I am a Mongolian

I have given this a lot of thought. It would appear that I am secretly Mongolian. Lets review the facts.

1. I love things that are felted (who invented felt? The Mongolians)

2. I like goats milk (I am presuming here that Mongolians kept goats)

3. I lived in a tent for a year there (Mongolians did too!)

4. I appear to be living a nomadic existence (Mongolians, it is well know, were nomads)

5. I took a facebook quiz and it said so (Admittedly the Mongolians did not have facebook)

So, Mom and Dad, I am not Irish-Italian-German, as previously believed. Rather I am Mongolian, and this clearly explains why I have spent the past three years of my life moving. I am simply following the rootless ways of my people. I suppose a case could be made that I am a Gypsy too. A Mongolian Gypsy. If such a thing is possible.

There are days when I am happy I am a Mongolian (Gypsy). On these days I like to imagine where I am going to go next. Or how many places I will have lived before I finally settle down. Usually these are days when I feel like I could go anywhere and do anything. Perfect freedom. I think these days are also temperature dependent. There were quite a few of these days in August, September, even October. But it is December now, and it is cold. The glory of being a Mongolian dims in the cold.

More often I have noticed that I am not happy to be a Mongolian (Gypsy). I want to go back to being a nice settled Irish person. They liked for whole families to live in one house for hundreds of years, you know. They are a people who do not relish change. Can anyone imagine that? Having your kitchen table be exactly where your great-grandmother placed it? I don't even have the table.

Unfortunately I have chosen the life of a Mongolian. At least for right now. So I have given a lot of thought in order to decipher how to be happy with this path that I have chosen. What is it that we really miss when we move around? Security? A sense of place? Belonging? Probably all these things, and maybe even more. To sum it all up: "Home".

I have noticed a certain ambiguity amongst my friends when they refer to going "home". I am going "home" they might say, and you would still have no idea where they were going to be that weekend. So you are forced to ask "Home, like, home-home?" Meaning, obviously, to their parents house. "Or home, like home-here?" meaning where ever they happen to be that moment. Frighteningly enough I once heard a friend reply to this question with "No, like home-college", which brings another level to it that I refuse to contemplate.

Making a new home in the gray light of December is a much more daunting thought than making one in golden September. But I am going home-home in less than two weeks. And the one really nice thing about being a Mongolian is that the non-Mongolians in your life are always happy to see you.