Afternoon Coffee

Well it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon...

Wait...wait...that's not correct. Let me start again.

Well it's been a quiet day in Norfolk. I've worked diligently on the thesis and consequently have made respectable progress. A little more to go (no more than a few more hours' work) and the infernal thing will be finished and on its way to my advisor. Between bouts of hammering away on the laptop (and periodically removing cats from the keyboard---the laptop is warm, so I guess they want to sleep there), I've also managed a much-needed trip to the grocery store, plus a few additional errands. Most importantly, I caught a nice afternoon nap.

So here I now sit in the study with a steaming cup of coffee before me. The howling wind is causing a rouge branch of the large magnolia tree next door to brush occasionally against my window. I must remind the neighbor about that before the next hurricane season.

It has been a week now since I returned from my trip and it seems that I've recovered about as much as I'm probably going to. (Yes, I know I ended the last sentence with a preposition. So sue me!) On a certain level, things aren't quite the same as they were when I left. And I don't mean in a material sense either; it's more of a matter of perspective, of insight into what comprises life here as I know it. Things seem so much smaller, so much more inconsequential, and my patience for a lot of the buffoonery we all have to deal with on a daily basis grows very thin. Our emphasis on material acquistion makes me sicker now than it did before. Is this grasping materialism the heart of American culture, the best we have to offer?

I noticed this phenomenon two years ago when I returned from a trip to South America, but that trip was much shorter than this one. So I suppose three weeks away was sufficent time for many perceptions about life at home to evolve. Perhaps all this is symptomatic of a broadening worldview, the greater realization that wherever we go in the world, we're all largely the same at heart, with the same needs, dreams, and hopes. Tear away the artifical construct of nationality, the label that we use to separate us from them, "good" from "evil" and you're left with just us, a bunch of humans, who often don't treat each other as we should, bound together, traveling on this tiny blue planet as it spins through infinte space and time.

Funny this sort of thing is never mentioned in any travel guides.