To define is to limit.

sometimes in life you drop little innocent hints about yourself and your location across multiple social media platforms that in and of themselves are neither too revealing nor harmful, but if you put them all together then they maybe just might be if you squint and tilt your head slightly to the left. other times in life you spend years taking classes in cyber security and grow into a very paranoid person that is hesitant to even look at a computer without first putting a paper bag over your head. and then there are the times where the first and second overlap just so and you end up leaving the country for three weeks but scheduling blog posts so that no one will know on the off chance that you have a crazy stalker waiting to break into your apartment the second they learn that it's empty. (granted, i mentioned on here that i would be leaving the country ahead of time so really, the whole effort was moot but whatever.)

anyway, i'm back! (i was gone as of july tenth, just in case you were wondering.) and i am exhausted. it feels like i spent a ridiculously large portion of those three weeks on airplanes and in airports. (i will probably calculate the exact percentage of my vacation that i spent in the air because i am a nerd, but it will have to wait until tomorrow because of that whole exhausted thing.) another large portion of that time was spent without the time/internet access to blog. (which i had planned for, hence the scheduled posts, but i was still supposed to write something last week.) i'm sure there are stories from my vacation that will seem blog-worthy in the morning, but at the moment, the only thought in my head is how delicious chinese food would taste right now. 

also, i definitely remember spending a lot of time before i left cleaning my apartment, but when i walked in today (after a taxi ride that i could not keep my eyes open in after the airlines didn't send one of our bags after we had to suffer through an annoyingly not-direct flight because we made reservations really late this year) and thinking, ugh the apartment looks so effing cluttered. because it is, of course. because there is really no other way for it be. i mean, there are only so many places that you can keep things in a one bedroom apartment. add to that the fact that i have an unhealthy addiction to yarn, regularly make and bring home pottery pieces throughout the year, have more books than i have room for, and a very bad habit of keeping everything "for memories" and, well... i'm sure you get the picture. i am able to block it out for most of the year, but the second i go to saudi arabia, where my room (in both families' houses) is sparse and neat and empty slash big enough so that even some things thrown on the floor doesn't make it look too messy, that ability disappears and i come back and just see small and cluttered and junk. but at the end of the day, it is my small and cluttered apartment and i love it. which is why i am the worst at house hunting fyi.