There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays

The weird thing about visiting my parents in California for a week is that sitting here in my big comfy bed with my orange cat Momo laying by the foot of it snoring, the heat running without me having to worry about paying for it... it honestly almost feels as if the past year and three months of living on the East Coast never happened. As if it was all some long, crazy dream.

I've had a lot of fun the last few days, and if I'm being completely honest with myself, there's a part of me that doesn't want to go back. Seven days hasn't quite been long enough for my emotional brain to remember that living with one's parents isn't quite as fun as having them spoil you for a week because they never see you. Despite my logic brain trying their best to remind my emotional brain, emotional brain just drowns out logic and sings:

Oh there's no place like home for the holidays... For no matter how far away you roam... If you want to be happy in a million ways... For the holidays, you can't beat home sweet home...

Look, I know no one does Christmas/Hanukkah/Yule/What have you like New York City. But the truth is, California will always be my home in my heart. You can keep your White Christmas - give me 65-degrees-farenheit all December, please. The Silicon Valley is the Valley of my Heart's Delight, and if I had it my way, I'd have taken a month off to visit rather than just a week. A week just isn't long enough to do everything I want to do, to see everything I've missed and some things I never got the chance to see. I'm already counting down the days until the next time I return to the Bay Area (next June for my high school reunion) and I don't even fly back east until Sunday!

I do miss my three-legged cat back in New Jersey, though. 

At the same time, though, New York is consistently in the back of my mind. San Jose is just as sweet and quaint and cool in its own way, but I've changed. I'm less of an easy-going pushover now. And okay, I'm a little more snobby sometimes - there has been more than one stop this trip where I've been like, "okay, it's cute, but in New York we have this similar thing that's so much bigger!" Honestly, I don't know how my family doesn't think I'm completely insufferable.

I can cook a lot better now, too - look at this fondue spread my mom and I made!

 I think, on some level, I will be happy to return to the East Coast. I do want to go to Hamilton Grange next weekend, I am curious about the axe-throwing place they just put in Brooklyn (expect my Viking ass to do a future entry on that), and I am eager to take my GRE and get a head-start on working towards the future that I moved to the east coast for in the first place. I just... don't want to leave California yet.

Honestly, if I had it my way, I'd live half the year in New York and half in California. Perhaps do spring and autumn in NYC and winter and summer in the Bay Area. But unfortunately, I'm not rich, that kind of lifestyle is just way beyond my means.

Anyway, I'm just rambling about how happy I've been the last few days, compared to the last few months (I had been, frankly, quite miserable for the latter half of October and almost the entirety of November and December - Seasonal Affective Disorder, you guys. It's a real hell and a half). But if you want, read on for a day-by-day summary of this little week of heaven. If not, I'll see you all in New York!

15 Places in the Bay Area I Never Got to Visit

I love where I live. I love it a lot. But lately, I've been getting pangs of severe homesickness. I miss San Jose. I miss the Winchester Mystery House, and Kelley Park. I miss eating at La Villa and Chaat Cafe. I wonder constantly - Did Sarah Winchester ever get homesick for New Haven? Did Alexander Hamilton ever get homesick for Nevis or St. Croix?

I have an advantage that they didn't have, of course. I have the internet. It allows me to at least look at photos of these places I've loved and left behind. But this, too, is both a blessing and a curse. Because the internet, you see, also allows me to discover places that I never got to see in person. Not just in San Jose, but all over the Bay Area, which will always be my home, even as I make a new home for myself in New Jersey.

This list is meant to serve not only as a place for my wistful longing, but as a plea to my friends back home who are reading this. I never got to see these places, but I encourage you to go look at them! Take lots of photos and send me photos, tell me everything, let me live vicariously through you!!!

Project: Wonderland (A Concept)

A few years back, over the summer I began to write a script of a webseries that was meant as a retelling of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (one of my favourite stories of all time, as long-time readers know), a personal psychological study, and a love letter to favourite spots in the Bay Area. Alice would meet the Mad Hatter at a local San Jose tea shop, for example, or the Cheshire Cat in Kelley Park, or the Mock Turtle down at Natural Bridges beach in Santa Cruz.

This scene would have taken place at the San Jose Rose Garden, for example

 It was a cool idea in theory. I still like the story I wrote for it. But let's be real, I was never going to make it. I have neither the time nor the funding to shoot a webseries, and where would I find other actors willing to trek up and down the San Francisco peninsula for 6-minute webisodes in funny costumes?

It was earlier this year that I begun to wonder if maybe, instead of something ambitious as a webseries, I turned it into a photography project? Instead of having to shoot and reshoot around tourists, I could snap photos and edit them in Photoshop? Art for art's sake, you know?

However, this still doesn't take care of the fact that I have neither time nor money to do so. I have equipment. I don't own a video camera or a boom mic or good editing software, but I own cameras and photoshop! But when I'm working to earn a living and saving for a cross-country move, I just can't afford to do a photography project all over Northern California.

So the solution that presented itself is obvious: If I ever do choose to do this (and that is a big IF), I'll have to do so in New York. Thus, I began the task of picking new locations to match the aesthetic I need...

(Photos included are either my own, or labeled for noncommercial reuse and used under creative commons license)

Thirteen Things I Still Need to do in California

This is a companion to the last post.

Where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars...

Those of you who know me in real life may remember that time I tried a project called 'The Bay Area Bucket List', meant to be a blog detailing my efforts to visit all the cool places in the Bay Area before leaving it, possibly forever if I may be overly dramatic for a second. It failed for a few reasons. Not least of which being that I just don't like Wordpress that much. (I know a lot of bloggers prefer it but there's a reason I moved back to this blogging platform, which suits my needs much better!) Other reasons included lack of money, lack of free time, and the fact that writing the same type of entry over and over is exhausting and not particularly rewarding.

But that doesn't me that the 'bucket list' itself doesn't still exist. I still have the list of all the things I had hoped to do, and I've picked out the 13 I want to do most. (Though the last two, being so far away, will probably not be done before I leave. Oh well. I can dream.)

Just like the last list, there's no particular order to this list. Just like the last list, these are all stock photos or labeled for noncommercial reuse.

My Recent San Francisco Vacation

Recently (on the 5th, 6th, and 7th - I've been in a post-vacation exhaustion haze since then) I took a vacation to San Francisco, meant to be kind of a last good bye to one of my favourite cities. New York may have my educational opportunities but San Francisco will always have my heart, and I could think of no better way to celebrate my graduation/leaving California than to go do things in the city by the bay. (Though honestly I hope to go back at least once more before I leave it for good.)

My itinerary was meant to be a combination of things that I already know I love to do and things I'd always wanted to see, and all in all it was practically perfect.