aphorisnt rambles

    “Home is where the heart is,” so said Pliny the Elder. Home need not consist of a physical place, a city or location one can visit or the material structure in which a person grew up or currently inhabits. Rather, home comes to exist more as an emotion, a feeling of belonging and comfort, of safety and welcome, a space–be it physical or mental–one can claim as one’s own. However, when asked to describe home and what it means to me I find myself grappling to identify one single physical location, thinking of the houses in which I have lived (four in total, though only three of which I honestly remember), my dorm rooms this and last semester, the three states and four cities I have inhabited. In each of those places I can clearly picture my house (or the dorm building), my room, the environment just outside, the people and rooms and structures nearby, and I almost feel compelled to identify one as unequivocally home. The problem is, when I really consider home, which in itself is quite a charged word loaded with myriad connotations, nothing stands out as my one true home. I can talk ad naseaum about the different places in which I lived at one point or another, and I can turn right around and launch into a discussion about how home need not be a place but can instead take the form of people or feelings or smells or air temperatures or the taste of the tap water.

Hey, folks! So I think this is the part where I explain my user and avatar and whatnot.

Well my username is actually the one I used for twitter when I used twitter (which lasted about a week, but there you have it). I had no idea what to put as my username because I'm really bad at coming up with usernames–I can't do sudden creativity when put on the spot and under pressure, even if the pressure is imaginary–so I scoured the depths of my brain to come up with something interesting.

At that time, we'd been reading Oscar Wilde in my high school English class, so I had aphorisms and epigrams on the brain, and thus my username was born. I thought something to do with aphorisms would be kind of creative, and given the limited character form of expression that is twitter, something short and sweet like an aphorism seemed fitting. However, I am not Oscar Wilde (I only wish I could be that awesome), and I lack the ability to continually come up with witty sayings, hence the "isnt" portion.