We went back to Dallas last week for the wedding of Sarah and Oytun. It was 6 days of non-stop activity. We stayed up late, woke up early, and slept in a different bed almost every night. It was a week of partying from which we returned tired and bruised, but full of warmth and good cheer.

There's a strange mix of emotion that comes when you return to a place you only just recently left. Strangely, you still feel like it's 'your' city, and yet it's different. I've felt this way before - when I left Houston, where I lived for 14 years, to go to college in Lexington, Virginia. I'd go back for summer breaks and it would feel so comfortable and good, despite the 99% humidity. Then just when little Lexington began to feel familiar, and I had started staying there during the summers instead of going back to H-Town, I moved to Dallas. These other places - Houston, Lexington - I've called 'mine,' but to a certain degree, I think Dallas will always be 'home.' It's the first place I lived on my own outside of college. It's where I got my first real job, a bartending gig that did more to teach me about myself than any other experience. It's where I met my wife. It's where much of my family lives. It's where most of my best friends live.

And despite all these things that make it so familiar and so comfortable, Dallas is also a city that makes me sick: the culture, the obsession with image, the quest for ever-bigger SUVs, boobs, and hair. And the driving . . . the endless driving over routes you've been over time and time again, your only glimpse of people through windshields and tinted glass. Living in Dallas, as in most Texas cities, requires that you be bound to your car. And I still shudder at the hours spent in hot automobiles on hotter pavement listening to bad radio and wishing for some interaction with humanity. It's lonely and isolating to live in the Lone Star State. It requires a courageous spirit, and alas, it got the best of me.

That's why, despite all of the familiarity, all the good things about Dallas, we still felt compelled to leave. And it's also why, upon returning to Washington DC, we already felt strangely 'at home.'

This past Saturday I walked around Adams Morgan, up Columbia towards 16th, past the Rastas burning incense, past the hispanics smoking cigarettes on building steps, along sidewalks where discarded receipts littered the path and at least two or three people asked me for change. Then I walked two blocks over toward Connecticut, where BMWs sat parked next to beat-up Honda civics, different walks of life, but both sharing a common scratched bumper. And the rows of tall red and gray-bricked town houses, elegant, colonial, lined my walk, the tiny gardens in front. I looked down at the red-bricked sidewalks a stark contrast to the modern, paved streets I'd just left. It's amazing - a person can walk from loud, heavily populated streets to a peaceful neighborhood all in the span of a couple of blocks. I love that.

And now, days later, I'm sitting here in my apartment listening to Old 97s and feeling nostalgia for life in Texas . . . sitting around a fire pit with friends, drinking beers on the back porch at the house on Rockhurst, and wishing the world were just a tad smaller.

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