Home is where all your crap is?

That's a picture of my house.

HA! Yeah right.

Actually, this is me in my living room--


I know, I know. Not bad. I actually love my house. But that's beside the point.

This year has been different at school because my friends and I moved off-campus. Now that we have a house, it has become home. When we call each other and say, "Yo, where you at bro?" If we say "home" that doesn't mean Minnesota or New York or Concord, California. It means we're at our house in LA. Our new home.

I can no longer call the place I grew up "home" because I only spend a couple of weeks a year there. My parents turned my old room into an office, so now when I visit, I sleep on the floor, the couch, or in my brother's room. When people ask me what I'm doing this summer, I tell them I'm staying here in LA and going to visit my parents for a week or so before I start work here. Then I ask them, and they say, "I'm going home...I mean, to my parents' house." It is a transition period for everyone.

I'm not "homeless" in the normal sense of the word. I am lucky to have a warm bed and a roof over my head every night, but is it really "home" when I know I'm only going to be there for another year or so? All my crap is there, sure, but really I'm just squatting until I get out in the real world. I don't have a permanent address. Hopefully someday I will....eek! Until then, I'll just call my house in LA "home."