Home

Got home last night after a long-ass flight. Went straight to dinner with the fam and the usual family friends from HK. Heard the predictable lines of "You lost weight" and "You gained weight (but thats good cuz it means you are takin good care of yourself)" and "How pretty your daughter(s) are" etc. Getting pretty tired of all that as it seems so fake and you know its just something thats obligatory for Chinese people to say to any Chinese girl. Ah well.

I have to admit that I wasn't really that excited to come home this time around. Sure its Christmas and its always that I miss home during Xmas, and I do miss family and friends and all the delicious Vancity food, but there's just something different this time around. If I had to pinpoint it, I think it's cuz this is the first time that it doesn't really feel like home here. It's like that line from Garden State:

Andrew Largeman: You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone.

Sam: I still feel at home in my house.

Andrew Largeman: You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for you kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

It's so strange, like when I was making tea this morning and wondering where the sugar was, I realised that there's no sugar jar here, like the small one I have back home in Amsterdam. Instead, there was just a big canister for cooking normal food with sugar, so I just skipped it altogether. It just seemed strange to me, and so reverse from before, when I would use the stuff at home in vancouver as a 'sane point' with which to measure everything else in life. Now, what I do in Amsterdam is what seems most normal...

I guess its all part of growing up, and moving out...