It's true, I've been neglecting my own website for this new lovechild (yet unfinished). Whenever I get a new web project I tend to forget about my own page...but in an effort to apologize, there are a few new pictures in the "photos" section. I've noticed that recently rocket-fish has been tempermental, and for that I apologize. As always, I don't know what the problem is.

You'll all be delighted to know that I am the new owner of this beautiful piece of art, an original 1st press 1968 White Album on white vinyl, original embossed lettering. Could I have given myself a better Christmas present? I think not. With that and Aeroplane out of the way, now I've just got to save up $200 to get the Nick Drake box set. How quickly I'm following in my father's audiophilia footsteps...

Christmas day has been a blast. I find that every year there is more eating involved. This year we had the annual Christmas Eve dinner with the relatives at our house. We had a Spanish feast (which means we used all the same recipes from that catered Christmas party). Then today we had sausage balls, scrambled eggs, grits, and cranberry bread for breakfast. Grapefruit wedges (my favorite candy) and Andes mints for dessert. There was eggnog and wassail, too. Tomorrow is my cousin's birthday, then my sister's first birthday celebration, followed by a later one on the 29th. She'll be 21 this year. In short, we've food coming out our ears.

Every year that my sister and I watch Little Women on Christmas Eve, I find myself reevaluating my life. I guess that's kind of a cheesy thing to admit. How many people reevaluate themselves when they watch movies? I think what's strongest about it is its sense of home and change -- two constants in my own life, which at times seem incompatible. I think that most of the things that move me are about those two ideas. Garden State comes to mind:

Andrew Largeman: You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff, that idea of home is gone.
Sam: I still feel at home in my house.
Andrew Largeman: You'll see when you move out. It just sort of happens one day, and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean, it's like this right of passage. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

And this year more than any other I'm anticipating the conflict of home and change. What will it be like to come home for the holidays and sleep in my old bed, my old room? What will I do with all the posters on my walls once I move out? What will my house smell like when I walk in after weeks of being gone? How will I learn the feel of a new room in the dark, which paths to follow to avoid squeaky floorboards, when I've had my whole life to learn this house? Will I feel like I'm away at summer camp for the rest of my life? And worse, what will happen when my family doesn't live here anymore -- when I can't even visit my old room?

I don't really know how any of it fits anymore. I'm clinging to everything I know of home these last few years -- my beautiful, amazing friends, who are a home in their own sense; the sense of humor we have about things like line breaks or misuses of words like "agoraphobic" that I doubt I'll find anywhere else (I can just see it trailing behind me for the next few years, an awkward silence following every punchline); the smell of my room; the proximity of my sister; my Dad's cooking, my parents' house; the familiarity of roads and street names. I'm clinging to it in the sense that you cling to someone with a tight hug -- it is not so much a fear of letting go, but an effort to be as close as possible, get the most out of it. I am bear-hugging my junior and senior year of highschool like I've bear-hugged nothing else in my life.

Before now everything seemed well-planned and linear -- before I figured out that I have no idea what I want or what I'm doing. It seems like a typically adult realization -- that "oh shit" moment when you realize something about yourself that you hope no one else has noticed. Whereas there used to be some fuzzy concept of the future, now there's just this sort of vacant blackness, like an abyss or a blind spot. There's something there but no real way to see or prove it. Which is a nice way of saying that I have no idea where I want to go to college, what I want to study, where I want to live, or even how concerned I should be about getting there. I'm not thinking about it, really. It's one of those things that I feel like will just happen.

This is another idea that has permeated my existence: things just happen. Home and change and absence just happen. The sense of home I get from being around my friends just happened -- one day they were acquaintances and the next they were family. Change, like college, just happens. Winnie's death and her absence just happened. All of this is wrapped up in Little Women. Every year it's about the same things and it's about something different. Every year I reevaluate.

These are the things I'm grappling with. Mostly, I'm happy and without regrets. Mostly, I'm having such a good time that I can't even begin to tell you all the things I've been learning. Home, change, and absence are perhaps the hardest things to capture.

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