Free Documentaries, and Going Home.

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Since I got sick I've been watching a lot of tv on my computer. Most of my time has been spent watching most of the first season of West Wing since yesterday, but I also watched a couple of documentaries online. I have to say that between Jesus Camp and Supersize Me, I haven't had the best impressions of Americans to contemplate today. In fact, they've been pretty repugnant.

Looking at footage from Missouri didn't make a very good impression of small-town middle-America, either. Just fast food restaurants, huge signage, ugly highways and parking lots as far as the camera would show. Maybe it's because I live in an 18th-century stone building. Maybe it's because I live in a city made of 18th-century stone buildings with independently-owned shops on the ground floor and apartments up above, but that kind of life just is not attractive anymore.

Physically, that is. What I wouldn't do for a Salina Dairy Deal hamburger and a Dr. Pepper right now. Or to drive a car. Or to be enrolled at OU, so that I could call myself a full-time student with a straight face.

It's not that I'm not enjoying the life, and it's not that I won't be ready to go home. I just wonder how I'm going to feel about it when the time comes to leave. I think I might feel like neither place is the right one.

Comments

  1. Anonymous01 February, 2010 06:05

    Oh man, I completely identify with that. I can't wait to go home, and yet I know I won't be happy there--not entirely. The long, long stretches of ugly highway flanked by ugly signs and clusters of parking lots.

    But then there's here, in which everything is gray and there is never any sun and I am constantly, constantly cold. Here, where everything is hard and complicated and I am always tired.

    The thing about living abroad is that it changes you, such that you never feel quite at home anywhere anymore. Visas should come with a warning label.

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