Well, I have just come back from the burn center’s family camp weekend which was wonderful, sad, happy, and endearing… but what happens at camp stays at camp… and in the hearts and heads of those who shared it… so I won’t be blogging about it.

As I was riding back to a friend’s house, I was amazed to find comfort in the boring mundane scenes of the Los Angeles freeway system.  The brown, dried out grasses and hillsides; the brown fake hacienda appearance shopping malls; McDonald’s with tile roofs – also trying to embrace the hacienda architecture; the smoggy haze that envelops the Valley; things that had become, at least to me, synonymous with ugly and represented the parts of LA that I wanted to leave behind.  There is beauty in LA – mountains, beaches, parks, etc., but the color and beauty of LA that I most miss is the colors of the wonderful friendships that I hold extremely dear to me.

I realized as I looked with fondness upon the urban desert landscape, that my comfort was in the fact that it is also so familiar.  For the past six months, I have been living in Pennsylvania.  There have been true moments of beauty – sunrises, sunsets, walks in the parks and woods, and drives through the mountains.  But I have resisted calling Pennsylvania home and adopting the new landscape.  It has been my temporary status that has kept me an outsider as much as the short duration of my stay.

It seems strange to me that some time in the coming years, I will have that same sense of familiar with New York.  Is that even possible?  How can the bustling city that throbs and pulses and seems so alive be a place that will become blandly familiar.  I’m sure aspects of it will, but it is all so new for me right now.  And I suppose that sense of mystery, adventure, or just plain unknown, is what is so unrelaxing in my life right now.  So my brain is essentially clinging to LA as a sort of respite from the limbo I have been living.

Does this even make sense?  Or am I so exhausted from the weekend that I am not only not waxing poetic, I am waning un or il-philosophically.

As ever,

K. Quinn