Seasonal funk

It has arrived. My annual bout of late-winter homesickness. It's not that there's anything about home in the late winter that makes me homesick - instead I believe it's normal late-winter ennui that tends to make me think more about home and therefore lends itself to a wave of homesickness.

Over the years my homesickness has evolved from being the standard "I miss my family!" stuff to something a little less easy to pin down. I don't just miss my family and friends and my hometown but I miss being where virtually everything was familiar to me. Not just the landscape but the culture and the customs. It's as if everyone I know is over there having a conversation and I'm over here and I miss out. I want to be able to keep up too!

Not terribly long after I moved to Germany, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" came on TV in the US. I used to think that I could kick ass if I could be a contestant but I was here and missing out. Now I think that if I went on that show (They don't even still show it, do they? I don't know because I'm not there to know!), I'd be terrible at it because any question dealing with American culture from the last eight years would be lost on me because I wasn't there to learn it. And enhancing this is the idea that if I went on the same show in Germany (where it is still shown), I would get tripped up on the first five questions because so many of them deal with sayings or children's songs or other little tidbits of German culture that I don't know because I didn't grow up here.

When I go back to the US for a visit I have a sort of culture shock. Things are familiar but somehow changed. I no longer recongize automobiles on sight (and they all seem impossibly enormous). When I go to the grocery store there are products that I don't know and the ones I do know have different labels. The TV is filled with shows I've never heard of and I don't recognize the face of the person reading the news. I forget what all-you-can-eat buffets are about and if someone hands me a Big Gulp to drink from it feels like drinking from a bucket.

I once read a novel where one of the characters is from Germany and lives in the US. She laments to a confidant that she feels out of place in America and has been gone so long from Germany that she feels out of place there as well. The confidant suggests that instead of feeling as if she has no real home anywhere to feel as if she has two homelands and she's at home no matter in which country she is. I thought a long time about that and most of the time it is how I feel. For the most part I feel fairly comfortable with where I'm at but it's when I'm longing for my other home I feel out of sorts.

Well...I imagine it's nothing that a peanut butter, banana and mayonnaise sandwich couldn't remedy.