This Is Most Definitely NOT Summer

I believe it was Mark Twain that said "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco", and once again I am living that reality. From sunny, muggy jungle heat (sexy!) to overcast, windy gloom: Oh, what a difference 5000 miles or so makes.

Back home...those two words are so loaded I cringe a bit every time I stumble into saying them to someone. I suppose I feel a bit like an international vagabond now, a scoundrel not flying a flag very long in any single place for the past several years, instead jumping back and forth between cosmopolitan San Francisco, the secluded Japan of Oita Prefecture and slow-paced Castro Valley. A segment of the first two will always define a part of me, while the third I'm trying to cut off with a machete as if it were some evil conjoined twin on my shoulder.

For now Maia and I have set up a sort of Hooverville within my parent's house with our collective mass of bags taking up the back room because they can't possibly fit into my old corner cave. How long we will live in the beautiful-yet-soulless hills of the East Bay depend entirely on how many job offerings we can find for positions that won't smother our spirit for life and then how many of those employers even want to speak to us. As of now the count is many of the former and zero of the latter.

*sigh*

Such is the way of things.

--Matt