You can't go home again.

Sometimes you have these days where you feel like maybe you're a professional, you know? You sit at the same table as a blogger you really like (even just for like ten minutes) and he tells you he remembers seeing your blog (even if it's just because you linked to him) and you meet a GG-nominated author while you're at your friends' place for dinner and you read most of a book (This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper is possibly the greatest book ever written about siblings, infidelity, and the shivah-sitting experience, and excellent train station reading). You're on track. You're networking, You're doing your thing. You're alright.

Then, you take the train home to your parents' house and are forced to listen to three girls in the next row argue about their perfect wedding, their perfect wedding dress (VINTAGE! no, PRINCESS NECKLINE! of COURSE my fiance isn't coming with me! it's MY wedding, not his!) (I wish I were making that up.). It's pouring rain and the cute boy in the next row is reading The Hockey News, and you totally judge him for it even though you've got a shitty old VC Andrews paperback tucked in your purse in case you finish your public-consumption book too soon. You finally get home, and feeling alternately virtuous and guilty you decide to floss your teeth, and a chunk of your tooth falls out on the bathroom floor, and your mother picks it up and then loses it. And then all you can think about is the fact that it's a very thin line between you and the lady with no teeth with whom you got in an argument yesterday because Darryl took out videos on her library card even though she told him not to, and now they're overdue and it's as much your problem as it is hers. The wind is howling and your mother finds your tooth again and tells you it looks like a little pearl and you pretty much want to vomit.

At times like this there's only one thing you can really do: skulk on down to your basement bedroom, burrow into the single bed you slept in when you were a kid, pull out the copy of Catching Fire that fell into your lap earlier, when life was still worth living, and read till you pass out.

Mixed blessings, friends.

It's good to be home.