being home makes me thoughtful

allow me to begin this post by letting everyone know that today i bought pants that were a size smaller than i have bought in 3 years. thank you dancing and never having time for a proper meal. and there was much rejoicing.

for some reason i always seem to do inordinate amounts of thinking while i'm at home. my first thought when i arrived in the q on wednesday afternoon was how i was already ready to leave again. the q is busier and more densely packed than last i remember, as it always is, and i must fight the urge to turn my car around and head back toward the turnpike. i got home and spent the evening with my mother and stepdad. they listened to my pre-screening cd, and stepdad insisted i let him call the music director at our church so i could sing sunday. whatever. mom and i watched the holiday, which is delightful, but...i don't know, but sometimes she just rubs me the wrong way. it always becomes very clear to me very quickly that i can never live here again. i can already foresee that christmas break is going to be a considerable hardship in some ways. i just don't live here anymore. things that i once found endearing now repel me.

on the upside, i do enjoy my mother's company most of the time, and it is nice to see her after months of being in the roc.

another thing that has recently come to my attention is that my very best friends here, "the beautifuls," and i have grown into completely different women with completely different lives. katy is off in dc working at an aids hospice and living in community. betsy is learning how to spend her day with seven-year-olds in central pa. melissa is practically engaged to her farmer-type boyfriend and is finishing a degree in literature of some sort near philadelphia. it's certainly not a bad thing that we are growing up, and differently, but...we are disjunctive now somehow.
melissa doesn't understand betsy's lifestyle choices (nothing crazy, but we are all old enough to drink now...), and katy seems distant (or maybe just tired?), as her life in dc is much richer than our night out in the q. even wife and i, who have had sympathetic growing pains for the past 3 years, are now on markedly different paths.

i love these girls, and thankfully, we can usually pick up where we left off, but there was something different in our meeting tonight. no longer are we high school friends whose friendship carried into college. now we are these independent, nearly adult women who were, in another life, inseparable.

i'll be back with more thoughts i'm sure.