Monday, December 3, 2007

If I lived somewhere completely different

I would be myself, only somewhere else. Still, I can't help perusing the realtor sites looking for homes in warm places. Spanish-style homes in desert towns or near the ocean. Condos where everything is taken care of for you, no repairs. No worries.

Right. There will always be worries. Money worries, job worries. Even if I took my work-from-home job with me to live in some wonderful place in the sun, I would still be me, doing that meaningless job. Married, living with anxiety and depression. Making friends but not keeping them. Leaving nothing behind on this earth. Except for plastic bags, which according to Al Gore will be around for a millennium if not longer.

Still, what if...? What if living in this place, 90 miles from the closest major city--with its McMansions where farms used to be and strip malls housing banks, pizza parlors, dance studios, and CVS drug emporiums--is really the problem? Wouldn't that be easy. Just leave. Go somewhere beautiful and cultured and warm, and happiness will be inevitable.

This is academic. When my parents and sister and her new babies finally come back from the faraway state where they are stuck until things calm down and they can come home, I will again feel the need to stay put. But now, with them so far, and so many of my older relatives gone for good, I feel little allegiance to this region. I could leave tomorrow and few would know or care.

Now I must shower and put on a suit and get ready for my big day. I've been planning it for about two months, and expect a decent paycheck for it. I hope that there are no problems because I don't want to deal with any one's concerns, and I don't want to be embarrassed by mistakes that I might have made. But really I just don't care. It's so unimportant. The event will come and go and disappear from people's consciousness. At least those plastic bags are here to stay.

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