It all sounded great, didn’t it? Sometimes you just have to be faithful, and sometimes being faithful is getting on LinkedIn. Check, check and check. I wrote those words, pushed publish, and then squared my tiny shoulders determinedly because TODAY WAS THE DAY. I was going to do it. Technology be darned, my deadened soul and I were going to join the ranks of suit-and-tied-people everywhere that have been browbeaten into submission, and wear the LinkedIn badge of shame. Big Brother was watching, and I was going to make him proud! A grin danced across my face as I thought about how surprised and excited Kellan would be when he got home, given that he’d been pleading with me to take the plunge for approximately two years.

Also, I am an exceptionally horrific gift-giver, and his birthday is coming up. I figured the timing couldn’t hurt.

Now, we’ve established that technology and I are not amigos. Kellan has long since given up attempting to teach me how to work our DVR because the launch codes to every missile America has tucked away are less complex than figuring out how to record How I Met Your Mother. I have better things to do with my time than push a zillion buttons and pray to the sweet baby Jesus that I don’t miss another episode.

Back to LinkedIn. I decided that given the fact that I have a Facebook profile [though truthfully, much to my protest one of my college roommates set it up for me], I could certainly handle setting up a LinkedIn profile. I mean, how hard could it be?

LITTLE DID I KNOW.  Fifteen minutes and more than a few choice words later, I had accidentally invited 163 unfortunate, unsuspecting people to be my friend—a midday inbox surprise that had to be about as charming as finding a band aid in your burrito.

I was mortified. I mean, I’d agreed to create a profile but I certainly didn’t want FRIENDS! At least not without buying them a drink or two, first. Some witty banter, maybe an appetizer… and yet suddenly, I was that girl cozying up to people who I haven’t spoken to in years-or in some cases, ever. I felt all HEY WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY SOME GIRLSCOUT COOKIES?!, only there was nary a Think Mint in sight and thus, nothing redeeming about the whole sorry disaster. Please keep in mind that you’re talking to the girl that once tried to defriend every person on Facebook that had ever tried to sell her something from Mary Kay. Live and let live, people!

Without my knowing consent, I suddenly found myself LinkedIn friends with my car insurance agent, an ex-boyfriend’s grandma, and a rather suspect fifty-something man that once stalked the interwebs for my email address and used it to ask me on a date to the Golden Corral. And that was just the unfortunate beginning.

By the time Kellan got home, I had straight-up crazy eyes. Have you ever seen the look on a Doberman pincher’s face right before he rips the hind quarters off a rabbit? Add in just a touch of rabies, and you’ve got the general idea. [I am lovely to come home to.] I mean, clearly this was HIS FAULT. Happy freaking birthday, are you happy now?! I told you nothing good can come of technology!!!

I announced my plan to delete the whole thing [you know, with his help], give up the job search and simply sell all of the plasma in my body. And maybe a kidney, if it came to that.

He smiled-apparently, he already knew, because I’d sent him TWO invitations during the course of his work day. [How? And did I sent everybody two? I can’t think about it. I just can’t.] Honey. Let me help you.

This is a public service announcement: If you get a LinkedIn invitation from me over the next forty years, please delete it. Thank you, and good day.

Thus, in an effort to avoid selling cheap, knock-off sunglasses out of the back of a van in NYC, I’m job hunting.  It’s something that I’ve never had to do quite like this—I have happily fallen in to every job I’ve had since graduating from UNC. Serendipitously, my brilliant MBA husband happens to be quite the expert when it comes to resume polishing and job searching [as in, people have paid for his expertise before], and he is determined to help me. [For free! And y’all know how much I love a good deal.] Unfortunately for Kellan, I am technologically illiterate and thus become completely overwhelmed with panic and try to hide under the bed in our guest room when he so much as tries to get me on LinkedIn. WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO CHANGE ME?! Honey, I’m not trying to change you, I just think there are more efficient methods of networking than liking people’s Instagrams. OHMYLANTA, THIS IS NO TIME FOR A LESSON ON CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY!!!

As you can imagine, the job search is going swimmingly. Also, we are out of wine.

There is something rather soul-numbing about summing yourself up on a resume. We live in a culture where What do you do? carries an implied, What are you? It is ugly and unfair and I am guilty of it. The difficulties of being unemployed in a new city are myriad, and they go beyond the bank account and right to the heart of the matter: my heart. The fight to believe that I am valuable and worthwhile because of Jesus, and not because I do something impressive with my 9-5 is daily. My desire to prove that I am worthwhile exposes an ugly pride that needs to be uprooted from my life.

There’s a story that I love about Mother Teresa. She and a wide-eyed visitor from suburbia, USA spent a dreary afternoon walking through the devastatingly impoverished streets of Calcutta. As they waded through the “least of these”, they passed a filthy little girl too weak to lift her hand to beg. Flies swarmed around a crusted, dirty mouth that could no longer remember the taste of food, and vacant brown eyes fluttered open and shut as if hoping to discover that death had mercifully come. Upon the defeating discovery that she was still alive, the disappointed little girl exhaustedly slipped back into semi-consciousness. She was one in a sea of thousands like her—the untouchable, unwelcome poor. Stricken and overwhelmed, the horrified American turned to Mother Teresa. You’ll never help all of them! You can’t even make a dent. How do you continue this work when there is no way that you can be successful? Mother Teresa simply smiled. I am not called to be successful. I am called to be faithful.

There is a sweet simplicity to that. We are not called to be successful: we are called to be faithful. Wherever God puts us, whatever He calls us to do. Even if it’s something as utterly mundane as getting on LinkedIn.

Here’s to being faithful today.

What you see is not what you get, New York. It’s not your fault. You can’t know that just a couple of weeks ago I was Ashley Peterson. [Actually, legally I still am because, well, too much change.] I was Ashley Peterson, and I had two little brothers not just one and a job I loved and people to go drink caramel lattes with at a moment’s notice on a Tuesday and I held my baby brother’s hand the afternoon that he stopped breathing which happened to be 72 hours before I walked down an aisle in a white dress.

You can’t know that. You can’t possibly know that everything I am in this state is everything that I’m not. And truthfully, I’m not sure how much to tell you because nobody likes to be the sad one. Loneliness is amplified when it feels like the world around you is still laughing and for the life of you, you just can’t remember how. Y’all know I’d rather laugh than cry, but it doesn’t always happen these days.

Part of me thinks that I can sleep grief off, much like a nasty cold or a headache. Two aspirin, a glass of water and eight hours in bed and I’ll wake up remembering normal. Yet each new morning, I find it again. Curled up next to me, staring me in the face, pressing in on me and quietly reminding me that it’s not going anywhere. There is an awful sinking in my stomach as I remember that it hasn’t even been three months since Ian stopped breathing, and I probably have so many more months to go before I finally get to see him again. The very idea can leave me so profoundly exhausted that I can barely stand the prospect of dragging my grief out of bed for a whole new day.

Some days are better. Some days I can laugh about milk or the Flying Biscuit [though really, did any of us laugh about that?], and those days are good to have. Other days, my heart just throbs and it’s hard to breathe.

I say this because sometimes, it’s braver to be Clark Kent than it is to be Superman. I’ve received enough emails from hurting people that read this blog to know that I am not alone, and you aren’t either.

There’s a song that I must have played for Ian in the hospital ten thousand times. A piece of it says:

Give me faith to trust what You say

That You’re good, and Your love is great

I’m broken inside, I give you my life

I may be weak-

But Your spirit’s strong in me.

My flesh may fail,

But my God, you never will.

Hebrews 6:19 says, “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.”

Lately, I cling to that idea of hope as an anchor. When waves of grief threaten to sweep us away, we are to be anchored in something far weightier. My hope is in a God who does not change even when five sit at a dinner table where six belong. My hope is in a God who is incapable of being anything but good to me, and anything but good to Ian. My hope is in a God who cannot, will not fail even on the many days that I crumble. My hope is in Jesus, who prays for me when I don’t remember how. We must decide that God is good-PERIOD-before cancer. Before the miscarriage, the freak accident, the lost job, the broken marriage. God is either good, or He is not. We are either anchored in His unchanging goodness towards us, or we are mercilessly tossed about by an ocean of sin ravaging the world today.

The effects of sin may leave us broken and bloodied, but they will never leave us destroyed. Jesus made sure of that when he hung broken and bloodied on a cross in our place. And though a violent battle rages, the war has already been won.

May your soul be anchored in hope this weekend.

I mean that quite literally—there are few things in life that make my heart race and bring me closer to the brink of losing my ever-loving mind like an almost-empty milk jug.

The explanation is deceptively simple: I stir skim milk into my Carolina-blue mug of caramel truffle drip coffee every single morning.  If you’re the kind of person that channels Snow White when you rise with the sun and greet the day by cheerfully  singing songs to small woodland creatures, I salute you. My Mother used to be one of you, and when I was a little girl she’d often wake me up by singing to me. I recognize that this ought to have been one of those precious moments that people make Hallmark cards about, but I’ll have you know that the second I figured out how to start locking my door at night, I did. And we owe our present loving relationship to that sage six-year-old decision of mine.

Y’all. Until my first cup of coffee in the morning, I am hanging on to this world by a gossamer thread and the hopeful gurgle of my coffee pot is my proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. I stumble out of bed convinced that my name is Phyllis, and often refuse to respond to anything else despite the trivial little detail that nobody has yet been notified of the change.

The bottom line here is that coffee is critical to life as I know it. No milk in the morning=no caramel truffle coffee=Ashley behaving something like Cruella Deville from 101 Dalmations. Normally I love a good puppy, but sans coffee I am entirely capable of skinning a small army of them and promptly proceeding to prance around my apartment in my new puppy fur coat singing “Baby I’m a fiiiirreewooorrrkkk!”.

I might recommend staying away from myself before cup number three every morning.

The milk thing is easy enough now that I’m married, given that I do most of the grocery shopping and thus get to decide how much chocolate pie we’re going to eat on any given week [answer: at least one] and whether or not it’s rational to buy two gallons of milk at a time. [It is.] This was NOT always possible when I had roommates who rotated buying milk with me, and didn’t always share my dedication to milk in the mornings. [The HUMANITY!] Kellan and I had a coming to Jesus moment about milk early on in our marriage [though who are we kidding-it’s going to be “early on in our marriage” for quite a while, still], and my heart melted just a teensy bit when I discovered two jugs in our fridge upon my return to Albany on Tuesday.

The man gets me. What can I say? I think it’s one of the sweetest things about marriage, thus far—someone knowing all of your little idiosyncrasies and neuroses, and loving you without a single “unless”. To be both known and loved is beautiful.

Wedded bliss had a close call yesterday afternoon when my husband almost had to hop a plane for an impromptu business trip. Mercifully it was postponed until next week at the last possible second, and so date night is saved! With milk in my fridge and my husband at home, I think we can already declare this weekend a winner. :)

Yesterday, I put on my blue suede shoes and boarded a two hour flight from RDU to Albany. Every minute had all of the pent-up, gleeful anticipation of Christmas Eve—I was just silly excited to FINALLY see my husband again! I married that man because if there’s one thing that Sweet Home Alabama taught me, it’s that marriage means you get to kiss your husband whenever you want.

And I want. Distance puts a damper on that, thus distance=not okay.

Leaving this time was an enormous  step up from a the first time that I left RDU to fly back—that time as I sat at gate A25, I was valiantly fighting the lip-quivering urge to  ugly-cry like a small, emotionally disturbed child, and trying to determine which of my friends would be most likely to come pick me up, hide me in her bedroom closet and NOT tattle on me for ditching my flight.

Don’t hate me for my emotional stability and rational decision-making.

Reunited at long-last, Kellan and I arrived back at our apartment and I melted all over the tile kitchen floor because ROSES. Not only had my devastatingly handsome husband carefully arranged pink and yellow roses in a mug [Bless him, he couldn’t find the vase!], but every inch of our apartment was spotless. He’d even folded up the bathroom towels just the way I like them because the man knows that his wife is neurotic and nothing gets me like a well-folded towel.

Hello, Sailor!

Amusingly, a quick perusal of our fridge showed that like a dog to it’s vomit, a husband without his wife will return to his old ways and  four rather suspect pieces of deli turkey,a box of instant mashed potatoes [a phenomenon that I am utterly convinced will usher in the fall of human civilization as we know it] and an oversized package of mini kit kats presented too much of a culinary challenge for a Tuesday night. Serendipitously, every Tuesday some of Kellan’s buddies from work partake a little tradition that they like to call “Taco Tuesday”, and when Kellan offered to take me I felt like Mary Bailey when George offered to lasso her the moon. [“Do you want the moon, Mary? I’ll do it. I’ll lasso you the moon.” BestillmybeatingHEART.] Now, rumor had it that Taco Tuesday is hallmarked by cheap margaritas and cheaper tacos, and so I didn’t hate it when an over-packed restaurant necessitated a game-time switch to a quaint little brewery called Druthers, where Kellan and I ordered matching his-and-her steak and spinach salads.

Unfortunately, there were no leftovers and so Fancy and I are off to the grocery store. Wherever it is. :)

That day, my perfectly-lovely-in-every-way dearest friend from growing up in Ukraine commented on a link to the story, saying “Ashley. I want you to have that desk. You need to buy that thing for yourself, and I would chip in a few dollars to help you! I’m sure other friends would too!”.

I thought it was precious. Precious and outlandish and heart-warming–…and I didn’t give it a second thought. I didn’t give it a second thought because the LBD that I’d fallen in love with was far too extravagant a purchase for me to even consider it this side of forty. Or a hundred and twelve. Owning it was as tangible to me as owning my own, personal submarine.

I logged on to facebook later that day and to my utter astonishment-…well, THIS:

To my chagrin, my sweet friend Colin had started an online campaign where people could donate money to buy my frivolous little LBD. His description read as follows:

We all love Ashley. If you can’t remember why, start by reading here:

http://ashleypdickens.com/2013/05/08/my-little-black-desk/

And then recall that her ability with words is amazing.  I, on the other hand, do not get along with words.  So, the only way to thank her is to buy her the little black desk so that I can continue to read the words in a way that make me happy. 

P.S. Kellan has promised to give free room and board and coffee to any friends who contribute and then promptly visit them. 

I paused to look up aneurysm  in my medical dictionary, confident that I’d just experienced one. What!? I felt strangely like the first and last time that I tried a deep fried twinkie at the North Carolina State Fair-a sort of strange mix of wonderful and what-have-I-done. I had never been so mortified and felt so loved all at the same time! The absurd, precious gesture all by itself was what stole my breath away—and truly, it never occurred to me that it would actually work. I mean, sweet idea, but ain’t nobody got time for that!

Except, it seems that people did, in fact, have time for that. A lot of people. People that love me and love Kellan and care about hard years and what and if I write. From friends that danced with me at my wedding two months ago to friends from elementary school in Ukraine that I haven’t seen since I was twelve. My sixth grade teacher. My in-laws. My parents. My Aunt and Uncle. Friends living across the country and across the world. My sweet husband. People that should have spent that money on the houses and kids they’re saving for or the missionaries they give to or any number of things that really matter-but chose to spend it on me instead. Grateful tears spring to my eyes just thinking about them all.

Five days later, I was the baffled, rather speechless owner of an eleventy-billion dollar desk that never would have been mine any other way. Y’all. I feel so very, undeservedly, extravagantly loved. That silly piece of furniture is infinitely more special than it ever could have been had I ever defied reason and ordered it myself–and not because I love it. [Though I believe that my original blog leaves little room for discussion on that matter.] It’s special because I love the people that gave it to me. And for the rest of my life, every time that I sit down to write at my LBD, I will think about the way that those sweet people extravagantly, irrationally loved me. That eleventy-billion dollar little black desk points me to a God that sees me. A God that sees me in the midst of a world wracked by cancer and grief and a thousand other real problems, …and somehow, the trivial little things that matter to me still matter to him. God sees me. And God cares about my silly, little black desk.

I am indescribably grateful to those of you that cared, too. Thank you for reminding me that he sees.

We walked on to NC State’s campus, and everywhere we turned happy families were taking proud pictures with their grinning, red-gowned graduates. The joy in the air was palpable—and we didn’t belong. As we walked across the brick sidewalk, I remembered Ian. I remembered driving him to work at his coffee shop the summer that we both lived at home and shared a car. He would often ask to pick up breakfast on the way, and would happily munch on his egg mcmuffin as I lectured him on the perils of fast food for twenty minutes. [I’m a big sister. It’s what we do.] I remembered Stephen and I making him Mexican food at Stephen’s campus apartment, right after I moved home from Senegal. I remembered visiting the dorm room he’d hastily cleaned up right before I arrived, and seeing a gargantuan pile of easy mac spilling out from beneath his rumpled bed.

I remembered Ian’s other accomplishments that we’d celebrated as a family. His first, fumbling piano recital. Little hands struggled to find the right keys and an exceedingly proud face beamed from the piano bench. I remembered sitting in the front row as he and his curly hair starred in Oklahoma, and each girl in the audience swooned. I thought about every play, a cappella concert, musical, soccer game, and tae-kwon-do meet. My family had always been on the front row for each kid’s accomplishment, whatever it was—and now, we were slowly walking towards Ian’s last.

I found myself in the front row once again, as administrators sat my family right in front of the graduates. A thousand curious eyes bored into the backs of our heads as Ian’s story was explained. Mom walked to the stage to receive his diploma, and the audience rose to give him a standing ovation. As if they were wide-eyed children with their noses pressed to the window looking at a terrible accident from the safety of their own cars—everybody in the room gratefully thinking how awful. I’m so glad that’s not me. I would have been thinking the same thing had roles been reversed. We then clapped as everyone else’s Ian walked across the stage one by one.

I left as quickly as I could. Ben and Michelle had insisted on coming [and true love is sitting through ANY graduation—but especially this one], and they took me to grab lunch and go to Saturday night church. We sang a song called “Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery” and I cried because the idea that God sent his son to die for me can never again be glazed over or trite after you’ve watched your parent’s son die. I cried thinking about heaven, grateful that Ian is there and longing to join him. I cried because death has been defeated, and the sting is only temporary. I cried because that temporary sting throbs with a dull roar and aches in every piece of me.

The gospel matters. When curly hair falls softly onto the kitchen floor, it matters that you have been loved with an everlasting love. When white blood cells flicker and falter and fade, it matters that you have been relentlessly pursued by the God of the Universe. When your hold your little brother’s swollen hand as he dies three days before your wedding, it matters that God is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

It matters that the sting is temporary

With Ian at his high school graduation four years ago.

Today is a good day. Today, Mom, Dad, Stephen, Emily and I pile into a car to meet my extended family in South Carolina to watch my twin baby cousins graduate from high school.

At least, they were babies yesterday. They just love it when I remind them of that.

I ADORE my family, and I’m thrilled to get to celebrate with them.

The thing is, it’s the first time that my family has been able to all travel in a five passenger car…well, in a long, long time. And I just can’t stand the fact that we’ll fit.

Tomorrow won’t be a good day. Tomorrow, I will attend NC State’s graduation ceremony. I’ll watch thousands of bright-eyed college students in red caps and gowns eagerly walk across a stage to receive the diplomas that they’ve worked so hard for. They’ll flip their tassels and throw their caps in the air and boldly step into a waiting world to make a splash.

Ian was supposed to be with them. He was so excited to graduate.

But my little brother won’t walk across the stage tomorrow. There is no red gown for him. There will be no over-the-top graduation party, no first “real” job—he’ll never even get to hold the diploma that he worked so hard for. Instead, tomorrow amidst the pomp and circumstance, I will watch the dean hand Ian’s diploma to my Mom and Dad.

Can I be honest? I think it sucks. It’s sad and it sucks and I hate it and I miss my little brother.

I think a lot about grief lately. Corrie Ten Boom once remarked that, “ There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”  Deeper still. The thing that nobody tells you about loss is that the initial loss of losing your little brother is only the beginning. There will be relentless waves of loss for the rest of your life that beat and overwhelm until hope seems like nothing more than a morphine-induced hallucination. Eleven groomsmen where twelve should have stood. A graduation gown that will go unworn. Twenty-two birthday candles on a July day that will not be blown out. Five in a family of six driving to South Carolina.

There are always new depths to grief-each heart-wrenching discovery met with an impossibly exhausted cry of not this too! Please, no more. No more.  But unyielding waves of loss will crash over and over again for the rest of our lives, each one a suffocating reminder that all is not as it should be. And it won’t be okay until heaven.

The promise, though, is not that it will be okay. [Because goodness, it isn’t.] The promise is that in Christ, there is always, always hope for the hopeless and new mercy for each new wave. And for each new wave that crashes, each new depth of grief discovered, there is a love that is deeper still.

Today, I am thankful for the promise of  ”deeper still”.

It was never supposed to happen like it did. Gretchen, Jess and I had grand plans to consume copious amounts of sushi and see a movie on Tuesday night—a foolproof idea that wildly derailed the second that I mentioned cake.

I blame myself. Cake has always been our downfall, and CAKE was all I could think about after being introduced to Hayes Barton in Raleigh last week. Some sweet friends had taken me, and one look at their dessert display left me stammering like a pre-pubescent, acne-ridden, braces-mouthed middle school boy. After one bite of their unspeakably fudgy chocolate pecan pie, I could neither think, speak, nor perform differential equations.

I didn’t even have to try to sell it—before you could say “coconut creme”, sushi and a movie were yesterday’s news and Gretchen and Jess had loaded me into the car to make the 45 minute drive from Chapel Hill to Raleigh in pursuit of dessert.

We drooled over the online menu the whole way to Raleigh, each girl judiciously planning to eat half a salad in anticipation of the decadence to come. We were celebrating being young and being alive, and also getting out of bed that morning! [Because why not?]

Imagine our utter horror when our elated quest was met with locked doors, and dimmed lights. The dessert case taunted us from inside as we pressed our dejected noses to the window and dolefully stared at the picture-perfect rows of cakes that would never be ours. Apparently, Hayes Barton thinks it’s acceptable to close on Tuesdays. Because that makes sense.

I went back to the car to grab tar and a pitchfork, only to realize that I’d left both in Albany. Which left me no choice but to gloomily plant myself on the sidewalk in front of a very closed Hayes Barton Cafe wondering what would become of me.

I went through the seven stages of grief, and ultimately decided that it was probably for the best.  Too much cake makes too much Ashley, as my parents used to say! We still needed dinner, and after Gretchen mentioned a close by restaurant called The Flying Biscuit, we decided to give it a whirl.

The menu looked deceptively…normal. Tasty, even! A BLT with chipotle aioli? I’m still making up for two baconless years spent in a Muslim country, so it was an easy choice. Intrigued, we each ordered a side of “moon dusted potatoes” with our respective sandwiches, and merrily chatted away as we assumed the chef went to work on our orders.

Let’s talk about that, shall we? To protect the guilty, I’ll call the “chef”  Billy Dean.  Dear, balding, just-out-of-prison-and-I-ain’t-never-seen-a-cell-phone Billy Dean. With his greasy, pit-stained t-shirt creeping up over an impressively hairy potbelly, he was much too busy making his way through a pack of Marlboro Lights to concern himself with minor details like sanitation scores and personal hygiene. Meanwhile back at the ranch, our premade meals cozied up under dirty heatlamps. Efficient, Billy Dean—but not delicious.

Our other-worldly looking sandwiches arrived looking as though they’d waved the white flag of surrender days ago. Limp, gray lettuce halfheartedly draped off of a soggy piece of wheat bread as the pumpkin orange sludge masquerading as chipotle aioli oozed off the side like so much toxic waste from a nuclear reactor. And the aforementioned moon potatoes? I can only imagine that the Flying Biscuit intends to market them in outerspace once we’ve populated the actual moon, because they had enough salt to be preserved to infinity and beyond.

We soldiered on, both southern charm and Emily Post dictating that we eat no less than ¼ of our respective dinners with plastic smiles and no fewer than eight quiet pleas for more water. Thank God the Flying Biscuit is bound by the rules of the Geneva Convention, just like everybody else.

Grimacing, we paid our bill [HIGHWAY. ROBBERY.] as quickly as we could, and  waddled towards the door to make our escape. We were only four or five short steps away from fresh air and freedom when Jess stopped dead in her tracks beside a table of white-haired geriatrics happily scarfing their senior specials and loudly groaned, I think I need to have my stomach pumped.

That was it. The white gloves were off, the proverbial flood gates were thrown open and out came a disgusted torrent of emotion as we began to realize what the Flying Biscuit had just done to us. We had been FOOD NINJAD. Top buttons were undone and PTSD began to set in as I collapsed in the backseat and a green-faced Gretchen swerved all over the road as Jess moaned that she felt as though she’d eaten her cast-iron dutch oven. Intent on leaving a digital trail in case we all succumbed to the moon potatoes before we had a chance to tell the world our story, I pulled out my iphone and began to tweet direct quotes from that conversation, making sure to tag the #FlyingBiscuit in every single one. Cries of “Where is BEANO WHEN YOU NEED HIM!?” and “I can’t breathe when I sit up straight!” were recorded for posterity, as ever-cheerful Gretchen chimed in with “…at least the diet coke was good?”,  seconds later admitting that she wished that she could go back an hour and simply not eat.

If only, Gretchen. If. Only.

Alas, irreparable damage had been done. Food was ruined for us—and there was nothing that we could do about it. With every bump and turn in the road, those blasted moon potatoes and the alleged aioli threatened to reappear. Every labored second of the forty-five minute drive home added insult to injury: we’d actually gone out of our way for this.

Vowing to never eat another biscuit, stationary or airborne, we somehow found ourselves back in Chapel Hill and proceeded to lay on the floor in a food coma for the remainder of the evening. My last indignant barb flung at the Flying Biscuit over the interwebs in the form of a tweet read simply:

#FlyingBiscuit, you should be ashamed of yourselves. #immobile #send help

Nonplussed, The Flying Biscuit had the audacity to tweet back, “Sounds like you all had a great time at dinner! :)”

…and that, my friends, is the sort of callous behavior that hallmarked Ted Bundy.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to have my stomach pumped.

I should clarify that I was not furniture shopping at Ethan Allen. This is NOT like the very first time that I ever met Kellan’s sister Keri for coffee at the Mad Hatter cafe, and I walked in sheepishly holding a bottle of Figi water. To my great chagrin, Kellan had INSISTED on buying it for me earlier in the day even though everybody knows that nothing makes you look like you think you’re Madonna faster than a bottle of Figi water.  I wish I could tell you that I didn’t spend ten minutes in a fluster attempting to explain the whole I-didn’t-want-this-Figi-water-I’m-really-not-a-diva situation to Keri…but sadly, that would be a lie.

It was love at first sip. Keri and I have been like peas and carrots ever since.

But no, that day at Ethan Allen was actually an accident. After weeks of eating dinner on the kitchen floor and sharing our ONE black hand-me-down recliner [bohemian and romantic? Yes. Squished? Also yes.] Kellan and I began hunting for furniture at every super-sized furniture warehouse and Walmart in Albany. One weary, gray afternoon as Fancy and I puttered down the road, I spotted an Ethan Allen design center out of the corner of my eye. Recognizing the name and armed with no other information whatsoever, I pulled into the parking lot, waltzed in the front door and immediately realized that there were a myriad of fantastic bargains to be had as long as you didn’t consider the US dollar to be an actual measure of currency.

But y’all. It was all just so breathtakingly beautiful and homey that I was absolutely compelled to wander the store. Just to see. Just to daydream a little bit about maybe-one-day.

And that’s when I spotted it.

A little black desk tucked away in a corner underneath an oversized window. Simple, dainty and elegant, it had antique looking legs and a little drawer that looked suspiciously like it might just be the perfect size for stowing my laptop. Never had I ever fallen in love with a piece of furniture before, but I knew without hesitation or reservation that this was the real thing.

Hello little black desk. Let’s run away together. And get married. And have kids and drive them to soccer practice.

I could see my little black desk and I living happily ever after, spending hours together writing the next great American Novel while Kellan spent his new found free hours training for a triathalon and falling asleep to the soothing lull of ESPN. How could I say no to something that would CLEARLY dramatically improve the quality of my marriage!? How grossly irresponsible would that be!?

…alas, reason dictated that there were more pressing purchases to be made—and my torrid affair with the little black desk ended before it began in favor of a stable and committed relationship with a very sensible cream colored couch at a store across town. All too soon, my little black desk and I were forced to bid each other a tearful goodbye. Still, I couldn’t shake the idea of it when I got home.

And out of the idea of it, friends, is where the new name for this blog was born. While the desk that I use to write happens to be Kellan’s ancient put-it-together-yourself contraption from the Walmarts and thus looks approximately nothing like the desk of my dreams, I do write my stories from a little black desk. And while I love the stacks of blogs floating around about the latest trends or how to make your hair look like Jennifer Aniston’s [and don’t let my hair deceive you: I read and enjoy those blogs!], mine is nothing like that. Here, you’ll just find stories. Stories from My Little Black Desk.