Whenever I travel back to Hawaiʻi, the concept of "home" gets a bit confusing for me.<\/p>\n
"Home" implies a place where a person feels most comfortable. It’s more than just a dwelling — it’s a state of mind, an emotional anchor.<\/p>\n
Once this visit is done, it will have marked the longest time I’ve been away from Austin. Four weeks, which is pretty much a month. Last year, I took a three-week vacation, one of them spent in Japan. But for this trip, I’ve been tied down to the house. If this were anything remotely resembling a vacation, I would have flown to Maui.<\/p>\n
It’s not.<\/p>\n
It’s me coming back to my first home and tending to it through some extraordinary circumstances. And as much as I’ve come to resent Austin in the last few years, I really can’t wait to get back.<\/p>\n
But it’s not the Alamo Drafthouse, Waterloo Records, Azul Tequila and South Austin that I necessarily want to get back to. It’s the shower head in my bathroom, a TV on which I know where the channels are, the guitars suited for my hands, computers configured to my own settings. I want to go back to the place I carved out as my own.<\/p>\n
At the same time, certain things about Hawaiʻi never stop feeling like home — the proliferation of Filipino accents, the fattening but oh-so-delicious food, easy access to Japanese pop music, and a day-to-day dress code that makes Austin look overdressed.<\/p>\n
Other things remind me of why I left — Hawaiian music, a genre just screaming for its own Astor Piazzola; passive-aggressiveness masquerading as "aloha spirit"; tooth-rotting sentimentality. (If I have to sit through another Lokahi Tree segment, I might have to find a gun to eat.)<\/p>\n
In the past, I would never consider moving back to Hawaiʻi as a viable option. I’ve tempered that outlook dramatically in the last few years, but I’m not convinced that time has arrived for me yet. At the same time, I do another spit take when I find myself thinking, "I can’t wait till I get back to Austin." It’s not Austin — it’s the place within Austin from which I barricade myself against Austin.<\/p>\n
In short, I need to move.<\/p>\n
I resented Hawaiʻi. I moved away, and now I appreciate it.<\/p>\n
If I want to appreciate Austin again, I need to do the same. I need to leave so that I can appreciate Waterloo Records, Azul Tequila and South Austin.<\/p>\n
But what the hell am I going to do without an Alamo Drafthouse?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whenever I travel back to Hawaiʻi, the concept of "home" gets a bit confusing for me. "Home" implies a place where a person feels most comfortable. It’s more than just a dwelling — it’s a state of mind, an emotional anchor. Once this visit is done, it will have marked the longest time I’ve been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4Bkgj-post_7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}