tired

I came home today and informed Paul why I’ve been so tired lately. I think it’s because I haven’t been drinking caffeine after my two cups before I leave for work at 7:30am. “Because,” I said, “after I got my afternoon mocha…”

Paul shook his head and smiled indulgently. “And how did you feel after that?” he asked.

“Productive!” I said. Which is true. I zipped through a dozen tasks in an hour, and went home somewhat on time. Work has just drained me this week, and I’ve been coming home and more or less collapsing. Today, thanks to that PM caffeine burst, I had enough energy to go to grocery shopping after work and pick up components of a major salad. I haven’t been able to do that all week – I’ve been coming home, eating a sandwich, and falling asleep by 9pm. (I wake up at 6am. 9pm is not all that early)

I suppose the point of all this is that I, again, owe journal entries on our trip to New Orleans, and if it comes down to pasting in the emails I wrote to girlfriends upon return, I’ll do that. Of course, there are pix up on my Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jilliant) It was a very different trip than ones I’ve taken in the past. And it was wonderful.

I’m homesick this week though. For the Island, for Seattle – I’ve planned a trip home for May, maybe that’s why. Maybe it’s that I just finished a book about British Columbia and its forests – the Golden Spruce. Maybe it’s that I always get homesick when I’m worried or anxious, and work has sent me on anxiety jags this week that even my fiance can’t help me with. Or maybe it’s that spring started yesterday, and I miss home in spring, more than anything. The flip side to not having a winter in L.A. (which I love) is that there isn’t a transition to spring. And I miss the collective joy that everyone shares in southwest BC or western Washington in spring, when the cherry blossoms start appearing, and when the whole world smells like the ocean waking up, and everyone shares the same happiness at the hope of the rain ending. I miss being able to feel the way that the atmosphere in Oak Bay changes, from the raw, cold wind off the Straits, to the kind, damp breeze from the south. I miss seeing the crocuses come out in my mom’s garden, and seeing the way Victoria carefully brings out flowers each year to torment the rest of Canada.

I’m home in exactly two months – on May 23rd. I find I’m able to go longer and longer periods without homesickness bouts now. I was thinking about that, remembering how homesick I was in the first few years off the Island. I know now that most of that was just that I was desperately unhappy in the places I had moved to. But part of it was just that I will always be from Victoria, British Columbia. I may not have the kind of extreme, gnawing, conscious longing that I had for home when I was twenty – but at twenty-eight, I still look forward to a time when I go back to one of the cities in Cascadia, anyplace that is rainy in winter, paradise in summer, and surrounded by rivers, mountains, and pointy trees.

I’ll get back home someday – I’m extremely lucky to be spending the rest of my life with a man who agreed that Seattle sounded like a fine plan. I hate to think of the pouting I would have had to do if he’d been terribly attached to Pittsburgh and wanted to go back. For now, we live in Los Angeles, which I quite like (certainly much more than I ever expected to). Our careers are here, as are vast majority of our friends and lives. And I’m quite happy with the way my life is in this city, with all the connections I have, whether they’re major ones to my best friends, or minor ones to people and places I don’t see as often. But someday, we’ll get back up North. And then I won’t have to worry that, when we do get around to having children, they’ll get some sort of horrible L.A. black lung.