a family drive-by

Well, I got to see my brother (half brother), his daughter, and his mother this weekend. There were here late Friday and gone Sunday midday, in and out like that. Yet somehow, since my brother's divorce, it felt like the longest, most intimate visit I've had with him in years. Hard times aren't necessarily bad times. Kyle's a new person with his old habits of enjoying the little things and speaking freely, but now he has a daughter with whom he can share his joyful attitude in life. I guess I have a lot of worries about a messy divorce scarring his daughter, and my parents have some concern for Lily (my niece), but right now I'm just really happy that Kyle is living again.
It was totally family weekend. My parents' little house had me, my brother and his family, my sister and her family, my parents and my mother's mother. Yesterday I spent the whole day recovering in seclusion. Cleaning before, during, and after family arrived, nieces hanging all over me, drinking and playing pool with my brother and brother-in-law until the wee hours of the morning, photography explosion, too much birthday cake... it was long, blissful, and very necessary.
I still haven't gone out of my way to see people since I've arrived home, even though the thought to call people has been at the back of my head for some time. It's curious, but I guess I feel like I've been inefficient with getting important things done and maintaining some of the better habits I had in Denmark. It takes me longer to write a letter than it did in unfamiliar terrain, and it's much rarer for me to make a meal from scratch. Maybe it's because I feel like I have more distractions here, or maybe it's because I feel like I should be doing certain things and going against my nature. I don't know. I still feel a little weird, and a part of that is because my progress in getting things done has come to a temporary halt. I'm on the schedule at Intermezzo again, but I have no shifts. I've found a room that I'm going to rent downtown, but I don't know exactly when I'm going to move in. I haven't really started class yet, and I think I may be anxious to start working. I thought things were going to work out with Ryan and me, but they aren't. I want to see old friends and enjoy the old social life I had, but I've grown out of a lot of old habits I had. I thought I'd already have my bike up and running, but maintenance has been delayed several times. Just be patient, Dani. It all comes together in its own time.
It's really amazing how much a culture can influence your concept of time-keeping. When I'm in Atlanta, I usually go crazy if I have a lot of free time, so I try to fill it up as much as possible until I'm exhausted from doing too much. In Denmark, I could spend hours each day writing letters and in my journal, reading, cooking a meal for an hour, taking a walk or a bike ride, whatever I wanted that would relax me. How do you take a mentality and style of living from one city to another?

Slumber jack party!

Well, after much ado, I decided to Craigslist it and check out the rooms and housing market in my local neighborhood, and boy howdy! there are some seemingly too-good-to-be-true rooms available in fabulous neighborhoods at dreamy prices. I'm completely in love with the concept of looking for something available at a weird time of the year (mid-January? who, besides people running from living situations gone awry, wants to start a lease in mid-January?), but we'll see if there is any follow-through. However, I need to feel really confident, excited, and positive about this process because I'm trying to find something for only 4 months. Tricky, tricky.
Honestly, though, looking for a new place to set up camp has gotten me out of this funk entirely and really excited to be back in Atlanta. Once (not if) I find a place to live, I can start biking again in the city, really concentrate on finding a job I'm enamored with, brewing my own beer, taking possession of a kitchen where I can cook all of my meals, and go urban spelunking. Besides, I have a certain somebody I'd like to have lunch with occasionally in the city, and it's nice to not have to drive all the way downtown just to have a date.
I realized that I'd been kind of hard on myself initially when I started feeling a little disappointed about moving back, thinking that I was supposed to maintain the high I'd been feeling for the last 6 months. Then it occurred to me that I wasn't immediately in love with Aalborg, and things were sort of melodramatic for the first 3 weeks when I had a great yet untimely romance with a now dear friend of mine. I developed strong mutual feelings for someone who had a girlfriend, and it sort of put a damper on things until I breathed and remembered who and where I was. So I think it's completely natural to feel a bit disappointed/overwhelmed/uncomfortable when you have such a huge shift in your life and you're still a little more sensitive than usual.
On another note, my current living situation has made it quite easy to start looking for a new place to live. The water pipes have been frozen for two days now and we've been waterless, my grandmother just arrived tonight for the first day of her 7-week stay, and next weekend we have 3 more family members coming for my niece's third birthday party. I'm sleeping in the basement with my belongings in a laundry basket, and I don't know what I'll do next weekend when everyone else is here. This is not exactly my definition of comfortable, but I do love being home with family.

I'm content here and now. Always trying to live it and stay with it. That's a great philosophy, you know? Here and now. (throwbacks to Way of the Peaceful Warrior for its stellar "here and now" mantra)

I'm hooooooome!

This is the longest time since I got to Denmark that I've gone without writing. I haven't written a blog post, a letter, or a journal entry in two weeks. I came home three weeks early, much to the surprise of pretty much everyone at home, and I've been so occupied with packing, 23 solid hours of traveling, visiting with people, attempts to sleep, and settling my life that I haven't had time to write. Or maybe I haven't wanted to hear myself think. It's weird to be home; the excitement wore off and now I'm home. Job searching, driving a car, spending too much money at restaurants or movie theaters, watching television... things I hated about living in America. They've come back like a bad habit; honestly, aside from job searching, all of those things are bad habits. It was so easy not to think about these things in a different setting, but here it's all too common and normal. Maybe life in Aalborg was like a pilgrimage, going somewhere so different and isolated from my home to see if I could live without a car on the cold days or read a book when I was bored. It's a state of mind, not the setting in which you're placed... I just have to keep remembering that and writing and discovering new aspects of myself, the family I make in my life, and life in general.
So far, I haven't seen anything glaringly American other than the huge cars, and I didn't need to go to Europe to realize that people are completely ridiculous about SUVs. I just feel so different, you know? The change is totally within, and I've decided to stop looking for differences between Europe and the US. I realized that I haven't been treating the settling down experience here in the same fashion as when I got to Denmark. In Denmark, I made no immediate judgments, gave every bad experience a fair chance, looked for the positive everywhere, and remained really sensitive to myself. I'm so much harder on my home than I would be anywhere else, and I need to lighten up. One obviously upside about being home is that it's home, and I'm with family and friends here. Another thing is that the sun rises at 8:30am and sets around 6. That's about 4 more hours of sunlight than in Denmark, hahaha. I'm trying to keep an open mind and a center. I really am.
Last night, I had dreams about traveling plans gone awry, missing planes, getting stuck in a strange city, calling airlines and being hassled. I realized that I need to wait a little while and settle down before I travel again. My parents are going to take my grandmother to Panama to live with my aunt and uncle in February - I was jealous that I couldn't go with them, but then I remembered my hellish dream and the horrid process of customs. Welcome back to the US, Dani.
Also, on a side note, traveling has wreaked havoc on my body. I never weighed myself in Europe (what am I going to do with kilos?), but I am currently 8 pounds more than I was right before leaving Atlanta. I think I've lost some since the height of my weight gain, which means I gained 10 or more pounds, despite my healthy lifestyle. My friend Michael said that he gained weight in Scotland and his ex-girlfriend Jen gained 30 lbs in South Africa!! Yikes! I can gather a number of logical reasons from weight gain when traveling, but how does one counteract that?