2001-10-16 - 10:43 p.m.
Bitten by the nostalgia bug

On the 1 to 10 scale of goodness, today measured about a 3.

Complete agh factor at work ... don't ask. It seems that now that I'm leaving, they can't make up their minds whether to suddenly demand more from me or give me nothing to do ... in spurts, off and on, all day long. Do all of these reports, have them ready in 20 minutes! Oh, thank you Shell, very nice .... (tick tock tick tock) Oh, there is a bug you must fix now! Oh thank you Shell, very nice ... (tick tock tick tock) ....

Anyway. You get the idea.

Add in the influence of decongestants (necessary to keep the ears unplugged and unpainful, but extremely blurring to the senses) and a sudden attack of nostalgia, amplified by the subject matter of the TV shows on tonight, and you get one extremely frowny Shell.

Silly of me, to suddenly miss a town I left behind twelve years ago ... more than half my life. It's strange though. Azash just met a guy on the 'net, in his EQ guild of all places, that left Laporte, TX in 1988, the same year we did. He lived on 12th street, we lived on 7th street. Talk about coincidence! What are the odds? Anyway. It got me to remembering all the things we left behind.

Then it hit me. I never get to reminisce about those years. My brother doesn't really care to ... he was younger, and transplanted much easier than I did. My parents don't miss the place that much, and they'd moved more than once before that. For me, though, it's a really important chunk of who I am. And it never really occured to me before today that there are damn few people I can talk to about my childhood, without running into the mmmhm-mmmhm-nod-and-smile routine. There's just no context for understanding. And I don't just mean the Texas part. I mean the whole ball of wax, everything about my life until age 11.

*sniff* The neighbors are smoking again. Most evenings when we have the patio door open, the smell drifts in and my brother gripes. I don't mind so much, though. It's bad health-wise, I know, but it reminds me of riding in trucks with my uncle when we were little. He'd make us swear not to tell our aunt, then light up and puff away. It reminds me of Papaw's jokes about snuff. It reminds me of sitting around campfires and telling ghost stories. It reminds me of summer barbeques out on the patio. It reminds me of woodsmoke on a chilly winter day, just after we moved, when all of Oregon seemed fresh-minted new, and everlastingly exciting.

Damn. I'm 23. Why get so teary over nonsense like this? Grow up, Shell. Find a job, get a life, move on ... *sigh* Right. Optimism. Forward-looking. I remember, eye on the goal, the play's the thing ... Ah, who am I kidding.