Perhaps in the midst of the hair-and-dust-raising activities of "packing up", Snarky will think back on her and The Mister's history together. Like many couples these days, they met online. The first month of their acquaintance was spent practicing the simultaneously high and low tech tradition of courting over email.
Their exchanges were refreshingly open and honest from the get-go. She was finishing her degree in a field she did not respect, and he was working in an industry that no longer interested him. They found a kindred spirit in eachother's restlessness.
Sometimes they made simple poetry challenges to eachother. One day The Mister asked Snarky to compose a quick poem using words no longer than four letters. Here's what she came up with:
soft paws
pad pad pad pad
purr
cat eyes look at you
a grin? (too fast to tell)
now she goes
zoom!
on your lap
pad pad pad pad stop
"mine"
say her eyes
you nod, "yes"
Snarky has to interrupt this regularly scheduled home improvement program to do a little theraputic venting/stream of consciousness whangdoodle:
Givens:
1) Snarky hates moving. HATES it. With a deep, burning, vitriolic passion. She suspects she might be a little OCD about her Stuff being Messed With, even if it is she who is doing the messing.
2) The Mister has been suffering from low-grade depression for as long as Snarky has known him. That would be eight years.
3) The Mister only recently started getting treatment for said depression when it developed into anxiety attacks that affected his work performance and also showed up as heart attack-like symptoms.
4) The Mister had to stop taking his "happy pills" because they gave him a rash.
5) The Mister hates his job. This is probably what pushed his depression into anxiety.
6) The Mister's job is so consuming that he's too busy during the day to do anything "extra-cirricular" and has also had to bring home "homework" that sometimes has him up past midnight (or in one instance, he never came to bed). Therefore, Snarky has been doing all necessary research for the house/move.
7) Snarky really, REALLY hates moving.
8) Snarky wrestles with her own issues of low self-esteem (coupled oddly enough with a raging ego, work that puzzle out) which can create overblown reactions to criticism.
Catalyst:
So today, all those factors came to a head as Snarky tried to secure temporary permits to allow the Snarks to park a fourteen foot moving truck in front of their (essentially, for the purposes of this story) downtown apartment building. It's always the little things that set off the best explosions, no?
This could have just as easily been a week-old stack of unwashed dishes in the kitchen or an odd comment on the appropriateness of a certain pair of pants to a certain type of musical venue. Something trivial and small yet monumental, like dripping water or straws on camels' backs.
Results:
A very terse, very public cellphone conversation in the middle of the engineering department where at points Snarky had to hold the phone away from her ear because The Mister, in his best moods, cannot use an Inside Voice to save his life. As he was at times apoplexic with anger (at Snarky, the world, his employer, again with Snarky, and again with work), fuming with frustration, and exclaming in exasperation, his Outside Voice was just about at Football Stadium Level.
Snarky responded with hushed, angry, trying-to-be-not-"you-statements" speak and had a fun time wrestling her features away from alternating between tears of rage, tears of sadness, tears of fear, and just plain good old fashioned WTF.
Snarky admits she is not blameless in this. She is passive-aggressive, sensitive, and requires much grooming. She's usually pretty much self grooming, but enjoys a fluff every now and again from her paramour. She can be a demanding diva bitch banshee at times, but has been working hard to recognize when those "chocolate and pickles" style impulses present themselves.
This is the rockiest point before it gets smoother. This is the abyss from which, after the dust has settled, they will look back with their arms looped around eachother's waists, and they will say "Whew! That was a close one!" And they will be glad that they had eachother to lean on, rail against, and be pushed through by in order to make it to the Other Side.
They just have to have faith and get there together.
Solution:
Snarky plans on making peace offerings tonight. But for now, she has a job interview for which to prepare, and a slowly rising tide of panic to quell with logic and love.
Since Snarky is an image posting fool, this entry is continued from Part One below...
On to the brightness:
This was supposed to be the Auburgine Anteroom to the Brown Boudoir. The second coat is darker, and the Snarks are planning a third. The Mister is already grumbling about washing over this with either black or dark blue to tone down the pink. PINK!
Behold the pukey green before of the exercise room. This color has been dubbed "shittay" by a close family friend, and the Snarks are not arguing with that. Shittay indeed.
The solution? A little somethin' somethin' called "Glowing Firelight". "Glowing"? Try "Glowering"! Darkity likes!
After one coat. There might be as many as three in this room too. Also eventually a metallic wash over the whole shebang. Because they can.
A shot of the test wall in the living room for the Granny Smith Apple Green. It is a bit brighter than in this shot. Also, yes, the red has GOT to go. This is not Christmasville.
Are your eyes now pulsing and watery? The Snarks are enjoying their crash course in color theory. They did not have the opportunity to paint prior to moving in to their last house. While the coming weeks promise to be a hectic scramble to the finish for so many things (the amazingly intricate domino array of contractors needed to just Take a Bath, not to mention the whole "move all the crap in the apartment into the house" manoeuver) (A procedure so complicated it needed extra vowels!) The Snarks are truly enjoying the feeling of putting their (technicolor, barf-up-a-rainbow) stamp on this little house.
Last night they even schlepped a few things over to make their first dinner in the house.
Nevermind the fact that they don't have a fridge yet. Brushetta!
Snarky would like to leave you with something a little more restful for the eyes. This is what greets them from the kitchen sink when they finally manage to wrestle the battered side door open:
Just breathe...
(Thank Beth for Faustus!)
The assumption usually made about those of a Darker Bent, is that they tend to surround themselves with dark, brooding colors in heavy, funereal (sometimes boudoiresque) fabrics.
Those traditionalists really need to just go elsewhere and have some tea and (angsty, morose) biscuits because Darkity is about to Blow Your Mind.
Behold:
Master Bedroom, apres Snarkification
After one coat. One more (maybe two) to go.
Master Bedroom, before, back toward the bathroom. Darkity added for scale.
The color is called "chocolate sparkle" though the Snarks are unsure from where the "sparkle" comes.
OK, OK. So that wasn't really all that crazy. In fact, it is rather traditionally dark and cozy. But! The ceiling? Those putrid green niches? Those are all going to be sky blue, y'all. The ultimate Master Plan involves a few different shades of green and leaf stencils to create a treehouse/canopy effect.
On to the brightness:
Oops! I exceeded photo limits... to be continued in Part Two, then!
Snarky's got a camera full of color, but hasn't had the time (or the energy) to download them for y'all. Hopefully she'll be able to snatch a moment's respite to faithfully record and report the process of The Snarks stamping their sign of ownership all over the walls of this house tonight. Maybe.
In the meantime, Snarky just wants to take a moment to share her newfound, revitalized love for violets. She bought a few to transplant into a strawberry pot from the local multi-culti pan-Asian megalomart. They've been acclamating by the kitchen sink (along with a fancy jade plant and six organic basil seedlings purchased from a redheaded entrepreneurial tweenager with charming salesmanship) and provided a very uplifting, very grounding whiff of goodness every time Snarky and The Mister bellied up to the sink to rinse out paintbrushes and pans.
She can't remember the last time a little handful of flowers has brought her so much peace and joy and contentment and hope. She can almost feel the chemistry of her brain rearranging to hardwire the smell of violets and fresh latex paint directly into her idea of this house that is slowly evolving into their home.
This makes her happy beyond the thrill of new homeownership. Most of her scent memories come from pre-adult times. She has always hoped to experience equally intense moments now that she can appreciate them more fully. (She has a fairly depressing theory about the relative impact of finite periods of "important" time in inverse proportion to the longevity of the subject experiencing those periods of "memorable" time. Anything that disproves this theory is welcomed warmly and with much fanfare.)
So yes. Tonight, possibly pictures of retina searing colors. If not that, than definitely the long and somewhat interesting tale of the fancy schmancy piece of exercise equipment The Snarks purchased over the weekend.
Edited to add: OK, so the tie back to BPAL is kind of tenuous at best. I meant to say that I am now going to re-evaluate my "to try" list to include just about everything with violet in it. Then I got sidetracked... and hell, tangents happen, y'know?
The Snarks are homeowners!
Snarky = ecstatic, The Mister = Already Thinking...
To commemorate this life-changing event, Snarky is tweaking her blog a bit to include documentation of the ongoing process of turning This Old House into their Home.
Snarky is still planning to keep with the third person format. She will most likely still throw in random fits of writerly aspiration. But the focus has shifted enough to warrant a re-chistening of this blog.
The Snarks are really, truly happy to have gotten through this first major hurdle toward housedom. Unfortunately, their new status started out with a Snakes on a Plane shakedown in the form of a break-in to their new house.
Apparently some bored, only mildly motivated hoodlums noticed the "SOLD" sign in front of the house and the fact that the previous owners had recently vacated. They took advantage of the occupancy lull and crowbarred their way into the empty house. After unsuccessfully attempting to wrench the sink disposal out of the kitchen, it appears they left empty handed. They even left the crowbar behind.
The Snarks are feeling a bit shaken by this. They've had car break ins in the past, but their home? Never. After talking with the neighbors, they feel a bit better. They're a (usually) watchful, mindful bunch.
Besides the obvious changes to the game plan (having the sellers purchase a new side door, installing anti-theft systems) they are now thinking that a Whole Hog style move in (rather than a piece-meal, dribs and drabs approach) would make them feel more secure about their few possessions.
What a way to get started! Nevertheless, The Snarks are determined to make crudites out of cruddy human nature and plan to gather fluff and twigs so that they can fuss and fidget until their nest feels Just Right.
The tenative plan for this weekend is to possibly purchase a nearly-new commercial grade elliptical machine for their gym/entertainment area in the basement. Though this fine piece of machinery is an amazing find on the Craigslist Portland site, it still is pricey enough to cause Snarky to reconsider her gym membership. If they can also find a decent set of free weights for cheap, she will hang up her wee courtesy towel for good and Sweat to the Oldies (or the Emos, or whatever else The Mister has going) at Home.
Snarky is also thinking about taking on the somewhat daunting task of refinishing the hardwood floor in the upstairs master bedroom suite. This might be as little as scruffing up the finish with steel wool and adding two coats of poly... or as much as renting a belt sander, floor buffer, and edger and spending two days stripping, scruffing, and recoating.
Either way, she thinks it will greatly improve the feel of the room and it will also be much less than the bamboo overhaul The Mister has been craving.
And with that bit of good/bad/good, this sleepy new homeowner is going to collapse into bed.
Snarky's analytical brain knows that there is still ONE MORE DAY until the house is officially theirs. But her animal Veruca Salt side of her brain is stomping its little patent-leather Mary Janes-shod feet all over the sensible hardwood floors, scuffing up the works.
Snarky just had a minor retail freak out over at Penance's tart site just now and is not looking forward to the reaction of The Mister. She doubts that he was as troubled as she was by the "Old House Smell" that was wafting up from the recently vacated basement. This assumption is based mostly on the fact that she had to point it out to him.
But she could not resist scent combinations like hinoki wood & cypress, blackberry & sage, persimmons (The Mister's favorite dessert fruit) & water orchid, and the legendary Red Velvet Cake.
Because Chez Snark will not have Old House Smell. It musn't!
Snarky is contemplating some sneaky shadiness in the form of "Oh! Why, it must be a housewarming gift from some mysterious and tasteful benefactor!" Yeah. That's the ticket.
Scent-induced memories have always been important to Snarky. Her memory is uneven and mostly buried in her subconscious (she could tangent off into a rather lengthy recap of this morning's just-before-the-alarm dream that dredged up all manner of high school, college, and oddly enough, recent pop-culture bugaboos). Anything to help trigger a sense of continuity and a past is snapped up and put in the arsenal.
Snarky wants this house to be linked to anything other than the Old House Smell. She probably went a bit overboard, but she wanted to have all her ol factory bases covered.
Darkity was going to squee all over the "how are you feeling?" thread, but there's some heavy shozbot going down over there and she didn't want to be the inappropriately gleeful one interrupting the flow of commiseration...
So she'll subject her blog to rampant glee instead.
Because the house? Very almost nearly officially ChezSnark! Darkity and The Mister signed away their lives and handed over The Big Check yesterday. The Sellers had already signed their bit up in Canada, so all that stands between The Snarks and Homeownership now is for the paperwork to record (and the check to go through... Darkity still regrets that her bank does not make their checks proportionately sized to the amounts they represent. She wanted to have a picture of the Ginormous Check Handoff complete with Ginormous Publisher's Clearinghouse style Check.), which is scheduled to happen sometime on Friday.
To add to the glee, some good friends visiting from Back East were dragged to the homesite for One Last Look on Saturday, and the house (and grounds) met with enthusiastic approval. These friends have about two more decades of experience with the world than The Snarks. The husband is the Ultimate Mr. Fixit and the wife is a Master Gardener. They both knew The Snarks' last ChezSnark (in all it's cute, quaint, cramped glory) and are famliar with Darkity's Black Thumb of Doom. So to get their nod of encouragement was... extremely encouraging!
Now The Snarks are dealing with nesting instincts on Overdrive. They found a place that consigns ecclectic furniture. They are addicted to Craigslist. They are gonna have a home!
Snarky's rule of thumb for writing is the good/bad/good sandwich rule she learned to apply to constructive criticism. Start with something good (ex: "Your lettering on this proposed architectural plan is immaculate and evocative of long past youthful, carefree summers.. "), slide in a critique of what you found lacking (ex: ".. unfortunately your design not only is not to code, but evidences a blantant disregard to ADA regulations and to the human body in all its forms and functions, plus it sucks... and is made of poo ... "), and always close with another positive comment to lessen the sting and leave a better taste in everyone's mouth (ex: "... again, those are really pretty 'g's!"). It's an old crutch of hers, but it's served her well and has allowed her to limp far in the world of BPAL oil reviews, friends' fashion choice advising, The Mister's culinary side-step evaluations, and also blog entries.
Unfortunately Snarky didn't make a good sandwich in her last entry, which was nothing but ageist, whiny pantied, somewhat gross yuckiness. For this, she apologizes.
Snarky knows that every person is allowed to feel like total and utter crap, that sometimes indulging in a Bad Mood can help to purge oneself of built up gunk. But laying it all bare and out there with no relief or sign of redemption was irresponsible of her.
That is what LiveJournal is for.
So here's Snarky's after-dinner-mint to ease any indigestion from the last bad-bad-not funny enough sandwich of the last post:
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
-Lyrics by Eric Idle, from "Life of Brian"
Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best...
And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...
If life seems jolly rotten
There's something you've forgotten
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you're feeling in the dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle - that's the thing.
And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...
For life is quite absurd
And death's the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow.
Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin
Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow.
So always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath
Life's a piece of shit
When you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true.
You'll see it's all a show
Keep 'em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.
And always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the right side of life...
(Come on guys, cheer up!)
Always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the bright side of life...
(Worse things happen at sea, you know.)
Always look on the bright side of life...
(I mean - what have you got to lose?)
(You know, you come from nothing - you're going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!)
Always look on the right side of life...
(And yes, I know, I'm referencing two different Monty Python movies. The song fit the theme better, and I can't pass up a good "wafer thin" joke pretty much ever. So there you have it. It's worse than mixed metaphors!) (Of which I am unnaturally fond of as well.)
This has been a year of body horror. Turning thirty, while not nearly as traumatic on the very day back in January as expected, has become a bit of a milestone despite her best efforts to avoid cliche.
Thirty was when she had her first (and hopefully last) root canal.
Thirty was when she had her first (again, she hopes last, but fears this is really the first of many) cancer scare.
Thirty was when she not only looked at her own changing body, but also The Mister's with a bit of shock, a bit of revulsion. Just a bit.
Her uneasy truce with her skin shattered. She now feels like a dying tree trapped in the tightening grip of some parasitic growth that has managed to encase her in its foreigness, its utter otherness.
She's caved in in a mountain of puss, bile, shit, saliva, and tears. It moves and shifts at the whims of Nature and she must move along with it to avoid suffocating.
A puppet mistress tangled up in her own skeins of control.
She's glad she only has to see the dentist twice a year if a routine cleaning unearths these kinds of thoughts every time!
Antimony ruminates on the Lloyd Dobbler/Diane Court dichotomy of soul mating.
Snarky has to admit, should the world of couples fall into the strict either/or of Lloyd or Diane archetypes: she aspires to Dianeness (Dianeity?), but is most likely the Lloyd in her relationship with The Mister.
Sure, Snarky is the rightful egghead of the two. Her nerdiness and geekiness are such to elicit hybrid words like gnerd or possibly nee(k) (an homage to Monty Python, which adds a flavor of Dork to the mix as well).
Heck, she even started making notes in dictionaries (her own copies, of course), she was crushing on Diane that hard.
But her yearning for The Mister, even now almost six years into their marriage, is all Lloyd. She feels she needs to be a better woman to be with him. He makes her want to succeed at things she's barely even dreamed about. He didn't take her across the pond, but they did end up on the other side of the country to follow his career. (OK, and it was separate flights so no hand/breath holding, "waiting for the 'ding'" moment for the Snarks.) (Which seriously? Next to the "holding up the boombox" moment? One of Snarky's favorites.)
Currently The Mister has a slight advantage to Snarky on bread winning. Very slight. The care and feeding of the home fires is done jointly (though the laundry-and-dishes part of the kindling often gets neglected). Snarky has taken the reins of the check book and manages most of the financial matters of the house, though The Mister does his Annual Duty of Using His Accounting Degree Once a Year for Taxes.
All in all, Snarky has to say her relationship with The Mister falls into a more stereotypical, "traditional" one (man provide, woman manage)... with leanings toward scale-like equilibrium rather than yin-yang parity.
She is thinking about taking up kickboxing.
Today Snarky is nekkid! Well, in the ol factory sense anyway.
Oh man, the Thomas Dolby concert was AWESOME. Even if "She Blinded Me with Science" is the only song you know, Snarky highly recommends this! There won't be any body slamming or sweaty zeitgeist communion, but there will be a definite bond of geekitude, nostalgia, and just "ain't it cool" gee-whizzedness.
And now Snarky has this song stuck in her head:
"One of Our Submarines"
One of our submarines is missing tonight
Seems she ran aground on manoeuvres
One of our submarines
A hungry heart
To regulate their breathing
One more night
the Winter Boys are freezing in their spam time
The Baltic moon
Along the northern seaboard
And down below
The Winter Boys are waiting for the storm
Bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye
Shallow water - channel and tide
And I can trace my history
Down one generation to my home
In one of our submarines
One of our submarines
The red light flicker, sonar weak
Air valves hissing open
Half her pressure blown away
Flounder in the ocean
See the Winter Boys
Drinking heavy water from a stone
Bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye
Shallow water - channel and tide
Bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye
Tired illusion drown in the night
And I can trace my history
Down one generation to my home
In one of our submarines
One of our submarines
One of our submarines
One of our submarines is missing tonight
Seems she ran aground on manoeuveres
One of our submarines
Today Snarky's wearing what's left of her Tombstone/Sweet Cove SN combo from last night and the zesty fragrance of Pangea Organics Chilean red clover with geranium & grapefruit lotion (she got a free sample).
Darkity never really got in to music. Even as a fledgling hedonist, she has managed to neglect that one of her five or six senses, hearing.
She listened to talk radio when her contemporaries were tuning in to the 80's oblivious bubblegum pop and/or nihilistic (yet also oddly poppy) electronic underbelly. She did manage to catch a bit of that hair metal infection like everybody else, though.
Then she met The Mister, who as an opening salvo to their courtship, compiled six mixed tapes to express his past, present, and possible future. He has been instrumental (har-dee-har-har) in opening up her ears to the world of sound.
Still, even with his admittedly diverse tastes, she finds herself floating passively along in the wake of whatever catches his interest and can't help but feel... a bit lost and sort of back where she started, musically.
Tonight the Snarks are going to see Thomas Dolby perform. Besides his one song she can think of ("Sah-sah-SCIENCE!") she couldn't remember anything else by him. After The Mister's hilarious recreation of "Europa" she's still stumped. They have one album (probably a best of) that she will cram with before heading out tonight.
Later in the month they will also see Sigur Ros (whom they have seen before, to great effect) and The Editors. Darkity suspects that the audiences will get progressively younger at each concert.
The Snarks are now in a city known for its diverse and rather indy music scene. The pace of trends here (in fashion/lifestyle/food as well as music) is breakneck, yet oddly retro. Darkity wonders if she'll ever get the hang of this.
Popular theory stated that Spring had indeed Sprung, but she couldn't help but feel mild bemusement tinged with her sense of personal tragedy as she looked out over the river during her morning commute.
Or at least, what she could see of the river. There was a solid, wintry gray wall of fog taunting the entire city from about halfway across the bridge. The repressive haziness continued all the way north to her workplace.
She couldn't see the tender Spring colors asserting themselves in the landscape. Her fellow commuters had all sunk back down into layers of woolen browns, blacks, and grays. Shockingly pale kneecaps, anklejoints, and collarbones retreated back into the warmth of cavelike clothing.
The weathermen all promised a return to sun, to life. She warily eyed the flat sky and felt the smallest flicker of hope.
She's wearing Midnight Mass to match the weather.
The Snarkys are addicted to HGTV. They watch famlies in their intimate spaces, delving up the tender secrets of their everyday lives to intruding strangers. They watch as these odd bedfellows work in sweaty, dusty, passionate union to create something better with their homes.
The Snarkys dream of doing it too. They are beginning to believe that this might become their backdrop. Cue bamp-chicka-bamp music:
Where all the magic happens...
But wait? What's behind this little hobbit door?
Secks-SAY!
Snarky's still in that purgatorial "will they or won't they?" place, but the expected immediate dismissal of the Snark's addendum to their offer on the house did not happen.
So they've entered a counter-counter-offer suggesting a credit for all the little fixes they listed on the addendum.
She hasn't dared to look at the 70+ photos she took of the house during the home inspection. She's been trying to let go already of all the future days she was projecting into all those fanciful rooms.
It didn't help that Snarky had the whole day off to wallow and sulk. She did manage to get out for a walk to the library (and, ahem, the LUSH store) but now she's back at home with an hour to burn before The Mister makes it home.
Must. Be. Strong. Don't look at the pictures!
She's going to go and knit in a corner.
Snarky's feeling very torn today.
The house inspection was mostly good, with a few somewhat glaring Need-to-Fix-Before-Moving-In issues (leaky faucets, bad wiring).
She and The Mister have been left to marinate in the juices of an extremely thorough inspection report and whatever else that $1000 got them until Thursday evening, when they will meet with their agent to discuss any addendums to their offer.
Since another offer for $20,000 more is waiting in the wings, odds are the sellers will simply back out of the deal and move on to the next fish. Snarky is working hard to be OK with this, even though she's spent the last week mentally placing furniture and having Special Moments in every nook and cranny of this house.
She took over seventy pictures of the place during the inspection, for goodness sakes.
On the upside, her boobies have been deemed perfectly healthy (if maybe just a wee bit lopsided) and she is fairly confident that her lovely "modesty mole"'s (by which she used to determine the level of raciness of various necklines) biopsy will also come back clean.
Snarky was going to extoll the benefits of an anxiety based weight loss plan... but she just succumbed to the siren call of chocolate chip cookies, so apparently that point is not only moot, but revoked.
Some of her distractions are also things from which she wanted to be distracted in the first place, though they tend to fall solidly on the "stess" side of the stress/eustress delineation.
Still, she feels better knowing that her days are filled with deadlines and potential outcomes.
Thanks to the forum, she's got Spring Switch Witch, Year-Long Deco books, and a brewing craft-for-smellies swappathon to distract her from the ongoing house saga (a frothy mix of one part stress to one part eustress mixed together with the swizzle stick of sticker shock) and upcoming followup mammogram.
Mister Snark has been wondefully calm and supportive on both all-consuming, thought and time-stealing topics. She's a bit frightened to find that she is losing her memory of a time without him. Her vaunted (and often cursed) independence harumphs and settles down on the sidelines.
She's layered LUSH's Skinny Dip buttercreme with Faustus to give herself a violet-tinged boost of assertiveness. They will get that house. And she will be healthy, whole, uncorrupted.
At the risk of incurring the Wrath of the Gods, Snarky wants y'all to have a peek:
The Possibly Maybe Future Chez Snark
She's already scheming where the yarn, BPAL, and LUSH stashes will go. She's going to have her own bathroom, finally! No more comingling of her "lotions and potions" (The Mister's term) with his manly toilette.
Snarky hastens to add that she decided to wear Clio today. This is another surprise imp in her ammo case that is sorta-kinda spring like (in a deep dark pathouli-ish sort of way). Also, the lavendar is helping her to remain a little more calm and clear-headed given the circumstances.
Spring is finally making footholds in the landscape. The sun lingers until well after dinnertime. That she is making a showing at all is a cause for verdant frolicking.
Snarky reached for Nefertiti this morning. To her logical mind this is because the imp happens by trick of alphabetical organization to fall smack in the middle-front of her ammo box.
But her superstitious hindbrain suspects that her hand was guided there to bring her delicate flowers and sweet-skin confidence in order to make it through this day of waiting.
She, in some small way, wanted to smell like spring. And Nefertiti is one of the few scents that approximates this effect. The rest of her collection speaks of winter's dead hibernations, autumn's angsty decay. But this? This is hope and joy and faith that life is returning.
The air is thick with love making. Sap rises, tender buds unfurl. She waits.
He trusts her. He continues to work silently over blueprints scattered across the living room rug as she presses her lotion-chilled fingers into the welts, all the angry red patches on his back. She works to cover all the places his skin has betrayed him.
His body seems, in all its solidity, horribly frail. He is an unbalanced chemical equation tipping forward on his haunches, always threatening to tumble away from her. Away and down into the dark valleys where she can't find a path to follow.
She tries to hold on with her slippery hands. Her palms linger on his shoulders, much longer than needed to set the medicine into his skin.
She resists the urge to shake him roughly, shake him back into the man he was.
He trusts her not to do this, not to stomp and wail and disrupt the little bit of foothold he has left. He trusts her to hold on, keep an anchor, keep him steady. He trusts her to trust that he will come back.
The Snarks went house shopping this weekend.
And it was good. No, no future home came out of it, but they've made a connection with a realtor who seems honest enough. He might have laughed a little too hard at some of Snarky's jokes, but they were pretty damn funny.
They went to eight houses in about four hours. It was good to feel them all out, interact with them. But it was also very tiring. Walking through the empty spaces, voices echoing off of outdated tiles and fugly cabinetry. Each room demanded five alternative placements for beds, sofas, coffee tables (Yes, the Snarks own two. No, they don't exactly know how that happened.)
Each house was the setting for a new part of their lives together. Each house was the beginning of a different path. Their minds bloomed, unfurled into these eight different paths. Lifetimes bubbled forth like kudzu, trying to cover every inch of possibility.
But none of the stories were quite right. The corners were too sudden, the proportions grating against some invisible outline. They reeled back in all the strands of possiblity. Wrapped them into loose hanks to hang at the ready for the next throw.
Later that night, Snarky stood naked in front of the half-mirror in their tiny apartment "walk in" (more like, "side-step in and pivot") closet. She looked at herself, tried to prognosticate. Perhaps it was the morning's house-hunting exercises that gave her flickering future-visions. She saw herself whole, hearty, healthy. She saw herself shriveled, diminished, in pieces. She touched her chest and tried to find a clue to what the next chapter would bring.
Snarky was just going to throw out a light, humorous, purple-prose-free post about the miracle of covering things in chocolate (obviously, the good), but she just got a call from the imaging center asking her to come back in for additional views (alarmingly, extremely, horrifically bad).
Based on her mother's occurences of breast cancer (2-3 times, depending on how you look at it), Snarky went in for an early baseline mammogram two days ago. The woman who called was very reassuring about the fact that several women get these "call backs", and that the reasons that are bringing Snarky back in (that have absolutely nothing to do with the glaring C WORD that neither mentioned over the phone) could be overlapped tissue and the fact that the radiologist wants the baseline mammogram to be as accurate as possible.
Still. Snarky can't help feeling the tears crawling up the back of her throat... nor the sense of absolute, blind, shrieking panic just barely restrained by her too-tight, too-cold skin.
Perhaps she should have saved the last chocolate covered Nutter Butter for later.
Maintaining the status quo.
Treading water.
Keeping a holding pattern.
Snarky has long suspected that she suffers from a slight case of whatever that dude in "Memento" had... her early life consisted of two year stretches between changes in scenery, and with each change she dropped most of her points of reference -- her friends, her hobbies, her life.
Pick up a new string, turn 180 degrees, start wandering the labyrinth again.
Sure, the "reset button" draws her back into a slightly different place each time, but it feels like two steps forward, one step back. It's a stilted, wonky march to the beat of time's inevitability.
There are a handful of touchstones. Powerful moments that break through the thorny hedgerows. Most of them are triggered by scent.
Today she's wearing Jacob's Ladder. The high, bright amber is bringing back memories of her maternal grandfather. Memories of his passing which was sudden, unexpected, and tinged by family lore about karma. He's been dead longer than he's been alive in her life, and that death still ripples through everyone in her family like a silent aftershock.
For years, his death froze her in a substrate of fear. Fear of nothingness and of simply not being anymore. It has taken time, but she is finally starting to see that being still and impacting little is an insult to this brief moment of somethingness she's been granted.
The amber is comforting, familiar. But it needs to be broken. She needs to climb those thorny hedges and see the labyrinth for what it is.
She's making a move.
Swimming for shore.
Touching down.
Snarky never claimed to be "goth", but she apparently ended up that way.
Black just suited her better, and while her musical tastes have always been on a diet, she enjoys what little genre music does happen to wander past her plate.
Oh and there's the poetry. The breadth and depth of which must surely qualify her for some sort of angsty, navel-gazey, inky black award.
It was on Glampyre's suggestion that BPAL would appeal to more "gothic" tastes that brought Snarky into the fold in the first place. But instead of finding a more delicious brew in which to wallow Snarky has found mostly happiness and resonance through BPAL.
Better living through (esoteric, alchemical) chemistry, as it were.
This morning's judicious application of Danse Macabre has eased Snarky out of her Existential Funk. She's now contemplating dinner with The Mister (another date-date!), a minor sandwich cookie binge (probably not, though, because of aforementioned date-date), and (hopefully) impending landed gentry-dom. It feels good to be grounded in the here-and-now again, rather than the shoulda-woulda-couldas.
However, Snarky will endeavour to honor her inky black roots and try mightily to contemplate something deepy dark and morbid. Possibly the wretched demise of this damned intranet site she's been trying to build for the last two months. Surely therein lies a tale of woe.
