The Top 10 Reasons It's Cool to Go Home Again
BY DANI FAITH LEONARD
These past two weeks have been filled with great times spent with family. I grew up primarily on Long Island, but always spent a lot of time where my family lives in Coney Island and I still go there all the time to visit and re-charge.
When you are super-busy and things get overwhelming, it's difficult to be creative. Sometimes, going home and being with your family is just what you need to re-charge (and when your family is as crazy as mine is, you'll spend a week laughing and want to get back to work again).
Here are the The Top 10 Reasons It's Cool to Go Home Again:
10 - Check out the new territory // Things change so fast these days, not only in Coney Island, but everywhere you go. No matter where you're from, it's probably changed a bit since the last time you were home.
9 - Strip away the bullshit // Going to a place where make-up is definitely optional and you are over-dressed in designer sweatpants and a ripped t-shirt really helps you strip away the bullshit and become as creative as possible.
8 - Hearing your grandmother's stories // Those stories that you never appreciated as a kid are what make you who you are.
7 - Eat your grandmother's cooking.
6 - Accept your new responsibilities // When we were young, everybody else provided for us, but now we have added responsibilities at our family gatherings. This week, my sister was in charge of food preparation.
5 - A return to normalcy // Some things never change and it can be comforting. For example, my parents' neighbor will always hate me for the time that I put dog shit in a wallet and left it outside his door and he stuck his hand in it.
4 - Work on removing embarrassing pics from your family's shrine to you before anybody else can see them // You can't let something like this go un-checked for too long. You never know what might pop up and if you are ever going to bring someone special home to meet the family...
3 - Running into your high school teachers in bars is fun.
2 - Validating realizations // You know that girl who picked on you that you thought was super-slutty, would probably end up in jail and would never amount to much? She was...she did...she won't.
1 - The obesity rate is so high that it is highly probable that all of your ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends are really, really fat.