Back

Just a quick note...I did get back home today. It was a long trip; it always seems longer coming home than going out. The happiness and excitement I felt three weeks ago, watching the familiar towns slide past the train window, was replaced by a quiet almost-melancholy watching them slide past in reverse.

I don't know. People ask me if I'd ever want to move back closer to where my family lives. Yes, all else being equal, I'd prefer that. But I don't want to go through a job-search process again, and definitely not a tenure-process (if there are even many tenured positions left available; it may be columnist-alarmism but a lot of the education-writers have been claiming that it's now "all adjunct all the time" as far as jobs go). And I doubt many Departments of Biological Science are as sane as mine.

It's just, part of it is, my town seems so REMOTE for a few days to a week after coming back here. My parents live in a smallish city that has almost everything you could want - good restaurants, bookstores, fantastic grocery stores (they have a Meijer's. A nice, clean, shiny, new, wide-aisle Meijer's. And yes, the wide-aisles are important, as anyone who's been trapped by people who decided to roll up their carts and hold a long conversation right in front of the dry pasta or some other necessary staple can attest). So it takes a bit of scaling-back, a bit of getting-used-to, a bit of reminding myself my property taxes are about 1/10th of what they have to pay. (And a bit of reminding myself that there are some most incredibly stupid and micro-managey laws on the books: technically, the city can fine you if you put your trash to the curb earlier than 6 pm the night before pickup.)

And there's also the fact that my parents are getting older, I am getting older, everything is changing...I think the various losses I dealt with this year makes me more conscious of that.

I remember when I was a kid, we'd go for a couple weeks in the summer to visit my grandmother (my mother's mother). And as we were pulling out of her drive, as we were waving to her as she stood on her porch, my mother would start crying. And I didn't understand that. And it scared me a little, back then. But now, as an adult - as someone not really any younger now than my mother was then - I cry those same tears sitting in my compartment on the southbound train. It's not so much tears over the fact that they are getting older - that I can hack. It's partly tears over the recognition that someday I will no longer have a reason to take this trip. And tears over the fact that I cannot stay close to them NOW.

The last few days of break are always a little hard. I caught myself thinking this time, "how nice it would be to just chuck it all - to decide not to go back, not to re-shoulder all the responsibilities I have, to just stay here, to move back into my old bedroom, to take over the adjacent guest room as a sitting room, and just stay here with the people who always understand me." But of course a person cannot do that. And of course I have too much expected of me. And of course I could not burn the bridge of failing to show up for work.

It always takes a few days after a longer break to readjust - to get used to having to always carry my keys again, and to drive everywhere I want to go, and to plan and cook all the meals myself.

And to do things like go down to the post office and ask what is meant by the big pink "Abandoned" card that showed up in my mailbox (the good mail-delivery person has been cycled off my route and replaced by someone who is apparently indifferent to information provided him; this time he apparently thought I had moved and left no forwarding address. Fortunately the person who actually SORTS the mail got and paid attention to the message that I was having my mail HELD, but for a few minutes I was concerned that all the bills, all the Christmas cards, all the magazines had gone irretrievably back to their senders).

Break was good, but re-entry is heck.

(AND I was in Illinois, so I heard more about Blagojevich the Corrupt than I cared to. The whole thing is a ****ing circus. No, that insults circuses. I don't know what it is but it's ugly and stupid but would be very funny if it were on some show like The Office. But it's real life, so it's more ugly and stupid than funny.)