A week ago, after numerous pained deliberations, I made my journey home. If I could have, I would have stayed in my apartment with Meemee, worked at Macy's, and played all day, but unfortunately the idiots who make the rules over at UPS still dictate my life. My participation in the Spring 2006 commencement ceremony was lies, all lies! I hold no bachelor's in English LIterature, and I shan't until I complete this American Sign Language class. Even then, because of some incredibly pointless rule, I won't offically graduate until Spring 2007 even though I'm taking and completing the class this fall. Those uptight bastards. One final twist of the dagger before they push me out the door into the realm of... reality.
Some of you may know that I was considering moving Chicago or Denver. It turns out Chicago was a case of bad timing, so I went to visit Denver with Debbie on our second romantic vacation. It turns out Denver was a case of being way too ghetto for my taste but right before we left we went through Boulder, which is definitely more my kind of town. I'm keeping Univ. of Colorado as a possibility for grad school, so the trip wasn't a total waste. The point is, moving somewhere random alone and having to deal with the stress of finishing my degree, finding a job and a place, and paying the rent was not something I needed to deal with at the moment, so home was pretty much the only option (no matter how much I tried to deny it all summer.)
So on a cool Tacoma evening, a mere two days after dearest Daebi departed for D.C., I absconded with (most of) my earthly possessions. Grande vanilla latté in hand, I headed for Portland and arrived at Auntie Joanie's empty house close to 2AM (just like that song used in the totally awesome episode of Grey's Anatomy where George helps Dr. Bailey give birth while McDreamy is doing brain surgery on her husband and Meredith has her finger on a bomb in some guy's chest...yeah, you had to be there.)
In the morning whilst watering the petunias and gathering the mail, I struck up an odd conversation with a balding, fourtysomething runner taking a breather in the middle of the street--apparently he is at the point in his career where he's well aware of the absence of any upward movement, and he strongly recommends that I do "whatever comes most naturally," careerwise that is. This trend for random conversations continued well throughout the day: outside of Powell's (where I bought 13 "new" books) with a spandex-clad biker; a nosey gas station attendent; a pair of middle aged women road-trippin to pass the time; and bunch of other secondary characters.
To be more concise, here is my trip home in bullet points:
DAY 2 (DAY 1 being packing and driving to P-town)
• Drove from Portland to Tillamook via the Tillamook Nat'l Forest. Many trees.• Driving down the 101, Cali here I come. Stopped in Hebo, OR for lunch before finally glimpsing the coast. Ah glorious water.
• Took a gander at Boiler Bay and just happened to see a grey whale spouting no more than 20 ft. offshore. It swam lazily about for quite some time. Apparently the whales like to come here to rub against the rocks to get barnacles and other unwelcome critters off their backs.
• Saw and smelled a truck load of pinnipeds at the Sea Lion Caves near Florence, OR. Shared the elevator with a Korean family of nine children + the eldest girl's Celtic descendant boyfriend.
• Almost plunged to my death watching a bald eagle fly by.
• Pulled over for speeding not once, but TWICE and I didn't get a single ticket--thank Zeus for my Berkeleys.
DAY 3
• Goodbye sales-tax-free Oregon!• Squeezed in some tidepooling at one of the first Cali beaches I saw. Admired crabs, starfish, and fed a mussel to a sea anenome.
• Ambled down the Avenue of the Giants near Humboldt. Walked a fallen redwood and communed with a blue jay who was using my car as camoflage.
• Passed through Benbow, CA and the Benbow Inn, a place I once stayed with my mom when we visited my sister at sleepaway camp. She was a counselor named Gator, and I was subsequently named Gatorade or some other derivative.
• Dramatically announced my arrival back home with much horn-honking and engine-revving. Boy were the folks surprised! Did I mention that I neglected to mention to my parents that I was coming home?
So was my solitary adventure. In retrospect, it was really quite Bill Bryson-esque, minus the cool British people.
And so my life is right back where it was four years ago. I'm at community college five days a week (for ASL and choir), no degree to speak of, unemployed, living at home with my animals, hanging out with my babies, my friends are all elsewhere and...yeah. That's it! Who knows, maybe things will change soon. Until then, I'll be laying in my house watching tv, seriously depressed that the sun goes down a whole hour and a half earlier than I've been used to all summer.
