Stop Asking What I'm Going to Do After Graduation, Please.

When I was in England last summer, I spent the first few weeks so homesick it was practically a physical illness. The strange thing was, I loved England. I still think about it all the time, even though it's been over a year since I came back. When I was with my friends out shopping and converting to pounds or eating pastries or strolling through the English greenery I was having an amazing time. I can still picture the funny little flowers that grew outside my dorm, and I can practically count the (four flights of) stairs from my room to the shower in the basement.

But still, I would get so homesick missing my family and friends and the California warmth that I would go three days without sleeping, because I was staying up all night to talk to them.

And the hardest part was that no one really seemed to get it. Everyone else in the program was having an amazing time getting wasted and hooking up with the English TAs or at least clubbing every other night. My family and friends went on with their daily routines and marveled at how lucky I was to be experiencing something so amazing. They sent me postcards and letters and I wrote back telling them about how wonderful my professor's accent was, or how I went to see the cafe where J.K. Rowling began Harry Potter. Even Mango was busy taking classes back at UCLA. He told me how strange it felt for him to be on campus without having me around, but always had to break off our conversation to go to class or dinner or bed. The only person who really seemed to if not empathize then at least sympathize with me was Stuffin. He'd stay up with me when I couldn't fall asleep and tease me about all the good food I couldn't get across the pond. And to just have one person understand made a lot of difference.

The reason I'm thinking of all this is because I don't get homesick at school anymore. I definitely think about home (especially of all the food there, I'm starving) but I don't yearn to go back. In fact, often when I do visit northern California I wish wholeheartedly (and guiltily) that I were back in L.A. The shift is strange but I suppose inevitable; after four years most of my life has been built up here. And I'm lucky in that it's not a lonely life.

Take tonight, for example. I get home around midnight and my apartment is empty. And I realized that I don't mind. I have Mango to walk me home when it's dark and check my empty room for monsters before he leaves; in the mornings I have Jenn to chat with while we eat brunch. At some point tomorrow the Y will stumble in all raspy voiced from having just woken up, and then over the weekend I get to hang out with my Watts kids at a museum before catching up with my roommates at night.

And then I wonder how I'm considering leaving all this behind.

I don't have a post-graduation plan. I do, however, have a backup graduation plan (in case I don't magically get offered the job of my dreams right after receiving my diploma)(hm, I guess that's my post-graduation plan). I figure that to avoid moving back home (for my own sanity -- I'll explain next time) I could always flee the state. I love my parents, it's no reflection on them. It's all me, and I have this strange desire for change and excitement when England has already proved that I should really only be taking such things in small doses. A part of me wants to just move to a brand new city and start all over and maybe end up having the kind of life I was meant to have, but the (small, but) rational part of me is saying: whoa, hold on there, cowgirl.

Say I move to Seattle or Connecticut or Washington D.C. Okay, what then? I won't know a single person there. I won't have a job. I won't know what neighborhood to live in, where to find decent Chinese food, or which bus line to take. I'll end up huddled up in front of my computer all day, bemoaning the time difference between me and California and wondering what all my friends are up to back home. And I might, god forbid, be lonely.

I'm a pretty independent person (Jesus, how did that happen? I have no idea either), but at times like this it would be really handy to have a boyfriend. I'm still young enough to think that there would be nothing more romantic than moving to a strange city with the love of my life and setting up a little loft somewhere filled with post-its and secondhand furniture and colorful bedsheets. We'd slowly but surely accumulate a circle of quirky but loveable friends. We'd have a bar we go to every Thursday night and a cafe we go to on Sunday mornings.

The thing about this fantasy is that it thrives on youth. What happens in ten years, or twenty years? Will we still be living off caffeine and poetry, or making plans to backpack through Australia? I have no idea what I want that far into the future, but I don't think it's that. I suppose the thing would be to find a boy who could make the transition with you from pseudo-starving artist to respectable suburbanite.

And that's no easy feat. But until then I still have ten months left on the lease to a Westwood apartment and (hopefully) enough savings to keep me afloat and out of Union City for a few months after graduation. And who knows? Maybe even enough to make that move.