This is Not My Beautiful House. This is Not My Beautiful Wife.

Do you ever get that feeling where you’re standing around in your own house and you suddenly think, “I live here” and that seems totally weird to you? Or you’re sitting with your feet up and you look down the stretch of your legs and go, “Wow, my legs are really long.” Or your parents celebrate their quarter century anniversary and you say, “Whoa, you guys have been married longer than I’ve been alive”… Okay, that last one’s probably just me. There were times when I was a teenager that I’m pretty sure most of my brain was having a nap.*

My point is — do you ever have those moments where the absolutely mundane seems, just for a little while, to be totally and utterly bizarre? Do you ever have that sense of cognitive dissonance where you feel momentarily estranged from your own reality? Like stepping out of a movie theatre and being surprised to find daylight and the world going on cheerfully as before…

I spent a lot of my holiday reading and going back to work this week I keep tripping over this feeling of being in the wrong place. I’ve spent so much time recently in other people’s worlds that coming back to mine is an adjustment. Like culture shock, where the familiar just doesn’t feel normal anymore.

It’ll probably help with the proofreading though, so I suppose that’s good…

 

* Actually there was about eighteen months when I was a teenager when my whole brain was having a nap, but that is a different story.