departure, defocused
Dec. 30th, 2004 01:41 amOne more day here in New Orleans, then it's back to SF for the New Year.
I feel more detatched from the city of my birth each time I visit. Jason and Jennie's second kid is starting to talk. Jason tells me that some of our mutual friends have kids on the way, are getting married. Lewis says much the same happened to the area science fiction fandom folks we knew: married, eaten by jobs, gone... normal.
Sometimes I feel far, far on the outside. Even if I still had the capacity for children, I wouldn't have one on the way. I've never had anything most people would think of as a romantic relationship with any chance of ever leading to that. It's not that it's something I miss - I think my tolerance for kids is about an hour, at best - but it's something so many people end up doing. Something alien.
I started to type something here about wondering what I would've been like, socioromantically, without the gender issues, but I still would've been an involuted little thing after my father died. Besides, lots of other genetic factors would've been different. It's quite possible I'd be as much of a promising failure if I was completely secure in my sex and sexuality. Or that I might've been an inherently optimistic thing.
New Orleans is where I'm from, it's where I grew up. But I really only come back because it's where my mother still lives. I've lost touch with nearly everyone I know who still lives here. Mostly the city just gives me a headache. Literally; all the mold and humidity makes my sinuses unhappy. And the whole place seems so small now, its sprawl constrained by lake and river, its extensions so suddenly and obviously the edge city. So used-up and dying.
It's not home, any more.
I don't know what is.
I feel more detatched from the city of my birth each time I visit. Jason and Jennie's second kid is starting to talk. Jason tells me that some of our mutual friends have kids on the way, are getting married. Lewis says much the same happened to the area science fiction fandom folks we knew: married, eaten by jobs, gone... normal.
Sometimes I feel far, far on the outside. Even if I still had the capacity for children, I wouldn't have one on the way. I've never had anything most people would think of as a romantic relationship with any chance of ever leading to that. It's not that it's something I miss - I think my tolerance for kids is about an hour, at best - but it's something so many people end up doing. Something alien.
I started to type something here about wondering what I would've been like, socioromantically, without the gender issues, but I still would've been an involuted little thing after my father died. Besides, lots of other genetic factors would've been different. It's quite possible I'd be as much of a promising failure if I was completely secure in my sex and sexuality. Or that I might've been an inherently optimistic thing.
New Orleans is where I'm from, it's where I grew up. But I really only come back because it's where my mother still lives. I've lost touch with nearly everyone I know who still lives here. Mostly the city just gives me a headache. Literally; all the mold and humidity makes my sinuses unhappy. And the whole place seems so small now, its sprawl constrained by lake and river, its extensions so suddenly and obviously the edge city. So used-up and dying.
It's not home, any more.
I don't know what is.