We're back. Today's flight was blissfully normal, besides the five million screaming children on it. (No, that's a lie, there were only two million.) I have to admit that through his tears, one of them was FUNNY as hell. He cried from the moment his mom got in line to check-in, cried through security, cried up and down the (small) terminal, sobbing, "I just want to go ho-o-o-o-me..." He couldn't have been older than three. I have to admit, it was funny. I'm pretty sure he was crying on the plane too, as we boarded, but we were pretty far up in the plane, and I think him and his mom were pretty far back. I kept my cool through much of this, though, because I had my trusty iPod and nothing could possibly have been worse than the flight on Friday. (That's a lie. Projectile vomiting could have made things worse.)
I'm pretty much exhausted, because S and I ended up sleeping in an antique bed. Box springs, the whole nine yards. Those beds are not comfy, and those beds are not good for backs. I had the MOTHERFUCKER of all lower back pains on Saturday and Sunday, and would have today, had we not gotten only five or so hours of sleep. S's parent's new house is beautiful, but it's outside my comfort zone, if that makes sense. Southern California is so foreign to me; houses are on top of one another, and the landscape is so different. Don't get me wrong, I think they can be beautiful little houses, but the sight of them all packed together, crampy and small, depresses the shit out of me. I'm not saying I need a huge house for myself (I only ever envision myself in a cottage-y thing with one or two bedrooms, 1400 sq. ft. max or a two to three bedroom condo), but these are bigger houses (four bedrooms in the case of S's parents) on small, small lots. Some backyards don't even have grass in them.
That's hard for me! I mean, S and I look out on more grass in front of our apartment than his parents ever will in the backyard they own. No doubt it will be a gorgeous back-yard, full of nice stonework and with a nice, built-in grill, but still. I try really hard to understand the charms of a life there (S's dad loves it; S's brother, SurferMan, loooooooves it there even more), taking into account the weather, and the surfing, and even the unbelievably AMAZING fish tacos S and I had at Wahoo's, but I can't make the positives outweigh the negatives, and the one big negative, which is that I feel sad and depressed the whole time I'm there. I felt positively gleeful to board a plane and get the hell out of dodge. I just don't feel quite that way about anywhere else.
I feel bad about this, at times, because I know S doesn't mind it there. He could probably be very happy there, but I would be miserable. Sometimes you just know (as in the case of the job from hell, or my happy year in Rome), and this is one of those cases. I can't imagine going there more than once a year; we'll see what happens now that S's parents live there.
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