It is totally weird to me..

..to see my name show up on someone else's blog when I'm not expecting it (and especially to see "Sugar Land, TX" right next to it (even though this is a line from an email I sent Maud, and she asked me if I would mind if she posted it, and I said, sure, but then I kind of forgot about it)).

Aside:
The last time I saw my name via Internettical means when I wasn't expecting it was when an email I sent to Harpers Weekly last year was included in the subsequent week. It was in response to a line in the 2/28 edition:

Sudanese villagers forced a man to marry a goat after he was found having sex with it; the man also was required to pay the goat's owner 15,000 Sudanese dinars as dowry.

I shot off a note, and when the next week's edition came out, I was scrolling down and saw:

TO: Harper's Weekly
FROM: Patrick Mortensen
I hope the Sudanese man and the goat stay together for the kids.
Thank you! Good night!

(See?)

End Aside.

However:
In the above-linked post, Maud refers to me as a "fellow Brooklyn transplant", and this will soon be an inaccuracy, as we have these two kids now who demand/deserve more space than our apartment can give them, and we can't afford the Next Size Up in Park Slope, and we can't find exactly what we're looking for anywhere else around here, so we've put our place on the market, and assuming it sells, we're moving to Chicago, my previous town of residence, and where my wife grew up.
This is both exciting and cool and also totally destroys me every time I think about it (how can I leave Brooklyn? all of my favorite bloggers are here*).

Anyway, anyway:
in the email I sent Maud, I referenced "pretty faces"; a while ago, I did a "memory map" (a fun, flawed game where you annotate a Google Map screenshot of your hometown on Flickr) for Sugar Land, which I had forgotten about until recently. I was just reminded of it again, because I mention the pulchritude in there, too.

Clearly:
you can't go home again.

But:
maybe you can go to Chicago again.

Thank you! Good night!


* seriously, though, do I have to stop reading Maud and start reading Bookslut? I don't want to fucking read Bookslut. Please do not make me read Bookslut.