Fair warning, readers: This post contains a picture of me. And some fill in the blanks!

And by a picture of me, I mean a terrible, horrible, no good very bad sleep-the-night-before picture.

You'll see in a few seconds.

I'm a terrible bloggy friend.  I respond to comments, but I always do it late (I have a habit of checking my email the moment I wake up, so I'm not in any sort of state to form cohesive, sensible responses).  And by late, I mean months later.  I don't know what it is, and I'm trying harder at it.  But with all the bloglazy I've gone through this month, I have fallen embarrassingly far behind.

That in mind...I got a blog award!  From the super amazing David, whose blog I insist you visit because it is also super amazing and one of my favourites--and let's face it, whose opinions can you trust more than mine?  That's right: no one.  So, I'm incredibly thankful, and this is serious y'all--it has rules with it, too!

The rules for this one:
1. Get really excited that you got the coolest award EVER.
2. Choose ONE of the following options for accepting the OMB! award:
(a) Get really drunk and blog for 15 minutes straight, or for as long as you can focus.
(b) Write about your most embarrassing moment.
(c) Write a "Soundtrack of your childhood" blog.
(d) Make your next blog a "vlog", or video blog. Basically, you talking to the camera about whatever.
(e) Take a picture of yourself first thing in the morning, before you do anything else (makeup, brush hair, pee, etc.) and post it.
3. Pass the award on to at least three, but preferably more, awesome bloggers like yourself. Don't forget to tell them (duh).

1. Believe me, it happened.  You missed the party.
2. Here's the thing: I don't get drunk and I don't have the means to make a vlog, so those two were out.  My most embarrassing moment relates to being sick and I've had enough of that this month; and the soundtrack to my childhood is the entire discography of Boyz II Men, Queen, Elton John, The Police, Michael Jackson, Ace of Base and All-4-One.  So, I'm pretty much defaulted to the picture of myself first thing in the morning.  It ain't pretty kids.  I slept for maybe 4 hours, and those measly hours were quite fitful. I was considering putting off the picture until the next day, but I'd already taken so much time since getting the award that I just sucked it up.

You see that awful double bag under one eye and the massive bag under the other?!  Yeah. Pitiful. I am going to be so wrinkly when I'm old...*sigh*  And consider yourself special, because few pictures after 2006 exist of me without glasses.

What disturbs me most is that...I don't do much else to my appearance before I go out.  I'm totally that girl who can roll out of bed and walk out the door without a second thought.  I don't wear make-up, except the occasional eyeliner and mascara (I don't even own any aside from that).  Just add glasses and we have my every day look.  I even took a picture later in the day for comparison's sake.

Hair is damp and unbrushed--apologies.

You would think this would compel me to put more consideration in my daily appearance, but...ehhh.  Maybe one day I will, but for now I'm ok like this.  Did I purposely post this on a Friday, when I know a lot of people don't/won't read blogs before the weekend so theoretically less people will see my horrid sleep deprived self?  Perhaps.  But aside from the small vain moments, I'm ok for now.

As for 3. I feel like I haven't been active enough in the bloggy world lately to really pick and choose people to pass it along to, so imma cheat a bit and defer passing it along until later when I'm fully returned to interacting.

Lastly, because I don't participate in enough blog memes (sarcasm font), I thought I'd participate in Fill-In-the-Blank Friday!  I've been a longtime follower of the little things we do and figured it is high time to join in the fun.  Similar to ToT, head over to her blog and link up if you participate, too!

1. My absolute favourite movie of all time is The Sound of Music.  I know, I know, I get ridiculed all the time, but it holds such a dear place in my heart I can never let it go.

2. My favourite movie as a child was The Sound of Music.  Wait, can I use that twice?  Also Beauty and the Beast and Toy Story.  And The Sandlot, The Mighty Ducks, and Hook.

3. The best movie quote ever is from The Breakfast Club.  "Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place."

4. My favourite actress is __________ and my favourite actor is ____________.  I don't really choose favourites in actors...I will love Denzel Washington for all my life and highly respect Matt Damon, but I don't know if I can label them with favourite.  As for actresses, I tend to favor Kate Winslet (I've never seen all of Titanic though, so don't go pushing that on me) and Sandra Bullock, but again...no favourites.  If I want to be Meryl Streep, does that make her it?

5. The movie I could watch over and over again is You've Got Mail and Pride & Prejudice (the Keira Knightley version).  Seriously, I think I've watched both at least six times each this past month.

6. My favorite movie genre is dependent upon my mood.  Normally I'm always down for comedy, but sometimes I just need a good romantic comedy or drama.

7. A movie I'd like to watch this weekend is Date Night, Bright Star or Precious.  The latter two are waiting in my computer to be watched, I just haven't gotten to it yet.  And I'd more than likely go gay for Tina Fey in a heartbeat, so of course I want to see her movie.  OH and I just realized, I do need to watch Les Poupees Russes (the French film follow-up to L'auberge Espagnole, arguably the best French film ever.  Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Amelie.) because it's due at the library on Tuesday.

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a house is not a home

Unlike yesterday, I won't allow a distraction to replace my intended blog post--but I will say this: I walked out of my house (after several minutes of pep talk to reassure myself that the bees will not harm me so long as I am not harming them), glanced down at my stoop and saw a large, very black spider.  Said spider starts crawling towards my boot, and I flip my shit, then realize that where I have run to is directly below and beside the purported beehive; in which I promptly flip my shit again, scream, and flee down the front path to my car.

Message of the mini-story: I am not leaving my house tomorrow because I'm 10000% positive my fragile nerves cannot take it.

So a few days ago I wrote the sentence: "I want to tell you how my heart hurts every day because I always feel like I'm away from home."  And then I found my old journalism notebook that had one of the six-word memoirs I wrote for a workshop, which reads "Lived in six countries.  Where's home?"  And for the lovely cherry on top (which I don't actually eat, but I'll stick with the saying), Tuesday's Glee episode was titled "Home" and had all these songs with the word Home or about your Home and even contained one of my favourite songs in the entire world.

Ok, world, I see the sign, I get it.  I will write the long-thought-but-never-written post about home.  For those who knows me in real life, I'm sorry, I know this topic is beaten to a goshdarnfriggen' bloody pulp with me, but I can't help it.  And for those who have read my blog for awhile, you'll know most of the facts already.  Feel free to hit "Mark as Read" if you like, because this post needs to be written for my own sanity, and I'm going to be a bad selfish blogger and write how I need to.

I love San Diego.  I do.  I really, really do.  I find it to be a vibrant, lively city, and I love that I have a beach 20 minutes away and a downtown city life 25 minutes away and safe little suburbs outside my door and snow only 45 minutes away.  There's so much in one small county, and it keeps my ever-changing attention.  And I love living here, too.  I like the people, I like the structures, I like the weather, I like the accessibility and availability of almost anything I need.  A good 50% of my relatives live here, too, and that's always fun.

But it's not home.

Ok, that's a lie.  It is home.  I feel comfortable here, it's familiar and loved and when I come back to it after a trip away, I breathe easier and find that I've been unknowingly yearning for the hill with shitty potholes to get to my house and the confusing freeways and the odd patch of grass with a bench at the major intersection at the light to turn onto the street bordering my house.  My family is here, my life is here, my friends and, maybe one day, my career.

But even when I'm here, I want to be elsewhere.

Having lived in San Diego for 11 years now (though 4 of that was spent 80 miles away at University in Orange County), this is the absolute longest I've ever lived anywhere.  Even if I were to subtract those 4 years, living somewhere for 7 years is the longest I've been anywhere, too.  By the time I was 12 years old, I'd moved 4 times; lived in ten different buildings; and was able to call 6 countries "home" at some point.  I still have a hard time accepting the fact that I've known people for longer than 5 years, and that I still see them.  Sure, I have my best friends from those years in Europe, but I haven't seen them in years.  Our entire friendship was created on knowing each other for a year when we lived in the same country and inevitably came to a close when one or both of us moved.  That was life, and that's all I've ever known.  My brother often tells me I have "friend ADD" because I get restless and tired of the same people all the time.  Every year, the rotation of people I would see changed, and I still have a hard time grasping that that just isn't the case anymore.

Anyway.  Living the way I did, "home" was a lot more of a notion than a real thing.  Home is transferable, transportable, mobile.  A flat in West Riuslup and an apartment in Jacksonville and a beautiful multi-story house in Brussels and a mobile home in St. Tropez and a small marble-floored building in Lago Patria and temporary living accommodations are all "home."

The problem with this is that I never, ever feel as though I'm really home, even when I am in my own house.  A part of my heart is still in that London flat, part of me still lives in Belgium, part of my life remains at the Amalfi Coast.  Each of these places owns a part of who I am, and no matter how much I love wherever I am at the moment, I'm never really whole.

You know that feeling about 3 or 4 days into a vacation trip when the homesickness creeps in?  You've reached that point of craving familiarity, of wanting to see that crack in the wall or run in the carpet or secretly chipped vase in your living room.  That small, gnawing feeling of just wanting to go back to the one place you know contains your life and what makes you happy and that you take for granted--which is ok, because that's what it's there for.  To always be there, even when you don't realize it.  It's that small tug at your heart to return to home.

That's what it's like for me, every single day.  No matter where I am.  I'll drive in San Diego and crave the metro in Belgium.  I'll stare out the window and wish I was seeing the courtyard to my Parco in Italy.  I'll sit in Coffee Bean and my heart will start to hurt thinking about sitting in cafes in Marseilles watching everyone walk by.  I was eating pizza in Orange County when I was at school and felt so far away from the pizzeria down the street from my old apartment in Italy that had the best pizza margherita in the world.  I was staring at the most beautiful scenery while at Monument Valley in Utah/Arizona, and I felt so close and so far away from Mt. Vesuvius, a silhouette that used to be a part of my life every day.  Even when I was living in Orange County, I would be in a library and miss the libraries back in San Diego.  Everywhere I am, I feel as though I'm away from my home.

I'm envious of those people who can pinpoint their home.  Who can tell you every detail of their two-story tan brick house with the archway and french door entrance.  Who can walk through their house and point out where they fell when they were 3 years old and cried, or the doorway they walked into when they were 7 and knocked out a tooth, or the stairs they ran down to answer the door for that sleepover in 3rd grade or the exact place they were when their high school sweetheart gave them their first kiss goodnight.  Even those who have made the transfer of home away from their parents house, who can walk the two flights up to their apartment and show you the spot on the couch where a friend accidentally dropped his lit cigarette or the broken screen window where a drunken ex fell into it or their pots and pans aligned as they want in the kitchen cabinet.  I envy the people who can walk through a door and know they belong.

But even when I know this envy is there, I would never change my life.  I would never, ever trade any of my experiences for one house that contains my entire childhood.  If I had to live it all again, I would do every move, every leaving of friends, every box packed and new apartment cleaned and introduction at the front of the class as "the new girl from the other country" and stamp on my passport.  I wouldn't even consider any other way.

It hurts, feeling like every step is in a direction away from home.  Some days I am literally gripped breathless at the longing I have to return to somewhere else.  Other days it's manageable, just that thought weighing heavy at the back of the heart.  Most of the time, I feel like I'm permanently on vacation, in that stage of small homesickness with the excitement of exploring something new.  One minute I'll be ogling where I'm at, two steps later I'll want to go back to a place I know and love, and five steps from then I'll be back to wanting to be exactly where I am.  I'm just always "away."

I want it to be clear that I'm not unhappy where I am.  I am happy.  I really like where I am, in all senses of the statement.  Of all the places to be in the world, I'm pretty sure this is tops, or at least among them.  I'm sad, I'm always missing somewhere or something or someone, and I don't think I'll ever really feel like I belong where I'm at.  But despite all that, I am incredibly grateful and in love with my current city.

I think my heart just needs to grasp that "home" isn't about a building.  It's not about being able to point at a spot and tell the story, or walking through your childhood memories every time you walk from one end of the house to the other.  It's not about loving the rose garden that was planted when you were 5 months old, or the small hole in the wall where you hung your *NSYNC poster when you were 10, or that cabinet that creaks.  It's about knowing your past, having those memories, possessing the stories of youth and younger times.  It's about carrying that feeling of belonging, of owning who you are and what you've become knowing where it all happened--even if it happened to be in multiple places.  Home is simply a state of mind.

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The birds and the bees. Except no birds. And really nothing to do with that. So, just bees.

I had this whole idea for this post to be about how I went into this big blue funk last week and couldn't find the will to do anything, and ended up moping around my house driving my poor family absolutely batty as I refused to talk about what was upsetting me, and how I eventually read through some things and found some items from my childhood that made me realize life really isn't in the shitter, it's just on a downhill and now I feel like it's on the uphill and I surely hope it remains as so.

But right before I started writing the post, I went to my window to open the blinds (sunlight is good!), and have since discovered that there is a goshdarnfriggin' bee hive on my house!

I'm sure by now we know of my spider phobia, but what I haven't talked about is my fear of bees.  I thought I was doing ok about them, since I have survived a bee sting (we think) and they are relatively harmless so long as you're not tossing rocks at them or some idiotic action of the sort.  But um...seeing a general cloud of bees swarming right in the corner outside of your window is not something I can remain calm about.  There are at least 15 bees buzzing around, and who the hell knows how many more since they're crawling into the crack of my house between the garage door wall and the roof.  So, obviously, the solution was to call my parents freaking out, then close my blinds because we all know how well "out of sight, out of mind" works.

Problem is, I can hear the bees hitting against my window as I'm typing, and even when I have music on, all I can hear is the tap tap tap and it's making my heart go pound pound pound and my nerves go shit shit shit.

This. is. not. ok.


---Well, there was an invisible 4 hour pause there in which my parents returned from work/errands and dad was a big brave man and took a can of Raid on those bees.  But um...let's just say there are for sure more than 15 bees.  And they may have made it into the garage.  A good lot of them are dead on our sidewalk now, but there is still an even bigger lot of them flying around.

What I'm really saying here is...I'm not leaving my house.  Ever.

...perhaps an exaggeration, especially since I have to take my brother to work tomorrow (hooray for brother's car being broken) and make a library trip.  But really, these bees are making me extremely uncomfortable and I keep getting chills when I think about watching them all swarm.  We are definitely calling pest control, and unfortunately the hive is probably inside the garage wall, resulting in needing to tear down the wall to remove it (apparently leaving a hive will either a] keep attracting bees or b] rot and ruin all the wood and moldings of the house...neither of which are preferable), so this is not going to be fun.

But I'm really more concerned about making the tapping stop.

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