Is there really no place like home?

So I'm at home. In lovely Dobbs Ferry New York. My cats are nice. My parents are nice. Everything is very disconcertingly the same. Not like I really expected it to change, but somehow being really tired and having had such a traumatizing past few days (more on that later) made me think coming home would be more emotional or scary or disconcerting. But no, it's just... coming home.

I have this mural on my wall that me and two friends of mine, Gershon and Mike, painted in the spring of my sophomore year of high school. We put masking tape up in the shape of a jazz band (trumpet, piano, drums, and acoustic bass) and splattered lots of colors of paint on top, in swirls and spirals and snakes and polka dots, and then we took the tape off so there's an outline of a jazz band in the midst of all this paint. Anyhow, I have this incomprehensible urge to get rid of it. Paint over all the paint on the walls, take down the brick wall of concert tickets and old posters that covers almost half the room, get rid of the posters we took marching against the war in Iraq. It's not that they aren't all part of my history, but somehow, and maybe this is just the complete exhaustion talking, they don't feel emotionally relevant anymore. With the wall, this is a good thing; there's a lot of things about high school that I'm really really glad are not emotionally relevant any more. But, coming home in general - it feels weird, how it's no longer the crazy emotional rush of memory and history that it used to be.

But I promised to talk about my traumatic weekend. Just because, as if having to leave everyone wasn't enough, it included such highlights as:
- getting nearly bitten by the dog I will be living with for winter and spring (the skin isn't really broken - well maybe a little bit - but there's a huge painful discolored mouth-shaped bruise on my thigh)
- getting attacked by a cat on the mini Bald Spot (scratches on left hand)
- having to drive through a massive zero-visibility thunderstorm to get back from Lakeville

anyway. So it's been dramatic. And spending the past day in Northfield with so many people gone, and then sleeping in the quad with hardly anything there except Rachel, Russell, and garbage, has just been weird, and scary, and really lonely. So maybe it's good to be at home, and then I can come back to Northfield with a clean-ish slate. -ish.