Fumble

I've been surprisingly okay with being away from home. I guess part of it is the fact that I don't really have time to miss people. With as much time as I spend studying just to meet the minimum requirements, I know I couldn't be doing this in Utah with sisters and nieces and the like serving as unintentional distractions. I cried a little when I got a video of my youngest niece crawling (which I haven't seen in person) and once when talking to Jen about everything her kids were doing, but overall I've been happy with my change in circumstances.

Then this morning I was going through some old pictures to find one of my nephew and me at a BYU game and it hit me: I'm not going to be sitting in the family room of my parents' house tomorrow watching the game. I can be as obnoxious as I want through texts and Twitter, but I won't have the pleasure of fighting with a single family member over the inferiority of Utah's football team in person. When the weather turns and I comfortably throw on my Penn State hoodie to bum around on a Saturday, I won't see 10 other people with lion heads on their chest, making things feel like football, like fall, like home.

So I know it's a dumb thing to miss and get upset over, but I can't help it. When, for your entire life, college football season has been the event your family waits for all year long, the series of weeks filled with more emotion than any other in the year, the high that actually makes Christmas feel like a letdown, it's tough to realize you're going to miss it all. Because I don't get to walk into Walmart with Jen and complain about the lack of BYU apparel. Instead I see what appears to be Corn Husker vomit all over the place. I'd rather the red I were seeing bear U's on it (and that's saying a lot).