"If I Could Go On Sleeping"

It's entirely too warm in the back bedroom of my apartment. I know it's the room furthest from the air conditioner unit in the living room, but with windows shut and blinds closed and the fact that the sun went down well over five hours ago, you'd think it would cool off at least a bit.

Granted, the easy solution would be to simply not come into this room. Sadly, it is the one which houses the computer. Sometimes I think I should have set up this apartment differently. Then again, that would mean my bedroom would have been in this room, and that would making sleeping in the summer rather difficult. I hate heat.

So one of my coworkers is getting ready for a trip to England to visit her beau. Depending on that trip, she might even being moving there permanently. To say that I'm jealous would be a gross understatement. I really do need to find a way to get myself to that country on some sort of permanent basis. I'm willing to be an expatriot. I'm willing to be made fun of for my accent. Hell, I'm even willing to deal with British food. Part of me thinks I'm so enamoured of England and all things British because they're not Oklahoma. There are days when I truly hate living here, to be honest. I cannot stand this state for much longer.

On the other hand, part of me is, I have to admit, loathe to leave this place. The great majority of my family--and all of my immediate family--live here. It would be (and will be) hard to live far away from my parents, grandparents, and siblings. Everett has remarked on several occasions how odd it is to him that I'm so close to my family, and really, I'm not even as close to mine as some people I know are to theirs. I know that I'd be able to live far away from them, and even deal with not being able to see them more than a couple of times a year. But part of me would miss them greatly. I may hate Oklahoma, but I also love it, in a strange way, because my family is intimately tied up with this state in my mind.

And it's kind of strange to me to have that love/hate relationship with this place. Part of me desperately needs and wants to be free of Oklahoma, but another part of me also realizes I'll always carry this state with me in my mind and my attitudes. Everett commented earlier that, in many ways, I'm a small-town, conventional individual who is very comfortable in the midwest. And that's pretty true. When they were looking to craft a definition of the average midwesterner, I think they probably had me in mind, or at least were thinking of someone quite like me.

That being said, I still want to go to England. Maybe I can still try to get my PhD from there.

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: The Eagles, "Best of my Love"