it snows nine months of the year and hails the other three

So it's not like I miss home so hard it hurts. But I will be really happy to get home and see everyone again. Like...I really, really REALLY miss my friends, and my dogs, and just the normal comforts of home. I love it here, I really do, but I am homesick. Very much so.

Of course, I'm only home for about eight days until I go skiing and then I'm back here for 2 more months. But two months isn't four, and I get a little bit of time to recuperate. I just. Wow. I just miss home a lot.

It's to be expected, I think, considering I've never been away from home this long. It's just, I haven't really been feeling the desire to be home until now.

Bah.

so today I went to my cousin's confimation at my old church.

Now, before I say anything else, I went to my old church for ten years. When we started going there, there were about 25 people in the whole church. It grew some, and when I started kindergarten sunday school, there were five people in my class. I was confirmed with 131 other suburbian eighth-graders, and now, three years later, my cousin was in a class of nearly two hundred and the congregation is pushing 10,000 members.

Anyway, because we started when the church was so small, we got to know the pastors really well. Granted, I haven't seen any of the official pastors in years, but I ran into one right away and he didn't recognize me. I wasn't particularly disappointed, as I don't look like I did three years ago, and he does have 10,000 people to take care of, and I'm not one of them, but I was surprised, a little. We were in a small group with him. He called me by name every time he saw me from when I was four to when I was fourteen. It just felt odd, you know?

And then I got into the church, and the sanctuary was packed, and I was right next to this pretty little courtyard that I couldn't go into because I had to be there and I jsut couldn't stand it. I got claustrophobic and had a panic attack right there. I can't be comfortable in that church--it was that way for the last year or so I was there, and that hasn't changed at all. I'm just depressed at how everything's changing--that church really was a place of sanctuary for me for a long time, and I miss it when it was small. Now, I'm glad I'm at my other church, though--it's the perfect size and all, but still. I'm pretty flexible with myself, but when it comes to things around me--physical, material things--change is hard for me. I don't like it a lot, even if it's for the better.

It was strange, though.

nebulia out.

I was thinking about why my school doesn't seem to have cliques. I mean, it's such a huge establishment in high school pop culture, and so on, and so forth, et cetera et cetera, et cetera.

And so I was thinking about this, and how my school didn't seem to have any. Is my school just rare? Am I not seeing something here? I'm a cynical idealist to a fault, so I could totally be skipping over something I didn't want to see. And then, as I was walking to class, I realized how small-minded I had been. I had just been thinking about my experiences, no one else's, and that was definitely me lost in my little bubble. As Agnes says, I am an island. One of those little undiscovered volacnic ones 1000 miles away from anything else in the Pacific.

Because there are cliques at my school. I just belong to several of them. Or, more accurately, I edge several of them.

There's me, MBF, and HLBF. Like many groups of best friends, we are a tiny clique unto ourselves. Then I am pretty fully involved in the Anime!Gaming!Et cetera!clique, though I'm not knee-deep (I am knee-deep in manga, just not in the clique). I skirt the drama clique fairly closely; I'm a thespian, I do every play, I participate in the bake sales, IHSSA, and the drama trip, but I'm still not in the inner circle. I circle the choir clique but don't event ry to belong; I love to sing but the choir people piss me off. I know a lot of the people in the music-lover's clique but I'm not in that, either, because I'm no longer actively participating in band or orchestra (never mind that my flute is played at least once or twice a week, if not every night); I totally skip past the Popular!Smart people clique and the Sort of Popular! Smart people clique and join the very loose Nerdy!Smart people clique, which is the least organized, as Smart people always seem to be in other cliques, too.

So I really don't belong in any particular clique. Except MBF's, HLBF's, and mine. And the truth is, I realized as I was walking to class, I don't mind. I know a lot of people. Some of them I don't like, some of them I do, some of them I don't really give a shit either way about...and it's good. Because there are definitely other times for me to belong, and other places for me to belong. And I've been a little bit of a loner; I like books too much and when I get nervous--most of the time--I babble and say stupid shit. So I don't mind. If it's a hole I'm in, I dug it myself and then jumped in, but at least it's got good books and a laptop.

speaking of good books, I highly recommend the one I'm reading now: The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. A great Gothic book mystery, rather like Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas, another one I highly recommend, especially if you like to read.

quote of the post: "and the day came when the risk it took to remain in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." --i'm not sure, but i sure love this quote.

nebulia out.