home/sickness

I'm now on my 6th day home sick from work after returning from India. Nothing serious, and I'll be back at work tomorrow, but I've had an expansive amount of down time to listen to music, read, watch movies and tv shows, eat cereal and make cocoa, do those kinds of things. In spite of the heroic bacterial war being fought in my intestines it's been pretty nice to sit around and unwind.

Unfortunately this all means I've been fully immersing myself in American creature comforts for the past week. A few minutes ago "Hate It or Love It" by 50 Cent came on the tail of a long progression of other random songs chosen by shuffle on iTunes which formed the secret combination of emoti-musical stimuli that would trigger a chain reaction of fond Seattle summer memories, evoking a cresting wave of homesickness from deep within me that rose high over my head, paused a moment for me to consider my reflection standing under it here in Japan, and then sort of knocked me flat.

As a man I'm not expected to focus on or talk about my emotions too much (I've been thinking more about such things since reading Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex", highly recommended), but when I closed my eyes to envision driving south on I-5 into the city with the windows down and 95.7 up on one of those rare blue-skied Seattle days where the Columbia Center gleams on the horizon next to the looming majesty of Rainier and the trees lining the highway seem too vividly green to be real and you come around that last bend in the road and see Elliot Bay and the Puget Sound sweeping out in front of you... as I did again now when writing it, I opened my eyes to find a tear or two in them and felt a little empty space inside carved out by memories of home. For real.

Thank you, 50 Cent, for helping me to explore my emotions as a man.