Home is...where?

I have a running joke in my life. My father asked me where home was the other day? Meaning where is the place that I call home, and I said "well, I don't really have one, I'm homeless." He laughed. I laughed; but it is kind of true.

 Ever since I was little I remember moving a lot. Now, don't get me wrong, I believe that I am the person I am today because of all the wonderful (and not so wonderful) places that I have lived and the people that I've met. I've honestly lost count. I know that the number of times I've moved since I went away to college is now ten. So, the over all count has to be somewhere up in the twenties. There was the time we spent living with my grandparents when we first moved to San Antonio. Then we moved in with my step-dad (just dad from here on out) for a bit. Del Rio. Back to San Antonio, where we lived in an apartment complex behind my elementary school. I got in trouble because I would just climb the fence to get home instead of walking ALL the way around the building, which is just a total waste of time.

Then we moved into the house. I can't remember the address anymore, but I can still tell you the layout of the house. I can still see the green carpet and my blue room, the tree house in the backyard. That is the house that I grew up in. So, when people ask me where I am from I do say Texas, because that is where my heart is. Unfortunately we had to move out of that house when I was a freshman in highschool. We moved in with my grandparents again, the house on Briardale. We were only there for a few months and then we moved to Florida.

In Florida we moved in with my mom's boyfriend. I hated the house, it didn't feel lived in. Then we found out some not so savory things about his character and we moved out. Well, my brother and I went to North Carolina and when we came back we had been moved. This is when we moved into the "shit shack", a little two bedroom house on 26th st. It was a perfect square. The joke was that you could stand in the center of the house and turn around in a circle and see the entire place, which wasn't really a joke just plain fact. I was only there for two years and then I moved back to Texas to live my grandparents back on Briardale. Then I moved to Chicago and I moved from dorm room to dorm room, back home for the summer, to apartment complex to different apartment complex.

My boyfriend and I started looking for a new place to live a few weeks ago, because his commute is an hour half to and from. We saw a few places...most of them crap. We found one we liked but we just didn't get that feeling. The "this is going to be our home for a while" feeling. The feeling we got when we first found our cat Jimi, or when we looked for months trying to find him a cat friend and then one day we saw Poe and instantly knew that she was the one. We didn't get that excited butterfly feeling. So, he said "maybe we should call Marty and ask him if we can stay another month." I emailed him last night, I was too scared to talk to him on the phone because what if he said no then we would literally be homeless. He is an amazing man and has taken great care of us these past few years.

A few years ago I got a tattoo on the back of my neck that says "gypsy soul" in my mom's handwriting. I got it for many reasons, because my father used to sing Van Morrison to me when I was a baby to help me get to sleep, the album with Into the Mystic on it. "I wanna rock your gypsy soul". But I also got it because they used to call us "the gypsy family" back in Florida and I believe that I am. I get restless staying in the same place for too long and I want to get up and move, but there's something different about it this time.

Last night I was reading in bed and Craig came in and said "I'm sorry that I couldn't find us a place to move to." I said that I didn't mind; that I was actually glad that we were staying. He said "Home. For a little while longer." I nearly cried. I think I'm finally starting to make my own place and I think I'm finally starting to feel it...home.

The List

For those who don't know I have started a new hobby/obsession. A few months back I stumbled upon "BBC's 'Big Read' Top 100 Books", and I quickly set out and scratched off the ones I had read. The number was somewhat sad and so I decided that I would try to tackle "The List". I was already half way through "The Fellowship of the Ring" when I found "The List", so I went about trying to acquire the rest of the books. I did own some of them on my Kindle, but we all know how I feel about reading classics on my e-reader. Sacrilege, if you ask me. So I'm determined to own every book, in it's hardcover/paperback/classic form. We already owned quite a few, which I was quite proud of, even though we had never really read them. The others, to my surprise and happiness, I have found at our local thrift store. Our friend Adrian can attest to the fact that I'm there at least once a week, "The List" in hand, exclaiming that it is either a good or bad book day. So, now friends I give you: "The List".

My love hate relationship with my Kindle

About two years ago my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I had been toying around with the idea of buying a kindle for some time, but I was still on the fence about it. I mean, could I really forsake my huge library for an electronic thing that weighed less than a pound? And could I jusitfy buying books for $9.99 when I could walk to Brown Elephant and buy a paperback for $.25? My library had grown considerably once I figured out that Brown Elephant carried books and when I realized how cheap they were. Soon I was buying books that I hadn't even heard of before! I was addicted. From the summer of 2009 until I got my Kindle in the summer of 2010 I read 17 books. I know that doesn't sound too terribly impressive...but I impressed myself. The problem with reading that many books is that I had to CARRY all of those books, not at the same time mind you, to and from the train everyday. If there was any chance that I could sneak in a bit of reading anywhere I had to make sure that I had the book in my purse, and if there was a possibility that I would finish a book on the way to or from work I had to bring a back up book with me because I can't just sit idle on the train. The day that I realized that I should even consider buying a Kindle was when I was halfway through one massive book. "The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool; Will Somers". This book is OVER 1,000 pages long and it's a bitch to carry around with you everywhere. I felt like I was back in highschool carrying around all of those nonsense text books. So, I started to research and I found that I could get a Kindle for $120 with ads. My boyfriend HATES that it advertises when I put it in sleep mode, but all you have to do is turn it over and "voila" no more ads, but he says it's still like having a big ol' billboard in the house.

Disconnecting

I remember when my family got our first computer. It was Christmas and I must've been about nine, if memory serves me, and my mom and dad did a bait and switch; a sort of box with in a box sort of trickery. I remember screaming and jumping for joy because my family finally had a computer in the house. That computer served us well. I played Oregon Trail and we had dial up internet via AOL. That really was the life.
Then quite a few years later I remember getting my first cell phone. I had just come back from New York where I celebrated my 16th birthday with my family. When I got home my mom had made my favorite dish, one of the things she does well, eggplant parmesan and there was a bag on the table, and then the strangest thing happened. The bag began to ring. I tore through the tissue paper and there was my phone. It was, what we call these days, a "go phone". I had a pre-paid amount of minutes that I could use and when those ran out the phone became, well, a paper weight. But I was still thrilled to have my very own phone. When I moved back to San Antonio from Florida I used my grandparents computer and I would waste many long nights on AIM talking to my friends that literally lived around the corner, but this was before everyone had texting so it was the easiest way to get in touch with someone at 2 in the morning.