Damn, it's good to be home. OK, so it's only for a week, but right now I'm going to focus on the fact that I'm home and away from the stresses of working in Houston. Yes, things are getting better, but they're still not good, but for the next week I can leave that behind and decompress...and Lord knows I need it.
The past three weeks have been one of the most profoundly emotional experiences of my life. I've seen a city- indeed an entire region- laid low by one of the most powerful storms of our generation. I've seen suffering and devastation of a magnitude that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. Seeing this in a place where I lived for 10 years and still have an emotional investment was an extremely difficult emotional challenge for me. Being away from it now, I'm only just beginning to realize the profound impact that being in the middle of all that has had on me. I knew that going to Houston would be a difficult and highly emotional trip for me. What I was completely unprepared for was the reality of just how true and how difficult being there would be for me. Because of the nature of my job there, I was essentially on an island, and I never really had an opportunity to talk about what I was seeing and experiencing. I never really had a chance to process what I was exposed to on a daily basis. Being back home is an incredibly disorienting feeling. After three weeks of being in a place still heavily in recovery mode, I'm back in a place where things work...and it's 30 degree cooler. Damn...I'm FREEZING....
I've got a week's down time, and while there are a lot of things I need to do during my time here (like getting an absentee ballot, f'rinstance), there's a lot of nothing to be done...and I've already gotten started. First things first, though; I need to get my body back on Pacific Time. This waking up at 2.30am sucks....
