That 70s House

When it comes to house hunting, I have mastered internet research. I know how to control-click the multiple areas in which I'm searching, select the interior and exterior features crucial to my abode and sort the views by price. I know what sites will show the tax assessment on all the surrounding properties and which sites have pictures. Unfortunately, there's only so far you can surf in the pursuit of a domicile.

Nonetheless, I probably would've continued my e-hunt from here to eternity if The Barrister hadn't badgered me (just a little bit) to make an appointment to see the house. When I say "the house," it's the one I look at every time I search. Just to scroll through the 10 available photos again and see if any updates have been added to the listing criteria or (fingers crossed) the price has been dropped. I know when it was built (75) and its exact square footage (1798). But finally, on Sunday, I e-mailed the listing realtor and asked to see the inside.

On Monday at 6, The Barrister and I drove over to The House for my first showing appointment as a potential homebuyer. Here's a recap of the good, the bad and the ugly:

The Good
- A quiet, centrally located neighborhood where I think I would feel safe
- New bamboo hardwoods in the living room and kitchen
- All new cabinets in the kitchen and granite countertops
- Appliances -including the refrigerator, washer and dryer - are included in the purchase price
- The living room is a glorious sunny oasis bordered on two sides by windows
- Hilarious "Wild and Crazy Guy"-esque wet bar behind louvered doors in the living room
- A cavernous garage
- Not one but two (two!) walk-in closets in the master bedroom

The Bad
- In the backyard, it's a bit hard to distinguish between maintained and unmaintained landscaping
- The roof is 20 years old
- Windows in the bedrooms are crank-handled windows which my dad swears could be the bane of my existence
- A friend of mine at work warned me that squirrels will eat the cedar exterior
- As The Barrister noted, there's not a good location for the television or the litter box (both essentials)

The Ugly
- Beige carpet in the hallway, master bedroom and first guest room, which The Barrister found revolting
- Atrocious burnt orange-brown carpet in the second guest room that reminded me of a few unfortunate diaper changes
- The unspeakably hideous guest bathroom - a combination of pale lime green tiles, terra cotta paint and a (gasp!) palm tree wallpaper border. It was a Boca-gyptian look of sorts.

I definitely could see myself in this house. I was mentally plotting paint colors and furniture placement as we walked through the rooms. But I don't want to get overly excited and make an offer before I've seen something else. Which means - unfortunately for The Barrister - a return to the dubbya-dubbya-dubbya search for another house worthy of the hunt.

Happy Birthday, STGD!

Happy birthday to STGD, my super powerful cosmic twin, armpits sweating and rosacea in full bloom! With his discerning eye for aesthetics and the kind of mad skills that would never require a cover letter like this, he's the best graphic designer on the planet - even Perezzers thinks so! His rapier wit is always entertaining (by which, I mean, clutch your side and gasp for breath), and his tender heart makes for an ever present help in trouble - like when you're barfing in the bushes in rural South Carolina. May you have the best of birthday, my fierce gay husband!

Much Love & Cleavage,
Ash

P.S. For your birthday, I got you this tiny paper tuxedo and a weekend trip to the Inner Banks.

I Love My Dad

I e-mailed the family today to let them know I'm going to see the inside of "the" house. My dad replied, "Good luck!! This makes me sad."

What I've learned: you can go home again. And it's just as hard to leave the second time around.

Baby Steps

I have just e-mailed the realtor about seeing the first house. At this rate, I'll be a homeowner before 40.

Someone Open a Window

Someone found my blog by Googling "farty teens."

One Two Five-O Let It Go

After much ado, I finally took approximately ten minutes on Saturday afternoon to pack up my hard drive. On Monday, The Barrister delivered it to the post office and sent it on its two-day priority way.

Today, I received the estimate - $1,250. One thousand, two hundred, fifty dollars. One-point-two-five-K. Twelve fifty (no decimal).

Now I know why I didn't send it. Something told me that it wouldn't be recovered so easily. That there would be a catch to the free evaluation and no-data-no-fee policy. That the fatal click was, in fact, fatal.

I called Mom, and then The Barrister. I choked up a bit talking to The Barrister. Partly over what I'd lost. And partly because I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I could've backed it up. That I knew it was dying. And yet, I didn't do anything.

I was talking to The Linguista about it later in the day.

"I'm sorry about your hard drive," she said. "Just think of it this way - you didn't lose your best writing because it's yet to come."

I half-smiled. "It's not the writing so much as the pictures."

"Of Dillon?"

"Yeah...of everything. Irreplaceable things. Wilmywood. But I've got no one to blame but myself."

"Well," she said. "I'm Buddhist, but you could always blame God."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah...or maybe just think of it this way. It's God's really cruel way of telling you to let it go."

I know she was kidding, but I still thought about the implications of it, were it true. The laptop was given to me as a graduation gift a summer early so that I could write my thesis on it. And I did. I wrote my thesis - the culmination of my need to "pursue the writing thing." I'm not saying that I'll never write, because I believe I will. I am saying there was a certain way of pursuing it that I exorcised myself of during grad school.

Then there was after grad school - a time of soul-searching. Of trying to find happiness that eluded me again and again. Of writing the same thing about myself and to myself over and over and over again in journal entries. I started the blog and stumbled my way through finding my way. I wound up back home, single, jobless, clueless. I found my job. I found The Barrister.

So perhaps The Linguista is onto something. Perhaps that this cataclysmic hard drive failure is more than motherboard deep. Perhaps it is time to let go of the memories I'm holding onto so tightly. Consign them to the cyber morgue - may they rest in peace - and let myself go in peace.

Hard Drive Goes the Hard Way

I heard the ominous whirring. The fan gunning and wheezing to a stop. But I ignored it and pressed onward. I could feel it dying every time I turned on the computer, its arduous start-up process. And it was made all the more pitiful by the broken hinges that meant I had to prop the lid on the couch arm to use it.

For Christmas, Mom gave me a ridiculously large external hard drive for backing up my photos. I left it in the packaging under the table by the bed until the night that the whirring turned to clicking.

Oh, the click of a withering hard drive.

I panicked, willing it to turn on just one more time. Just long enough for me to plug a USB in and drag all my precious files to safety. But instead, they drowned in a sea of rhythmic clicking. Like a life preserver tossed into a tempest, Mom (who's quite tech savvy) tried to reboot from the system disk. Alas, there was no hope. And so, I sat there on the couch, with my hand on the lid of the laptop and thought of all of the photos of Dillon and Reese and Wilmywood, all of the half-started stories and poems, all of the downloaded-only music, sinking down through the cyberspace abyss.

I carried it to the mall to a rather chaotic looking little shop where a harried Asian lady attempted to start the failed piece of crap. Instead of success, she shook her head sadly and repeated, "I don't know. It's the hard drive. I don't know." And I thought to myself, Don't say it again. And two weeks later, she declared it a lost cause.

I had flashbacks of the Sad Mac and poor Carrie Bradshaw's lost files. The Barrister guided me out of the mall while I alternately tried to console myself and contemplated quickly dispatching myself in front of a moving vehicle. I sat in the car, the hunk of plastic and circuits tucked inside the Belk bag that held my newly purchased "fat" shorts (adding insult to injury), and looked out the window. I felt stupid. Hard drive failure had happened to me at work. And I knew that the laptop was on its last leg. I remarked nearly every time I started it up that I needed to back it up. Instead, I let myself down.

Now, the hard drive is sitting on the dining room table, deftly removed from its casing by my mom. There's a box in one of the chairs. There's some packaging materials I've tossed on top for when I get ready to ship it to the ridiculously high-priced data recovery center. There's probably a thin film of dust on it - it's been weeks.

So why I haven't I sent it? I don't know. It's not that I don't want those memories back - I desperately want to be able to look again at the photos I took of Dillon at the playground the day before the hard drive died and the pictures I took at the work retreat and the autumn leaves at last year's trip to Valle Crucis and mine and The Barrister's Valentine's Day and, perhaps most desperately, the pictures I took of the Grace Street apartment that can never be replicated. I want the words I never finished, and the drafts of my thesis that lead me to what I published. And yet, if I don't send it, they are still alive, somewhere in cyberspace limbo. And if I do send it, I might have to hear that they're gone forever, little bytes of life vanished as though they never happened.

Reverse Psychology

The Barrister and I watched the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance while we put on our own production of So You Think You Can Decorate, which resulted in, I'm sorry to say, a series of rather large misplaced nail holes before we finally got the quadrant of photos hung reasonably straight. Due to the starring role landed by a former contestant, every commercial break featured the trailer for the remake of Fame.

By the end of the show, The Barrister and I were standing in the middle of his living room, admiring our acceptable handiwork when the trailer ran for the 47th time. The Barrister paused, watched a few moments of the trailer and then said, "You know, if you wanted to go see that, I wouldn't say no."

If I wanted to go, huh?

Principles

Last night, my friend Tommy treated me to a belated birthday dinner.

Waitress: Do you want to see the dessert menu?

(Tommy looks at me inquiringly.)

Me: Um, yes. I'm fat, not dead.

Stinky Feet Pizza

Tonight The Barrister and I decided to celebrate the completion of the first draft of a major project I've been working on - and Wednesdayness in general - by going out for dinner. For our celebratory outing, we selected an Italian restaurant in the same building complex as my office. The restaurant has been open on and off in the last two years under at least three different names and who-knows how many owners. Its most recent rise from the ashes supposedly brought delicious brick-oven pizza and other authentic Italian delicacies. So, The Barrister and I decided to give it a chance.

To start, we had wonderfully salty bread and the kind of olive oil that makes you realize what olive oil is supposed to taste like. As I contemplated my order, I watched the pizza oven flame and saw several steaming pies pulled out of its depths. Even though I was favoring the spinach ravioli, I made a last minute switch upon seeing a pizza with pineapple, balsalmic vinager and gorgonzola cheese.

In my trilogy of decades, I know that gorgonzola cheese has passed my lips. But I'm not sure that I've ever had gorgonzola melted and smothering the entirety of my meal. As soon as our waitress set the pizza down, I inhaled a lung-full of sweaty foot odor. Startled, I sniffed again and realized that - sweet fancy Moses - the smell was coming from my dinner.

As The Barrister dug into his pizza - dotted with cuts of spicy salami, black olives and pesto - I tentatively put the stinky feet pizza in my mouth. I chewed thoughtfully. I swallowed. I waited. And then the foot odor taste wound around my tongue. The Barrister exclaimed over his pizza while I bit and gnashed and swallowed dutifully, trying to make it taste better. Half the pizza, I told myself. But one slice shy of my personal pan, I took the last bite of the wedge in hand. And in my mouth, the full intensity of potent stinky feet pizza exploded, assaulting my tastebuds. I winced a little and gagged. The vile triangle of death, the stinky feet pizza crushed my resolve. I put down my knife and fork and surrendered.

But don't feel too sorry for me. I consoled myself in an Italian confection whose name translated to "Drowning in Chocolate."

Sorta Memory

Just listening to the Sarah McLachlan station on Pandora, and it's playing Tori Amos's "Sorta Fairytale." And for a flash, I'm standing in the kitchen of the Grace Street apartment in the middle of fall. The windows are open, twilight is settling, and the air begins to bite. Debating a glass of wine and smelling the cold. Filled with melancholy, but I don't remember why...and then, like a fairytale would, it dissolves into nothing more than an ephemeral shiver.

Rusty

Tonight, I logged in to the Jungle for the first time in ages. I suppose I've checked into the dashboard a couple of times over the last two-and-a-half months, but, to be honest, I haven't really had words. I haven't had words or time or both, or maybe the chemistry to grease the wheels between thoughts and expression. For whatever reason, I took an unintended hiatus.

At times, this accidental absence has felt like a release from responsibility. But at this point, the silence is deafening. The words are clogging my synapses; it's difficult to even know what to say.

My first impulse was to try and write everything...try to somehow recapture the lost time. Instead, I'm going to oil up the brainwaves and just let it all tumble out. And if there's something you want to know more about - if any of you are still out there - I'll be happy to expound upon it. So here's a little of what you've missed...and by the way, it's good to be back.

* Third blogiversary
* Winning lottery ticket - $35
* Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince
* The death of Michael Jackson
* 30
* New-found affinity for goat cheese
* Monet's water lilies * Birthday shoes
* Dillon's 2 1/2 birthday party
* House hunt with renewed vigor
* Big new account at work
* Trip to Ohio and reunion with the one and only Kim Shable
* Nearing 8 months with The Barrister
* Introduction to Beach Ball Rodeo
* Client placement in an in-flight magazine (the ungetable get)
* Reese sitting up
* A terrible tragedy
* The rise of tweeting
* Frequent travel to the Big City office
* New tripod
* A month of physical therapy for my continued back problems
* Blackberry cobbler
* Weight gain
* Death Cab for Cutie concert
* Death of the Hard Drive
* Tommy's 30th birthday party
* Growing volunteer group
* Seeing Penelope & Andi
* Meeting The Ice Cream Man
* Discovery of The Furminator
* Received a hand-painted lizard from the Dilly Monster
* Laughed, loudly, as always
* Made mistakes, as always
* Lived

Field of Grief

It was a brutal day. Up at 4:15 a.m. to be in Atlanta for a meeting - followed by a meeting and another meeting and another meeting. By the time The Barrister picks me up in an abandoned restaurant parking lot after my last one, I am ragged and weary.

Two hours later, our westward journey ends on old turf...the school where Anna and Ronnie met. The baseball field is being dedicated in his memory. And though the gesture is honorable and kind, it punctures my heart, that place so carefully and newly healed over. It deflates all that I've been steeling myself against, and I wither under the curious stares of those who have gathered for the ceremony.

The air pressure drops, like the atmosphere reenacting my emotional state. A storm gathers to the west, moving toward us with the swift cooling winds.

Around me, there is the murmur of voices, occasional bursts of laughter. Aluminum bats connect with baseballs with a tinny ping that sounds hollow in the emptying air.

And the pressure drops and the tensions rise and the storm moves in on us.

We huddle in an aluminum building and listen to the rain slosh on the roof in a deluge so strong it sounds like a firehose is being sprayed wide open above us. And slowly, the heavy splatter of the rain begins to tinkle. Liquid turns to ice. Marble-sized hail pelts the roof in an eerie staccato so loud, we can't hear each other over the sound. It fills my ears; I can feel the vibrations inside my chest. I squeeze The Barrister's hand.

When it stops, the ground is covered in a layer of round white ice gumballs. The storm passes away, warm spring air behind it. And where warm meets cool, a fine mist begins to rise. It shrouds the field from our view as the makeshift ceremony goes on as planned inside the metal building.

As the master of ceremonies starts talking about Ronnie, goosebumps raise on my arms. And the punctured hole gives way to a torrent of tears. I don't know why I am crying. Why am I crying so hard, standing on astroturf and staring into the white air? I am trembling and hollow.

After it is over, someone calls out that the fog is receding and that a rainbow is arcing over centerfield. The crowds shuffles out to see. But I can't. I don't want to see it. It's too poetic. Too trite. This hope stretched out above us when there is none around me. I can't look, and so I stand in the doorway and watch the ice evaporate. Watch the cool solidity slide away into nothingness.

Obligatory Cuteness

A Voice from Afar

Hello.

I'm still here.

Promise.

Posts are a-brewin'.

April showers will bring May flowers.

Miss y'all.

Morning @ The Office

Me (to The Linguista): Is this top to boob-y for work?

The Linguista: Ashley, you have large breasts. Everyone knows this. The jig is up.

*****
The Violinist (in response to e-mail suggesting lunch place where one can order delicious falafel pitas): I would like to join your group of pita eatas.

*****

The Violinist (to me): What is my job title? Hobag?

Reese's Pieces

FAIL

* Blogging

* Reading the novels sent to me by Kim Shable and Susan

* Leaving the bar at Smartini

* Seeing Reese and Dillon

* Contact with the outside world

* House-hunting

* Being productive at work

* Writing (in a way that uses that MFA thing I've got)

* Finances - surprise - $270 for car servicing! Taxes not back yet. Yelch.

* Sending back the merchandise that Amazon sent me incorrectly

* March project for volunteer group (although, I will have to partially blame it on the rain that is falling, falling.)

* Putting a picture of The Barrister on my desk at work

* Life, generally speaking

God is a Sniper

Ominous message on the letter board outside the Apostolic church half a mile from my house:

"When we take things for granted, those things we are granted get taken."

Choke

* to stop by strangling, stifling
Like Pavlov's dogs, I respond to their reactions. An endless cycle of act and react, the latter beginning to paralyze me.

* to stop the breath by squeezing or obstructing the windpipe
The more they squeeze, the faster I run. After all, I have to breathe.

* to suppress an emotion
I will not give in to the angerandfrustration. I will swallow it again and again and again. And though I am full on it, though it rises up in my throat, I will choke back the words and bite my tongue; shed blood in my mouth to keep the peace.

* to check or slow down the movement, growth, or progress of
Aging faster than I'd like to admit and surrendering my independence inch by inch. As the days grow closer to thirty years, I grow more and more emotionally crippled.

* to fill chock-full; jam
And it's like this over and over again in my life...memories flood back to me. Thirty years of redirection through tense silence and direct assault. In the classic words of parents everywhere, I've had it up to here.

* to enrich the fuel mixture by diminishing the air supply
It crushes my ribs, collapses my lungs and pushes every last bit of air out of me. I am gasping. But the independence that's been jammed down to the pile simmers, threatens to ignite.

* to seize with a chain, a cable or the like to facilitate removal
It's time to free my independence and move forward. To rise above and sail away. With the fire fueled quietly, kindling underneath the surface, I fan the spark.

* to shorten one's grip on
I'm firming up my grip on myself and my emotions, preparing my grasp for what promises to be a fight. I flex my fingers, try to be strong and dig in.

* to fail to perform effectively because of nervous agitation or tension
Again and again, I shy away from the confrontation. I choke under the onslaught of terse words, unpronounced judgments. I forget how to be me. I forget how I want to be. Because I'm trying so hard to be what they want me to be.

* to become speechless from the effects of stress or emotion
And I realize after all these years, I can no longer say I'm sorry. I know they want me to have words for why I am as I am. Why I am different. Why I break the mold. Why I go forth, marching to the beat of a drummer no one else hears. And truly, there are no words other than to say I am me. I am me.

* a slight narrowing of the barrel of a shotgun to concentrate the shot
Choking on the crowd of selves trying to prevail, I narrow my focus. I have to push the one I want to the front. I have to be to the world as I am. I have to be true. I have to make independence my target. I have to keep my inherent fragility in my sights. I have to be ready, aim, fire and shoot-to-kill the illusion of me that threatens to destroy the reality.