Back.

I return to Utah to the tune of four loads of laundry, a web of class and job scheduling conflicts, a $688 semester booklist, an engaged best friend, multiple messages from my apartment complex (who has moved me for the third time), unmanageable roots, bad skin (I always break out after long flights), and overall bloated-ness after a week of (literally) living large. Sigh. Saying "I miss Boston" is a gross understatement.

I met my family in a DC hotel and was surprised because though I love them, my first emotional reaction was overwhelming homesickness. We had a wonderful time together, but I'm a different person when I live alone--better in many ways, perhaps worse in some, but always me. It's like a part of my real self dies when I contort myself to fit back into my family niche, a part that reawakens every time I'm away for extended periods of time, but only at the expense of leaving another part of myself starving in the process. I, or what I like to think of as I, can't seem to exist simultaneously. I'm a case study for failed individuation; feed me to Carl Jung.

Manhattan was wonderful and I don't know why so many people speak badly of it. It wasn't Boston--sprawling, green, clean, academic Boston--but it was beautiful, all crowded and lit up and bustling. Everybody there walks just as fast as me and I fit right in as I zoomed down Fifth Avenue, five hundred dollars of Mad Money (my family's version of a surprise cash gift) in my knockoff purse and tiny point-and-shoot in my hand. I can't believe I'd never seen Times Square before. I lived in London before I was sixteen; I saw Paris and Manila before eighteen and made it to Cairo, Jerusalem, and Amman before twenty, but I never made my way to New York before Wednesday. Broadway was a highlight; we saw Jordin Sparks premiere a starring role in "In the Heights" and stopped by "Wicked," of course. We sat in home-run range at a Yankees game and ate sandwiches and cheesecake slices as large as our heads at Carnegie's Deli. We had $50 steaks and limo rides, late-night food cart stops and huge desserts, and it was all fabulously indulgent. Now I just need to make friends who will go back with me. I want to stay out in the city for 30 hours--one day, one night, and one good breakfast before crashing in a hotel room or hostel or what have you. Doesn't that sound fantastic?

Anyway, back to work. Tomorrow: schedule hair appointment, begin work training (and attempt to explain newly developing scheduling conflict), look into buying books, look into buying Lost: The Complete Collection (ohhh yes).