Toilet Nostalgia

I never expected to feel this way, but I guess it was inevitable.

It was two hundred and sixteen days out in the world and another thirty days in Middle America before we returned home. And in regards to the world vs. home, that's roughly half a year of trying to forget about home and then another couple of months trying to remember.

As you can imagine, I greatly anticipated syncing back up with Los Angeles. LA meant a city I halfway understood, home meant my own familiar apartment, and a living space meant having a refrigerator again. I eagerly looked forward to sipping wine with people that I had known for longer than an hour. So assuming a breezy transition back into normal life would await me on arrival, I hadn't given home much more thought. Struggle was not something I would have foreseen. But I forgot that life in America moves at the speed of sound, that here we have an innate propensity to accomplish. I guess the world of adult responsibility sort of escapes you after so many months of doing whatever the hell you want.

In these early days, I find myself stumbling into this new (old) world. My capacity for everyday tasks is far less than it used to be, almost as if every day my body and mind turn off at a certain point, even though I still need to find a cell phone plan and buy a kitchen table. I wrote a post in Turkey about how I felt busy while digging a hole in the sand and ended it with a joke about how I'd have to let you know how it goes when I get to LA. Well, this is how it goes.

So now as I relearn the burden of obligation, I find myself nostalgic at every turn. Like when my cell phone rings and I grudgingly wish that I couldn’t be found at every single moment of my day. Or how nice it would be to read for hours on end without distractions like bills and the Internet. But the most remarkable nostalgia, the time when everything about the trip comes into focus, is when I'm sitting on the toilet longing for the days when I had to throw my TP into the trashcan.

It seems finding my rhythm is going to take a while. In the meantime, I'll be posting a commentary of sorts here at jackatrandom – the one thing I did then that I can do now.