I haven’t written about the weekend, but it was wonderful for the most part.

Friday I rushed off to catch the train to the airport so fast, I forgot my shoes and my keys. The latter I wouldn’t realize until Saturday, though, and for the moment I put the annoyance of having forgotten my shoes out of my mind. The train got me to the airport, and I sped to the terminal whose plane would take me to Dulles. Having timed everything exactly, I arrived just as they called my name. Got on the plane. Settled in, and waited through the flight.

I was at the back and so I waited for a long time, but the flight seemed a bit shorter than the one to BWI is. Making stilted conversation with the guy next to me helped things to pass a bit faster as well, but mostly I read my book, No Country for Old Men. The Boy picked me up and we drove to my house, stopping for fried chicken along the way since I hadn’t eaten since two.

When we got to my house, everybody came from the innards of the house to greet us and sit with us in the living room while we caught up.  I had my brothers watch Dr. Horrible, we finished off the chicken, played with the dogs, and went to sleep.

Saturday was a date day, and the Boy and I went to DC to walk around, hold hands, eat good food, and enjoy the day. It was beautiful. In the evening we ate a fast dinner and drove to meet some friends at the movies, so we could watch Tropic Thunder together. About twenty minutes in, the fire alarm went off, and so we were herded outside to wait. Told to go home, we started to drift to the parking garage. Some of our friends had already started driving back to my house so we could hang out, since we assumed the theater had closed (it’s what the manager had said!), but we saw people re-entering. All of us ended up seeing the later showing, and had a good time because of it (plus, free food).

At night, the Boy and I cuddle in the room and watch an episode of Heroes.  In the morning, since I do not have to go home on the earliest, crack-of-dawn flight, we enjoy a rare moment of solitude, together, in the quiet of the morning.

These times are both the best to hold onto and the saddest for me; I love the moments we get to share during the brief visits right now, while we live apart. But leaving restores the inevitable distance and separation that comes between us when we can’t see one another somewhat regularly. What will this mean for the future? I’m not sure yet, and so I keep hold of what little I can, the photographs, the ticket stubs, the hugs and the late nights spent driving over and over the land from the airport to what used to be my home, and back again.

Sunday morning, when we finally get up, I get to eat eggs, pancakes, a bit of cherry yogurt, and drink coffee sweetened with cream and a little sugar.  We linger a bit longer than necessary, but I get to the airport around 11. Check in. Miss the next two flights, but have them change my priority (which ends up being downgraded anyway) so that I can try to make the 2:45 flight home.

I do, and sit in the first class seat that is by itself on the left side of the plane. But I make the most of the isolation by reading (currently Abundance, a novel about Marie Antoinette), writing, and musing about the weekend. Taking pictures of clouds out the window.

In the end, it is a long train ride back to Decatur, where I’ve left my car. My coworker has left the key hidden under the tire, visible with just a bit of string, and I am tried, aching, but happy. I return to the house with a load of sheet music. I clean, relax, and get a good night’s rest.

Good night last night. Today’s shaping up to be a pretty good day too.

I have a lot on my mind, but for some reason it won’t translate into words this morning. That’s all right.  There’s lots to do before I fly out tomorrow. Hopefully the weekend will bring interesting things to talk about on Monday!

This weekend was spent repressing getting over the horror that was last week.

Friday: Working, barely functional. Bleary-eyed, uncomprehending, and generally spouting gibberish when spoken to. Friday night is a movie by myself (I think?), some piano playing, and then sleep, much needed sleep.

Saturday is the gym. Winding through the city. Can’t quite remember. Coming home, cleaning up. Dust and folding clothes. Three loads of laundry. Trash everywhere. Piano playing. Flute playing. Then a  movie (X-Files: I Want to Believe - see below for a semi-review/spoilers!), then some games, a tumble in heels which results in a scraped knee (who gets a scraped knee when they’re 23 years old?!), movies, my games, and sleep.

Sunday is the gym again, but only after some cleaning, lounging around, and piano again. Wind through narrow streets in Atlanta and stumble upon the Trader Joe’s again. Mango-vanilla soy ice cream, fair-trade dark chocolate, a little can of crab meat, and some rice bowls later, I walk out with a paper bag and go back home. Watch two movies and relax, do nothing, and generally have a good day.

Yesterday, I owned a project and impressed my boss when I finished faster than normal. Today she told me she was confused about some parts, why I departed from her ideas, but in general is still happy that it is at least drafted fully. I’m still unsure of her enthusiasm, as praise is never quite forthcoming, but it’s better than nothing.

The locks are getting replaced, the house smells like ‘lilac comfort’ air freshener, and my floor space is cleared, with the exception of the goldfish tank, which sits on the ground by my bed. I’ve gotten more sleep in the last three days than the entirety of last week, combined. I’ve been doing well at work yesterday and today so far and hope that it keeps up.

This weekend, I believe I’m going home to visit the boy, close a bank account, and generally hang around. I think it will be a good weekend.

(more…)

Yesterday was a truly horrific day. I think I’ve grown a bit since my last really awful day though, because while I felt angry and indignant that these events were happening to me, I was also able to laugh and accept. Not laugh in the truly amused sense, of course, but laugh ruefully.

Well, my bad run of luck started the night before, when I got lost on the way home from work. My mental map is extremely lacking in the Kirkwood/Edgewood neighborhoods still, and so once I realized I had no idea where I was I started to feel irritated with myself. You can’t even follow simple directions! my brain screamed at me, and the minutes ticked by, wasted, as I meandered around tiny back roads, until I finally found Memorial Drive, one of the main roads that runs east-west through this side of the city.

Cousin and I went out for a while, spent way too much money on simple things that we needed for the house. The heat, sheer effort of moving the television and heavy boxes of furniture for me made both of us irritable, and it was late by the time we got back to the house. We got into an argument which resulted in us not really speaking much the rest of the night.

I stomped upstairs after this, decided to put together my new stuff, and ended up putting my back through the wall as I tried to move my bed. Yes, through.  I cannot tell you how much this pissed me off. I’d backed up to the wall, pressed against it and was about to move my bed frame and mattress with the strength in my legs (much stronger than my arms and back)…. and found myself sitting inside the wall.

For the moment, I’ve covered it with the dresser and fish tank, but I know that soon enough I’ll have to repair it. Great.

This was the first in a series of terrible events, though.  What followed was that my cousin splashed fish water all over the end of my mattress, I got to sleep only four hours, and when I did I lay awake for a long time looking at the unfamiliar shadows. I had dreams in which I was eating plants and gagging on them, woke up freezing, and since I hadn’t set the water up warmer, had to take a cold shower (in an already freezing house since the AC was set down to 70…), and go to the court house hungry, since I didn’t want to be late.

Then at the court house, I was bounced around from clerk to clerk until finally someone agreed with me that my documents, including the notarized form that my dad sent specially, were good enough to start processing me and get my car registered.  But they asked for my registration.

Back in my car, it was no where to be found.

So I drove home, tore my room apart and found my MVA registration where I’d put it–in my planner, which I’d taken out of my purse the night before.

They sat me down in front of the slowest teller on the planet. The whole situation was just so pathetic, I had to laugh.

She typed with one finger. Checked her personal cell phone, twice. Gossiped about how Bernie Mac died. Got up a few times to verify something with her manager, since apparently coming from out of state is so confusing to everybody that peons at the customer service level can’t figure it out. By the time we had finished and I had paid my $38 registration fee, it was 10:15.

So I went to work, played out the rest of the day, and came home.

But no, the bad luck didn’t stop there.

I tried getting my license plate off, to no avail. The front one came off fine; the back one had bolts so rusted in place I chipped giant weals of metal off each one, cut myself, and gave up. There were shelves missing from every bookcase I owned, and when I went to dust off one of the remaining ones that had all its parts in my room, I noticed the bottle of poison was leaking.

I’d brought it upstairs the night before after noticing something huge and disgusting scuttling around on the floor. Used the poison on the base boards, then left it sitting at the top of the stairs.

Last night, I noticed a small puddle around the nozzle, which is extendable. I’d left the nozzle itself on the floor but figured that nothing would leak too much, having to work against gravity and all. Then I saw the cardboard box nearby was wet a few inches up its side.

Cursing, I went to shift the box and saw that not only the side was wet, but all four of them and the bottom. And that almost 4/5 of the entire bottle was empty. Last night I’d used maybe 40 sprays total, not enough to even register a difference in the level of liquid inside. As I started to lift the box, I felt low panic rising, especially as the bottom threatened to give way.

There go all my journals, I thought rather dully. Years and years of journals stacked in there, plus pictures, and some other random knick knacks.

Worse, worse by far compared to the journals, I think, was the school records I’d filched from my father’s drawer that are some of the few remaining free details about my mother’s past.

Ruined. The paper melted when I picked it up. The only thing that survived was the yearbook, which was still only about half all right. I picked it up carefully and set it on the ledge in my room close by the fan so that it could air out naturally.

I don’t think it’s hit me yet, losing all that stuff, and I keep telling myself that it’s the universe’s way of telling me that I need to move on, to forget some of my grievances with my past. I don’t know.

But those journals are all me, from when I could barely write two sentences up until the most recent years of my life, and everything in between.

One friend asked if I’d “backed them up” somewhere… I could only laugh. Maybe if I’d had some foresight or was especially paranoid, I would have thought to scan all those pages into my computer and save them somewhere digitally. Or type them in by hand. But who has the foresight to think that you’re going to let four gallons of poison leak on to the floor and destroy everything? Now I’m afraid that putting them in plastic bins will just be a bad idea if my house burns down–they’ll melt with the plastic. Maybe a bin inside a fire box?

Maybe I’m overreacting.

I know the important parts of my past and my writing are not gone; they’re still a part of me. But I won’t be able to read through them again and see how I experienced them when I did, in the moment. I think the loss of that is harder than anything else, and I think once it actually hits me I’ll grieve for the loss of that stuff.

But for now… what can I do?

Today I felt this tightness in my chest after we’d signed the lease and I’d gone to work, because I want so much for it not to be a mistake.

It was a beautiful day but all I could think was that maybe we did rush into it, that since the house wasn’t even ready for us that it was a sign that we should have kept looking, should have held out for something else, something more.

It’s the cutest little house, a squat little grey cottage set in a strange little slice of suburbia within the city itself. Just south of the golf course (the very expensive golf course), and only a few miles away from work. Further from the gym than I’d like, but only going three or four times a week is all right with me, especially since we live close to the highways anyhow.

It has black shutters and hardwood floors, and right now is so intensely dirty that I can’t shake the disappointment leaking into my thoughts. I keep telling myself that I expect too much, that when we clean it all up things will be wonderful, but I can’t help but be suspicious now that it won’t turn out that way, that we will just have another repeat of this apartment, which I liked so much in the beginning but which has slowly spiraled downwards, until it has become depressing for me to return to, to live in.

I also can’t help but think that it is partially because of the inhabitants that this place has so much negativity. Not only my across-the-hall neighbors, but my roommate too, I feel like have been slowly poisoning the energy here with their complaining, their constant yelling and conflict and general unhappiness.

And the place right now is so small I can’t even close my door to all of the bitching, the meanness that’s in this place, especially when my cousin is at home.

Luckily, this new place is about double the size of this apartment, and so we’ll all have room to breathe (I hope). My room is the entire upstairs, although that’s still small, but the floor space is more than I’ve ever had and I simply love it, love the possibilities it brings.

And even while I was happy about this at first, already the phone calls have started with the complaining, the rejection of a place that isn’t pristine. Complaints that there is some strange plant growth in the cabinet, some fruit flies around it, cobwebs everywhere, debris and junk left out.

While yes, I do think it’s a bit odd that the place wasn’t cleaned out before we got ahold of it, we also seemed to catch the landlord off guard in moving in on it so quickly. I asked my new roommate if he could sell any of her medicine that she left (jokingly…), and then told him to put it all in a giant pile so we could give it back to her later if she wants it. I told him not to worry about the root thing and the bugs, that they’d go away if we just tossed the whole growth or whatever in the garbage and bleached the drawer.

These things seem so rudimentary to me–that we should have to clean some when we come to a new place–that I almost can’t believe I have to give instructions on how to deal with them. It is almost as if I must now mother both of my roommates, when that is the last thing I want to do.

I want to be left alone, is all. No, better, I would much rather live alone than with lots of people, especially people I don’t know well. I have come to need space over the last few years, space in which I can retreat into myself and my surroundings and just be, without having to be everything else that they have come to expect of me.

So still, I do secretly enjoy the moments in the apartment when things have just been cleaned (by me), straightened (by me), and washed (by me). It’s those moments when I’m alone that I can truly relax, smile, do what I want. Lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling and drift off imagining that I’m somewhere else, somewhere fun, or dive backwards into myself and my memories and hash things over. It’s those nights when there’s nobody here, and it’s Saturday and I can watch three movies in a row and write in my journal, nights like that I enjoy.

I have no doubt that I will enjoy this new place, however much cleaning up I have to do in order to get to that point. Part of the charm in an old house, I told them, is that it’s old. It’ll have cobwebs, it’ll have creaks and dents and small holes in the walls. It will be grey on the outside, and on the inside yellow and blue and green. It will maybe have that strange depression in the tub where water seems to pool if you let it. And yes, it may have the occasional horrifying root growth where the previous owner forgot some kind of legume in the drawer. Big deal. It will also have the chestnut piano, the odd little window at waist level in the hallway that looks out at the refrigerator, the grate in the floor, the stairs that lead up into the master bedroom, and the yard next to the dog that pees on you. It’ll have the warped shutter, the perpetually open screen door, and yes, the little tiny hole in glass in the living room. And the three heart lamps the land lord left you because she didn’t want them. Yes, all of these things and more.

I still find myself hoping desperately that it is not a mistake, and knowing somewhere in my mind that it can’t be. It won’t be. It’ll only be a mistake if my roommates manage to convince me of it. And they’re not around much, so I don’t think that will be an issue, see?

People in my life make me so angry sometimes.

Been getting to work a bit earlier than last week, which gives me a few minutes extra to read my book, No Country for Old Men. It is helping me understand the movie more, and it looks good when I’m hovering outside. Shows everyone that I still have hobbies, and that I can make it on time.

Worked all day on graphics, which was refreshing from the normal stuff I am supposed to do. I think my boss just likes me so far because I will do what I am told, thus giving her the graphic that she envisions, not necessarily one that is sound in terms of design. Maybe that’s why one of my other co-workers is working so hard to break me of some bad habits… so that I produce graphics that work on a design level, and not graphics that are simplistic and ordinary. I don’t know though. It may not be a bad thing, doing exactly what I am told.

Drove through what seemed to be the end of the world. Well, the streets had started flooding from the torrential thunderstorm that began to roll over around five o’clock, and so it took me much longer than normal to get home. Several times the lightning struck so close that I flinched away from the steering wheel (as if that would save me from a true lightning strike). By the time I reached midtown it was over, and I didn’t even need my wipers.

Watched The Ruins (may be some SPOILERS!). Surprisingly, not all that terrible. Although I will say it wasn’t so much as a horror movie as it was a gore-flick. I do think it pushed boundaries for me though. I couldn’t watch a movie like Hostel all the way through (and indeed to this day I have not finished that movie, nor do I really feel I can in the future). And if I’d known this movie was more disgusting than it was scary, I wouldn’t have worried too much. And I probably would have finished my dinner well before seeing it.

I think it was the gore that made the film, though. The general plot is of course, hackneyed. Dumb Americans (and Germans this time, too!) decide to hike well out of the way of civilization on their last day of vacation, get stranded atop a mysterious pyramid in the jungle, and are kept there by some angry natives. Subsequently, terrible things start to happen and people die. Then everybody is dead, and the movie ends.

In this movie the only real “horror” element was the weird vines that emulated different sounds (a cell phone, someone’s voice), and that were flesh eating. Yes. And little pieces of them would break off and get into your body.  And aside from the characters carving themselves up… This film only made me squirm because of how disgusting it was.

Interesting though. Like I said, not a total loss of an evening. While I guessed where it was going overall, I couldn’t guess how it got there. It surprised me, I’d say. Which is a good thing.

Well… time for bed. I have a terrible headache. Ugh.

Wow, so many good things can happen in one day. I woke up this morning not expecting anything good, but by mid-morning was pleasantly surprised at everything that was going on.

I don’t want to jinx the run of good luck I’ve been having, so I’ll be mum on the subject for now. Maybe by the end of the week I’ll have something more to say

Whoo, what a week. It’s only now slowing down and I’m enjoying the relative quiet of my apartment, relishing the solitude of the weekend.

I’m not sure what the housing situation is yet, still. I think we may go for that house provided everything goes through. I had a mini-melt down over it yesterday, was unbelievably angry at my cousin (who seems to have changed his mind several times now, but has settled on ‘yes’ so as to appease everybody), and went home tired, haggard, and looking for someone to push me over the edge so I could explode.

I played a game for a while and when my cousin came home, everything must have been in my head (that or he realized that he shouldn’t push me on the topic anymore??), because we started laughing and joking about the game. He wanted to play as well, and relocated to the living room so he could use the Xbox (his Xbox), but yelled for me to help him pick a character name and then navigate through the prison and then around the main map. The scene reminded me of childhood, when I’d spend long summers at his house. During the day I would watch him play the games (I remember specifically Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega). He wouldn’t let me play until our grandfather came and yelled at him to get some summer reading done–and suddenly the games would have lost their appeal.

So we played games most of the night; our third roommate called at some point and we more or less resolved to apply for this house.

I am happy about it, but scared that I may be committing financial suicide if something happens and my cousin needs to back totally out. So scared that may be the case. And while I could float him for a month, maybe two… after that I would be ruined.

But I think as far as the house itself and the neighborhood goes… I am making a good choice. There are better, sure. But there are far, far worse. The matriarchs of the little strip have lived on either side of this new place for years though, so this brings me comfort. I’ll be able to jog outside again. It’s closer to suburbia than this place is, and suburbia is what at least my cousin and I are used to. It’s a house. It won’t have roaches from hundreds of people living around it. We’ll have a little yard, some place for my third roommate to build his bed. And I’ll be closer to my friends, who live in town, and closer to work. Further from LA Fitness, but I’ll cope with that (”further” by only six miles straight up the highway).

I suppose my reservations come from the fact that this is all happening soon, very soon. As in August 1, if all goes well, we’ll have a key and a new lease soon. As in… I can move out of this dump and start living a life without these terrible annoyances soon.

At least, that is what I hope.