Tag: Home

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A traveler’s home is her stuff

Today, I was hanging out in my kitchen when my roommate, Alex, came home after going on a hike with our friend Megan. As only roommates can do (because no one else cares enough to listen), we began chatting about the most minute details of our day.

“I hadn’t seen Megan since before I got back from vacation (about one week ago),” Alex said. “And, of course, even though I put it in my bag, I forgot to give her the bracelet I got her.”

I told her how much that drove me nuts too. I hate having other people’s stuff in my house, I hate it when people leave things behind and, of course, I hate leaving my own things behind.

I like knowing that everything I need can fit in this backpack.
I like knowing that everything I need can fit in this backpack.

Continue reading “A traveler’s home is her stuff”

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The Shore Was Made for Scavengers

Following my graduation from the Jersey Shore beach paradise that is Monmouth University, I did the most reasonable thing and I could think of rented a house a block from the beach for the winter with no job prospects in sight. What could possibly go wrong?

As I signed my name in blood in that overly-air-conditioned Century 21 office three months before graduation, I knew, as a hopelessly logical human being, that what I was doing was stupid. I was panic-struck I wouldn’t be able to afford my rent, I was petrified that it was much more difficult than I had imagined to find a job, and I knew that employment down by the shore was few and far between. However, that panic was outweighed by an even greater fear – that of returning to the mountains with my parents. I hoped it would all just work out. 

I couldn’t even bear the thought of leaving my one true love, the shore. I couldn’t imagine not hearing the waves as I slept or taking an afternoon walk down Ocean Avenue or staying with all my beachrat friends in one-square-mile seaside towns. I literally didn’t know if I could fathom the loss of the paradise that I had grown accustomed to for the last four years.

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So I signed, and nine long months proceeded to drag by, similar as to how I dragged my tattered suitcase on the floor back-and-forth and back-to-forth from my dream-like beach home to my new-found place of employment… two hours north.

Even though I had fun (on the weekends) – I enjoyed long crisp runs on the Long Branch boardwalk, supplied a boarding house for my backpacked friends, and wandered to my favorite seaside bars and restaurants only miles from my house – the whole debacle was a nightmare. I totaled my car, put 9,000 miles on my new car in six months, spent money people spend to live near their jobs only I lived two hours from my job, and pretty much gave up my life for a constant view of the ocean. It was not worth it. It did not all work out.

I grew resentful of the place that I loved. I angrily drove down Ocean in my 9,000 miles-older car, glaring at the winterized and empty version of the place that used to be mine. I probably spent most of my time in my room, drinking wine alone and packing my things for the next journey north, which came every four days at which point I would camp out at my mother’s home for three days (an hour and a half away from my work also) before returning back to the shore.

But, thankfully, all bad things must come to an end. The lease ended, I got a new job, and… I moved back to the mountains. With my parents.

This transition seemed equally daunting. Move home? Back to the middle of nowhere? With my… mom? Oh god. Why life.

However, the summer started up quickly and my friends rallied me to their places in Seaside, Point Pleasant and Long Branch. Most weekends, I run around my room, eagerly throwing my belongings into a patched backpack before getting in my car and eating my dinner on my lap so I can make it to my friends’ homes before they go out for the night. I sleep on dingy basement couches, I eat Jersey bagels from my driver’s side, I shower at the beach, and… I’m so happy. 

Things will probably change once the summer hoopla wears down and I miss my beach (and my old reliable beach house) once again, but for now, I think a lot of the shore appeal for me is the nomadic pull of it all.

Part of the fun is wondering on Friday afternoons, How am I going to get there? and Where am I going to sleep? I kind of like trying to find a secluded spot to change clothes in my car or sketchily sneak into bathrooms. I like not knowing when my time in paradise is going to end and who I am going to end up seeing from my favorite spot on North Beach. If paradise becomes the everyday, is it still paradise? If it becomes your home, can you resist not taking it for granted, not counting its flaws? Can you get sick of the most stunning window view you could ever think up?

I really don’t know.

But what I do know is that the shore was made for scavengers with backpacks in their cars and dirt on their faces… which is why that’s where you’ll find me every weekend, every time.

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My Life Aboard The Traveling Circus

As anyone who has ever read one thing written by me ever, you probably know that the most settled I have ever been is the few years where I lived in the boondocks at the edge of the woods with my mother, a yappy beagle, and an orange cat.  Not very exciting… or so it seems. 

Now that I’m back, (poorly) adjusting to post grad life, it seems all the more depressing. I have no one to hang out with, the only thing to do on a Friday night is go bowling (except there’s no one to go with…), and the only bar within a reasonable distance is Applebee’s, which doesn’t really work for me because I’m not ready to pick up soccer moms quite yet.

However, back in the day, this town was the place to be! Well, not really, but we made the best of it. Because there was nothing easy to do (…the closest mall is still 30 minutes away…) we had to make our own fun. Every single day. Mostly because we didn’t have a choice, but even still, it made us able to have fun in a cardboard box. I used to be good friends with a girl who moved to London, and her friends there in the city wouldn’t even believe her when she told them the trouble we got into on the weekends, no mind-altering substances necessary. We didn’t have a bar or a movie theater or a mall to keep us company, so we certainly never gave up being creative trying.

We would take our friends’ cars and hide them around town and make scavenger hunts for them to find them again. We would play golf in the middle of the night, setting up our own courses in abandoned playgrounds. We made our own boardgames, tie-dyed sheets in the backyard and then made them into tents and camped out under them, ran through high school hallways by nightfall, and otherwise caused innocent mischief like only kids can do.

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To do these things, I didn’t have to get on a plane or pay an astronomical museum “donation” fee. I didn’t have to try to find a dirty hostel to stay at or figure out why I had to pay for tap water at an overpriced tourist restaurant and I didn’t have to listen to a tour guide with a heavy accent tell me the history of anything. Instead, all I had to do was walk outside and call one of my dopey friends to come over.

In many ways, I think that it was these boondocks adventures that prepared me for a nomad life, one spent living out of a suitcase and scavenging for free meals and trying to solve little crises that only happen when you’re 18, dumb, and broke. Irony is, as much as we all complained about living in the edge of nowhere back in the day (and then, trying to make the best of it by having more fun than anyone who lived in civilization), it was those quirky adventures that made us yearn for it for every year onward, always keeping us upon the life aboard the traveling circus.

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On My Way Home

Living on the Jersey Shore, surrounded by 24 hour diners, dark-haired greaseballs, and leopard print yoga pants, I couldn’t really be much further from Italy, where well-dressed people enjoy shots of expresso and kiss on street corners. I think nostalgically about my time in Italy daily, often wondering how I ended up back here surrounded by the congested parkway and the smog of the nearby city. Often, it feels like that was another world, another lifetime, and it becomes more and more difficult to remind myself that was me there and not a body double. However, during every afternoon run on the boardwalk, gazing out over the pink sky and quietly whispering winds, I sometimes forget that I’m here at all and instead, I’m taken back to being that carefree, kind-of-dirty kid one year ago.

The Jersey Shore beach doesn’t really look like any of the beaches I ever saw in Italy did. It doesn’t look like the spotted mountainside beach towns of Cinque Terre, nor does it possess the sunny winding roads of Sorrento or the wilderness-ridden cliffs of Capri. The air isn’t as light and clean here and the people aren’t as happy and slow-moving. Hell, even the water here doesn’t have the turquoise dreamy tides of the Mediterranean. However, seaside smells and salty air are the same no matter what town you’re in, and the little towns on the Shore are no different. Sometimes when running on the boardwalk, I almost want to close my eyes and, just for a second, remember my first weekend trip to Cinque Terre.

The more places that you go, the more that you realize how remarkably similar many of them are. Don’t get me wrong here – the world is a quirky place, reminiscent of a family of black sheep where each cousin is a little different from the next. There is no place in the world with the tres chic of Paris, the art splendor of Florence, or the loom of Budapest. However, they all have sister qualities within them nevertheless. New Orleans is the dirty, rogue sister of Savannah, San Francisco, the big-city hipster brother of Seattle. And when you happen to run into one of these unexpected family members, even in a place as unsexy as the Jersey Shore, it’s always a welcome reminder of the home that once was.

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The Weight of The World

“How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.”

– Up In The Air (2009)

I’m not sure if I can ever say it quite so eloquently or quite so sadly as George Clooney did when he played Ryan Bingham in “Up In The Air,” but after the last few days in the hoopla of the final and rather surprising selling of my house, not the only house I’ve ever lived in but certainly the most significant, I can say that I agree with our handsome friend.

Traveling is a funny thing. When we’re on the road, we depend on the little we have on our backs. Which is probably why many of us sweat wondering what we’ve forgotten, double-checking for our phones and our keys and our credit cards and if you’re me, a pair of ear plugs and extra underwear. By the end of a trip, as much as I always love the destination I had the pleasure of visiting, I’m always a little relieved to be free of this stress and to be back at my house, my house, where everything is where I put it and everything is comfortable, familiar, and ordinary. In a life of uncertainties and insanity, it is this ordinary, this average, that is effortlessly grounding. 

However, when you have to give the place you live to someone else, a total stranger, your life is at ends with itself. When I think about someone else who I don’t know and never will know sitting in the exact place I’m sitting in now, closing a broken window that is mine and running down hallways that are mine and stumbling into doorways drunk that are mine, it makes me pretty uneasy.

Unfortunately, this is the way of the world. I’m a 22-year-old postgrad living in my mother’s house so quite honestly, I have zero say in the matter, and rightly so. I can’t make my family and my childhood toys stay in a place that I would desperately love to move out of just so that I can always know that they are there, my life, my ordinary, waiting patiently for my return on a particularly gloomy weekend.

It’s at this point where we have to ask ourselves: How much do I weigh? When your house is gone, when your life is gone, you have to restart. You have to look at your life and arm yourself with what items, what memories, and what people matter, and you have to create a new home within yourself.

And this is travel. When scavenging the open road, we don’t have our comfy beds and our mother’s cooking and the safety of our locked windows at night. Instead, we will stay in unfriendly rooms with people we will never see again and we will pack our toothbrushes up after using them. In this way, what we do in our travel is what we must do in life when it is time to reevaluate, move on, and restart. We create homes inside ourselves while packing as little as we can possibly fit into our patched backpacks.

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Because, as always, for an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself. 

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Where to Nest

When you’ve lived in pretty much the same place for your entire life, a funny thing happens… you really start to absolutely, positively loathe it.

And, at the same time, every place I basically have gone ever I have wanted to move to, which I do not hesitate to tell my mother about. Her eyes get glossy for a second before she realizes that I’m probably full of shit, when then she says, “Well that’s nice, honey” before going back to finishing her dinner and I’m stuck there feeling like a little kid who says they want to be an astronaut when they grow up.

However, by no means is New Jersey an unpleasant place, despite the things you have heard me say and the rumors you have undoubtedly heard. (If you want the truth, the reason we make fun of Jersey is because we want everyone else to stay the hell out). In actuality, it is the garden state (shocker) and is full of green forests, beautiful beaches, bustling towns, and life.

Driving down Ocean Avenue to work is always a pleasant reminder of this. Yes, to me, New Jersey may be a little overdone, and I wouldn’t mind eventually finding a new place to set up camp and move on to bigger and better things. At the same time, I try to look at these beautiful beaches as an outsider and that’s when I remember…

This is the most beautiful place in the world. Long Branch

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There’s No Place Like Home.

Having returned to America from my semester in Florence, Italy last Saturday, I have clearly taken my time in posting anything about my farewell to Italy and my return back to this strange country I call home. This is because all that I can articulate about the whole thing is

I am sad

And happy

The end.

Because honestly, how do you sum up the strangest, most exciting, tiresome, scary, and thrilling three and a half months of your life? How do you put that into pre-packaged little words that you scramble away on your laptop back at home in your childhood bed?

Sitting in this bed with my stuffed animals and my best friend Dona, the same thing I have done for the last god-knows-how-many years, makes me feel like those three and a half months in Italy weren’t even real. When people ask me the much-anticipated question how was Italy? I just want to ask them, wait, I was in Italy? That was me in my own life? What? 

And at the same time, I feel like kind of a jerk when I’m standing in line in Starbucks chatting with my friends and I say Oh, in Istanbul, Starbucks has way better holiday drinks and the woman in front of me turns around and gives me a confused look. I feel even worse when I ask my family, Hey, what’s new? and they have nothing to report, when all I want to do is tell them about how I spent the weekend before last in Ireland. I feel spoiled, awful. For a second, saying Florence sounds so natural and it rolls off my tongue because it was where I called home. Now, it is a faraway place that people dream of visiting.

At the same time, I remind myself that I made this decision to go, and it was scary and exciting and I did it, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of to not want to be the same person I was back in August. It’s okay to come home and not be happy anymore with going to Applebee’s for dinner when I could be at a family-run hole-in-the-wall place or go on yet another vacation to Florida. It’s okay to not want to wear sweats and Uggs and look like every other cookie-cutter girl in their Victoria’s Secret gear and it’s okay to want to explore the cities that are in your own backyard that you now see that you haven’t really experienced yet.

And yet it’s also okay to take back the life that was yours- your friends, your jobs, your much-loved responsibilities and your big bed and your pets and your obscene amount of purses that still have tags on them. It’s okay to appreciate your television set in English and the fact you can now send text messages without asking what’s the wifi password? I missed my friends and my cat and the fact that I am needed here in America, that people rely on me and I’m not just flitting about aimlessly just because I felt like it.

On this note, I feel like some of the things I wanted so badly to come home to maybe weren’t so great after all. I craved pancakes and bacon and buffalo sauce and driving, and now that I have it, I miss my beautiful pastas and fresh croissants and taking a nice walk to class. It’s funny how the things that once seemed so important really aren’t so important at all. I used to wish I had my dryer back and that I had all my clothes in my closet back to wear. Now I see I wear all the same outfits I wore in Italy anyway.

So what am I getting at here? Um, that’s a good question. I was hoping this was something I would be answering at the end of this post but maybe it’s just not possible to make these grandiose conclusions after something profound. I’m happy to be home, to have my life back and my friends back. Yet I am saddened by the problems I see in America that I was blind to in the past. All I can think of is that day we got in our taxi at the ripe time of 7:00 am in the much-fitting pouring rain and bid farewell to our beautiful Duomo, our beautiful home, that we will never return to, that feels like a dream.

Home

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Where are We, Anyway?

Today, my mother’s usual (and chronic) lateness led me to stomp off to the hotel breakfast alone, which, although I’m sure appeared pathetic to the average person, seemed perfectly fine to me as I was still half asleep (at 11:00 am).

Anyway, I think that this one waiter felt kind of bad for me, so he came out to chat since there was no one else who needed to be seated anyway. We got to chatting, and the 21 years old double major in Drama and Business turned out to be a New Orleans native.

My annoying self: “Wow! That’s so cool! Man, it must be so fun to live here. Do you go out on Bourbon a lot?”

Him (names have been forgotten): “Na, not really. It was fun when I was younger, when I had to pay a 20 to get into one of the clubs. But now it’s just like… I’ve already done it. It’s boring.”

WHAT? NEW ORLEANS BORING? was my first thought. But, when I thought about it, we all feel this way, like where we are has become too stale, whether we live in Paris or Sydney or a small tow in New Jersey.

When I moved to my current town, it actually wasn’t so bad. We drove around the dark streets at night, standing in fields and stargazing. We built forts in the backyard next to our bonfires. We swam in the neighbor’s pool till we pruned, then crept home in a spook. Then, we did it all again the next day.

But it seems to me like no matter where you live, you reach a point that, for many reasons, the romanticism fades away and cabin fever takes over from the outside in. Who knows, maybe one day that kid will come back to NOLA and I’ll go back to my mountain town. Or maybe, he will move far away and never even call. Who knows.

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Let’s Go Home.

Today in the car, after an unfortunate visit with boring and expired family members, I had a thought–

I just want to go home. 

Yet curiously enough, when I thought of the “home” that I wanted to go to, I didn’t think of my house nestled in Morris County, the house that I have lived in for most of my life, where my family is, my childhood friends, my blue room, my dumb animals. Instead I thought of a different place– the beach house I rented at school and the room that I lived in for a measly three months, which I shared.

When I am old and gray, the time I spent in that house compared to the years that I have will be incredibly inconsequential. A few short months in a house that I had only seen once before, a house where I owned nothing inside it but my clothes and my bed sheet (and yes, just one, because the other one was my roommate’s). Yet, that will always be a time that I remember, in a room that I shared with my best friend (and a room stuffed with beds so I ended up sharing it with a lot of other people too). It was a house where we threw parties and danced on the same countertops that I learned to cook in. Where my friends would light fireworks in the front yard and try to jump in the closed pool and spray the fire extinguisher for fun. It was where we stumbled home a countless amount of times, and where we tried to catch kittens in the backyard and poked around through our landlord’s endless amount of stuff hiding in the damp basement.

It doesn’t matter how much time you spend in a place. It doesn’t matter if it’s your car, an apartment you spent a weekend camping out on the couch, or an otherwise forgettable house in an ordinary neighborhood. What makes a place home isn’t how much of your stuff that you can jam in there. It’s the significance of the people that you get lucky enough to be shacked up with.

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Pack the Car, Mom

I have a confession to make.

As much as I love to wander, I also love my house. My house on the hill with my dear animals and blonde mother feels like a battery pack in which I can stop in between wherever I have to be and I can eat some food (for free, mind you) pet the cat, sit on my awesome bed, read a magazine, and change my clothes (again). However, a major problem is presented when you opted to spend your summer working an hour and a half away from where you live.

You end up with a new home. And that is your car.

At first, I was a little anxious about having to literally pack up everything I could possibly need (gifts for happy hosts, cooking utensils, sports bras, clean underwear, stuffed animals) and stuff it into my dear Ford Focus, since I often forget things and end up having to make some pitstops. But there’s something raw about living out of your car. As I drove out of the wilderness where I live for the first time to embark on one of my many journeys, I realized:

I don’t need anything. 

Yup. That’s right. You don’t need your running clothes, because you can run barefoot down the boardwalk. You don’t need clean clothes, because you can wash them in the sink. You don’t need water bottles, because there are water fountains in the local department store. You don’t need anything. You can relax.

And with this came a freedom. For once, I wasn’t worrying about how I was going to stop home and run these silly little errands that don’t really need to get done anyhow (Read the mail? Why bother). I didn’t worry about anything. Instead, I put the to-do list away, left my phone in the console, and went about my merry way. Having nothing solid to do is refreshing, wonderful, new. Stay out a few extra days? Who cares. Miss the Saturday morning workouts? Whatever. I would rather spend my time with the ones I find, the books I come across, or the scenery I stumble upon anyway.