day of wow

still reeling from michael owen's stunning and clutch goals last weekend, i've finally emerged to meet my fellow americans.

these next two weeks i'll be home for thanksgiving. home to sleep, home to eat normal food, home to become stupid again watching mtv, and home to see the bravos, of course. being out of the country for almost 11 months now, i always thought i was missing out on "life." i kept up with adult life on-line, reading newspapers and such. pop culture life was another matter entirely. so after flipping through the december issue of "vanity fair", forty minutes at my local bagel shop, and less than an hour's fill of gossip tv, i passed out from commercial exhaustion. having been out of the cycle for so long, i had forgotten how seductive and easy it was to believe in all of it.

i'm not sure this makes sense. i've capped off two weeks of "long days at the office" with an 8-hour flight of nodding off with my body at a 110 degree angle. maybe this is first-day jitters and tomorrow i'll be inoculated. maybe michael owen's redemption last weekend has made me nostalgic for france 1998, when he shook up the world and made us all believe he was magic. i'm off to drive into the everglades and see if there's still some beauty left in this corner of the world.