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It took me years to do it. Twice, I left and came back. Once, I planned to leave it for an even smaller town.

I was clearly insane.

When I moved to the Bay Area, though, I knew that I’d escaped. I’d visit, yes, but I’d never move back home.

Wyoming, as I’ve said more than once, is a lovely place to be from.

There are things that I miss, though. Lilacs. Oh, how I miss the lilacs in the Spring. (And never mind that Spring may not come until June – the lilacs are worth the wait.) The old brick buildings downtown. People who stop to help if your car breaks down. (Seriously – eight years of driving an old Bug in LA, and only a few times has anyone stopped. Once in Santa Monica, when I was trying to push my car up the California Incline; once just a few blocks from my house; and twice in Topanga. The time I ran out of gas on the 101? The Highway Patrolman who pushed my car into the breakdown lane didn’t even bother to ask if I had a cell phone before he disappeared.)

And when I’m stressed, I want to go home.

This morning, Sara, who camped across the street from us our first year at Burning Man, tweeted that she and Frinetik had “Just passed happy jack road and is stopping to look at the floating head of lincoln.”

“Hey,” I told her, “You just went through my hometown!”

And then I went to look at the Prexy’s Pasture webcam, on the University of Wyoming campus.

That statue in the middle is by the same sculptor who carved Lincoln's head.

And surprised myself by bursting into tears.

Today, I just want to go home.

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And yes, I’m going to the doctor tomorrow. But I’ll have to have NovySan call for the appointment, because I can’t talk. (And unlike the fine folks at Rocket Matter, who did a demo for me today via telephone, Glance and Skype chat, so that they could talk and I could type, Kaiser doesn’t seem to do IM.)

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But I don’t think it’s come to that yet. (Note that I said “Yet.”)

I said earlier this week that I don’t like to blog about work, and that’s what’s consuming my mental energies right now, so if that was all I had to talk about today, you would indeed be watching an embedded video clip shot by someone who isn’t me. (How about embedded Hulu links? Are those any less cheesy than YouTube clips? No? That’s what I thought.) But as I sat up in here in the dimly-lit garret of NovySan’s office, waiting for him to get off work so we can go eat sushi with an opera singer, someone else started to sing.

Crickets.

They live in the walls.

And they’re calling out for love, sweet love.

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And now that I’m back on a full-sized keyboard (and have fixed the weird formatting in the above paragraph)… It’s been a roller-coaster day. Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the United States, and oh man, does that make me happy. But Prop 8′s passed, and so I’m angry and I’m disappointed and I have to remind myself that there are ways to fight that. (There’ve been three lawsuits filed already, and that makes me happy, because at first I thought, how do you challenge a constitutional amendment as unconstitutional? And now I have the answer. But it’s still up to the courts to decide whether they’ll accept the argument. And there’s another argument I’m wondering about, which is that if same-sex couples who married before the ban are still married, but no additional same-sex couples are allowed to marry, does that create a constitutional problem? And if those marriages are invalidated, does that violate the couples’ constitutional rights? I need to do some research on this…)

And even though I don’t write much about work (because I’m in an information-finding industry and I know any one of my co-workers is more than capable of tracking down my blog (especially since I haven’t made any effort to conceal my real name), and because I don’t want to be defined by what I do, and because if I feel like writing about work, it’s probably because I’m angry, and not everyone needs to hear me rant about it), it was a bad day today, and for all the reasons that make most of my bad days bad days. I was face-down on the kitchen table sobbing this afternoon, with my sweater pulled up over my head, and it wasn’t a pretty scene.

(I am looking for another job (something else I haven’t mentioned much, because I don’t want to panic anyone I work with), but it’s not a good time, and since I’m trying to transition back into the law, I have that additional “career switcher” hurdle to jump over, and sometimes it seems impossibly high.)

But NovySan’ll be home in a few minutes, and we’re going to The King’s Head for Guiness and ribs, and that makes it a good day, whatever happened this afternoon.

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