homeslice

I always say I never consider a place called home until I hang my dogs playing poker portrait. And, looking through old pictures from the past 10 years, I see that it actually has rung true. From the moment I purchased the iconic framed picture, it has followed me wherever I find a place to sleep and settle in. For example, here it is in Hayward:

My place on Landfair:

My summer dorm at Rieber Terrace:

My apartment at Veteran:

And finally, at my apartment here in riverside


And so it had me thinking, what is this concept of ‘home?’ I’m no stranger to uprooting myself. My parents moved out of the home I had grown up in right before I started high school and moved out of the region I grew up in my third year in college, leaving me with a floor to sleep on and nowhere to place my shit. Some people say home is where your stuff is, but my stuff has been traveling all over the country and is in 3 difference places at the moment, so I’m not sure what to make of that.

And given that I’d been in college since 2004 (and still taking classes, even after receiving that coveted Bachelor’s degree), where everything is temporary (I blogged about it before), you can see that I’ve had my share of different living situations in the past 5 years. So it had me thinking, what is home for us? I hate to quote a movie like Garden State, starring professional overly sensitive pansy Zach Braff (I still love you in Scrubs!), but there comes a point in everyone’s life where the house you grew up in is no longer your home.

It’s true, leaving home for the first time is sort of a rite of passage, a challenge, a journey for you to grow and thrive and strive to create a sense of home and accomplishment for yourself. And sure, some of us are successful in doing so and may never come back to the place we once called home. Others may eventually go back to the place they left behind to re-establish ties or mend familial and financial obligations or simply to hide away from the real world, sometimes out of choice, other times not.

In the past month, I’ve passed by and visited various places I’ve once called home: Union City, Hayward, Sproul Hall, Rieber Hall, 690 Veteran, Chicago…and it was upon passing these places that I realized that these places were home for me sometime in the past, at a different stage of my life…but no more. And it’s not just cause I sleep on the floor now whenever I visit my family or that I haven’t really settled down somewhere in months, but I’m constantly reminded that unfortunately, I’ve moved on with my life, and so has the rest of the world (totally an overrated concept, by the way).

But that’s the essence of life, right? Change. Sometimes it’s a good thing, it’s something we can believe it. But a lot of times as well it sucks. If something works, why change it, if you’re happy the way you are, why mess with it? I’ve witnessed enough ends of a lot of eras for a lot of people in the past few months to leave me homesick for a place that doesn’t exist anymore.

And so I say this: change is inevitable. Home is a concept, not a place, and it’s up to us to determine whether or not we can accept that.

Your thoughts?

Wow, two completely serious posts in a row. How self-absorbed. Don’t worry folks, I’ll be back to my strange and semi-interesting self when I find the time.

"I came to Haight so I could buy something hip...and I ended up getting something from the GAP"
-AS