They’re signing the papers to sell the house on April 19th.

I’m tired, and a little grouchy. I’ve had to work in the evenings several days this past week. I haven’t been getting enough sleep. It’s been cold and wet and I had to go back to wearing my winter coat (which may be chili-pepper red, but does not compensate for the deep gray of the sky) after the vain hope that it was time for it to get dusty. My lovely in-laws are in town, which is a sweet treat (literally — it usually involves lots of cheesecake and brownies…), but I haven’t had as much mental and emotional energy for them as I’d like because of the working in the evenings thing, and the cold and wet thing. And I’m lonely, because Ben’s gone and Peter’s gone and Jenn’s gone (ok, Jenn was only in New York for 5 days. But I haven’t had time to call her, because see: above) and I’m lonely and cold.

And Ross is sweat-logged from taekwondo and I can’t hug him.

Oh, woe is my Poe-night!

My troubles are small and insignificant, beloveds. But verily, is that not what makes a person most desire tea and sympathy?

I can at least take care of the tea, although it does mean I’ll have to get up at 3 in the morning to pee. Truly, the misery never ends.

…on a day when it snows, just when you were hoping spring was really sprung, and you have 1500 words to write before bedtime that you will be paid for but not own, and the pile of dirty laundry in the closet is so huge it prevents the door from closing, and you’re tired and uninspired and your day was so boring you don’t even remember what you had for lunch — even then, everything can turn around in an instant when you come home to a manila envelope in the mailbox from Sarah that contains a 26-song mix-CD, a yellow and green “Reading is Sexy” bumper sticker, and an interpretation of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too that has been printed out on the back of a “Welcome to Prattville” letter from Prattville’s friendliest dental care office.

Ah! It was pizza!

Because I’ve gotten used to seeing a photograph here, because I’m working on an article that’s boring me to death, and because in my imagination this poor kid is getting the dreaded sex talk from his two stodgy uncles, and it cracks me up.

Go here for Part 1.

*******

It has been almost eight years since my mother and father first claimed my hastily chosen email address as their own, thus pushing themselves off on a long journey through the vast waters of the internet, oft punctuated by smiling explanations to quizzical acquaintances. I think more than anything they enjoyed the frequent opportunities to discuss the implied character of their absent daughter — nine thousand miles away at college and sorely missed. And surely they must also have experienced some small frisson of delicious vanity at being associated with such a gently, cleverly subversive alias, without actually having to be the ones responsible for choosing it. Yes, my parents had their wicked fun.

Yet the reason I’m writing this entry now is that a few days ago I received a note from my dad in which he raised — not for the first time, either — his ongoing dilemma about whether or not to keep paying for the ISP that this particular email account comes with. Over the course of the past eight years they’ve gone through several different computers, upgraded to a new broadband provider, and each gotten accustomed to using a personal email address: my father has one from the hospital, and my mother made herself a shiny new Gmail account many moons ago now. So wickedATpacific.net.sg, despite its illustrious history, now spends most of its time languishing under the weight of hundreds of spam messages a week. Why keep it around? Well, as my father points out, it doesn’t cost very much — a few dollars a month for the dial-up connection they don’t actually use. And all of my parents’ correspondents know it by heart, although they don’t write to it very often. These are not the most compelling arguments.

But as my father also offers, a bit faintly, he “quite likes it.”

Hmm. He quite likes it. I know my dad, and I know what that means. It means my first email address, like the old street sign marking the location of our first family apartment (which he bid on and paid a small fortune for when the government started putting up new signs, and which currently leans against my parents’ living room wall); like the license plate number from the first new car he bought (which he has paid to keep using with every subsequent vehicle he’s driven) — like almost everything that sticks around for long enough, good old wicked has gone and become an object of nostalgia.

I read my father’s note, which includes the observation, “It was you who started it and so I am asking you for your thoughts,” and a smile creeps across my face. I search my mind for thoughts on the issue and find only sweet amusement, as well as affection for my dad’s hard-won sentimentality. Don’t ask me, I say to myself. I am the one who catapulted between keeping boxes and boxes full of every falling-apart, folded up note any classmate ever passed me since the age of 10, and throwing the whole dusty mess out in a breathless purge on my last visit home. Don’t ask me. Hold on to what you need to remember, and let the rest go.

In thinking about it I also find that I have grown so accustomed to inhabiting my own self-same-self that, upon saying goodbye to my Brandeis account (through which I expressed my secret desire to dance naked in the forest suckling wild deer at my breasts, in a Dionysian frenzy), every email address or site username I have chosen has consisted, very simply, of my real first and middle names run together. It’s difficult for my moldy old brain to remember who I’m supposed to be if I pick anything else, and more and more I feel very silly inventing an appellation that is supposed to stand for me. I stand for me quite comfortably these days.

But I understand my father’s sense of nostalgia. We live in an oddly evanescent world, despite the fact that we surround ourselves with so much stuff. There really aren’t that many things in our lives that are sturdy enough to carry bits of our past selves inside them, specific enough to become vessels of memory. If an old email account is brimming over with images of years you would like to remember, as well as cascades of spam, why not hang on to it a little longer?

Late in 1996 or early in 1997, when I was about to turn 18 years old, we got an internet connection for the first time at my house. I was immediately entrusted with the responsibility for choosing the username for the email account that came with it, because my parents weren’t quite ready to take their first steps over that threshold, and my sister either didn’t care about it or already had her own account with the university; I don’t remember which. Those were halcyon days, in terms of the internet and Singapore, and no one could yet foresee a period in which online aliases are so thoroughly picked over that you have to add ever-increasing strings of numbers onto the end of your chosen moniker in order to secure for yourself a unique identifier.

So I mulled over the decision with a sense of calm and possibility, as well as a pleasant lack of attachment. Understand, this was my first email account. I had spent exactly 5 minutes on the internet in my whole life, most of which consisted of wandering about the colorful but confusingly pointless homepage of our new internet service provider. The idea of having an email address was exciting, in a way, but in the end it was not much more than a charming novelty, whose eventual usefulness and importance in my life I could in no way predict. The process was remarkably free from pressure or analysis: I did not feel as if I ought to be choosing a signifier for my life, my character, the person I wished to be, or the person I hoped other people would think I was.

I was, however, smack in the middle of my adolescence, a time when pretty much everything you choose to surround yourself with cannot help but become a signifier for your life, your character, the person you wish to be, or the person you hope other people will think you are. So whatever it was, this new username of mine, it had to be — well, it had to be kinda cool.

I wish I could remember the list of possibilities I went over before coming to my final decision. I don’t — but in reconstructing that determinedly dark period of my life I can imagine the kinds of words and phrases that might have gone through my mind: Morbid? Poisonous? Impoftheabsurd?

It was only a matter of minutes before the perfect word dropped into my brain and I smiled, typed it in, hit “Return” and waited to see if it would take.

It did.

I was the proud owner of the shiny new email account wickedATpacific.net.sg. I had a name. I had an address. I officially existed on the internet.

I was pleased with my choice. It had an edge, but it was also cheeky. It didn’t sound too intense, or too depressive. It was smart and playful, and it winked at you. Somewhere between mischief and iniquity, it was only as naughty as your imagination. (It would be years before I moved to Boston and discovered that the word “wicked” is also an adjectival modifier used to intensify whatever it precedes, which was the beginning of the word losing its luster for me.) I handed my address out to all and sundry, and grinned to myself whenever they looked up at me with a hint of surprise and approval in their eyes. I grinned even harder when my parents started having the occasional need to send or receive an email, and their friends — usually from church — stared in confusion for a moment upon hearing the family address.

It was all a bit of a lark, and I enjoyed it.

Two years later I was at Brandeis negotiating a surfeit of new email accounts: one from Hotmail –heh– and one gifted to me by my university. I was striking out on my own, leaving my old life behind — including wickedATpacific.net.sg.

And so my sly, sexy, slightly deviant username became the default email address of both my sweet, upstanding parents — in the hands of whom it was destined to become the ultimate endpoint for hundreds of forwarded jokes, animated e-cards, and inspirational stories.

*******

Part Two follows.