uprootin’

By Wednesday I’ll have to have all my belongings in a few boxes, packed snugly in my friend’s basement. By Sunday I’ll be on a plane headed back to Portland. If we’re being honest, I wish I had more time; this summer has seemed like both a lifetime and a brief blip, and I feel like I haven’t been able to accomplish much that I set out to do.

I’m leaving completely unsure what my future on this career path will look like, what I want, or how I’ll get there. I’ll be going home to laze around for a month, not earning a wage, no goals to accomplish. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait to see my fiancé, my best friends, my family. I just can’t help feeling I’m not much use.

Travel is excessively stressful for me as well. Having to spend an exorbitant amount of money to stuff myself in a metal tube and be shot across the country? Not to mention having to submitting myself to the whim of the TSA, sitting down for hours on end… you get it.

My summer hasn’t been incredible. There’s the heat wave. The fact I’ve been eating the same meals on a weekly rotation from the dining hall, having no breakfast meal swipes, and not being able to afford my own food. Not to mention being relatively isolated for the past two months. But I feel that in spite of those things I’m having trouble with feeling like I always have to move my sense of ‘home’ right after settling in.

The saving grace this summer has been my new bike and getting back into exercising, but even that I’m leaving behind for a while. I can’t say I have solutions to these problems, which is disappointing both from the perspective of wanting to write about them and also from having to deal with them. I’ll keep on trying though, and I hope that if you’re feeling a bit uprooted that you will too.

My media recommendations for this month are The Three Body Problem by 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin), The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Timespinner for the Nintendo Switch.