tbaroundtheworld

I’ve been back in the country for a couple of weeks and things have been anything but dull. I thought it would be tough coming back to this life after a full month at home, and it was about as bad as I expected it to be, worse perhaps in a dozen little nagging ways. When you don’t want to be somewhere, the refrigerator door that won’t close is something close to intolerable. As are the elevator that smells like cigarette smoke and the mayonnaise jar that you can’t get open. Never mind the fact that it’s crappy mayonnaise and the picture on the label – a little line drawing in red of a kewpie doll – is enough to warrant defenestration from the 24th floor. But you get through those things and settle back into your routine and focus on the bigger issues. Like spending time thinking about your situation and what you’ve gained and lost in a commitment such as this. I’ve learned and awful lot about people, and I’ve learned a bit about myself and chief among those epiphanies is the one associ...

“I don’t exist when you don’t see me; I don’t exist when you’re not here.” Or so sang the singer in a song I used to like - away back when. Those lyrics have been threading through my mind these last few weeks as I spent some time managing the horse ranch and trying to maintain some control of my work which sat 8000 miles and 14 time zones across the sea. While the man singing the song was of course talking about his SO, I think those words speak clearly to the life of an expatriate. When you live in two places, it eventually feels like you live nowhere at all. While your family clearly doesn’t forget you, you certainly fall off the Friend Radar. You run into people in your home country and you can see their tubes firing as they try to remember the last time they saw you. You talk about insignificant things because if you’ve been gone long enough, the ongoing changes have mounted to the point where you may as well start anew in getting acquainted. The flip side – your friends in the fo...