finding the familiar

I feel grossly overbooked lately.

in describing this feeling to my mother, I said, I feel like I go to work all week, go to whole foods all weekend, and spend the rest of my time trying to catch up with everyone else or on sleep. it's like I'm doing the same thing over and over again, and I just keep watching the time pass by without being a part of it.

she goes, oh, so it's like you're in groundhog day.

though she has a point, I knew that I'd missed something in explaining how I felt about how I spend my time lately.

somewhere between the 62-hour work week, the healthy amount of sleep I try to get, the social life I try to maintain, I still feel lonely. I still feel like I am missing out. and it makes me a whiny, grumbly sort of person when I'm doing something I don't think I should be doing with my time.

and "whiny, grumbly sort of person" is exactly how I would describe myself on labor day.

it was my little brother's 26th birthday, and I was absent for a family function yet again. tired of not having actual days off, and angry because I hadn't thought sooner to drive home for the day, I was a pouty mess for most of it. when it came time to finally venture out into the humidity for some socializing, I basically relied on nick to drag me.

like the end of any feel-good story, I returned home several hours and two different social engagements later feeling much better about life. my friends are silly, vibrant people who tell ridiculous stories and make me think, and I am grateful that they are (whether they know it or not) easily able to pull me out of such funks.

but I still missed my family as I crawled into bed that night... until I realized that I'd seen them all day, and the best part of my family was already in bed with me.

see, each time I move I have a hard time remembering that being home is less about being surrounded by the comfortable and more about being comfortable in your surroundings. I could move home to kalamazoo in a minute, knowing that I would recognize smells and sights and street names with little-to-no effort, but being there for more than a weekend would make me want to jump out of my skin. the nice thing about st louis, and the thing that I am apparently just now realizing, is that I am beginning to have both sides of the equation.

now I just need to work on that whiny/grumbly thing before it becomes too familiar to everyone around me.