Dre with a Wig

me:  Looks like we might get the nice one bedroom with an "office" (two bedroom) places in Mangaf, by super chicken or whatever.  Allen is calling it 1 bedroom with office to sell it to Henry.  He was given the go ahead to "broaden the scope" (Ie. increase the budget).  They're brand new, pretty close to where we are now, not HUGE, but decent size

Gianne:  Does that mean we gotta start planning a going away party for Biz¿

  
me:  Nope.  He will probably make the living room his bedroom though.

Gianne:  One apartment to a person?

me:  Yeah.

Gianne:  Imma make mine a prostitute den

me:  Yeaahhhhh 

Gianne:  Thai ladyboy prostitutes

me:  My favorite.  Make sure they look just like that guy up front in netops.

Gianne:  Nah, they're all gonna look like Andrei with a wig

me:  Haha, "This is Andre...ea, and this one is .Andre...ey".

Gianne:  Call the place "Dre-Bidets"

me:  I was thinking: "Andregynus"

Don't these girls know?

Chuck:  My friends hooked me up this girl once.  She had a kid.  I had never done that before, dated a girl with a kid, so I figured, “why, not?”, ya know.  I mean I’m not against kids.

He pauses for a second then continues.

Chuck:   So I get to the door and very first thing she does, right off the bat, she puts this baby in my arms.  So I’m like ‘oh, okay” and as I’m holding the baby she kind of ushers me into the room and her parents are standing there.  So within the first 30… no not even, within the first five seconds of meeting this girl I am holding her baby and meeting her parents.  Strike one: Holding the baby. Strike two:  Meeting her parents.  I mean, don’t these girls know that those are two things that you don’t ever ever ever want to do on a first date.

At this point he grips the steering wheel a little tighter and has this demented grin spread across his face.  He begins to shake his head in disgust and slaps the steering wheel.  His head gyrates in a snakelike motion before he utters:

Chuck:  And then she gives me Chlamydia (he Slaps the steering wheel again).  Don’t these girls know that those are three things you don’t do on a first date?

Home

Everywhere is home.  That is my new motto.  I realized this when I said I was going to VA and called it “home”.  When I was living in VA, Rochester was home… unless I was in Rochester, then VA was home.  When I was ready to leave VA to come back to Kuwait… I said I was going home.  So which is it?  I say they’re all home in one way or another.  Home is relative.

Rochester will always be “home” because that is where my parents live.  VA was still home because I owned a home there.   Now, Kuwait is home, because it is where my job and “normal” life is… although “real life” is still in the United States.  This life out here is kind of non-life.  It’s a break from life while real life is on hold in the States.

I wonder if prisoners call their cell home, or if travelling circus performers call their trailer a home.  Sometimes I even call the lodge during a snowboarding trip or the hotel by the beach home.  I guess home for me is any place that I can relax and I am out of the elements.  I wish I could say that there has been a moment where I have felt that the outdoors was my home.  I have really become obsessed with certain outdoor activities and intend to continue to develop this interest… but the truth is I have never called the outdoors home.  Outdoors is always vacation for me.  Maybe that could be the “great change” in my life that will alter me in a way that opens my mind to completely different and exciting possibilities in the future.  Or maybe home just needs a TV.

I play HIMYM on a loop in my apartment in Kuwait, it makes me feel at home.  When I was in VA, I played FrasierTV (Frasier on a loop) because it reminded me of home (Rochester).  The 25^th hour, the Spike Lee joint with Edward Norton is one of my favorite movies because of its accurate description of NYC, (ie home). 

I guess the point is, I find home everywhere I go and everywhere I go is home.

A Glutton

I was depressed my first year at college.  It was the first time that I had lived away from home and I was living at my aunt’s house on the upper west side, which meant that I was considered a commuter.  You don’t make a whole lot of friends at school being a commuter.  Most commuters still have their friends from home so it isn’t a big deal that they aren’t making new college friends.  And yeah… I did and still do have a lot of family that are one LIRR ride away from Manhattan but when you are living in the city, Long Island seems like a world away.  I may as well have been living in Japan.  I had a girlfriend but she lived in Rochester.  I spoke to her most days and she had to put up with my depressed, friendless, overworked talk for an entire year.

I spoke to her the other day and told her that I didn’t know how she did it, that I must have been miserable.  I was so depressed, I must have just spoken in moans and groans.  I couldn’t imagine having to listen to me that way for an entire year….actually two when I think about it.  I was just as depressed the second year.  She told me that she didn’t remember me being depressed.  I guarantee that I was a miserable wreck that whole year and somehow she doesn’t even remember it.  How could this be?

She was in Boston my second year and she said she wasn’t happy either.  She didn’t like Boston at the time.  I visited her there twice.  The second time was a Valentines weekend when I drove four hours on a whim and surprised her.  That was the last time I was there.  She knew that.  She said that I hated Boston.  I don’t know if I hate the city itself but there are lots of things in that city that I do hate.  Being a New Yorker, that was to be expected but the one thing that I remember really hating most  about the city was how clean it was.  I felt like the train stations looked like Hollywood sets and that bugged me.

Apparently, I liked everything that wasn’t nice at that time.  She said that I acted like I liked the hardship that I was in, like I was meant to go through it.  It’s weird to hear about a former self and to realize that you haven’t changed.  Earlier this year, there was a lull in the drinkin.  The holidays had come to and end and I had returned to a girlfriendless, ghost-filled house.  I walked out on my balcony to have a whiskey and a cigarette and it hit me.  The pain of my break up had finally caught up to me.  I felt a knot turning in my stomach as I embraced the cold dampness of my balcony and I smiled.  The pain had returned.  It had been many years since  I felt that pain, the pain of the end.  I missed it.