Jane, Divided, But I Can't Decide Which Side I'm On, Jane Decided Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run, Jane, Jane

--"Jane", Barenaked Ladies

When I told Casey and Laurel that my parents were selling their home I'm sure they didn't how I wanted them to feel. Honestly, I didn't know how I felt about the decision. I still don't. On one hand, I haven't lived there in almost five years and the majority of my time there was thinking about either how to get out or feeling sorry that I was compelled to move back. On the other hand, it is the home I think of as my childhood home. Even though my family and I had at least three houses we lived in before that one, the house in Sierra Madre is the one I spent most of my life in. Hell, it's the one practically everyone I've ever met has been to at one time or another. It literally is the one place I thought I could always come back to.

I just don't know how to feel about it because you're supposed to have let go of your childhood home a long time before this. Many people don't even have a family home they can come back to because their parents have already moved long before their mid-thirties. I feel like it shouldn't be a big deal. I feel like it shouldn't bother as much as it does.

And yet it does. I don't know what I expected, but I'm beginning to think that I expected that house to be there for the rest of my life. I think I expected it to be always around somehow. And I'm kind of thinking I dislike my parents a bit more for deciding to sell it out from under me. It's almost as if they betrayed me by selling off a piece of my childhood, a so-called security blanket that I never knew I had. And I know it's crazy to believe this was done as a direct affront to me, but it still doesn't lessen the sting.

That's why when my friends decided to take me out to karaoke bar on Saturday night to cheer me up I found the only song that fit my mood was "Jane" by The Barenaked Ladies. Not only is it a song about feeling ambivalence, but it's also a song about obsessing on something innocuous that for some reason gets under your skin. That's how I feel about the house. The house is my Jane, something I shouldn't give too hoots about at this stage in my life.

And yet I do.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers