{"id":1171,"date":"2005-10-03T17:25:26","date_gmt":"2005-10-03T21:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/03\/im-starting-to-feel-a-little-left-out\/"},"modified":"2015-04-26T12:30:09","modified_gmt":"2015-04-26T17:30:09","slug":"im-starting-to-feel-a-little-left-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/03\/im-starting-to-feel-a-little-left-out\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m starting to feel a little left out&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p>It&#8217;s officially been three full weeks since I left for Rome.  Which, I would like to point out, is about the same amount of time that I actually got to live in my new apartment <em>before<\/em> I left on this trip.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m starting to feel like I&#8217;m missing things&#8230;sure, the only channels on the TV that I understand are CNN International and BBC World News, and I have relatively unfettered internet access, but something is, just, well, off.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m somewhat of a loner generally &#8211; there are times when there&#8217;s nothing I enjoy more than spending an entire weekend by myself, running errands, not making any &quot;plans&quot;, just, generally, taking it easy, but I generally don&#8217;t go for three full weeks without seeing either friends or family.  And I&#8217;m certainly speaking to them less on the phone because, well, it&#8217;s not exactly a local call, even if it is on a work-provided cellphone.  That, and the relative alienation of not understanding anyone around me.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe I&#8217;m just feeling out of it because my friend had her baby the other day (everyone&#8217;s doing great!), and I&#8217;m not going to get to see any of them for at least a few more weeks, and I know that if I was home I would at least be calling her every day to check in (as opposed to once a week) for at least the first little while&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s not even taking into account the weird <a target=\"NewWindow\" href=\"http:\/\/ezraklein.typepad.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/conservative_re.html\">political shift<\/a> that&#8217;s happening, like, all of a sudden in my home country&#8230;and again, I can read about it, but I can&#8217;t spend a half an hour in a co-worker&#8217;s office or on the phone with a friend just trying to wrap my head around the things <a target=\"NewWindow\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/10\/02\/weekinreview\/02kornblut.html?ex=1285905600&amp;en=b30949f93958250c&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">that have been going on<\/a> lately.  When I asked my dad to send me my mail the other day, I had to tell him that I really <em>needed<\/em> my back issues of the New Yorker, and not just my bills, because I need some cultural touchstones.  I almost cried when I read the <a target=\"NewWindow\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/10\/02\/magazine\/02essay.html?ex=1285905600&amp;en=5122777f43c5293b&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">cover story<\/a> in this week&#8217;s NY Times magazine, and it was just a story about NY politics.  But it so captured so much about why I love New York, the idea that everything that happens, happens in New York first (for good and bad), and that we&#8217;re one of the only places that was founded as specifically commercial, with no time to waste on petty puritan religious &quot;stuff&quot;&#8230;it&#8217;s a reason a lot of people hate New York, but it&#8217;s a reason why I love it.  Ric Burns captured that essence really well in his documentary history of New York, and this article does the same thing&#8230;I know that I&#8217;m not the only one who gets sentimental when I hear phrases like &quot;cathedrals of commerce&quot;&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Wow, now I&#8217;m getting off track.  Can you tell that I&#8217;m a little bit homesick?  That, and it&#8217;s getting significantly colder and rainier around here, making it just a tad less &quot;fun&quot; on the rare days when I&#8217;m not working around the clock&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I so shouldn&#8217;t have had that last espresso&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s officially been three full weeks since I left for Rome. Which, I would like to point out, is about the same amount of time that I actually got to live in my new apartment before I left on this trip. I&#8217;m starting to feel like I&#8217;m missing things&#8230;sure, the only channels on the TV [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,60,9,89,6],"class_list":["post-1171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-current-events","tag-italy","tag-politics-and-law","tag-rome","tag-travel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZBi-iT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8493,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions\/8493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}