After an epic 28 hour journey from Amman to Chicago to Austin, I’m sitting here with my family in our (relatively) new home enjoying a relaxing 2 week break before I head back to my Jordanian high school life. I’m spending ten days here, and then three in Washington, DC catching up with friends from UVA. After a day and a half, I’m still pretty jet-lagged, which makes me not very excited for my return journey, when I am going to have to get those eight timezones back while explaining the mysteries of our physical world to unruly high schoolers.

If you had told me even in my senior year of high school, before I had heard of UVA, before I had any interest in the Middle East and before my parents moved to Texas – before I had ever considered the possibility of somewhere other than New Hampshire being “home”, if you had told me that I would be hopping around between these three places… It makes me really think about the word “home” and makes me wonder if I associate the concept with a physical place or something more ethereal. Passions, people, memories, relationships, life activities, employment, excitement. Who knows where “home” will be in the future physically, but something tells me that it’s actually always been somehow in the same place. And home will probably stick right there in the future.

Until January.