The funny thing about going away...

No, no pictures just yet. Mostly, I just haven't bothered to sit down at my computer for a long enough time period to figure out what all I'm going to post, and where. It's not that I've been so crazy busy since I've returned (although I have somehow managed to get quite a lot done). It's mostly that I just... haven't... bothered yet.

I went to Honoka'a in March for a two day trip to have a good look-see around the town, meet some people I'd be working with, etc. Honoka'a didn't seem like such a small town to me then. And it didn't seem like such a small town when I went this summer. It didn't seem like such a small town during any of the six weeks that I was there. You know when it began to seem like a small town? When I got in a taxi cab at the Honolulu airport and told the driver to go to my place. And off we drove through the city.

Honolulu is a huge friggin' city!!!

I don't say this as someone who has lived in Chicago. When I moved here from Chicago, I was unmoved as to Honolulu's largeness. I say this as someone who spent the summer living in a town that you could walk from end to end in ten minutes. The contrast of Honolulu to Honoka'a didn't make much of an impression on me. But the contrast of Honoka'a to Honolulu most certainly did.

I spent the cab ride home with my face plastered to the window. Buildings. Huge buildings, towering up into the sky. In six weeks on the Big Island, even in Kona and Hilo, I don't think I saw a building taller than four floors. And I didn't even notice until I got back and saw these concrete leviathans marring the landscape, coiling out their monstrous reaches over near-infinity-long stretches of city streets, popping up in rectangular bulges of cinder block, glass and steel.

Seriously, there are roads here that are over TWO LANES WIDE!!! More than FOUR, even! And cars! Cars like you've never seen, all filled with people. And people on the streets, and in the buildings. Busy people rushing around or lounging about with their shopping bags and their designer drinks in paper cups and plastic bottles. Neighborhoods of houses spread far and wide.

I remember laughing once at this kid from deep Mississippi for moving back to his hometown because Southaven was too big for him. Dude, whatever your name was, I totally get it now.

The thing about going away and experiencing something completely new and different is that when you come home, there's this reverse culture shock. I feel it every time I go back to Tennessee. As much as we talk about TN, reminisce fondly or not-so-fondly, as much as I tell people about what it is like there, how they would love or hate certain things about it, as much as it is on my mind... it still surprises me to actually be there as opposed to not-there. So it is with city life. Five years now I've lived in one city or other. And before that a rather large town. And before that, yup, city! I'm a city person. But six weeks in this quiet country town and I'm struggling to adjust back to the noise, and the population level, and the lack of nature (compared to Honoka'a, not compared to Chicago where they have banned all nature).

It's weird here in the city. And loud. And tall. But the city has in it the boy I love, and that means that it's not all bad.