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༏༒༏ ༎༎༎་ confinement
༎་ Region Pub Florence
༊་༐་༎་་་་་་་་་་་་ Uhm
ḍᴀᴜᴛᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀ ᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀ ᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀ.
ᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀ ᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀ.
ᶀᴍᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀᴀ.
Pear  apartments
The second level is that family home, the place where you felt love, you're fortunate and have a nice family like I did, going home to moms or going home to grandmas, it's where there's tradition and food you remember and relatives and that kind of feeling of home.
And I guess that's the third level is the home you create for yourself and not having kids, I realize I really haven't done that for anybody.
I have a wonderful husband, but as far as creating a home and building my own traditions, I haven't really felt that, nobody goes home to Claire.
What do you think home is? How do you think we can define it?
Where your family is, and I have a husband here, so this is definitely my home. Well, it's really wherever he is or we are together, but because I have such a lot of family in Ireland, that's home also.
I did not have any clue that San Francisco was much farther away from Ireland than Boston was, because I grew up in a small country, so thinking of a country that is that enormous that it would take you five hours to fly from one side of it to the other, it was just unfathomable.
And I think maybe if I had looked at a map, I might have thought, oh, that is very far. Do I want to go all the way to the west coast? Maybe I should stay a bit closer.
So it's a very different life over here, but it's home both places, I think.
Home to me is more like going back to my childhood and living in the Midwest, and living in that house, that was a really big part.
It's just pretty much defined who I am, and I'm super nostalgic, so I always think about that area and growing up with the best friend across the street, and having big open backyards, and having the train tracks right there, and doing everything straight out of Calvin Hobbes.
That was my whole childhood, so I think it really defined who I am.
So thinking about that time, that is what I consider like the most at home, and then since then, it's always been sort of a disconnect. I've never really felt like established and like this is my home, I guess.
How do you think we can redefine the concept of home, if it's so abstract?
I think to redefine the concept of home. See, that's another hard question, because I'm still trying to define that concept of home for myself.
I'm not really sure.
It's not as simple for me as one childhood home that I've always grown up in, or have grown up most of my life in.
The concept of a childhood home, that's really just new to me. I don't know what that means, I feel like it's such an upper middle class, middle class term.
To own a childhood home, to go back to your childhood home, and to feel something so comforting and familiar, because it's such a luxury, a privilege that not everyone has.
It's a sense of security that not everyone has, something to fall back on that not everybody has.
Every year when we lived in South Africa, from the beginning of December until about the middle of January, we'd go to Namibia, which is a country just northeast or northwest of South Africa.
That's where my grandpa lives, and that's where my mom grew up.
When I look back and think of things, when I become nostalgic for stuff, it's always stuff related to being in Namibia.
It's more about the weather and smells than it is of visuals for me.
When it's over-classed outside and it feels like I'm close to the beach, then I'll feel like I'm back in Namibia.
Or like if I smell somebody making something like ox tail, which is weird because I'm vegetarian, and I'm like, oh I miss home.
So it's more smells and feeling things than it is seeing something.
First of all, the Armenian people live in a diaspora since the genocide we spread all over the world, so my great-grandparents ended up in Lebanon.
And to have your entire home disrupted instills a level of fighting to preserve what you have, no matter where you are.
So now, all around the world, in all these countries, there's Armenian communities, very distinctly Armenian, and they fought to stay that and keep it that way.
We geographical location had to not matter in order for the nation of Armenia to exist, and now we live in this diaspora.
So in that regard, clearly geographic location doesn't matter as long as you have each other, the culture that you want to preserve.
Even the bad things that you want to change, but it's all a part of it, and the language, the music, the food, all these things can remain, and they don't have to go away because you're relocated.
Certainly, we also in Puerto Rico have what we call el lamento borincano. El lamento borincano is the lament of everyone who's ever left.
And right now, there's more Puerto Ricans living in the states than back home, so the lament is loud.
So the idea of us remembering what it was like to be home, which is really an imaginary thing, because when you go back, it's never the same.
And I draw a lot of strength and confidence from domestic situations growing up.
I have a very closely knit family. The idea of sharing a bathroom, sharing a bedroom, it's not something that I would just, that's how I was raised.
So living alone and this idea of independence and obsession with having their own things and their own space and needing space, this is all very American and very alien to me.
In Puerto Rico, there's no boundaries either. I mean, the domestic space is where everything is negotiated.
Right here, it's down here.
A little below Glasgow is where it is.
Yeah, there's a little peninsula and it sticks out. I think it's below that.
Yeah, it is.
I think we're moving to that notion of home in the 21st century where everybody will be moving all the time and home will have to be more state of mind than a place with a hearth and a familiar chair.
Maybe we'll figure out how to do both but the amount of movement or maybe we'll move less.
Maybe we'll do all our contact via Skype-like interactions so that we won't have to go to Moscow to see a Muscovite. We'll just Skype him.
Maybe that's what's coming and we'll end up having homes in the sense of place from which we have wonderful little built-in TV studios
through which we can interact with people anywhere in the world without actually boarding a plane.
I don't know which it's going to be.
You know, I can be hundreds and hundreds of miles away from my mother and give her one call and there we are together again.
So to me, as long as those, like my relationships in my life are as solid and as honest as I can make them, I think I'll always have a home.
Yeah, it's not a physical place. It's not a location, clearly. It's the ones I love and the ones I love.
Pretty good time for the sunset.
You know, I never go to Moscow before.
You know, I never go to Moscow before.
I never go to Moscow before.
I never go to Moscow before.
