In theory, I love to travel. In theory, I would like to see the world. I want to meet people and do things and have adventures and taste foods and marvel at the beauty and the wonder that there is to experience on this big spinning globe we all travel on together through space etc. etc. But I only want to do it if I can stay home. If there were some way to make a day trip to Morocco I’d do it. If I could spend an afternoon in Paris, I’d spend every afternoon in Paris. If I could drop by Tokyo, it would be my favorite lunch-time destination.

It’s not the traveling—I don’t mind the traveling. It is possible I even like the traveling part. I like airports, because I always feel like they’re an excuse to not think about how much things cost because otherwise you’ll have an aneurism and here is twelve dollars for that packet of peanuts. I like planes. There is something very contained and peaceful about a plane ride. There’s something about a plane ride that makes it very easy to focus—on writing or work or reading, and then you order a couple of tiny bottles of wine and a little snack box and you feel like you’ve just splurged and you have because now you can no longer afford to send your imaginary children to college.

I like to land and then go look at things and Experience Life and eat delicious things and enjoy the strangeness of it all, but then I am done. Then I want to go home. Foreign Place is not home. Foreign Place is too far away from home. Foreign Place is not safe. Foreign Place does not have an adequate supply of Diet Pepsi or a change of shoes or my fluffy pillows.

Foreign Place feels like a mistake I can’t fix—it’s too late now. I am stuck. I think it’s that feeling of having no recourse, of having set off without an easy way back, of having to follow through whether or not you want to. There’s no inexpensive, simple way to say “Sorry! Not really feeling very ‘Marrakesh-y’ today. I’ll try again tomorrow!” You are there and you are staying there unless you can afford to pay a steep Stupid Tax to change your tickets and flee.

I definitely don’t like being told I have no other choice. I panic like a little rabbit, and my little rabbit heart thumps to bursting and then it does.

But I’ll move anywhere. I don’t want to visit London—I want to live in London. I don’t want to sightsee in Tuscany, I want to own a villa. I am not interested in vacationing on the beach in Mexico—I want a little cottage by the ocean, with satellite Internet and a hot tub. In my imagination I have settled all over the world—most of the coastal Americas, much of Canada, the majority of Europe, and select places in Asia because I am a little chicken. I would settle down in Istanbul and make a life in Prague and live in three square feet in Tokyo and own a mountain goat in Peru.

There are spots for me all over the world, and I like to think that someday I’ll claim them, but that is unlikely. It’s also unlikely that I’ll ever become a world traveler like my brother and his wife, not while I’m crazy—a state that is also unlikely to change. I don’t like it when my dreams are unlikely.

A came and got her Friday night, while I was out. I stumbled home kind of tipsy, was confused when no dog came exploding with joy to see me, limbs akimbo, tongue lolling, stub of a tail beating back and forth in a wild blur. She is supposed to circle around and around me and through my legs and push her face into my knees and cover me with love when I sit down to scratch her butt and then climb on my lap and sigh and put her head down like everything is finally right with the world and she couldn’t imagine anything being any better than it was right there and then, forever.

But the house was quiet, and she was gone and E said, reasonably, You knew he was taking her soon, and I did but I still found myself sitting down right on the floor and bursting into tears, because she is gone, and she wasn’t ever my dog, anyway, and how can anyone possibly take care of her as well as I did and how can anyone possibly make her as happy as I did and how can I ever possibly be as happy with another dog when I had the best dog ever in the history of them?

She wasn’t the best dog. She’s a crazy dog, with a lot of crazy dog problems, neurotic, jealous, possessive, anxious, destructive, aggressive. Crazy. It’s better for her to be an only dog; it’s better for E’s dog and his roommate’s dog to not have a crazy, neurotic, aggressive roommate of their own. It’s good for her owner to take responsibility for her, to be grown-up and adult and meet his obligations to the animal who belongs to him. It’s good for everyone! It doesn’t feel so good.

She is still the best dog. I kept it together for awhile, for a whole day and a half. And then when we visited friends, they said “Boy, I bet everyone’s glad Min is gone,” (because her Crazy is widely known) I almost started crying there and I have been crying on and off ever since. I miss my dog. She’s doing very well–A spends a lot of time with her, he walks her twice a day now, she had a wonderful time at the dog park and made best friends with a poodle, she is learning to deal with her crate and not be on furniture and so happy to have A back and to be loved the most and not have other dogs trying to butt in on her love. But I am feeling very sad, and very sorry for myself, and I miss my dog.

My personal stance, my plank in the platform, is that I am very fond of Valentine’s Day. I am a fan of love; I am glad that there is a day that honors love, in all its forms, filial and fornicatory, penetrative and otherwise. I am cheesy, and okay with that, a little (lot) sappy, and okay with that, and I enjoy the people I love and want them to know that they are adored and there’s no need to be okay with that–it is just a true fact.

I don’t need flowers or chocolate (though I enjoy flowers and chocolate) and I don’t require the perfect romantic evening that starts with a candlelight dinner and ends with passionate, gazes-locked, whispered-pledges lovemaking on a bed of velvety rose petals. Though of course I do not judge you if that is how your Valentine’s Day must be conducted otherwise everything is ruined and your sweetheart never really loved you.

Our plans involve garlic and DVDs and for me, anyway, general, overall qualities of happiness and contentment, possibly because of the Oreos but maybe because I am a little cheesy and a little sappy and kind of crazy about this guy I’m seeing. But also I will call my mom, and my brother, and my best friend, and also I will tell you guys–Happy Valentine’s Day! Take my love. TAKE IT. You have no choice, for it is yours. But don’t tell me what you do with it.

photo via chicks57

God, when you put it that way it sounds completely insane. Exchanging California for Utah? For Utah? Really, for Utah? All I had ever known of Utah was what everyone else knows–Mormons and conservatism and a vague impression of a state full of backwards unsophisticates who know nothing about culture and hate the gays and also like extreme sports. It is cold in Utah, there are mountains, what the hell am I doing?

Once we were in the truck, and on our way over the mountains and through the pass, our bellies churning with McDonald’s breakfasts and the adrenaline dying down, I found that it was a chant in the back of my head–what the hell, what the hell, what the hell am I doing, am I doing, am I doing? I had had so many good reasons for moving–Utah is cheap, I can live off my freelance salary, I can use all my time to write, and there’s this boy who I love and who loves me back and I think we have a real chance except for the fact that he lives, of all places, in Utah. And if I can move there and see if it works–it being my freelance career, my writing, my relationships–then there are all my happinesses, gathered in one spot. I don’t have to live in Utah forever! What the hell am I doing?

We pulled in after 18 hours of driving, and my apartment wasn’t ready. My landlord was crazy, the snow came down and the apartment was freezing and I had no friends and I was cold all the time, lonely, not writing, barely ever out of my pajamas, never showered. I spent a lot of time under my electric blanket, thinking what the hell have I done? I spent a lot of time wondering why nothing ever worked out for me and wondering what I was going to do, and waiting for everything to get better soon, please, because it had to, because a move of this magnitude had to work out. Narratively speaking, there was no other way for it to end up, because I am not living in a tragedy, by god.

Spring came and the sun and warmth and meeting people. Waking up and feeling better about life. Buying a bike, getting the hell out of the house, finding out that my little town is beautiful. Discovering that Salt Lake City isn’t a cultural wasteland, that I am happy in the work I do and good at it, too, that among the best things that ever happened to me is my relationship with a wonderful man who pushes me and makes demands of me and asks me to make demands of him and who makes me happy. We figure each other out, and start to figure out how to be together, begin to realize how well we really do complement each other. We have fun.

And a year later I look around and I think, you know what? I love this state. I love the wide-shouldered mountains and the huge expanses of sky. I love the people who are kind, the liberals who know that they are swimming in a very red sea and are all the more passionate for that. I love the snow and the wind and the huge, white hills for sledding and the icy-cold nights for curling up with tea. Sprinting across the empty golf course with the dogs at my heels and E behind me, laughing. I love my beautiful apartment which would cost me a million dollars in San Francisco. I love that everything is so cheap it feels like I’m getting away with something when I dry clean a coat. I love the people I am surrounded by, and E’s family who call me family too.

I love my life here. I don’t know when I stopped thinking what the hell am I doing; I’m not sure when I stopped wondering how long my furlough would be and where I’d be going next, and just started enjoying where I was, who I was with, who I am. A year ago I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but a year later I am so glad I did it anyway.

Everyone says my mother and I look so alike, but she’s got blue eyes and cheekbones that make me grumble, because why couldn’t I have gotten them? And her nose, too? She’s got a perfect nose. Instead we share the small mouth and the little knob of a chin, the body shape that runs up and down through the line of women in our family–if you got us all in a row, every woman in our family, you could see, in a casual glance, that we are related. That used to be something that bothered me–you can tell that I’m a part of this insane family! You can tell that she is my mother! But I get older, and my mother gets cooler. Or I get older, and far, far smarter than I used to be, because I am proud that she is my mother.

She is so smart, and she is creative. She is a hell of a writer, and can draw, too. She is so clever with her hands–her crochet is absolutely, terrifyingly precise, each stitch perfect, the perfect gauge, exactly like the one before it and exactly like the one that will come after it. Her handwriting is copperplate to the point where it looks unreal, beautiful, uniform, looping and clear. She is organized, careful with her money, thrifty, smart, and forward-thinking. And mostly importantly, my mother is very tough, and she is very brave–when my father died, we stayed in Pennsylvania and she raised us, little shits both, and she did it alone.

Whenever my mother has left a job, they’ve had to hire two people, sometimes three, to replace her. She is a whirlwind of responsibility and activity, of productivity and encouragement. People go to her for her advice and her support, to be listened to, because my mother is a good listener. People trust my mother, because she is one of the most rock-solid and faithful people you will ever know. If my mother and her huge and beautiful heart is on your side, she will always be on your side, forever and ever amen. You are one of the luckiest people in the world, if she is on your side. My mother has always been on my side, and I have not always appreciated it. I am grateful and thankful that I have figured out how lucky I am. I am grateful and thankful that I have finally reached that point where I am smart enough and old enough to know my mother as a person, to love and appreciate her not for what she’s done for me (so much) or who she is to me (a mother I am lucky to have) but as a good, kind, loving, beautiful person in her own right, on her own terms.

She is hilarious, and silly, and generous. She loves sci-fi and fantasy and to dance. She is a terrible singer, but has never let that stop her from singing. She is outgoing, positive, friendly, a force of nature, someone that people is drawn to. She’s a little nuts and totally dopey and despite the fact that I have, early and often, been a rotten, neglectful daughter, she always forgives me and I get to keep her.

I love you, ma. Thank you. And happy happiest of birthdays.