Insomnia has not gone away, but it is less wearing than it used to be. I've developed a system, and that's good enough for me and the Guy, who is no longer forced to defend himself when I start thrashing in sheer rage on my side of the bed. I am small, but my legs and fists are quite mighty; he is prone to getting hit by friendly fire when I get upset at my inability to sleep. In lieu of staging a frontal assault, I now just get up and head to the other bedroom, where I can thrash around in isolation and eventually go down out of sheer pissiness.

It is not a mature or particularly dignified coping mechanism, but it works for me.

My sister's boyfriend John is in Argentina, climbing in Patagonia. At least, I assume that is what he is doing; Sako tells me that the airline lost his luggage ten days ago, and that it contained a great deal of very expensive climbing gear. When I called her earlier today, she was engaged in trying to track it down.

"That sucks," I said. "He's gone all the way there and he doesn't have any gear."

"It's okay. He has a lot of friends down there."

"So he's borrowing gear?"

"Yeah. And one of his buddies decided to bring extra."

"Lucky."

It's one of the perks of being a seasonal worker that you make good friends with people during a season, after which those people go off into the world and return to their places of origin. Yosemite's summer staff is, in many ways, a giant club of like-minded people with similar interests, similar lifestyles, and similar personalities from all over the world. The draw is obvious: the National Park is practically designed to appeal to the outdoorsy, active nature-lover. Seasonal work is obviously temporary, and most people who engage in it have to live a certain kind of lifestyle, one that involves traveling where the work is.

At the drop of a hat -- and my sister has actually been a living example of this, so I do not say this flippantly -- either Sako or her boyfriend could pretty much hop on the next outbound flight, destination unknown, and end up someplace where they have a friend who'd be willing to put them up, lend them stuff, and go climbing with them.

It's a vast and open-hearted community, by all accounts. Sako fits right in. If she had any real estate, I'm certain she would make it available to her friends, too.

"So the other day, the weather was bad so they couldn't go climbing," Sako said. "So they went hiking instead and found a headless body."

I should know to be prepared for these sorts of things when talking to Sako. And yet. "...what?"

"They found a body," she said patiently, "and it didn't have a head. It was a hiker or something who probably got lost or something."

"Oh my God. Did they bring it down? Were they able to ID him?"

"He was up there for a long time. They probably knew he was dead."

The use of the word "probably" implied a general lack of commitment to the proper authority notification process. "Did they go to the police?"

"Well, they're in Argentina."

"They have police in Argentina."

"It wasn't going to go anywhere."

"Yeah, but a dead body sounds like something you should inform the authorities about."

"I suppose," she said. She sounded unenthused. More, she sounded uninterested.

I had a sneaking suspicion. I voiced it. "They finished the hike, didn't they?"

"Maybe if they were in the park," she said, still on the topic of informing the authorities. "I could see that."

There is this about living the kind of itinerant lifestyle: if you are to survive it, you must be practical. Ruthless pragmatism is the order of the day. It does not hurt that both Sako and John are in (or in the case of Sako, about to be in) medicine; more than any other profession, I imagine pragmatism needs to be a dominant personality trait to succeed.

"They know pretty much where it is," she assured me. "They could probably point people to the location. They'll probably go back up and try to find it again."

"Crazy," I said, and hung up the phone to spend the rest of the day goofing off at home.

Sako is driving to Seattle from Las Vegas right now. She's on the last leg of her trip, which started on Saturday. She has to be back home by Tuesday, at least in time to get to the first day of her class; she claims that she needs it as a prerequisite for nursing school, although I'm skeptical when she says it's the last, or rather, one of the last.

There have been a number of classes that she says has been the absolute last one that she needs before applying to schools. One of the difficulties of nursing schools, as I understand it, is that many of them have completely different prerequisites, barring a common baseline. If she targeted one school and geared her prereq classes to that school only, this ongoing saga of piecemeal coursework would have a finite end; unfortunately, another of the difficulties of nursing schools, I'm told, is that there is a great deal of competition to get in. Sako is hedging her bets by working towards several schools at once, which may be all well and good from the strategic standpoint, but does rather lead me to wonder if she is not simply prolonging the undergraduate portion of her university career.

I am in no position to say that there's anything wrong with that, beyond wondering if after 13 years of straight college schooling, being on that side of the classroom podium gets a little tedious.

She called maybe a dozen times between her first phone call, around 10:00 am, and her final phone call at around 7:00 pm. "How far is your town from this other town?" was the gist of most of her questions.

Not that she was coming to visit us, she explained carefully. She was just curious. Well, maybe she might come visit. Maybe not. Anyway, how far would it be? We mapped it out for her on google.

Sako uses the phone more than anybody I know. It's a thing for quick chats and random tangents. The flotsam and jetsam that wanders through her mind needs an outlet, and that outlet is usually whatever's on speed dial on her cell.

"Oh my God," she said when I picked up. "It smells like cow."

...which allowed us to pinpoint pretty much exactly where she was on her route.

"It's so disgusting," she said. "Do you think being able to smell themselves makes cows suicidal?"

"After a while, you actually get used to the smell and stop noticing it anymore."

"Ungh," she said, and hung up.

"I'm not coming to visit," she told us at 4 pm. "It's 3 hours out of my way, so I'm going to just keep going north. I can stop at Portland or something."

"Okay."

"Unless I do come to visit," she amended. "How far are you from where I am, again?"

Two hours later she called to inform me that she was tired of driving. "So I'm coming over," she said, "if that's okay." And: "How do I get there?"

The Guy walked her through the directions. It took three more calls.

"Your sister," Heisenburg said, wandering in during the second to last one, "has the directional sense of a pika."

"...what?"

"I like pikas," he said thoughtfully, and licked his whiskers. "They crunch."

"And where the hell have you been?"

He floated his tail into a question mark. "Here and there," he said airily. "I don't suppose you'd be interested in a mastodon skull?"

"What?"

"I suppose you don't have room here."

"Why the hell do you want a mastodon head?"

"Not a mastodon head. A specific mastodon skull. We hit it off. I felt like we really had something," he said with regret. "Like triscuits and soylent green. There were sparks. Oh well. Where's the goat? Never mind," he added pleasantly, as I opened my mouth. "I don't really care."

"A creationist mastodon skull," I said with outrage.

Heisenburg stared dreamily past me out the window. "I like creationism," he said. "It's salty." And he wandered out again while I tried to come up with an appropriately crushing retort.

I haven't heard hide nor hair of him since Sako left, so I suppose he hitched a ride up to Seattle with her. It's apparently going to snow up there. He ought to love that.

It is raining outside like it thinks it's Seattle.

Insomnia caught up to me with a vengeance on last Thursday; the lack of sleep (I presume) made me extra susceptible to whatever bug has been crawling around my office, and I was out for most of the day -- literally out, in most senses of the word: out of office, out of mind, out of commission, out like a light ... which isn't to say that I actually slept.

It's been over a 3 weeks now, but insomnia and I have figured out a kind of armed truce. I get to sleep between the hours of 8 pm and 3 am, if I choose to take advantage of it ... and only if I fall asleep before 10 pm. From 3 AM to 9 AM, insomnia keeps me up, unless I wander around the house several times and crawl onto the sofa in the living room. There, I may (if I am lucky) fall asleep for an hour or so at a time.

It's all very wearing. Armed truce is maybe not the word. Conditional surrender might be more accurate.

The end result is that I'm a little more short-tempered than usual, and the commute home is sort of memorable in the way that it's really not: not memorable, I mean, because I'm in serious danger of dozing off during the drive. There have been more than a few occasions when I've had to swerve back into my own lane because my eyes have fallen shut. Do not, however, mistake the urgent desire to sleep with the actual ability to sleep. Exhaustion is all well and good, but it has yet to translate into really consistent sleep cycles. From time to time, insomnia gives me a free pass, but then it comes swooping back again the next night just to remind me who's boss. It's making me cranky, to be honest.

I called Mom on Monday, realizing that I had not spoken to her in a while. She informed me that she had fallen down the stairs on Friday night. She reassured me that she had not actually broken anything, and that she had also been (mostly) able to walk as of Sunday -- MOSTLY. Fantastic. -- when she'd finally decided to go to a clinic and get checked out.

"They put a thing," she said sadly. "What is the word? It is around my legs."

I tried to explain the word 'brace,' but she seemed to be getting it confused with her actual braces -- the metal ones on her teeth -- and the conversation went downhill from there. In between recriminations about why she didn't immediately seek medical help, and generalized swearing, it all got a bit excited.

"Why didn't you call me?"

"It was only a little fall. And it was late."

"But still."

"You are in California. It would not help."

"BUT STILL. You took two days to go to the doctor?"

"It was weekend."

"You couldn't walk!"

"Well."

Apparently, the only reason she did go to the doctor at all was that one of her students informed her that his brother had broken his foot and hadn't realized it until the doctor X-rayed it several days later. Under the persistent and very vocal badgering from her Saturday students, not to mention their offers to cancel their lessons so they could actually drive her in to get medical attention, she finally gave in and went the next day.

As of yesterday, she claims that she is all better. "Except swell," she said, which means 'swelling,' which she assures me does not hurt at all. Of course, one has to remember that pain is all relative, in her lexicon; she measures it against standards that I have never really understood. Does it hurt compared to smashing her thumb with a hammer? Does it hurt compared to being impaled with a 2x4? Does it hurt compared to actual death?

She was quite cheerful, which I suspect means that it did hurt, but just enough that she could be a martyr to the pain and enjoy being strong.

"I wonder if they gave your Mom Ibuprofen?" the Guy asked.

I eyed him.

"--which she wouldn't take anyway?" he tacked on, thoughtfully.

Sako is headed home next week to finish some of her last pre-qual courses for nursing school. I called her on Tuesday morning to tell her about Mom taking a header. Mom tells me that Sako promptly called her in turn.

"Did she yell at you?" I asked.

"No. She said, 'Mooooooooom,'" she said, with that note in her voice that was a perfect mimicry of how either Sako or I sound when we want to reach through the phone and shake this particularly frustrating parent.

I said, "Good," and, "It served you right."

Cranky, I'm telling you.

I have insomnia.

"Try wine," Sako suggested just now over IM. "It always helps me. Or whiskey."

Or Bailey's. Or Kahlua. Or--

"Or exercise," she added thoughtfully. "But don't exercise before you sleep."

I'm not sure I understand that. Does she mean I should exercise while I am asleep? Unconscious exercising? If only.

Everybody is full of advice when they hear that you have insomnia. It's like the hiccups: public domain and entertainment for the masses. "Do you have too much on your mind?" a coworker asked. "Are you really stressed out about something?"

I'm stressed out about not being able to sleep. It's gone on for almost two weeks now, with last night being the worst yet. At 4 AM I lay in bed, thinking quite seriously about just getting up and driving to work. Out of sheer perversity I stayed in bed until 5 AM, then 6 AM, and played cat's cradle in the dark without any string.

It's amazing the kinds of idiotic things it occurs to you to do when you're sleepless in the night.

"Are you going to go all Fight Club on me?" another coworker asked, which -- I suppose is a pop reference I should get, but I don't. Something to do with split personalities. He explained it to me. I forgot what he was saying almost before he was done. This is the problem with not sleeping. Your brain starts to go. God knows I'm no mastermind during the best of times, but this is getting ridiculous.

"Too much caffeine."

Thank you. I hadn't thought of that.

"I drank one cup of coffee yesterday," I told him. Caffeine is not something I regularly indulge in. "I had to, in order to stay awake during the day. Because I was sleepy. Because I have insomnia."

It all made sense to me when I said it, but I'm not entirely sure now. Somewhere along the line, that argument appears to have looped around and ended up back where it started.

I don't know.

I would kill to be able to lie down and grab a solid 24 hours.

The Guy had his company party on Saturday.

He went to my company party a week before, which was a Friday that happened to land on the day of a freak storm that battered California and took out power up and down the coast. I had originally RSVPed, but had then decided not to go, only to change my mind about an hour before the party.

"And you're coming," I told him, adding considerately, "Unless you don't want to."

As any guy who has ever been in a successful relationship with a woman will tell you, this is code for, 'I want you to come to be my support blanket, and if you do not come I will be understanding, but punish you anyway.'

"Sure," he said. "I'll be right there."

Say what you will about the Guy, he can read the writing on the wall.

The unfortunate result of my last minute decision change was that we were both wearing Silicon Valley chic at a party that had some very nice clothes on display. Jeans and sneakers are all very well in the office out here in geekland, but there is a time and a place for everything. Sadly, as usual, self-consciousness lasted for about two minutes, after which my nebula-sized ego forgot all about it. It did not hurt that, also as usual, everybody was sweet and did not comment on my excessively commonplace fashion sense. In case I haven't mentioned it recently, I really do work with some of the best people in the business.

The Guy's party was a different matter altogether. It's pretty unusual that we have a chance (or a reason) to dress up in our daily lives; his company's event was a White House State Dinner, featuring Walter Scheib, who was the chef at the White House during most of the Clinton administration and for four years following.

"The food will be good," he says morosely, the day of the actual event. He didn't actually say But... but a wife learns to read between the lines.

Saturday was, for several reasons, fairly stressful. There were appointments and deliverables, and assorted other problems. On top of a week in which raging insomnia and sleep apnea played a fairly significant part, the need to dress up and socialize with people one works with during the week itself seemed unnecessarily egregious. To dress up and socialize with people you don't even know but your husband works with during the week was especially brutal. Of course, I owed the Guy: turnabout is fair play, and he made a respectable showing at my company party, after all. We both collapsed in mid-afternoon, and woke up bleary-eyed and delirious from a nap about an hour before the actual event.

"Do you want to go?" he asked.

"Nnrgh," I said.

"Is that a no?"

I mustered what was left of my higher brain functions to consider the matter. "Mmfn," I said, which, translated literally, meant, 'I'll go if you go.'

We crawled out of bed. The Guy put on a tie. I put on a dress and heels. I even put on lipstick.

As is the way of these things, we actually had a great time. The Guy's prediction that the food would be good was dead on -- not really a surprise when the chef in charge headed the White House kitchen for 11 years. What was more surprising was that he proved to be quite a raconteur, full of hilarious and endearing and amusing stories about working intimately with two presidents and their First Ladies. In between courses, he explained what we were about to eat, and told us a little back story involving the recipes themselves. He was an engaging speaker, and a practiced one, and managed to be entertaining without ever being cruel towards the people involved.

"When you work for the White House, you check your politics at the door," he said.

I'm not a foodie, especially of late. My new diabetic diet (or it could be my medication, who knows) has made me a bit hostile towards food in general, which means I can't really enjoy it as much as I used to. The stories made the meal for me. Even when I can't remember what we ate, I'll still remember the tale of Jenna Bush and the tequila meat sauce, and Mrs. Clinton and the leg of lamb.

"It's funny how people always ask me what the difference was between the two presidents," he said at one point. "They seem to think that there's red state food and blue state food."

We laughed, because we're from California, and -- well, we do.

Scheib was brought on board because Hilary Clinton wanted to change the way that the White House did food. The previous chef did French food. What Mrs. Clinton wanted was to make the White House kitchens representative of America: eclectic, with all the influences of the hundreds of cultures that have made America home; organic and fresh, with all the food that is home-grown and available in the United States.

The First Ladies were always on one kind of diet or another, he said; they were careful about what they ate, and the nutritional quality of the food. The Presidents would've been perfectly happy if they'd just opened up a TGI Friday's in the basement. Somebody asked, was it ever difficult reconciling what the Presidents wanted with what the First Ladies wanted?

The rule of the House, said Scheib, is to make the First Lady happy. If the First Lady's happy, everybody's happy. Even if the Presidents would rather not be.

At the beginning of the Bush presidency, Scheib said, the President came to him and said, "Cookie," -- he called the chef 'cookie,' for whatever reason. I presume it's a Texas thing. -- "Cookie, let me tell you what I don't like. I don't like green food. I don't like salads. I don't like soup. And I don't like wet fish." Wet fish apparently meant any fish that wasn't grilled or fried.

A little while after that, they had one of their first state dinners. Mrs. Bush came to Scheib to work out the menu, and as part of that menu, she requested a green soup with a topping of light salad, with a piece of poached fish on top. Scheib listened to the order with some anxiety. "I don't wish to cause any trouble, ma'am," he said humbly, "but the President said--"

At this point, the First Lady fixed him with a Look. "I don't remember asking to know what the President wanted," she said. And that was that.

Keep the First Lady happy, that's the rule. The state dinner went ahead with the menu as she requested it.

We were none of us acquainted with real state dinners, so Scheib explained the mechanics of how these things work. The tables are ranked by order of importance. There is tier 1, which is the heads of state; then tier 2, which contains the slightly lower-ranked attendees, then tier 3, and so on. Obviously tier 1 gets served first, and then tier 2, and so on, so forth, with servers moving in and out of the kitchen in waves so that everybody gets served quickly and (more or less) at once.

The President of the United States plainly rates a Tier 1 table, and so he was among the first served. He looked down at his plate, saw green soup, green salad, soup, and wet fish, asked, "Did this wash up on shore?" and pushed his plate away.

Now, it being one of his first state dinners, he apparently was not acquainted with the way that the etiquette works at these sorts of things. When the President pushes away his plate, that is the cue for the President's Butler to take his plate away. And when the President's Butler takes away the President's plate, that is the cue for all the other servers to take the other plates away. So now half the room has not been served yet, but the other half of the room is having their plates taken away, and there are suddenly two waves of people trying to leave with plates and trying to enter with plates, and an utter domestic disaster as pandemonium erupts.

The chef looked out his window at this tumult of colliding and whirling bodies. "Oh boy," he thought. "Somebody's in trouble." There was never any real question of who that somebody was going to be.

That night, the word came down that Mrs. Bush had set her husband straight on future state dinners. "I don't care if you don't like it, Bushie. Don't do that again. From now on, just pick up a fork and move it around on your plate."

Scheib has a new business, and a book out that I think I'll be buying (or at least borrowing from the library) at some point soon. It's always very easy to dislike a president for his politics, his decisions, and his personality on camera. It's a lot harder to differentiate between the private person and the politician, a line that gets blurred far too frequently in American politics today. It's good to get the reminder now and again that even the devil likes quesadillas, and that behind the print and the sound bites there's also a guy who'd really just love to have a hamburger, if only his wife were out of town....

My sister still hasn't gotten that crown fixed.

Anybody surprised by this, raise your hand.

It has been two years since I last got my teeth cleaned, which corresponds almost exactly to the length of time I have not been living in Redwood City. My dentist before I moved was conveniently located kitty-corner from my ghetto apartment, requiring only that I change out of my pajamas and put on shoes before trotting across the street to get my teeth cleaned. Cavities and dental health may be a motivator for most people's regular checkups. For me, convenience is a bigger factor. Our new home is half a block away from a large complex that claims to house an entire fleet of dentists, and yet I remain tied to my old provider. Even if I don't visit him as regularly as I should, he is still my dentist, and I eye the geometric brownness of the neighborhood complex with great suspicion.

I do not like change, is the moral of this story. Even if it means that my teeth will fall out.

Having moved 20 minutes away from my old place, I had not previously had the motivation to get my teeth looked at again. It wasn't so much that getting in the car and driving that distance was inconven-- no, wait, that was the real reason. Hitherto, my work was south, whereas my dentist was north, which anyone will tell you are mutually exclusive. Some people (like my husband) would tell you that it is not beyond the realms of reason that one could go to work, then drive north to get to an appointment, then drive south to get back to work. I will not even bother to go into the reasons why this would not work for me, mostly because I'm not sure that there's any way to explain it that wouldn't result in me being universally condemned as a total freak. You will have to trust me. It simply wouldn't have worked.

My new job conveniently removes the whole north/south difficulty. My dentist is north. My new job is norther. My stars have aligned. Thanks to the consideration of cosmic forces, as of Tuesday, I now have clean teeth.

Yay.

After two years, the session went rather better than I expected. I am, I confess, one of those millions of Americans (and billions of ... well, not-Americans) who do not like to floss. It has been a repeating refrain over the years as I lie in the dentist's chair and cringe at the sound of scraping picks.

People tell me that the sound of the drill is actually the worst sound in a dentist's office. I have not found this to be the case, mostly because I have only ever had preventative cavities: holes that were not really holes, but rather irregularities in my molars that were filled in in order to prevent possible future decay. (This, to me, is like making roads extra thick in order to prevent future potholes. It's possible that this actually works, although if you live in the Bay Area, you have empirical evidence proving otherwise.)

In terms of sheer repetition and frequency, teeth scraping looms large on the horrible sound measure, at least in my experience. There is the squeak of metal against your teeth, which sounds like you are biting slowly down on an excited rat, and then the vibration factor, which is like the Sweet Arbor Home bowling team rolling rocks around in the empty chamber of your skull.

Conversations with dentists have normally gone like this.

"You ha--" squeak squeak squeak "--build-up an--" squeak squeak rumble "--flossing?"

"Nuh?"

rumble squeak rumble "--should flo--" squeak squeak SQUEAK

"Ungh!"

"Sorry. Floss more re--" SQUEAK. "Spit, please."

After each cleaning I've held my bleeding gums together with one hand, clutched the sample bag they give out like candy in the other, and promised my dentist, I will floss more next time. I will! -- only to remember that night at home that flossing requires mess and fuss and Inconvenience, which puts paid to the entire notion until the next time.

Somewhere in my home there is a bucket of floss that could keep a South African village in stock for the next 10 years.

The issue here is that I don't mind doing things if they're made easy for me, a sentiment that identifies me as typically American. This is why those small, disposable floss picks you can now buy in supermarkets and drug stores will be single-handedly responsible for my ability to chew real food well into my forties. While the environmentalist in me is appalled by the kind of waste represented by their purchase, the lazy ass in me is delighted. Cleaning my teeth without ever having to touch my mouth is, by any definition of the word, awesome. Convenience is the key. They keep me entertained at work, watching TV, working on the computer, reading books--

My last cleaning took all of 5 minutes.

"Hm," said my dentist. squeak squeak. "Rinse, please?"

I bet you thought there'd be a point to this entry.

Sorry.

My sister has a broken record quality to her at times. "Come down to Yosemite and visit me," she says. "When are you coming down to Yosemite to visit me? Why don't you come down to Yosemite to visit me? You're never going to come down to Yosemite to visit me, are you?"

This summer will be her last at the park (she claims) since her summers and her winters will be taken up by the need to finish nursing school in the limited margin of time they permit a body to get a nursing degree. It is a stepping stone to a better life for her, at least in the economic sense: she does not begrudge it, or at least not aloud to me. Once she has established herself as a gypsy nurse, she will likely go back to spending her summers at Yosemite again.

"Gypsy nurse." There's something so outstandingly odd about that phrase.

She's vocal about trying to get us to come, but she isn't nearly so expressive about explaining why we should come. She's eloquent enough about Yosemite, but mostly emphasizing those aspects of it that we, as luxury-loving homebodies, would be least likely to enthuse about. "I live in a cabin," she told us at one point, offering the information as an enticement. Since she promptly followed that up with, "It doesn't have windows. Or doors. Or walls, as such," the image of the cozy cabin in the woods promptly gave way to an image of abject misery, mold, and bored wild animals and insects roaming in and out at will.

I question how a body can have walls "as such." Sako claims that canvas can make a wall. Me, I'm more of the brick and mortar school. If I can cut through the wall using a dessert fork, it is not adequate to my needs.

It's in pictures that she manages to do all the persuading that her stories fail to accomplish. She sends them from time to time, in massive chunks of arbitrary data. They could be labeled descriptively for what they are: the occasional brain dump, without context. Here is a picture of Sako waving her arms in front of a mountain. Here is a picture of complete strangers drinking beer over an inflatable raft. Here is a picture of some more strangers eating dinner by candlelight outdoors.

Here is a picture of a rock and an anonymous big toe.

Occasionally though, Sako manages to take some breathtaking, brilliant photographs. They happen without warning in the middle of a collection of utterly bewildering images. I'll flip through thumbnails, staring blankly at strange faces, and find myself caught by a picture of absolute, heart-stopping beauty. She has creative genes in her background -- our paternal grandmother was an artist; our paternal grandfather and father's generation were all musicians -- but in her it comes out in erratic bursts and bubbles, like small burps that have been suppressed too long for comfort. She does not bother to nurture or develop these strange and unpredictable talents of hers, but they're there. My sister the slacker is a goddamn genius.

You have no idea how annoying that is.

I remember Mom despairing over her when she was younger, clutching a handful of pictures Sako had drawn in which serious, impressive talent was mingled with the kind of haphazard scribbling only a bored child who'd rather be doing something else can produce. Her report cards tended to say things like, "Has talent but does not apply herself." "Lacks concentration." "Does not fulfill her potential."

"Your daughter," Mom used to say to Dad, which would just make him snicker. It's possible he took it as a compliment. He was not, perhaps, the most mature of parents, but he had a kindred spirit's appreciation of the wayward and the rebel. Sako was more like him than I ever would be.

Of course, seeing where it's taken her, who could possibly say that he was wrong?

Allow me to backtrack a little to a few days past.

My mother gets odd mail, which I blame as much on her tendency to give random donations to equally random charities -- a check here, a pair of old shoes there -- and her apparent inability to distinguish between junk mail and real mail. She has a reverence for the written word that borders on the pathological. Kami, she reminds me from time to time, means both "paper" and "god," though using different characters and with emphasis on different syllables.

While she understands the concept of fiction and enjoys it as much as the next person, there is an odd disconnect in her mind between that and false advertisement, for instance. Context no longer applies when it comes outside of a book. Sometimes it doesn't even apply when it comes within a book. Articles in The National Enquirer are just as likely to prompt anxious inquiry as the most carefully researched article in the New York Times, with little discrimination between the two. An explanation that one is fiction and one is subjective fact meets with polite skepticism: why, when words are so important, would anyone write down lies? Did you see, Yuhri, that there was a baby born with two heads in Texas to a woman who was abducted by aliens?

I worry what will happen when she starts getting penis-pump spam. There's a conversation I really don't want to have.

As I say, my mother gets odd mail. A few days before we left, I flipped through a stack of envelopes on her kitchen counter, more out of a lack of anything to do than any real curiosity. From time to time, she still gets mail meant for me, mostly requests for money from my alma mater and my fraternity's non-profits, or magazines from the alumni associations of the same.

It was the envelope that caught my eye. Rather, it was the text on the corner of the envelope that caught my eye. There's just something about the phrase, "Free," when linked to the phrase, "pre-paid cremation" that strikes a body.

A living body, that is. One that has received that particular offer in the mail.

"Mom," I said. "You get weird mail."

It is true that my mother is not, shall we say, in the first blush of youth; she qualified to get social security checks a few years ago, and waves her senior citizen credentials with all the enthusiasm of a nun displaying her very first syphilis-positive diagnosis. Nonetheless.

"--She got what?" Sako said. "How come I never get those kinds of offers?"

It is true that any business has the right to advertise, and probably needs to in this day and age. Also true that death is a multi-billion dollar industry, and there's a lot of competition for those dollars.

Nonetheless.

My mother, who thinks happily and morbidly about death at the drop of a hat, hardly needs the reminder from an outside source. She is given to reminding her children about the arrangements for her burial and disposition of her effects, a reminder of mortality that we, her children, neither want nor need -- particularly since she usually accompanies those reminders with the hopeful remark that the world will probably end before that, anyway, and have we made emergency plans? My sister can usually answer yes, while I must usually answer no, a sure fire way to kick off a lecture about the importance of being prepared for all eventualities. I do not deny the truth of that, but after all, the end of the world is customarily accompanied by annihilation and sudden death; as I have told her a couple of times, I'm not entirely sure what a water purifier would do for me if the seas (for instance) turned to blood and rose up to blot us off the face of the earth.

"Well, you might get thirsty," Mom says, which makes sense in her mind, if not in mine. Then again, she has a less Biblical concept of Apocalypse.

I'll maybe talk about that some other time.

In retrospect, it's possible I'm more annoyed at the combination of the two words, "free" and "pre-paid" than I am by the offer itself. It seems to indicate a lack of commitment to the concept of "free," or at the very least, a lack of understanding. I'm not entirely sure I would want to entrust my corpse to someone unable to grasp such a basic concept. If "free" poses such a difficulty, what trouble, then, might they have with "fire?"

I am resigned to funereal urns occasionally sounding a rattle when you shake them. I'm a little more dismayed by the thought that they might squish.

The writers' strike these past two months is impacting us in the way where we now watch DVDs instead of TV. In many ways, this is actually worse; the addictive quality of starting a full series -- like Babylon 5 -- wherein you know that you have access to the next story in the arc available and ready to hand and all you have to do is select the next chapter....

Let's just say that the Guy and I have spent a lot of time on the couch these past couple of weeks.

Jazz, meanwhile, has pinged me with this small jewel, a blogger who not only links to youtube tracks of one of my favorite canceled television shows, Cupid, but actually goes through the episodes one by one.

If he could find just find recordings online for Remember WENN, my cup would runneth over.

New Years is a complicated time for Japanese folks, all wrapped up in mystique and formality and tradition -- most of which I tend to ignore, seeing as how I'm really a giant banana: Asian on the outside, white on the inside. Mom made osechi ryori, the Japanese New Year's meal, for Christmas instead. Since none of us were going to be there for the actual new year celebration, it seemed like a good idea until she actually started cooking -- two days in advance. Normally it takes three days to cook a decent osechi ryori spread, but we were going minimalist for the occasion: only 10 dishes instead of the more usual, oh, I don't know. 40? It's a quasi-spiritual thing, in the way where Easter ham and boiled eggs dipped in food dye are spiritual things, which is to say not at all.

It is, however, very pretty.

We spent our New Year huddled together on the sofa. California, as I mentioned before, is cold right now. Our house is several degrees colder still, and the lower level is absolutely unlivable, while the middle level, where kitchen, living room, and assorted entertainment are situated, is at least survivable if not entirely comfortable. It's a cultural tradition to make mochi at this time of year, and so that's what we did. Pounds and pounds of sweet rice went into our little mochi maker, and pounds and pounds of mochi came out. Much of it ended up in our stomachs, more than was strictly advisable, but there was enough left to make gifting a definite possibility, not to mention freezing for future use.

Insofar as traditions go, mochi-making is one of the more charming ones that being Japanese has gifted me with, and the Guy is not noticeably reluctant to participate. In between soaking and steaming and pounding, he surfed the web for mochi trivia, surfacing occasionally to share tidbits.

"Did you know people die from eating this?" he asked. "Every year, Japanese news media reports on how many mochi-related deaths there were."

I suspect he got that information from Wikipedia, which I see is looking for a citation on that particular piece of information. I could ask my mother for verification, but I don't think 'Mom' is an acceptable reference, even at the best of times. After all, she thinks that moles cause earthquakes.

Admittedly, I haven't been able to prove her wrong.

I realize that it is now the second day of the new year, but I've actually bothered to come up with resolutions this year. Not creative ones, to be honest, but it's rare enough that I decide to engage on any campaign of self-improvement that I think it deserves mention.

I'm not good at resolutions. It helps, I think, to have some semblance of long-term memory when committing to something like this; mine is vestigial at best, and woefully underdeveloped. I fully expect to have forgotten all about this by the 5th, or maybe even (optimism aside) the 6th of January.

1. Don't procrastinate. As much.

   This is obviously already a failure, and yet. The truth is that I'm not a big procrastinator in the professional sense. Not that there is such a thing as a professional procrastinator -- is there? If anyone knows differently, please drop me a line. I'm always up for another career change -- but rather, procrastinating in my professional life: not something I do. I continue to have a more or less Japanese work ethic, some days more, some days less.

   In my personal life, procrastination is my religion. It drives the Guy wild, and has stung me in the ass more than once. You'd think I'd learn, but old dogs, new tricks -- and the two minutes it would take me to finish something in the here and now is somehow never counterbalanced by the thought of the two hours it will take me to deal with the mess if I don't, later. The cost-benefit calculations would be far more useful if I actually conceived of the future; as it is, I punt along from moment to moment, and suddenly find that the electricity has been shut off because I never bothered to pay my bill.

   For the record, the Guy is taking care of all utilities now.

2. Finish unpacking.

   See above. I suppose if the one is solved, the other automatically follows. It took us almost 5 years to finish unpacking in the tenement, and the new house bids fair to remain in boxes until 2020. At this rate -- and I should add to my list, "get a housekeeper," because the sheer shame of having someone see just how poor my personal housekeeping and unpacking skills are should be enough to motivate me.

   Should. Except I have a feeling that I might be too banana to care.

3. Learn a new skill.

   I don't know what this will be, yet. I have a few months to think about it, and an entire year to pick something up. Jazz mentioned Toastmasters to me a while back, and that might be something to consider. My love of my own voice notwithstanding, you can rarely go amiss with working on your personal presentation skills.

   Then again, there's a sign language class near my workplace, and a deaf engineer two cubes down. Decisions, decisions....

4. Exercise more and practice more.

   AT LEAST 30 minutes a day of either piano or exercise: the two aren't complementary, but they are both things that I've been meaning to do more of, and 30 minutes is a start, if not necessarily sufficient unto themselves. At the end of 2006, I was doing fairly strenuous cardio at least 4 times a week, and in the best shape I've ever been. At the end of 2007, I'm ... devolving to several million years before opposable thumbs and air-breathing. "Slug-like" would be the best way to describe me now.

   I like being fit. I like being a pianist. It would be good to get back to both, even if it's inch by inch.

5. Create something.

   Self-explanatory, without being specific. Starting things, I'm good at. Finishing things, I'm not. This will be the year I finish things, which brings us back to item 1. Well, from one trunk, all branches grow.

And there we go. Vague, amorphous, irresolute resolutions -- but they're a start. Maybe I'll check-point in June, just to see where I stand.

Unless, you know. I forget.

Today I steal from the entire world, with New Year blessings and hopes for you all.

"May God stand between you and harm, in all the empty places where you must walk."

- Egypt

"May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand."

- Ireland

"Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

- Rabindranath Tagore, (1861 - 1941)