Being a young woman in my slighter-later-than-mid-twenties, I have some privileges. I get to make 70 cents on the dollar to my male counterparts (hang on, I think it’s up to 77 cents now–it is! I’m rich!), I get to fear walking alone, going to parties alone, and meeting trusted male friends alone, I get to have second shift of cooking and cleaning and coming home from my full-time job…Hang on, those are the reasons having ladyparts sucks.

What I mean to say is that I have the privilege of going back to Ye Olde Homesteade and changing from an ambitious go-getter of the big city and turning into the bratty ingrate my parents know and love. Soon the day will come when I return home to embezzle their retirement funds, stick them in old folks’ homes, and clean up their various bodily fluids, but that day is not now and thinking about the future is for suckers. (For those of you keeping score at home, dying dog: not dead yet. Which means she’ll never die ever and that’s why she spends her nights communing with nature under the grapevines and who told you I was beating my breast and rending my clothes there last night THAT SOUNDS LIKE A PORNOGRAPHY YOU PERVERT.)

My favorite part about coming back is seeing my family and blah blah blah parents and stuff blah blah memories blah return to roots, etcetera. My second favorite part of coming back is eating all the fancy food my parents can afford now that all their children are gone and have stopped sucking the teat of family funds.

This is me, lack of ears and all.

They are also environmentally conscious because they care about stuff, I guess, which makes for some winning Slow Food ™ combinations. For example, my father hand grinds fair trade, locally roasted coffee beans every morning in a camping coffee grinder, makes his coffee in a french press with water heated up on the stove in a fifty-year old kettle, and my mother uses the same water to make her coffee (machine ground, but she’ll get there) in a ceramic pour-over with a cloth filter that she washes every day. No drip pot for them! Percolators, ha! Suck it, Starbucks! It’s going to take thirty minutes to make coffee and they like it that way! (It’s also delicious.) They serve it with turbinado sugar (you know, it’s brown and little squares instead of itty bitty white grains, so you can’t pretend it’s coke and have a Wolf of Wall Street theme party), and local cream that comes in a glass bottle, is so thick it looks like paint, and is still lumpy, just like when it comes out of the bull. I may not know where milk comes from, but I know those lumps are pure fat and that is goddamn delicious. It also costs approximately 700 dollars an ounce, but you can return the bottle for five cents, so it’s really a deal.

Stuff of the gods. The sweet, sweet milk gods.

They live in the civilized part of Washington state (Tacoma is civilized compared to Sequim or Forks, probably–a sparkly vampire would either get stabbed or concerned-white-people’d to death), and so there is an abundance of incomparable, affordable seafood. Last night we had salmon on the grill, wrapped in grape leaves from the yard that we did not worry about getting heavy metal poisoning from, and there was nary a siren nor a nutty homeless gentlemen in sight or sound of the meal. There were many hummingbirds, who brought us warm towels and beautiful hummingbird sculptures when the meal was over. (That’s a lie. Hummingbirds are all bastards. It was seagulls, who are fine sculptors despite their fish smell and aggressive need for validation from strangers. Indeed, they are the performance artists of the air.) There were also hornets, who did not sting but rather braided my hair with the delicacy of the child laborer who undoubtedly made my t-shirt.

And naturally, I did nothing. I took a nap in front of their giant tv in a giant blue chair (cable! a Futurama marathon! local commercials!) while they made dinner, fetched me for dinner, poured me a beer, entertained me with their loving marriage antics, and then did the dishes. Being an ingrate is fun.

Such things can’t last, though. It’s imperative that I don’t spend too much time with the people who birthed me, raised me, and ensured I had a decent education and could go to college to be in debt for the rest of my life. I’ll be back to the squalid, sprawling squalor of Los Angeles in a few days, left to forage in ill-kept grocery stores for my meager gruel and water, slaving away in the the insidious non-profit industry (save me, corporate America! you have evil on your side!), making my way through the hard, cruel world like the blind slug that I am…

Fuck it. I’m staying here until they drag me out by my hair. Independence is for suckers. If you miss me, I’ll be instagramming a reasonable cost of living.