Thinking of Home
Currently reading: Legacy of Heorot by Niven, Pournelle and Barnes
Finally got my library card. Wish the library was within walking distance, but I can’t complain - after all’s been said and done, I’m pretty comfortable here right now. Unemployed and everything, but I’m still getting one or two interviews per week. At least my resume’s getting read.
Back to the book. It’s a fairly standard Niven/Pournelle novel, loosely based on Beowulf… a bunch of interstellar colonists dealing with the local ecology. I tend to like hard science fiction, Niven, Sheffield, Bear, Clarke, Vinge… good stuff.
Talking about how much memorabilia each colonist was allowed to bring on their mission:
It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Enough, because the behaviorists and sociologists and colony planners said it was enough. Because they, in their infinite wisdom, had calculated exactly how many pressed flower petals and class album videodisks were required to stave off depression: just enough to stimulate the fond memories, not enough to create an incurable homesickness.
Enough. Got me to thinking if I’d brought enough on my own mission here, this far from home.
Well, the moment you stop being homesick is the moment you make a home for yourself here. And I don’t see that happening for a long time. If ever.
But I haven’t brought much. School transcripts. A hardbound copy of my master’s thesis. My cellphone.
Two hard disks, packed with my personal data - my old course materials, ancient multiple-choice exams, Powerpoint slides. MP3s. Old save games. Letters I’d written to friends, journals I’d written to myself. Two years worth of digital photographs.
Photographs of the girls back home. They’d given me a bunch of pictures, in a fold-out wood frame last Christmas, when everybody thought I was leaving in January. I’d given them teddy bears. I’d thought I was leaving too.
What little news I get from home doesn’t seem to be enough. My sister-in-law’s pregnant, so I have another niece or nephew on the way. I haven’t spent enough time with my two nieces. Wonder if they’ll remember me when I get back.
Was watching the History Channel yesterday. Rescue At Dawn: The Los Banos Raid. Of course, watching WWII veterans talking, I was more interested in the background. Baker Hall. The Field. Mount Makiling. Laguna de Bay.
And it physically hurt. There was a hard, sharp pain in the bottom of my stomach, something that made me turn off the TV and go lie down for a while.
Ulcers? Don’t know. I just know that I’ve been having really weird dreams lately… ones I don’t remember in the morning.
Oh, well. Maybe I need to keep busy. Maybe this’ll all go away when I finally get a job.
Maybe someday it won’t hurt as much.
