Home is a set of plane tickets

mainly because I don't have one location that is the traditional concept of "home" for moi. And really, I'm lucky enough to be able to jet around all over the place and piece together the puzzle pieces that make me, geographically scattered as they are.

I found a dish towel hanging from my mother's oven that reads "Home is where my mom is." And really, home is where my loved ones are, it's true, therefore home are where they are. Home "are" there or maybe "is" like a spilled bottle of wine or juice that trickles into different crevices but is still part of the same whole. Maybe in measurement, home is more of a liquid, divided in fragments but part of a whole.

I returned to Porto Alegre, Brazil, for a brief spell and then was pretty thrilled, anxious even to get back to the US. I was eager to retrieve my past you see. It all started with a dear childhood friend's wedding in Boston, followed by travel to DC and Colorado with another dear childhood friend/distant relative from Israel. All of the East Coast travels convinced me that I should just move back to the American East Coast because Home...maybe there are places on this planet that make me feel especially like "me" and maybe quite a few of them are concentrated over there. There's just a whole lot of juice in those parts and now my mind is working on that idea, of a wonderful return, a homecoming to a place that I love. How sweet.

chocolate pie ...and this title is complete

I'm wearing a goofy shirt that reads "I <3 Capoeira". It's for a 7-8 year old boy and so it's a tiny bit tight around the sleeves. It reminds me of how when I was a teenager it was popular to wear itsy bitsy shirts and show off your midriff. I have backpedaled into my teenage self and my midriff is slightly on display in this way too small thing I'm not sure why I bought it (except that the mestre with the Arnold Shwarzenegger accent who sold it to me has a charm about him, so if he says it's woman's shirt maybe I'll believe it for a little while,) but maybe I should cut the sleeves off....my little sisters wouldn't approve. It's a high school thing, it's a petty thing, it's a family thing, how to display myself, it's a fashion thing, it's a bullshit, bullshit thing. They always judged me so harshly, my mom and sisters, ridiculing me like a gang of popular bossy girls on the playground. I always succumbed, if not in action, then in hurt feelings. Very hurt feelings and a very sore ego.

I had my first Batizado this past weekend. Mestres and students flew into Chicago from all over the country and world to teach workshops and to graduate students in an order of dancefightloving....I somehow passed, graduated into a level. A white-yellow cord signifying that I have some level of skill: totally unexpected.

I'm in from the "beach," the Lake Michigan Shore...this whole Chicago summer thing is a new and interesting experience for me. It's the first time I've experienced it at all...I'm meeting a lot of nice, fun people in this warm version of Chicago. Well I can befriend for a little while before I re-Brazil my life. Chicago will never be Brazilian or tropical or warm enough anyway. A part of my heart has given up on it even as I discover lovely new nooks and crannies and finally meet the kind of folks I could enjoy myself with.

Things, in some way only have substance if you believe in their thingy-ness. If you believe in them. And I make-believe my own things all the time and that's a good escape from the confines of a mostly senseless world. The only parts that matter are the warm ones. Not their substance but their temperature. Touch my forehead. 

home? is where the mummy organs are

I moved again...when...was it two weeks ago? The movers finished scooping out my belongings, like so many moveable intestines ready for their next mummification treatment, just in time for my statistics lab.
Grad school, (and we know this from phdcomics but it's much worse than that) is ridiculous.
You pretend to have the carefree existence of a student (or is it the religious devotion to learning of a monk?) while adulthood and responsibility and reality and taxes and ovaries and bills and maybe people named Bill and, and, hunger and thirst and family and Maslowe are all there with you, staring you down as you pretend.
You stay away from tv and stores and people and material obligations and maybe your hair starts to dreadlock and maybe you forgot to make payments and returns and stuff like that and when you try to return crap to stores two months later they don't give a shit that you don't live on the same space-time continuum as the rest of the society...does the ivory tower sound like fun? Hahaha.

So there it is, my STUFF. The internal organs that get moved from one dwelling body to another where I sleep and reorganize the STUFF and re-place it, some of it gets frazzled, abused, lost, a frayed edge, another tragically lost earring.

When mummies move from one world to another nothing is lost. Everything is put into perfect gold jars and it stays so immaculately preserved for archaeologists to fawn over. The artifacts of my existence are less perfectly cared for, I have no civilization of slaves to pamper my every whim or to pack my suitcases. Instead I do this late at night with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer so that I can pretend that packing and moving, this endless transitional process I seem to be in, is a constant party. The life of an amoeba. A jellyfish. A protean squishy creature that remolds herself until it hurts. And it hurts.A boyfriend packed my boxes once. Even some of my suitcases. Boyfriends are good for these things. If you'd care to apply for the position, I accept applications on a rolling basis.