This was my Facebook status update that I posted today:
On many days I envy my friends who have their own house or apartment, regardless of the size. A home that is warm and cozy, with a real kitchen to cook food, a kitchen table to sit at, a family room couch to watch the tele on, and a bathroom counter to leave all their billions of creams and whatnot on. I don't have any of that. I live where I work and train -- I live in my boxing club. So on days when I feel particularly envious, I step outside of my bedroom and punch the hell out of the sandbags and I find relief in the fact that my others can't do that. I can box naked if I want, beat that....hahaha.
I posted this after the inevitable and oh-so-repeated question came up when talking to someone about where I live. "Don't you wish you had a real home?" he added. "I DO have a home. It may not be a home in the conventional sense of the word but it depends on how you define the word home," I told him. If a home is a place to lay my head then even a "homeless" person has a home and thus isn't actually home-less. Perhaps four walls, heat, water and shelter defines what a home is then. Well, if you allow me to count my electric heat blanket and coal heater as heat than I have a home. Home is where the heart is, where ever that may be. I know foreigners here who have a beautiful, warm apartment but still say they "miss home", as in miss where they came from, so in that sense I'd consider them homeless and me very much living in a home. My heart is here, in my boxing club, here in Cheonan South Korea, and though my boxing club may not be the typical place to set up a home it is where I have mine.
My kitchen is the juice bar area, with a pop-up camping-style burner and a long 12 foot counter to call my kitchen table. My family room is ringside and it stretches from the juice bar area to where the coal heater is. After hours we usually bring the side office couch over and cozy up on it to watch TV. My bathroom has 4 toilets, 1 urinal, 1 sink, and a large shower room. I even have a group shower room too. My home has four showers, beat that. The perk of my very publicly-used bathroom is that because so many people use it, so many people tend to leave their shampoos and shower stuff there. Every week I find some new body rinse or conditioner to test out and it's great. Unlike most conventional homes, my house has a secret room and even a secret patio. My secret room is lined with books, pictures of loved ones and memorabilia that is all special to me. As for my patio, it's small but I don't use it often. And then there are the crawl spaces that line the club. They remind me of the secret passageways of Casa Loma, a stunningly huge notorious castle located in Toronto, Canada. My secret passageways may not lead to a horse's stable or be candlelit but the vents in them allow you to look out into the club and it perhaps could pose of a safe spot if someone were to break into our club. I could simply crawl into the crawl space and be completely safe.
My home isn't a conventional one but it is still a home -- my home. We originally moved into here as a means of saving money and banking what we used to have to dish out for rent. I didn't think I'd even like to live here but now, as it turns out, perhaps I don't want to move. Cleaning the club means cleaning both my home and work place in one shot. There's no commuting to work and I can simply escape to my bedroom here for a midday nap if I so please. I have a pool table here and a massive TV so friends always pick my home to come over to as supposed to that of others and I am the only one with a house where we can host an indoor BBQ. Sometimes my friends bring their dogs over, a mere point but nonetheless a point in favour of my home because they never do that when they visit the homes of other friends. They love the fact that their dog can freely and safely run around the club and I know many of them love the fact that they can run around with my pups here too.
So please don't ask me if I wish I lived in a "real" home. My home is more real than what so many others are living in. My home may not fit most people's conventional idea of what a home should be like but perhaps their home doesn't fit my idea.
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