departure, defocused

[egypturnash]

One 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.

Comments

[puppehkat.livejournal.com]

I know how you feel. I grew up in New Orleans and surrounding areas unti I was about 9 years old whe I moved to Georgia.

Since then: I have lost my accent. I ave lost all sense of 'placement'. As in.. I don't know the towns and parishes anymore (which I used to). I still visit because all my extended family lives there.

But when I go 'home' again.. It's just.. I don't know.

It's 'home' only because it's where I grew up. And part of me wants to go back to live there... then I visit and it's like... it feels old.

Part New Orleans' charm is that it has character and history. You can go into a seemingly rundown building and know that the reason its rundown is because it's from the turn of the century.

I dunno. I love New Orleans. Part of me always will. But as the years pass... I find that most of it's greatest memories and moments are just that... memories. I loved New Orleans becuse I remember it through the eyes of a child. And now when I go back and look through the eyes of an adult... it's just... not quite the same.

[defenbaugh.livejournal.com]

Yes I think its a natural reaction to anyone who goes away from their "Home" for a while.

Lasalle/Peru does'nt feel the same anymore to me either.

Nietche(sp?) was right. "You can never go home."

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I stayed in New Orleans until I was about the age most people seem to think I am now. Left on the week of my twenty-fifth birthday. It wasn't a place I was really broken up about leaving, just Where I Was From. There's certainly not much future for me here unless I manage to get regular income as a freelance artist and decide I want to move back to my hometown - which I doubt, as a week of the moldy air is about all my sinuses can really stand.

It seems smaller, every time I come back. And more of its character is leeched away by the big box stores out on the edges.

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

few things are more a more natural, alien, xenophilic experience than extended gestation leading to laborous, pelvis-cracking childbirth...

and Home, as a concept, is so dear and precious.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know what you mean.

Georgia was never home for me, and Ann Arbor kind of became my home town by default. By the time I left town it was getting sort of gentrified, for better and worse, with sleek bagel chain shops replacing old grimy institutions, students who all had SUVs and laptops, that sort of thing. Further and further away from the weird 60s college gloss on a blue-collar midwestern town.

And that was nothing by comparison to Santa Cruz, which Sammi seems to think of the same way I think about A^². I saw a little of what Santa Cruz was in the old days, Sammi lived it, and you saw what it's like now. Anubis Warpus is long gone. Game-a-Lot is now only as cool as the typical small town game shop. Cafe Pergolesi now sucks inflamed red baboon butts.

I'm seriously scared that if I ever got to go back home, it'd be this alien place with lots of yuppies, and little warmth.

[slinky-treecat.livejournal.com]

Home is where you make it. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Someday I should do something with that pencil sketch.

I don't know if I've made one in the time since leaving New Orleans, but whatever I make wherever, I doubt it'll be here.

[secretagentmoof]

I was married for a while, and we'd talked many a time about having kids at some point. It's decidedly weird contemplating that after all the estrogen et al that it'd be incredibly unlikely for that to happen now.

When I visited my parents for Xmas, there were literally only three people I knew that were left. I think the Bay Area is home now, but I'm still not sure. I've been here for six years, though.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Some TGs hear their biological clocks tick away despite the alarm being rather disconnected. I don't think I'm one of them. I have enough trouble raising myself; I can't imagine kids!

The Bay seems a bit more home than LA, but not by that much yet. It's got some of the features of memory-of-home without problems like allergies, at least. Which is better than the void that Los Angeles was. (Though I wasn't allergic to that town, either.)