downstairs hallway, the old toys scattered around in cabinets and boxes... even the musty smell of the woodshed downstairs.

So right now, wishing that I wasn't here, that I was somewhere else, is distinctly uncomfortable. Last night, my mom called me by my sister's name. That's not unusual - I'm relatively used to it - and I corrected her teasingly, but what shocked me was what she said next. I was in the other room, and at first I thought she had said "Oh yeah, you're the daughter who doesn't live here anymore." What she actually said was: "Oh yeah, you're the daughter who doesn't live here all the time," and for all intents and purposes, not only are they not dissimilar, but they're neither completely untrue. (All the double negatives mean I'm uncomfortable with this subject; my strained relationship with confrontation manifests itself as grammatical complications when I'm writing.) I don't entirely belong here anymore, in the way that means that literally, for the majority of the year, I'm not here. I have other people and other places, and right now where that leaves me is in a kind of Limbo-Land (which makes me think of Bimbo Bread: a reference probably only a few people will understand) with bookshelves filled with too many books and papers and notebooks scattered without place on the floor of my room that feels like a hermit crab's shell, if I were the hermit crab that outgrew it.

I read a romance novel yesterday, some of the first reading for pleasure I've done since spring break, and it made me realize, as it often does, that I envy fictional characters their sense of their place in the world. There they are, floating beautifully through a world that was crafted around them, and for them, and I can only wish desperately that I had three best friends with whom I'd grown up and played dolls, and that now, in the prime of our lives, we ran an enjoyable, inspiring, charming, thriving small business together, and lived in different wings of a beautiful old house and told each other everything and fell in love with each other's brothers... pffft. What is it about formulaic drivel that is often so much more satisfying than reality?

So as a "cure", I proscribe myself the following: more fluffy novels, tempered with a few solid chick flicks, along with a hefty dose of knitting and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.