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Ashwolf
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Name: Ash
Country: United States
State: North Carolina
Gender: Female
Interests: Japanese; creative writing; Law and Order; Chihuahuas; Miyazaki movies.
Expertise: Sleeping.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Asian Studies
Message: message me
AIM:  ElphabaSan
Member Since:
1/7/2004
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| A long time ago, I filled this journal with
surveys that asked the same questions over and over again: boxers
or briefs, favorite eye color on whatever gender floated my boat, and
so on. While they provided those who read this Xanga of mine tiny
little insights into my life, those surveys also revealed to my friends a
road upon which to cheat their way into a manner of understanding all
that is Great and Of The Ashness. I let it all hang out and
damnit, that was just too easy. I posted my favorite movies and
foods and festivities; I even hinted at my deepest, darkest
desires. No one had to work for those answers, those juicy little
morsels of goodness that make up my incredibly perverse soul. I
suppose you could say I sold out. Let myself go. Lost my
ever-loving mind.
At work a few weeks ago, I halfheartedly typed the address to this
journal into the searchbar of my browser, scrolled through a few of the
surveys, and felt disgust splash against the back of my tongue like an
socially unacceptable fat kid splashes into the community pool wearing
Hawaiian-themed swimming trunks. I couldn't let all those surveys
stay up for all the World Wide Web to see. They were that
bad. They were... exposing me.
I deleted them all, every last one, and I'm not sorry about it.
Now my journal begins with the chronicle of the sad death of my
college's mascot. Makes me seem really cheery, doesn't it?
In order to perk things up a little, I suppose, I'll do one of those
nostalgic surveys. Except now, yeah, the answers aren't
just waiting here to be read and filed away for purposes of blackmail
later.
If there's something you wanna know about me, this time you've gotta ask.
Ask me three questions. I will answer each one honestly. These
questions can involve any subject. They can be rude, intrusive,
balmy, wicked -- use your own imaginative adjectives. They must,
however, concern me alone.
Don't ask me what my second cousin twiced removed did last summer
because, if you really think about it, I probably don't know. I
do, however, know myself pretty well, and I am therefore able to
provide an honest answer to any question you have about me.
...most likely.
Go for it.
~Ash
Edit/Questions from Crystal:
1. The way you are on the outside (Sarcastic, blunt, cheerful in a
noncheerful way .. you know ... everything that I love about you) ...
is that exactly how you feel on the inside?
-- Most of the time, yes. I'm actually a lot
more cheerful and optimistic inside than outside, and for some reason
that doesn't tend to register with most people (meaning they see me as
Ms. Gloom and Doom). In the same vein, I'm much more blunt and
caustic with the words in my head than the words that come out of my
mouth. I'm always sarcastic and blunt. I guess you could
say I'm pretty much the same inside as out, only my inside isn't as
tightly controlled as what everyone sees.
2. Do you regret anything?
-- Not hugely. I don't think I've lived long
enough to have any real regrets. I wish I'd written a book in
high school. That would've been awesome. And I wish I'd
gone to vet school and not majored in Asian Studies. I like
animals a hell of a lot more than I like Japanese.
3. If you were to die tomorrow, what would you want people to say about you?
-- I'd like them to say I was a good friend and a moderately okay person.
| | |
| Yesterday morning at around 11am I wasn't in the best
of moods. Having been ditched by the person who was to have lunch
with me, I sat outside the Undergrad Library on a bench in a huff and
let the cool breeze rattle my elbows. I tried to read a book for
class but kept getting distracted by the leaves and other bits of
greenery landing in my hair from the nearby trees. The wind
carried them to me, little missiles of induced procrastination. I
didn't have much choice about sitting outside, though -- if I'd gone
inside the crowds from the morning rush were certain to have
overwhelmed me, and I didn't feel like smelling the variety of body
washes and shampoos and perfumes regardless. There
was a young woman standing next to a short stone wall in front of
me. I noticed her because the high pitch of her voice, enough to
shatter glass, had been drilling at my ears for the past fifteen
minutes or so. She yammered into her cell phone in the heaving
ohmiGODs so common to her species -- I wanted to throw my book at
her. When she dissolved into a series of small screams that
reminded me of Tasmanian devils fighting over small mammal carcasses on
the Discovery Channel, I couldn't take it any longer. I lifted my
head in preparation to give her The Glare. You know what I'm
talking about. The Glare doesn't just come from the eyes.
It's an expression that utilizes every muscle of the face to become
simultaneously intimidating and sincere. It says to the offending
party at which it is directed, "Please stop wasting my air." The
Glare I attempted to form for the woman fell from my face seconds after
I looked up. It wasn't because she'd stopped talking, stopped
making enough noise for a small city, stopped existing -- no, it was
because a small squirrel had crept up next to her and was standing with
its forepaws pressed to the bag she'd left sitting on the stone
wall. It was no more than three inches from her hip. If
she'd looked down she might've noticed it, but she was so caught up in
her own world that I'm sure someone could've been doing the cha-cha all
around her without her acknowledgement. The
squirrel stuck its head into her bag first. Its tail bristled and
undulated in a gray, furry wave, and in the next instant it was gone,
delving deep into the cloth folds of the fascinating human device that
probably contained food coaxing it onward: a bagel, an apple, a
packet of crackers. Who knows? The
woman lifted the bag, settled it on her shoulder, and walked off still
chirping into her cell phone. As she disappeared around the
corner of the building I lifted my head and strained to see, and sure
enough, the tip of the squirrel's tail was only just visible over the
edge of her bag. My day had never seemed so bright. ~Ash | | |
| Ushered in without much fuss by a younger
generation that spends about thirty percent of its time
text-messaging, the age of technology is a golden and glorious time to
be alive indeed. Every day I walk across campus, I'm dazzled not
only by what hairstyles people climbed out of bed with, but by the
shiny, glittering electronics that drip from their every
appendage. I see mp3 players the size of nickels; I see pocket
translators that could fit into body cavities with minimal discomfort;
I see cell phones so thinly minuscule that their owners are forced to
utilize toothpicksto dial outgoing numbers. Somewhere on the
long, winding road between the Industrial Revolution and the present
day, common sense got off the Greyhound and appears only fleetingly, a
grainy photograph, on the backs of milk cartons. This lack of
intelligence in the technological world can't be more evident than with
the invention of these:
What's
wrong with this picture? Do you see the
problem? I'll admit that on first glance, this looked like
a perfectly ordinary faucet to me -- but it doesn't have knobs,
people. And while you might think that there's nothing wrong with
a knobless faucet, allow me to wholeheartedly disagree based on an
experience I had today in a public restroom.
I was leaving a
stall today in a restroom on campus, trying to dislodge a bit of toilet
paper from my flipflop without actually having to bend down and touch
it, when I heard the unmistakable chirrup of a young child and glanced
up to find an unaccompanied minor wandering around at the sinks before
me. I looked at her as I might look at a squirrel with two heads;
kids on campus at midday, especially in the Student Union, are about as
rare. She apparently didn't approve of my existence because she
gave me a glance of utter disdain, turned around, and began to pull
paper towels out of the dispenser with gusto.
A woman letting
the hand-dryer move the water droplets around on her fingers gave the
kid a peevishly disapproving snarl of a face and snapped at her, "Stop
that! You're killing trees!" I kid you not, Miss Save The
Trees has a face and she goes to UNC. The kid was put off enough
that she threw all the paper towels down on the ground and walked
toward the woman and the sinks. Do note that I was also making my
way in this direction, albeit slowly -- I was too startled by the
environmentalist's willingness to yell at a child to be moving quickly.
The
kid wandered up next to a sink and leaned on the edge of it, getting as
far away from Miss Save The Trees as possible. She disturbed the
sanctity of the porcelain basin, however, and also the motion sensor in
the faucet, because most of the bathrooms are now equipped with that
technology. All you alumni, yes: your donations are going
toward putting knobless sinks in the university bathrooms.
The
sink suddenly started spewing out a stream of water that was no more
threatening than the fuzz on a baby's head, but the noise it made
sounded like the grinding molars of God. It scared the kid so badly
that not only did she catapult backward into Miss Save The Tree's legs,
she wet herself too. Her little pink pants were soaked abruptly
in urine and Miss Save The Trees started picking up paper towels and
smearing them all over the kid's body like it was going to
help. The kid's mother decided, of course, to come out of her
stall at that very moment, and she took one look at Miss Save The Trees
with her urine-smelling child and went off into a screaming fit about
how college students have no decency, that they're always pulling
practical jokes and they don't even care about The Children. In
capitals. Because The Children, didn't you know, they're an
organization now, like The Church. And they look like this:
"Hey
lady," I wanted to tell her, "don't blame the environmentalist.
Blame the knobless faucet. Blame technology." But I was a
coward and the smell of urine was starting to make me feel like I
needed to go right back in the stall again, so I basically ran all the
way out of the bathroom and down the hall until the screams of the
kid's mother were only faintly audible. I felt a wave of pity
rise in me for Miss Save The Trees; even more I felt bad for the kid,
who will probably remember that experience of wetting her pants in a
public place for the rest of her life.
Most disturbingly of all,
though, in a world of glittering surfaces and tiny cell phones and
motion sensor sinks, I forgot to wash my hands.
~Ash
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| Every morning I wake up knowing that the first bit of written information I'm given will be a lie. I roll out of bed each glorious dawn and groggily assess the lump of blankets on the bed across the room. Sometimes it's my roommate, and sometimes it's just a clever imitation of fabric sculpted to look like her slumbering form; I never know until I've fumbled for my glasses and forced them onto my face, often first jabbing one of the earpieces into a wayward nostril. Next I clamber down from my bed, which is accessible to someone of my short stature only by a university-furnished, treacherously rocking chair, and even before staggering into the bathroom, habit burned into my brain by the modern era forces me to pop open my laptop. What do I see first? 
That lie I was talking about? Yeah, there it is. I check the weather because, like most normal human beings, I want to know how to dress before tossing my fragile, vulnerable body into the elements beyond the safe, hospital-like corridors of my dorm. Some people have the luxury of being able to test the temperature while they traipse along to get their morning paper at the end of the driveway. Me? I'd have to traverse yards upon yards of cold concrete floor and stairs in my fluffy slippers and pajamas just to get close to the outside world. Even then, I'd have the pleasure of opening the side door of the dorm to the nearby bus stop, and the last thing I want to make habitual is broadcasting my early morning persona, which is a classic merging of Sonic the Hedgehog and the Bridge of Frankenstein, to the UNC masses. What I'm trying to say is I'm stuck with the internet on this one. This morning, my WRAL 5 DAY FORECAST proclaimed that it was 59 degrees outside. Loath to believe such a thing because not only had it been balmy and delightful the day before, but because my one pair of clean jeans was displaying a tear perilously close to the crotch, I pulled up my blinds and looked down at the road that stretches out in front of my dorm. I watched a jogger beat herself in the face with her own breasts as she made her way past, took note of the trickle of t-shirt- and shorts-clad students behind her (viewing the jogging show from the back, no doubt), and decided that WRAL was, as usual, full of it. I soon emerged from my dorm dressed daringly in an outfit similar to those of the jogger's crowd, and the instant I opened the door I was greeted by an audacious belch of spring that simultaneously tried to scorch off my eyebrows and frizz all evidence of conditioning out of my hair. It was a lie -- all of it! This day knew no such temperature as 59 degrees, and the long, tawny forms of the students that fell across the quads all day to bask in the glorious glow of the sun only attest to that fact. Yet every morning I check the WRAL website to look at the constipated expression of the man below because, I suppose, I'm not brave enough to show the world my face before I've seen one as unfortunate as his. 
Greg Fishel, lie through your teeth though you might, your weak-chinned visage makes my every day a little bit brighter. ~Ash | | |
| Since even before we lost to
Georgetown yesterday, our campus has been caught in a kind of stunned
lull. People all around look and are
depressed. If they have team shirts -- and who doesn't here at UNC,
home of the Tar Heels? -- they wear them, plucking at the logo proudly
stamped on each one in absent hope. Like me, most of them feverishly
check ESPN every hour for updates, crossing their fingers that there's
no more bad news.
None of us want to believe our mascot is dying.
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/ncaatourney07/news/story?id=2812224
It's
amazing to me how much someone I've never actually seen face to face
has impacted my life. I never even knew what the guy looked like
without the suit until now. To me he was always Rameses, a huge and
lovable presence on the court or wherever the Heels happened to be
playing. I was walking past the stadium once after a football game and
he tried to get me to come take a picture with him; seeing as I don't
like football, I shook my head and kept going. The fool came after me,
wrapped me in those enormous arms of his, and officially gave me the
only hug I'd ever gotten from a ram. He was determined not to let me
miss out. The next time I saw him I didn't try to run away and he gave
my hair a ruffle as I allowed myself, somewhat shyly, to be hugged by
the mascot. He's not allowed to talk while he's in the suit, but that
single motion let me know that he remembered me.
Please keep
him in your thoughts. At this point, I don't even care if you're a
Hoya. Every little bit helps, and I just want the big guy back.
EDIT at 1:26 PM on Monday, March 26:
Jason Ray, Rameses, died this morning at 8:38 AM as I was writing this entry.
~Ash
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