For all the trips I’ve gone on this year (and there have been a lot), my trip home in a few days is the one I am anticipating the most.
It’ll have been a year since I’ve last been back in the Bay Area and I’m so excited to see family and friends. It has been way too long…
I have a feeling this will be the best trip of the year :)
I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I saw the breaking news about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School today… So senseless and sad. Twenty children lost their lives and will never get to chase the dreams they drew up and wrote about in school. All because of a shooter who was thinking who knows what.
And this happened in the same week that another shooter killed three innocent people in a Portland shopping mall.
Argue what you will about the second amendment, but quite frankly, guns scare the crap out of me. I shot a gun for the first time at a shooting range this past April because I was curious. The power I felt with a gun in my hands was intense to say the least.
It struck me that I had the potential to cause so much harm with such a small and accessible device. Many people around us have this potential and it makes you think why shootings don’t happen more often.
I wholeheartedly believe that people are good. But people lapse, people fail. After all, we’re all human. Why chance tragedy with guns?
I moved to Madison just over a year now and looking back, it was a leap but one that I’m glad I made.
For the first 22 years of my life, I always lived in the Bay Area. Sure, I went on family vacations and other group trips around America and across oceans, but California was home sweet home. It still is.
I say I’m glad that I moved though, because life is so different outside of the Bay Area bubble. There’s a way of life there that’s unique and I love it, but that was all I ever knew.
Out here in the Midwest, it’s different, both good and bad. Different though.
I’ve gained a new perspective on life. And not just in geography and weather, but in independence and adjustment.
I’ve been forced to try new things, live in a different culture, and learn who I really am… things that I wouldn’t have figured out if I’d have stayed in California.
That said, I can’t wait to go home for Christmas to see family and friends :) I miss the bubble a little bit.