TWO WEEKS INTO THE NEW YEAR

Well, well, well.

So here I am, about two weeks after Christmas. I've been outrageously busy, and to top things off, there are a zillion other things I want to busy with, and am just waiting until I have a little more time. Honestly, this whole "work" thing is just interfering with my plans.

Ian is here visiting me, and I wish I'd had more time to spend with him. I just finished up my last huge project yesterday afternoon--it was one of these things where there was a bug in the part of the code written by someone else, and I had a heck of a time trying to fix it. A lot of this had to do with being really tired--it's hard to do really in-depth code-figuring-out when you're tired (if it's your own code, it's a lot easier, because you know where everything is and what it's doing). But now, I'm done, and I want to:

Spend time with Ian

Compose music

Do a Flash presentation for my ICS lodge

Do some lampooning of the project I just finished

Get some exercise because when I'm too busy, I eat rubbish and don't have time to worry about anything

It's funny, because I've never really been conscious before of just how much like the rest of my family I am. But I haven't seen Ian in a couple of years, now--this is the longest I've ever gone without seeing him before. And it's scary because he's *just like me*, only amplified. We have the same facial expressions. We make the same puns. His are just bigger.

In other news, my flatmate is still a pill, Rich and I appear to be on speaking terms again, and my cult leaders are still adorable puppies trying to pretend they're wolves.

I got a DVD from my friends, Andy and Michael, back home. Watching it made me realise, again, how much I miss them and miss being home. Andy did an amazing job producing it--he's really talented. They've done little vignettes of their life in the last year, and each one is a small video, with perfect editing, music that is exquisitely matched, etc. Andy usually doesn't seem gay at all, but I'm afraid he's completely given himself away with this. No straight man would have produced this as well.

The last few years have taught me some weird kind of lesson. I guess I've spent most of my life working long hours and trying to...get somewhere. I know people who never left Alaska. I love Alaska, and could conceive of retiring there, but not until after I've gone places, and done things, and seen things.

And we were really poor when I was growing up, and to be honest, I'm still not exactly swimming in money. And in some ways, what I've done has been to drag and claw myself out of the gutter, although this particular gutter was well-cleaned and populated by people who found grammar and spelling important. So I've worked really hard to obtain a decent education, to teach myself job skills that enable me to move beyond "secretary", and to take care of my family.

All of this, though, has meant putting in long hours for something in the future. I can't go home until I've seen somewhere else. I can't worry about having friends and places to go at night, because I have to study or work a second job.

Now, suddenly, I've realised that there are things that make me really happy *right now*, and that it's okay to spend time enjoying myself now. There were times when, if I had taken a night off to go to a party, it would have cost me the ability to get a better job in the future, or to visit my father when he was dying.

But I think I'm finally at the place where, as financially messed-up as I am, I can take an evening to play music, just for myself, and I won't reap some horrible reward of suffering later. Buying my keyboard wasn't creating a future hell in which I won't be able to afford groceries; it was setting myself up so that I can have a whole lot of evenings, evenings where I play music that doesn't cost me anything.

And I guess, in that way, I'm ready to go home. It's not that there isn't a lot of the world that I have left to see--it's that I've seen enough of it to know where home is, and to no longer have the desperation, born of poverty, to experience something outside of the small box I was born in.

Being here, I'm learning things about the world, and...becoming something. Becoming someone who knows what it's like to live outside the US. Becoming someone who feels comfortable functioning in a French-speaking country over the weekend. And those were things I felt like I needed to do; things I needed to accomplish for this future self.

But both my present and future selves love my friends, my family, my screwed-up country that desperately needs people to vote the bad people out of office, and evenings making music. So I guess I've worked really hard my whole life to have exactly what I have now, and I am ready to scale back and have more of a balance between dragging myself to a higher plane and enjoying the one I'm on.