nawl

Home now. Happy Thanksgiving.

I've been feeling homesick lately.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep from screaming out "The east coast is a soulless pit full of pale people who dress in tasteful collared shirts and short skirts and pointy-toed high heels all carefully matched in seasonally-appropriate color schemes and live in boxy houses and who relax by sitting in bars and getting drunk and only work hard in search of some kind of external validation and eat beautiful food that tastes uniformly like cardboard and nobody touches anyone unless it's sexual," where by "east coast" I actually mean the ivy-league Princeton microcosm that I spend most of my time in.

I mean, I know that isn't entirely fair. East coast people who get stuck in California complain about the lack of seasons and black-and-white cookies.

But really, instead of mountains and sea, there are strip malls and wimpy trees. What am I supposed to do?

The weather is dipping towards winter. Last week the temperature dropped 30 degrees within a couple hours, and when I woke up yesterday morning the sidewalk was dotted with frozen plates of ice covering the puddles from the rain the day before.

When I took my bike out, the gear shift and brakes were stuck until I pulled on the cables and little chunks of ice fell out.

With other students from the bay area, we reminisce about cheap food that doesn't suck, about living in Berkeley co-ops, about Gaskell ball. With students who aren't, I end up trying to explain what exactly it is about long-haired bi Pagan poly geeks that I miss, and tell probably inappropriate stories about food orgy and naked hot tubbing that are sure to brand me as a hairy hippy for years to come.

Am I so fundamentally a west-coast person that I'll never be happy anywhere else?

(Update: Mike, native east-coaster and former Princetonite, responds to my holier-than-thou grousing.)