Hometown Travels Reflected

Hometown Travels

I Don't Wanna Grow Up

Just a few days ago one of my coworkers asked me how I decided what I wanted to do when I grew up, as that is a question she is currently pondering. Since both of us are 25, it could be argued that we are already grown up and therefore the question is moot, but I don't feel grown up and I certainly haven't started a career so I think there is still some growing up to be done.

Well, that question started me thinking.

I feel like I'm living up to my destiny as a youngest child, preparing to live a fly-by-night existence once I finish school, always moving and changing, never staying put. I have so many interests and so many things I want to do during my life that I can't decide on a single career path. I could clearly see myself moving from country to country, city to city, job to job during my life, never settling anywhere permanently until forced to by old age or exhaustion.

To be perfectly honest, spending the rest of my life consigned to the suburbs with a husband, a white picket fence, and 2.5 kids sounds like eternal purgatory. Even considering the prospect of it makes me shudder with revulsion. Yes, I realize that that is most people's projected and expected future, but I can't handle it. I need to travel, to experience new things and meet new people, to accomplish something and feel like I've made a difference.

Ergo, my hope to carve out a career in the never-boring, ever-complicated world of humanitarian relief. In short, I want to be an aid worker.

I met a Canadian woman in Kabul who has been working for various NGOs in the microfinance field for ten years, and during those ten years has lived in 22 countries.

I love it!

I love to travel, and even more I love to get to know a place and a people, which you usually can't do unless you live there.

I will admit, based on my obsession with HGTV and especially the show "House Hunters," not to mention the burnout that affects everybody in my chosen field at some point, eventually I will feel the need to build a nest complete with my own permanent home. Eventually, I hope to stock that home with one-of-a-kind items I have picked up in various places rather than average items found in every chain store and therefore every home across the country.

I've never wanted to be like everybody else. My life will be MY life. Different. Exciting. Unlike every one I know.

Snowy Days Have Come Again

It's been steadily sleeting all day and is expected to turn to snow sometime this evening. Forecasts keep changing, so I'm not really sure exactly how much we're supposed to get but I think it's somewhere in the area of several inches. Luckily not a foot or more like other areas of the country are getting!

This picture is of my cousin, taken several years ago when he was three. His little sister had just been born several weeks before, in early December, so they came for Christmas and we got to see her for the first time. Our old dog Maggie was endlessly patient with my little rapscallion cousin, who wouldn't leave her alone for the entirety of his visit. She was the best dog ever and unfortunately died at the ripe old age of 14 last winter. That was about a month before I moved out of the house, to my current life here in the Burg. Oddly enough, with everything that was going on with my parents, it was Maggie's absence that made my home stop being my home. Without her, it was just the place that my parents live. How odd is that?

Dust of Snow

More Hope Cemetery. Sorry, I took so many pictures that one day that I'll be posting them for weeks. Plus I never have time to go out and take new ones, so these are all I have until I get another day off.

I'm going home next weekend. Well, more accurately, I'm going to my hometown next weekend. As my parents are no longer there and my old house now sits empty, it doesn't qualify as "home" any more. I'm staying with a friend while I'm there, and planning to meet up with all my other friends who will be home as well. I think it's going to be really strange, going back to my hometown where I grew up, lived all my life until I left for college (but still came back to for breaks and after graduation), where my parents grew up and lived all their lives, where my only living grandparent still resides, and where my dad's entire family lives, as a visitor. You know the old saying, "home is where the heart is"? Well, I hate that saying. It's corny and trite and cliche. But annoyingly true. My home is now wherever I am. I have my apartment, my cats, and (for now, at least) my roommate. THAT is home. There's another saying; "You can never go home again". I always thought that was crap, but now I know: it is true.