I come bearing good news

Well, we've now returned from the land of endless summer into the cold of the East Coast. And yes, we were greeted with a random person gazing up at our house at 11:30 at night, from the street. No doubt trying to think of the myriad of ways in which he was going to rob our empty house. Not realizing that we rigged the place Home Alone style before leaving. And that he would have been greeted by a flooded basement and some empty paint cans. Which, in retrospect, we really should have thought through more because we've got quite a mess on our hands.

If you're fortunate enough to have a good family (I do) then returning home from a holiday trip can be a bit of a let down. It seems weird, that these people who are absolutely essential to your formation as a human being, that you only see them for about 2 percent of the year. How can this be? How can we only see the really important people in our life so infrequently? And yet, we will see our co-workers, and here I'm not even talking about the one's we might like but rather the guy who sits at the front desk who's name we're not entirely sure of, on about 80 percent of the days?

I'd like to propose some grand theory that claims the rise of secular humanism in the West, espoused by some sort of Jeffersonian individual pursuit of happiness has caused us to lose the important bonds that had previously been such an important part of our culture. Yet, something as basic as the good old King James Bible asserts that,
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."

I'm also fairly convinced that though we are products of our culture, that we can still choose freely. Human beings are indeed like Sartre's waiter. We do not need to pursue our own happiness, (happiness here meaning whatever you want it to mean. The term can be broadly applied to education, marriage, job status, et al. I'm intending it as a catch all for whatever you value more highly than staying in a place that is near family) at the expense of severing daily family relations. We choose to sever those relationships.

I don't think I'm really saying anything radical here. I'm merely reiterating a simple fact of twenty-first century American life. And perhaps it's even more narrow than that, perhaps I'm merely highlighting the experience of the educated or overeducated twenty first century American. She who travels out into the world to find fulfillment from the world, job, marriage, apply catch all again here). So why are twenty first century educated to overeducated persons choosing to live away from families?

I probably need to think about this more and as it's nearly 1 A.M. I'll get around to it tomorrow. Either that or my movie review of Avatar, or why we need to keep kids out of Christmas. My sweater size is medium.