Home.

It's been a full day since I've been back and I'm already indulging in the comforts of home: the marble tiles and my silk bedspread, silverware and those new sharp-ass knives my mom just got for Mother's Day.  If you didn't know me, you would assume from the previous sentence that I was some sort of real housewife of ________ (anywhere because every variation of that show is essentially the same i.e. they all suck).  But that's not really what's important here.  What's important is the relative heaven-like quality this place has in comparison to the dorm I just moved out of. Bathrooms smelling of the sin of shit and alcoholism, littered with little trimmings of ironic moustache/beard (screw you hipsters!) and the stench of rotting beer at the bottoms of PBR cans wafting out of the garbage disposal as you step out of one hell and into the next.  Don't even get me started on the kitchen.  The kitchen in my building was to ants, cockroaches, fruit flies (and whatever little creature dearest Dalí would have incorporated into his works of art if he weren't already so taken with his hormigas) as this apartment is to me; heaven on earth in other words.  So it's been like reaching safe haven after fighting through a zombie apocalypse for 3/4 of a year.  I can sleep when it's still dark now and my skin's cleared up in just one night.  I can't blame me for wanting to soak it all in.  Neither should you.

I'm currently listening to "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

I can't stop.  I'm practically listening to it on repeat in video form on the internet.  When I first heard it in the wee morning hours Saturday, packing up my things and trying not to literally pass out from fatigue, all I wanted was just to get Home.  Home with a capital H.

This song makes me think about a couple things:

1.  How my aspiration to be a professional whistler, for Belle and Sebastian in particular, was ridiculous.  And yet now I want to be one for Mr. Sharpe and his Magnetic 0's.  

2.  How I miss sitting under our peace tree in Jesus Square (which has since been demolished), strumming on guitars in epic sing-alongs like the little neo-hippies that we were at the age of fourteen.

3.  How my dad pointed out a man much like the one in the video for Home and said "Look, it's Jesus' little brother" and how I tend to think the same thing.  Watch out Fleet Foxes--my dad and I are judging you.

4.  How I wish I could successfully get a group of friends to jump in unison and snap a still frame photo of all of us in mid-air like they did in the video.

5.  How I wish real life was just that perfect but not in hipster vision and less facial hair.

6.  How I love to hate hipsters and yet I hate to love them too.  Paradox.  Woah.  But isn't that what a counterculture is?

And that's it.  Welcome Home, me.