Blatant play for sympathy

I don't want this to be another post about how homesick I am. But I keep thinking of my family and things that are familiar to me, yet so far away. I never knew places like Farmington existed outside of movies like "Erin Brokovich." Places where the Catholic Church blankets the lawn with little white crucifixes bearing names like "Timmy" and "Valerie" to commemorate all the babies -- millions, according to the Church -- murdered by abortion. Halliburton has several offices in this county and the men work hard and dirty then go to church on Sunday.

This seems like such a meats'n'potatoes town and I am used to Spam and kimchee. This is a place where the women have big 80s hair and washed out features and the men wear Wranglers and buckles. It's a fucking time warp. In Honolulu the girls almost dress like they're in L.A. and the boys wear slippahs and surf shorts and everybody has a tan or a sunburn. There's a Merle Norman cosmetics shop here, just like in Hawaii, only in Hawaii it's a fancy boutique in the Kahala Mall and over here it's behind a pair of dirty glass doors in a strip mall.

Some of these descriptions are colored by my homesickness. When I was in Hawaii, Hawaii didn't seem so great, so tropical, so perfect. And I never thought I fit in there. I was a dorky kid in high school, always wearing oversize long-sleeve T-shirts and ill-fitting jeans with my dirty sneakers when all the other girls had discovered their bodys and pushed the limits of the dress code in mid-drift and cleavage bearing tank tops. I was always at home with a nose in a book while it seemed every other teenager at my school was at the beach or at the movies or at the karaoke place. I swear, I hated Hawaii and believed with all my heart I'd fit in better on the sophisticated mainland.

But here I am, discovering what 99.9 percent of the locals that leave Hawaii discovered: They fit in in Hawaii, even if they are book worm nerds that never learned to surf or hula.