ill communication

Let's put it this way: either we're really good friends who are very tolerant of each other's social lapses, or else we're space cadets. It's got to be one or the other.

My dear and excellent friend Ashley lives across the globe from me in Calgary. Despite the distance we've stayed very close. We lived together for a year while we were doing our Master's degrees and somehow we can connect again easily when we see each other. I feel like we're family in the sense that I can't imagine 'losing touch' with Ash, but while I can exhibit rotten behaviour around my actual family (see chapter four in the Niedzwiecki handbook, Thaba's Traits for futher details on my snappishness, holier-than-thouness, and big sister bossiness), I'm much better behaved around Ash. And being someone who naturally tends towards hermit-hood in terms of the size of my friendship circle, I really value my friendship with Ashley.

Ash visited us in Vietnam twice. On her first visit, we poured Thang Long fruit wine down her throat and drove her to the border of China and then got her to climb a muddy mountain under the burning fire hot Indochinese sun. She came back for more and visited us at Christmas-time, when she arrived with a cooler full of perogies and smoked salmon and a bag of homemade shortbread cookies. In thanks we outfitted her with a velvet Vietnamese granny's jacket and introduced her to our tailors. We celebrated the epic New Year's Eve 2000 with Ash on a boat in Ha Long bay, watching in extreme inebriatation and disorientation as silver dolphins crested out of the waves on the horizon, leaving ripples of phosphoresence in their wake.

We should have gone to see Ash and Turner in India but we were stupid jerks and didn't have our priorities straight. And so we missed out big time. But since then we've tried to make up for our failings.

My whole family braved the very real possibility of contracting hypothermia on a walk from the car to the hotel when we went to Ash and Turner's wedding in Canmore. My hand got stuck to a metal doorknob it was so frickin' cold. On the good side, I got to wear my mink, have my hair done up real big, and I got to give a speech (and very, very thankfully I remembered not to partake in the widely available BC bud prior to giving it). We were also fortunate enough to get to join the Turner side of the Bristowe-Turner club when we went to Antigonish for Turner's family reunion last year. The lobster chow-down was epic and we thanked our lucky stars that we had the right connections to get us a seat at the table. After Ji and I moved back to the tropics, we hosted Ash and Turner in Malaysia. Pregnant with Sloane, Ash nonetheless cheerfully endured me getting us lost on the NEVERENDING freeways of Kuala Lumpur, and trekked around Chinatown for hours on end hunting for the perfect mangosteen. And lucky she did, too, cause those very mangosteens - cut on our kitchen counter - ended up gracing Turner's article in Maissoneuve magazine. Now that is a good friend. How many of you have world-famous counters? Huh? Not a one of you I bet. But I do!

More recently, when I went to Calgary for my gramma's funeral, Ash very graciously joined us for the prayer service and for the mass and hosted us at her house despite the fact that she was single-parenting. It was while we were at her house that we started chatting about our communication since the summer. Ash, Turner and Sloane had driven up to the Sayo-Niedzwiecki Countryside House Party in August, but then I hadn't heard too much from her since then. I'd sent a number of emails, but hadn't gotten replies. I figured Ash was too busy with Sloane to really engage in ephemera like email and chalked up our lack of interaction to a momentary side effect of new motherhood. Ash, however, brought up an email that she had written and sent to me with some comments about one of my posts here on fixed address. I was all, uh, what are you talking about? I never got that email. And she was all, uh, I sent it to you. Why didn't you read it? And I was like, hey man, I didn't get it. And she was like, hey yourself, I sent it. She said, aren't you checking your gmail account?

Uh oh.

Yeah, sure, I signed up for a gmail account back when everyone was sending around invitations. It seemed so exclusive at the time. I used it twice and then all of a sudden hotmail increased their account sizes. And I left the gmail account to wither away. The only person I'd actually sent a few emails to from gmail was Ash (of course, since she's the only person outside of my family who I correspond with on a regular basis).

It happened that we were sitting beside Ash's computer when this topic came up, so I took the initiative to go and sign in and check out my gmail account, and crappily enough, there were seventeen unread messages from Ash. Thus, for the entire fall season we had been sending emails out into the ether. I'd write to her, expect to hear back and yet hear nothing. She'd write to me, expect to hear back and yet hear nothing. The incredible thing is that neither of us noticed anything was amiss for four months. As I said, good friends or space cadets. You make the decision. [Balzac-11-December-2005]