Home sweet... oh wait...

They say you can't go home again. Not true. I can go home again, but I'll be living in the garage since my sister took over my room. It is not a nice garage.

I don't think I'll ever move home again. I might do it for two months between now and law school if I get an internship in my hometown, but that will be about it. From the moment I moved into my dorm in college, I knew that the only way to live was without the boundaries that my life at home necessarily imposed on me. Without ever voicing a single rule, my mother constrained my life simply by being present. When your parent is in the same building as you are, any independence that you experience is largely imagined. You might work and drink and play at being a grownup. You could convince others, and, if you work hard enough at it, you could even convince yourself that being at home doesn't stunt your growth, but in the end you're being coddled in a very large security blanket.

With that said, the security blanket is nice. I love blankets! You come home and there is food or leftovers that you didn't pay for. You leave the stove on and the place doesn't burn down. Your parents might be the type to wake you up when you're late for work. And if you pay rent it's a fraction of real rent but provides all the sense of umbrage that you'd get from giving away your hard earned money to a real landlord.

Perhaps an anecdote would best illustrate my point. It is sadly not my writing but that of my illustrious guild leader Kain.

Let me tell you a story about a man named Danrax. Dan wakes up at 6 a.m. every day, puts on a dry-cleaned suit, his best shoes, and grabs his hat and suitcase full of pictures of cats. He goes to his local McDonald’s, orders a cup of coffee, and sits back to read a newspaper. He then goes home and plays Warhammer Online. This daily ritual is known as "pretending to go to work", or as he puts it, "practicing for when I have a job".

So basically, your independence at home is about as real as the job that Dan pretends to go to every day.