i used to have a blog. in the last year of my undergrad, and for a very brief period after i graduated. and then i stopped. i'm not entirely sure why i stopped. i think it may have been because suddenly my life was so different (without really being different at all) and i didn't totally know how to make sense of it, but the things i thought and wrote in that old blog just didn't seem to fit with me anymore. so i just stopped writing. 

almost entirely, actually. 

which seems even more ridiculous when i was seriously considering writing a book last year. i had all of these things that i wanted to work out, but yet i could never get myself to write it. writing something always makes it feel more permanent, more real, more damaging than it ever does when it's merely spoken. and that's what i wanted : i wanted to root the sadness and pain and frustration that i felt in something permanent. i also wanted to lay some blame. yet, at the same time - and i think this may be the biggest reason i didn't write - i wanted to pretend that the people i was angry at didn't have that kind of power over me and my emotions and my life. well, obviously they did. 

so now i haven't written in ages. i've written essays, and grad school proposals, and emails and messages on people's facebook walls. i've been thinking a lot lately about going and buying a nice new journal - i'm taking this class right now on life-writing, and so i'm constantly thinking about why people write, and why people want to read about other people's lives. and yet i still haven't bought that journal. i guess sometimes it can be hard to start something that feels so important.  

tonight i read my friend emily's blog for the first time - i don't think i realized she'd been writing one. so i guess her blog kind of inspired me to start a new one myself. or at least it was the straw that broke the camel's back. anyways, thanks emily. 

oh, the title. i don't really like having to title things - i usually feel like the title is annoying and stupid about 5 minutes after i've decided on it. the title for this blog comes from a book i had to read in my first year of university for a world religions class. in the introduction, the author writes: "This book, then, has a home - a home whose doors swing freely in and out, a base from which to journey forth and return, only to hit the road again in study and imaginings when not in actual travel.  If it is possible to be homesick for the world, even places one has never been and suspects one will never go, this book is born of such homesickness"

it sounds dumb already.