faulty vision

While suturing a laceration on the hand of a 90-year-old Texas rancher whose hand had caught in a gate while working cattle, a doctor and the old man were talking about George W. Bush being in the white house.

The old Texan said, “Well, ya know, Bush is a ‘post turtle.’”

Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked him what a “post turtle” was.

The old man said, “When you’re driving down a country road, and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.”

The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain. “You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he can’t get anything done while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor dumb thing get down.”

The Guy seems to think that I owe him the opportunity to rebut a statement made in the earlier entry, namely, that he’s a scrotum. “I have one,” — TMI! TMI! — he said, dubiously, “but I don’t think you could generalize my personality by associating it with a single body part. Besides,” he added, “you weren’t in any real danger. Firecracker wouldn’t have hurt you. You gave her roses.”

Sez you.

All in all, it’s been a piss-poor week. The brightest spot was when my company filed for Chapter 11, which just goes to show you how the rest of it has gone. Thursday was the Slushpuppy’s last day with us; not having been hit with layoffs two days before, he found himself another job in Southern California, and decided to move on.

“If they find your Slushpuppy machine, can I have it?” I asked.

“What’s a Slushpuppy?” College Boy wanted to know.

The education system in China is tragically deficient.

After a four-year absence, the machine was finally located by Facilities in the garage under the next building over. They carted it up for him, and shortly afterwards reappeared with a satellite dish that Slushpuppy had had sitting on top of another building. The two objects lined up next to each other outside his cart suggested nothing so much as a next generation orbital satellite, after NASA lost all its federal funding to the NRA. We opened up the Slushpuppy — machine, not man — and discovered all sorts of new and exciting biological contaminants had taken up residence in its belly. Somewhere in there was a cure for canine incontinence.

“Ew,” said I.

“What’s that smell?” asked Indian Woman (the Second.)

“YOU ARE NOT A MAN,” said Firecracker. “REAL MEN DO NOT LEAVE WOMEN.”

Poor College Boy is the only guy left. He’ll probably grow breasts from all the estrogen flying around. Slushpuppy could very well have been one of the last three employees at the company who had been there over five years. An era is ended.

Friday found everybody’s favorite Firecracker listless and quiet.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, following that immediately with an equally selfless, “Are you mad at me? Are you going to hurt me? Don’t hurt me.”

“I’M NOT MAD AT YOU,” she sighed. “MY HUSBAND, HE READ YOUR JOURNAL LAST NIGHT. HE LAUGH VERY HARD BECAUSE OF SHAKE THE BABY. HE SAY I NEED MORE EDUCATION.”

“Dump him,” I said, immediately. Ann Landers, I’m not.

“NO, I CANNOT DO THAT.”

“You should,” I urged, secure in my spinsterness. “He’s given you a baby, what more is he good for? Dump his ass. Upgrade. Get a better model.”

Firecracker peered at me and laughed. “YOU LIKE YOUR FRIEND TO HAVE DIVORCE? WHAT KIND OF FRIEND YOU ARE?”

“He threw food on your baby,” I pointed out, deeply disapproving. “You had to wash him. Off. Your husband’s broken. They have to have manufactured a better model of husband since you last checked. I mean, look how often they release processor upgrades.”

The latter half of the week was listless and superbly unproductive, due in part to the fact that we’d lost three people in our group, and dozens of people in other groups that we were friends with and actually needed to do our jobs. Hardest hit, I think, were the two managers in our department; the one who had had to actually give the victims their pink slips came down to visit us the next day. “Are you mad at me?” he asked a bit wistfully. “Do you hate me?”

He’s an unwilling manager at best, and the last half year of his career has been spent in trying to get out of a promotion foisted on him against his will to begin with. We mentally patted him on the head and shrugged. “It’s not your fault. You were just doing your job. You’re still our guy,” I comforted.

He wandered away, looking puzzled but a bit consoled. “I’m not quite sure what that means….”

Firecracker came in on the last day wearing elevator shoes again.

“YUHRI, WHEN SHE TALK TO ME, HER EYES START OVER TOP OF MY HEAD AND THEN GO DOWN TO FIND MY EYES,” she explained. “I CANNOT STAND ANYMORE, SO I DECIDE, I ONLY WEAR ELEVATOR SHOE FROM NOW ON.”

(I really do love this woman.)

At around 4:45, She Who Will Be Obeyed gave up all pretense of even caring, and brought out the ping-pong paddles she had brought to work. She herded College Boy, Firecracker, and me together; Indian Mom was about to leave, and Indian Woman (the Second) had just headed home. “Let’s go play.”

…and that’s how we spent the next hour and a half, decompressing. At around 5 pm, Indian Mom came upstairs to share some news before heading home.

“We finally declared bankruptcy,” she announced. “We filed Chapter 11 in San Francisco.”

The rest of us looked at each other. There was a moment of silence.

“Oh,” we said.

“It’s about time,” I said.

“Why San Francisco? I thought we’d do it in Delaware,” said She Who Will Be Obeyed.

And then we went back to our game.

Priorities.

I tell you, sometimes it’s just hard to get going in the morning.

Take yesterday.

The early morning was a haze — I think I might have hit my head rolling out of bed, which led to a debilitating coma — and while I know that I posted an entry sometime before noon, I’ll be damned if I know what the hell I wrote about. I could simply open my web browser and check, but I’m struck by a nervous fear that I might have written something disgruntled and bitter about the fact that I’m the only employee left at my company, which will inevitably lead to some top executive accidentally dropping by my page and discovering that they actually missed one on campus. The ultimate end to that would be for me to walk in to work tomorrow and discover that all my belongings had been neatly deposited into boxes and dropped into the lobby, four hundred and fifty pounds of paper, pencils, binders, toys, crackers, cereal, baffled black ants, and kites that I will then have to carry home on top of my head because I’m too poor or too apathetic to buy a car.

In other words, I’m too scared to look. It was probably about the RIF. Was it about the RIF? I’m guessing it was about the RIF. I do remember that it was depressingly quiet for the first part of the day, save for a spurt of nervous excitement around noon when ….

….oh. Oh, my. Now I remember. I just got a little shiver down the spine.

This morning, the Firecracker found out about the journal.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is an irrational fear, not wanting the Firecracker to find out about the journal. It’s not like I’ve ever written anything bad about her; I don’t have anything bad to say about her, so I would be hard pressed to say anything negative that I wouldn’t want her to read later. On the other hand, I’ve written everything — insofar as she’s concerned — fairly truthfully, faithfully documenting most of the foibles that make her unique and entertaining, down to her avaunt garde interpretations of English grammar. I’m not exactly scared of the Firecracker finding out about my journal.

I’m scared of the Firecracker reading my journal and then coming after me to hurt me.

We gathered at my cubicle this morning, in the aftermath of yesterday’s RIF; the office had nagging gaps in it, empty holes where there used to be bodies. My teammates huddled around the blazing warmth of my personality for comfort. An obligatory interval was spent marveling over the fact that the Firecracker had suddenly lost inches again. Having gained ground several days ago by wearing elevator shoes for a solid week running, she had suddenly started to wear flats again, and I found myself standing side-by-side with her, staring down at the top of her head.

“Were you this short before?” I asked, without thinking.

It’s important to set up a scene. Picture it, as Sophia Petrillo used to say. The Firecracker seated herself on a case of water bottles at my feet, and began telling me very seriously that I was just like her husband. It was a fairly confusing subject change from some previous conversation about empty cubicles and hardware-raping. There was no segue. As always with the Firecracker, one minute you’re on one topic, the next minute you’re on another. It’s like trying to put an I.V. into a dwarf hamster on pot. She called me a cow.

“–BOTH OX,” she was saying decidedly. “BOTH READ SAME MAGAZINES, BOTH SAY SAME THINGS, YOU SAY HERE, AND HE SAYS SAME DAY WHEN I GO HOME.”

There was another little confusion of words while I objected over her ongoing commentary, “You don’t like your husband. You had a fight with him. He threw food all over your baby and it got all on the walls. You had to wash the baby. I remember you telling us all about this.”

It’s part of the Firecracker’s charm that she can quite happily continue speaking at the top of her lungs while one tries to reply to some question or some comment of hers; not one word will she listen to until she’s done having her say, at which point one suddenly discovers that she’s been listening all along. Seamlessly attached, a response to your comment will come tumbling out of her mouth, an avalanche of words that might or might not be related to each other, but which all share the dubious honor of unjumbling to form a complete sentence in some alternate reality in some alternate variation of English on a theme by Picasso.

“–NOOOO. WHY YOU SAY THAT? IF I DON’T LIKE, IT’S PROBLEM FOR ME TO HAVE HUSBAND IF I MARRY HIM AND DON’T LIKE. KEEP JOURNAL LIKE HIM,” the Firecracker plowed on, happy as a clam. “I FIND OUT YESTERDAY.”

Indian Mom’s eyes flew open and engulfed her nose. All the blood in my face pooled down around my feet. I could feel my ankles start to swell.

“Who told you I kept a journal online?” I sputtered.

“–KNOW ABOUT WHAT? KEEPING JOURNAL, I LIKE ONLINE.” The Firecracker’s eyes turned into shiny little marbles. “YOU WRITE JOURNAL? IT’S ONLINE? CAN ANYBODY READ? CAN I SEE? YOU WRITE ABOUT ME? WHAT IS URL? CAN YOU GIVE TO ME? I’M FAMOUS?”

It was a revelation to the Firecracker. She hadn’t been talking about me at all. I’d been nailed by the oldest trick in the book: English by Fractions. “YOU WRITE ABOUT ME?”

I was caught, strangled on my own tongue. I cringed. “I’ll give you the URL if you promise not to hurt me.”

The Firecracker frowned. “I’M NEVER ANGRY. I’M VERY NICE PERSON. I’M NEVER MAD.” She made her hand into a little fist and thumped me on the arm. I instantly started to bruise.

“”You’re a dead woman,” the Guy told me over Yahoo Messenger. “It was nice knowing you.”

Yeah. Normal boyfriends would come running if they thought their girlfriends were in imminent danger of losing an eyeball or two. Thanks for the moral support, you scrotum.

The Firecracker trotted off to investigate my web site. “I KNOW WHO I AM NOW!” she yelled over the cube wall, while I crawled over Indian Mom, trying to find someplace strategic to hide. “I’M FIRECRACKER. I AM VERY VERY FAMOUS! MY HUSBAND WILL BE JEALOUS! I WANT TO WRITE OWN JOURNAL, ONLINE. CAN I?”

Much of the rest of the day was spent arguing about which country made the best cooking knives: “CHINESE KNIFE BETTER!”, or “What planet are you from, ‘Cracker? Everybody I know who cooks worth a damn uses Japanese or German.”

The Firecracker’s argument was that the Japanese had learned to make knives from the Chinese during the first century B.C., so Chinese knives were therefore better. She became violently vocal on the subject, raving defiantly on the subject alone in her cube. She Who Will Be Obeyed, in the next cubicle, listened blankly for a while before plaintively lifting her voice over the partition. “She’s crazy. What did you let her eat for lunch ?”

Last Saturday I went back to my mad Hairdresser in San Francisco to get my hair done again. End result: I now have a three dimensional head. In fact, it’s a perfectly sphereoid head; by some artistic miracle beyond my capabilities to understand, the mad Hairdresser managed to cut my hair — my aggressively straight Asian hair — into such a fashion that it automatically springs out in one massive curl when I’m done washing it. From the back, it looks like a giant bowling ball has been strategically strapped on top of my stubby neck.

Would it be irrational for me to say that I kind of like this geometric look? Add my haircut to the 4′2″ tit that everything below my neck has turned into, (refer to earlier pages for explanation), and my entire physical presence is now best described as a unicycle with training wheel.

It didn’t have to be like this. Several weeks back I tried a new salon for the first time, a place called “Maneframe” located one block down from my sister’s work, Lombardi Sports on Polk street: “Where Service Would be Great if it weren’t for the Damn Customers.” The Polk Street Fair was taking place at the time; I walked into the salon and discovered a rangy, grey-haired woman playing freecell on the reception computer. This, it turned out, was my hairdresser. She was an interesting character; she had lived the sixties, beat them into submission, and now wore the remains of that decade on her ears. The seventies were a pair of shoes and a jangle of jewelry; the eighties were the rest of her ensemble, skinned and tanned and tailored to fit. Not normally a chatty person with strangers, I found myself chatting, laughing, gibbering away like a stoned canary under her influence.

“I used to have long hair,” she told me at one point, fluffing her short cropped ‘do.’ “I used to put it into pigtails and braid them. Then I’d do a hit of acid and go to a concert, and I’d wave my head around, and you know those streaks you get when you’re high on acid? ” — it was a rhetorical question; in her world, everybody was an intimate of Mr. Lysergic Acid Diathylamide — “I’d watch the streaks while my hair floated past my face. It was amazing.”

101 Ways to have Fun with Hair.

Yesterday we lost two of our people to a RIF.

God, that sounds awful. RIF. One letter different and it would be RIP, and we all know what that means. RIF, for those who don’t speak Corporate Speak, means ‘Reduction In Force,’ a nicer way of saying ‘Canning Your Ass.’ The casualties this round were The Intern and another girl in my office, Ip, who I rarely wrote about because she was so quiet. The Intern wasn’t quiet. She might have pretended to be quiet, but she was sort of like a weather front. One minute you’re “Aw, how cute!“-ing about the puffy, Hello Kitty-shaped cloud on the horizon, the next minute you’re watching your toy poodle get blown away by Hurricane Vanessa.

It was a traumatic day.

Why, my friend asks, don’t you look for another job?

Good question.

Why, asks my other friend, didn’t they lay your lazy ass off?

A better question.

Let me think about it.

As a result of the RIF, I had to confess that I was the one responsible for the roses showing up on people’s desks — yellow ones last week, pink ones this week. I had to. Ip was crying, and she asked me before she left. What’s the fun in drawing this out when people won’t be here to be toyed with anymore? I’m demoralized, dammit.

We took The Intern to lunch at Fresh Choice, — College Boy’s selection, since the rest of us were too depressed to object — where we subsequently ate the entire lettuce crop of Iowa and made tactful conversation about our salaries and being employed.

“I don’t want to go to school again,” the Intern sighed. “I didn’t want to do interviews again, either. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have stayed at work until seven last night, finishing up code.”

“Let’s go steal office supplies,” I said, hopefully. “I’ll pack, you pick. You can always use a good stapler.”

The Intern, being less criminally inclined than me, politely refused. Wasted opportunities…

Today I came in to work and there were empty cubicles where the Intern and Ip were. I’m sad. Sniff.

Sigh.

Not much to write about today. I mean, there is, but I’m about as motivated as a vegetarian at a pig-calling contest. I’ll write later, when I’m in the mood.

In the meantime, I’ve made a couple of additions to my links page, the most significant of which is the addition of another journal called The Sex Pistols are Alive and Well and Living in Sohatsenango. The writer is a very talented woman of Iranian-American ethnicity, and — inevitably — she has a unique perspective on what’s been happening these days in America. For the record, I’m with her on her September 25th entry.

For those of you who haven’t seen the other links yet, check them out. My other especial favorite is Postal Experiments, a bizarre and hilarious little interlude from your friends at improbable.com, a group of intelligent people with way too much time on their hands. I need a good laugh, now and then.

Today’s dictionary.com word of the day: maunder \MON-dur\, intransitive verb.

1. To talk incoherently; to speak in a rambling manner.

2. To wander aimlessly or confusedly.

Maybe I should rename my journal.

I’ve joined Weight Watchers.

Again.

I didn’t have a choice. Over the course of the last six months or so, I’ve gradually felt the effects of a more sedentary lifestyle combined with richer and bigger volumes of food. My pants grew increasingly tight. My thighs grew increasingly big. My entire body became increasingly, er, voluptuous, in a stellarly unsexy way. I was, if you can imagine it, a massive breast, with my head as the perky nipple. In the reflection of the glass doors at work, I turned into a perfect sphere.

Ironically enough, where it could have done some good, I remained almost aggressively flat-chested.

My sister, who — like my mother — has the metabolism of a hummingbird and the body of a triathlete, not to mention the aesthetic sense of a disco queen, expressed dismay at the prospect that I’d lose some weight.

“You’ll get thin in your cheeks,” she protested. “You won’t be as cute.”

Right. Okay. So anybody out there who hasn’t ever seen me, imagine a koala. Strip off the fur. Reduce the nose just a little bit, and put on a pair of specs. That’s me.

I started on a Monday. Now it’s Friday. In the course of the four intervening days, I’ve learned some things about our culture. Important things, which I hadn’t really realized until I was back on this weight loss program.

Item 1

Every single commercial on the effing television is about food. Bar none. Oh, sure, there are other commercials that claim to be about other stuff, but even in the ‘drugs cure cancer’ ones, there’s food steaming away on the counter in the set behind the actor. There is. I’m fairly sure it’s a Marie Callender black cherry pie.

Item 2

Americans waste a lot of food.

A hell of a lot of food.

Ever notice how on the sides of boxes, they say ludicrous things like: ‘Serving Size: One Grape’? Yeah, well, that really is a serving size. Americans eat more food than they use in calories. That’s a waste, isn’t it? And then we have to go on these lame-ass diets where we find out that our normal eating habits are those shared by the common pig. (Did you know it’s nearly impossible to find out the scientific name of porkers? Maybe I’m doing this search wrong. Don’t fail me now, Google!)

(—damn.)

Consider that our average daily diet is probably the same amount of food eaten by your average group of 30 in Ethiopia. (This is, by the way, a statistic I whipped up out of my ass, but it sounds impressive. People love statistics; tell them 9 out 10 people who stop breathing eventually die, and they’ll all go out to buy oxygen tanks.) At the cafeteria at work, they always serve me enough food for me and the Firecracker, who lately has taken to asking for half of my meal as some sort of tithe. I think she’s turning into a bully. If it weren’t for the fact that she views my chin from below, I’d be less cowed than I am.

Item 3

The invisible people in my ears want me to stay fat.

They must have been feeding off of the extra food I was eating. Maybe they were chewing on my crumbs, I don’t know. All I do know is that they don’t like this diet thing. They don’t like it at all. I can hear them right now, holding a little conference in the back of my mind. They’ve been drinking all night now, so they’re a little aggressive, and a little hostile, and they’re eyeing the box of Ranch flavored Keebler Munch ‘Ems sitting on Indian Mom’s desk. One of them is headbanging on my motor nerves, trying to get me to reach for them.

I’ve taken to gnawing on things in order to get them to think I’m gnarfing on something bad for me. If I’m ever murdered and dumped in the woods somewhere, they’ll be able to identify my body from the perfect dental cast preserved for posterity on this bottle of Eucerin skin lotion.

Addendums.

Of course, I realize, reading this, that Item 3 had nothing to do with our culture. However, I thought it an interesting factoid in and of itself, so I put it in anyway. I’m sure nobody will mind, except for the invisible people in my ears. Tomorrow I’m going to go out and invest in a really solid earpick.

Also, The Hunger Site, — I could really go for some spareribs right now — is back up. Between now and the 30th, the funds generated from the site will go to aid victims and survivors in New York and DC.

I added a notify list registry for people who want me to send them an email when I update. It’s canned CGI, not something I coded. If I coded it, I would know it would work. Probably. Maybe. (I think.) Anyway, I figured it could spare me some bandwidth from people constantly checking when I’m notoriously flaky about updating, anyway….

It’s true, I’ve been a bit depressed over the past week. I haven’t been updating, really; I wrote a couple of entries and then never put them up, and I redesigned my entire web site in an attempt to avoid anything remotely resembling responsibility towards the writing portion of the journal.

But that’s all changed. The Guy has bought an electric toothbrush.

We is cool, yo.

First of all, the toothbrush has three detachable heads, one for him, one for me, and one for the invisible people who live inside my ears. Each of the heads is color-coded. He got blue, because he’s a boy. I got yellow because I’m a canary. The invisible people got dark blue, because they apparently have more testosterone than either of us. Each of the little heads is round, like an orange, except flat, like the world. It rotates on a little axis, really fast — buzz buzz buzz — and when you press it against your teeth, your entire head starts to vibrate. The bones in your nose, (I bet you didn’t know you had bones in your nose, did you? Those are the things that your nose hairs are attached to), start to vibrate as well, and that makes you want to sneeze.

It’s waterproof, so you can brush your teeth underwater if you wanted to. It’s a two-speed, with an upper speed of 50 miles an hour, and a lower speed of 20. They know this because they chained tiny men to the bristles and made run around very very fast with pedometers clipped to their belts. Also, after charging it for sixteen hours, it stays charged until it’s not charged anymore. That, I think, is the neatest feature of all.

This is the coolest gadget. The Guy is so in love with it, he actually brushes his teeth, which just goes to show you just how cool it is, because apparently dental care is something that the British normally reject as one of those too-American-to-be-classy things, kind of the same way the French abjure bathing. In fact, the Guy is thinking of buying another one so that he can carry it around with him, and all I have to say to that is go for it. Another neat feature of the Magical Vibrating Toothbrush is that it comes with its own carrying case, so that when you pop it in your backpack and go to, say, church, it won’t accidentally bump into some harmless corner in your bag and start vibrating loudly to embarrass you in front of all of your celibate priest friends with dirty minds.

On second thought, I don’t see how a waterproof toothbrush is really all that cool. I mean, what would they do with one that wasn’t waterproof? There’s a lousy marketing idea. It’d be like cigarettes; you’d have to depend on faulty birth control to constantly replenish your customer base. Can you imagine the warning labels on the packages? “Attention: Please remove toothbrush fully from mouth before rinsing with liquid substances.” Or better yet, “Warning. Please do not salivate while brushing.”

I wrote that pretty well, actually. Maybe I have a career in writing warning labels on merchandise.

“Warning: Toothpick is not meant for use in eye.”

So, Monday at work, everybody in my team came in to work to find a little bud vase with two yellow roses on his or her desk. There was no card, no message, nothing: just two yellow roses. This was — is — the big mystery of the week.

It instantly drove everybody else in my group absolutely nuts. No, I take that back. Half the team was curious; the other half went insane. Especially the Indians. If the roses hadn’t cheered me up, the subsequent lunacy on the part of my coworkers would have. They speculated for hours on Monday, and hours on Tuesday; every time someone new came into the office that morning, they would sit up in their cubes, ears pricked, waiting for a sound of surprise at the sight of the roses. Then they would hurtle around their cubes towards the newcomer and ruthlessly interrogate him or her.

One by one, the list of possible culprits narrowed. With the exception of Slushpuppy, (who was in Southern California), everybody on the team denied responsibility. “It must be the Project Coordinator,” my team decided.

“I bet you’re right,” I said, agreeably. “You should go ask her.”

They all trooped off to ask her.

“It must be the other manager,” my team decided, thwarted by the Project Coordinator’s disavowal of knowledge.

“I bet you’re right,” I said, agreeably. “You should go ask him.”

They all trooped off to ask him.

“It must be Slushpuppy,” my team decided, after the other manager proclaimed innocence.

“I bet you’re right,” I said, agreeably. “He could have done it before he left for Southern California.”

Slushpuppy called later on in the day, and declared his ignorance. “Yellow roses? On all our desks? Even mine? And College Boy’s? Are you sure they’re not red?”

“Maybe it was Vak,” I said, helpfully.

They trooped off to ask her.

“Maybe it was the Project Manager?” I suggested.

They trooped off to ask her.

At the end of the day, every possible avenue had been closed, and my team was back to where they had started, randomly accusing each other. I popped to one quiver or another, hugely entertained.

Indian Woman (the Second) came around to my desk before she left for the day. “I think it was She Who Will Be Obeyed,” she told me, confidentially. “She was here early for orientation. She could have done it before she went.”

“She said she didn’t do it,” I pointed out, interested. “Do you think she’s lying?”

Indian Woman (the Second) stared at me blankly, shook off the thought, and plowed on stubbornly. “I think she did it,” she declared.

“You’re probably right. She was in early. And she has a garden. She’ll probably confess tomorrow,” I agreed.

Satisfied, Indian Woman (the Second) went home.

Indian Mom came around to my desk before she left for the day. “I think it was Indian Woman (the Second),” she told me, confidentially. “She was here first in the morning. She could have done it before we got here.”

“She said she didn’t do it,” I pointed out, helpfully. “Do you think she’s lying?”

Indian Mom stared at me blankly, shook off the thought, and plowed on stubbornly. “I think she did it,” she declared.

“You’re probably right,” I agreed. “She was in first.”

Satisfied, Indian Mom went home.

Nobody confessed the next day. Or the day after that. Now it’s Thursday, and still nobody knows. On Tuesday night, Indian Mom started yelling at one of her roses, which had bloomed its quota and was starting to droop. “You can’t die! You have to tell me who gave you to me!”

“Maybe we could do some DNA testing,” She Who Will Be Obeyed said, thoughtfully.

“Did you do the flowers?” demanded Indian Woman (the Second).

She Who Will Be Obeyed laughed. “It wasn’t me. Maybe I should take credit for it, and the real person will get mad and say, ‘no way, it was me!’”

“That’s a good idea,” I said, encouragingly. “You should do that.”

Nobody’s stepped forward yet.

“Aren’t you curious to know who did it?” they asked me, yesterday.

I shrugged. “Nah. You guys are funnier. What can I say, I’m easily amused. Give me a piece of string and I’ll be entertained for hours.”

“You’re a mean person,” accuses Heisenberg.

Remember what I said in my last entry? Well, here’s a nice link…

Thursday, 5:30

The office is still quiet, except for the sound of crispy sound of College Boy eating sunflower seeds. The Intern has started reading my journal; I’m worried on a daily basis that the Firecracker will find out about this and tear my little head off.

She almost found out today.

“WHAT, YOU WRITE WHERE YOU WRITE? WHAT YOU TALK ABOUT?”

She popped up unexpectedly around the corner while I was talking to College Boy and the Intern about some email I’d gotten regarding my last entry. It’s possible I turned pale. She may be only four-foot five, but she could kick my ass from here to Mississippi and not break a sweat.

The Intern — and really, I should call her something else because she’s not really an Intern; we just called her that so Human Resources wouldn’t ask dangerous questions — asked for the URL and retreated to her cube to read. A little while later, she called me.

“Yuhri? Could you come here for a second?”

Knowing that she was reading my journal, suddenly worried that I’d written something damning about her in one of the past entries, (I swear I don’t think those aren’t really her breasts!), I hurried to respond.

In a hushed voice, she tapped her terminal, where my journal was brightly displayed, and informed me that she liked how I put all of the Firecracker’s speech in capital letters. “At first I was sort of wondering,” she whispered in deference to my paranoia about the Firecracker overhearing. “Then I thought, oh, I get it. It’s funny.”

Well, good.

The Firecracker speaks, oh, loudly. We love the Firecracker. The office wouldn’t be as much fun without her.

Thursday, 10:00 pm

The Guy is back after a short road trip to Los Angeles, and I’m vaguely relieved, I think. We went to sushi and then went to Tower Records to mock their prices for DVDs. It’s late now, but I’m feeling the need — the same need I’ve had the last three days — to redesign my web pages. This is calming, soothing work; it’s relatively brainless, and I can spend hours just staring blankly at Adobe Photoshop trying to figure out what one of the little buttons does. I learned about layers yesterday, purely by accident. To date, I haven’t once given in to the temptation to just read the manual. Manuals are for people who aren’t masochists.

Hey, everybody needs a way to get their kicks.

Friday, 8:00 pm.

I’ve been reading the BBC news online, and rediscovering my faith in humanity.

I have never been so proud to be part of the human race.

I have never been so grateful.

All around the world, people are joining in to mourn the people who died on Tuesday; flowers build up outside embassies, and offers of help come pouring in. A line to sign a condolence book at the US Embassy stretches for over a kilometer. The changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace takes place to the US anthem. In Palestine, Arafat gives blood, All of Europe grieves; Asia bows its head, Africa prays. All through the world, life stutters to a standstill for one moment of remembrance.

One hearbeat.

Two.

Three.

And then we moved on.

I’ve been moved by the generosity of our neighbors across the oceans and nearby in the Americas, who have found time from their own troubles to cry with us. Terrorism isn’t unknown to them; they experience it on a regular basis, losing their own children and parents to cafe bombs and machine gun spray. Some of them have experienced first-hand what genocide really means, and waited in vain for someone more powerful to do something, to care. Until now, the United States has never grieved with them as a people, and yet, they have the greatness of spirit to turn and grieve with us. Maybe they also felt that the United States was sacrosanct, preserved by the Atlantic and the Pacific. Maybe they felt a bit of complacency with us. Maybe they remember the days when America was the land of shining hopes, where the streets were lined with gold and everybody had the right to live in safety and peace. Maybe in the wake of everything, old resentments about US arrogance will die, and something wonderful will result.

Tonight, I walked home from work and saw American flags flying everywhere, draped on trucks and hanging off of car antennae. In the wireless store, every phone displayed had a flag-patterned face shield. At the train station, the everyday commuters had American flags tucked into the handles of their briefcases. A block from my house, a group of young men in wife-beater shirts were drinking heavily and lighting candles, blaring angry rock music and yelling when they received honks from passing trucks. Theirs wasn’t a memorial; it was a strange, twisted celebration. I have to admit that it frightened me; fairly or falsely, I can’t help but think of all the times when a flag became a rallying cry for mindless, devouring violence against reason. Some of those flags I saw were, I have no doubt, raised in anger, or hatred: us against them.

Of all the displays in Redwood City tonight, it was a small family that reminded me that patriotism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Standing on the corner of a busy intersection, they held their small candles and waved to passing cars, inspiring their honks of sympathy, or recognition, or maybe even appreciation. I didn’t read the posters that they carried; it was enough that their demonstration was peaceful, and gentle, and that it was light against darkness, not nation against nation or race against race.

I don’t believe we can demonize the people who perpetrated what happened on Tuesday. To do that is to distance ourselves from them: to say that they are evil because they are different, because they have crossed over some line that makes them no longer human. That makes it too easy to hate, too easy to point a finger and differentiate between one human and the next. It should never be easy to hate. The truth is, they were just like us, and that’s what makes it all the more terrible. Somewhere along the line they made a choice or learned to cling to a twisted idea of love that demanded that they hate. If they had been born in a different place, known different people, gone a different path … well.

I can’t imagine any person — any terrorist who believes himself to be fighting for freedom or for his belief, in Ireland, in Egypt, in Malaysia — who could not be humbled by the world’s response. I can’t imagine any person who uses violence for his cause not pausing to look hard and look deep, and not start to doubt what sort of person he’s become. In the days to come, maybe this will make some governments compromise, some guerillas lay down their arms and pick up their pens, make some people who sacrificed conscience in the name of expedience look at the future and wonder if it can be built on a foundation so faulty that it has created men that will do what these hijackers did.

I hope that wherever they are, the people responsible for planning and ordering what happened are watching the courage and determination of the rescue workers. I hope they’re watching on the news while the rest of the world mourns with us. I hope they realize that they created a rare moment of near global unity, a moment of harmony the likes of which has never been seen. I hope they see that and are ashamed.

If I cry today, because I’ve paid my tithe of tears most days this week, it’ll be because I’m relieved I have no reason to lose my faith in humanity. It’ll be because I thought I hated, and I’ve found out that I don’t; because yesterday I was angry, and today I’m not; and because life goes on, bit by bit, and wounds heal.

And that’s how it should be.

9:30 AM

The phone had been ringing furiously since early morning; we’d ignored it, as usual, until some nascent speck of social conscience made me go answer it. I woke my roommate. “It’s for you,” I told her, and went back to bed. Two minutes later, I heard the television raging in my living room and came wandering out to investigate.

While we were asleep, the face of America had changed. Our people were at peace.

Now we are not.

It sounds strange. Someone has declared war on us, on our land. Not since World War II has a battle been fought on American soil. Our soldiers have fought and died in foreign countries, our Congress and our President has thrown weapons and money at battles around the world, but as a people, we stayed innocent, untouched. We demonstrated; we carried signs bearing the names of dead soldiers; we sympathized in a detached way with parentless orphans; we watched the news coverage of massacres in Africa, bombs in Ireland. Then we changed the channel. “Not us,” we thought. There were oceans to guard us. “Never us.” We were annoyed that our soldiers had died. “What does it have to do with us? This isn’t our problem. Bring them home.” And we did. And foreigners died.

I don’t know how I feel. I won’t know for a while. I feel — hollow, I think. The sky is blue, and the day is grey as ash. There’s a snake coiled inside my stomach, and it moves from time to time, pressing against my chest wall. I can hear my heartbeat in my throat.

For months, I’ve been watching as Bush separated America from the global problems facing humanity and been irritated. Not irritated enough. I didn’t pick up the phone, didn’t write a letter, didn’t do any of the things that would make me less guilty than he of policy. I was just irritated.

We removed ourselves from the world.

Now the world has come to us.

4:30

I watch Peter Jennings on the news and notice he had ink marks on his palms. One of his hands shake; his eyes are red-rimmed and under the makeup, his nose is swollen. For the first time I see the plane, a living bomb, explode through the World Trade Center. One of the scenes is of a man hurtling through a window and plummeting to his death from the top of one of the burning buildings. I hug my elbows and shake with horror.

Grief isn’t pretty. Grief isn’t sane. Grief is ugly, and irrational, and scary. I watched on the news while the capital of Afghanistan was bombed and for one savage, frightening moment, was glad. Then I was ashamed.

The office was quiet today, except for the blaring of televisions in cubes. I brought one in, and we hooked it up to the cable lines. The news was endless, and it was beginning to repeat itself; the rest of my team huddled close to it anyway, gathering in small groups whenever it could for comfort, maybe. Everybody else went home — only my group remained on the floor, determined to force some normalcy to a day gone mad. I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t work, couldn’t do anything but look for more news or dream up random, impossible ways for me to help the survivors in New York and Virginia. I left early to take one of my teammates to the station, and then drove to a blood bank to try to donate. The line stretched around the corner — “There’s a four hour queue,” one woman told me, hugging her crying son to her chest as though she’d never let him go. Her eyes and nose were puffy; her face was drawn and lined. She set her jaw grimly. “I’ll wait,” she said. “I’m O-negative. I’m a universal donor. It’s all I can do.”

I went back to the car, put my head on the steering wheel, and let myself cry.

5:00

“…a date which will live in infamy.”

All through the day now, there have been comparisons between the destruction on the East Coast and Pearl Harbor. I wince when I hear them say it; in all these years, I’ve never admitted to the shame I carry with me, racial shame, ethnic shame, about the actions of Japan during the war. Every movie about the Pacific Theatre, every reminder about what my people did to America, to their neighbors, hurts me. In Japan, they ignore that portion of history, burying their nation’s sins in a new generation’s ignorance. I am American, of Japanese descent, and I lack that luxury. I hold up stories of the Purple Heart Brigade and the Japanese Internment camps and bandage them across my heart, only to have old scars opened again by reminders in the media, or in books. In the West Coast, Chinese grocers put up signs declaring that they were not Japanese, but were beaten and harassed anyway, simply for being Asian. I can’t fathom how the generation before mine felt, torn by their love of their country, and the hate their countrymen heaped on them in return; to learn to be ashamed of being their parents’ children, and to regard the face in the mirror as the enemy.

Already, there are reports of attacks on people of Arab descent, of taxicab drivers of Iranian ancestry being pulled from their cabs and attacked, of people being spit on because of the color of their skin. I hear these things on the radio, and I’m blinded by the same rage I felt when I watched the towers fall. Not at them, but at the people who would be so contemptible, so despicable, as to treat them as the enemy because they look a certain way or speak a certain way. We are all Americans, first generation or third, and to deny them that basic right, the right to call themselves Americans that was promised them when they came here or were born here, degrades the memories of those people who died. People who died, just because they were American. How dare they. How dare they? If we feel sick to our stomachs at this atrocity, how much worse for those who can look at the rubble and think, my people might have done this. This blood flows in my veins.

I’m frightened for my friend, whose father is Palestinian. She lives in Berkeley. I can’t reach her; I want to hear her voice and have her tell me that she’s okay, but the service tells me she’s unavailable. I don’t want to leave a message. What will I say to her? It’s easier being frightened for someone else than for us all; it gives me a face, someone to care for. Someone I can, maybe, help, if only to tell her that I love her. I’m frightened for the vulnerability that none of us realized we had. I’m scared that the backlash of this will cause another world war, one that could destroy us all. I’m worried that racism will be exacerbated in this country, and that it will destroy other, innocent lives in the days to come.

I know what I feel now, and that’s something, anyway. I watch the footage of a little group of Palestinians celebrating outside of a store, watch a little old woman who could be the grandmother in the apartment above us throw up her hands and dance, grinning. I can’t understand how someone could rejoice in the suffering of other people. And then I realize I would grimly celebrate, that we would all dance our own wild dance, if we inflicted on the terrorists some of the suffering they inflicted on the hijacked passengers, the dead firemen, the injured and the dead.

I feel violated.

I’m remembering what it feels like to hate.

I can’t help myself.

And that scares me most of all.

Once upon a time, there were four little feet — two of each type, left right left right, two big, two small — who went exploring on a motorcycle. It was very exciting, travelling on a motorcycle; the four little feets hooked themselves over shiny metal bars, and zipped through the streets very, very quickly.

“We’re sore,” their companions the buttocks complained, but the little feet didn’t care because they were having a wonderful time. They had never gone so fast before, no, never ever!

“Where shall we go?” one of the feet asked another. “We have an entire day to laugh and play and frolic and step on things.”

“We shall go to the beach,” the rest of the feet decided, and went to the shore, where they dipped themselves in sand and stared at the ocean.

“Look,” screamed one little foot to another little foot. “The ocean has a nose!”

The four feet wandered happily up and down the beach. They saw seaweed, little flies, and shells. They stepped on pebbles. One of them crunched a barnacle and felt very powerful. “Look at me! Look at me!” it yelled. “I’m a god!” There were many little footprints in the sand from other, different little feet. There were birdy footprints, and doggy footprints, and even some bare nekkid toe footprints. It was very exciting. One of the little feet was so excited, in fact, that it thought that it would throw up its little guts all over, but luckily it didn’t because it remembered that it was in its third decade and that sort of thing is only done by feets in their first decade.

 

 

“Wow,” said one pair of feet to their friends, the other pair of feet. “There’s a hole in the world.”

They looked at the hole.

They walked a little bit further, and came across a wet spot. There was green stuff all over the rocks, and it made the rocks very slippery. The big feet helped the little feet, even though the little feet complained a lot. The little feet didn’t want to get wet. “We can go down this way,” the other pair of feet told them, and so they slithered over rocks and crossed a little sand bar where they saw a dead bird.

“Ew,” said the smaller feet. “It looks like someone stabbed it.”

“It’s just bugs,” said the bigger feet.

The little feet didn’t like the dead bird, so they went on to a fun place where there was a lot more green stuff over the rocks. Ooooh. It was slippery, but the waves came up close and sprayed them. Whoosh!

The big feet tried to take pictures of the waves, but they couldn’t do it because they forgot to take the cap off of the camera.

“Haah!” cried the little feet. “I’m smarter than you are!”

After the beach, they had ketchup and fried fish and chips at a bar. One of the feet bought an oatmeal raisin cookie.

“You don’t take very good pictures,” one of the little feet told one of the big feet. “I took good pictures.”

“You’re taking pictures of ketchup bottles,” the other little foot told the big foot.

“I’m showing you how to do this right,” the big foot explained patiently, but the little feet didn’t want to listen.

“I’m better at taking pictures than you are! Yay, me! Yay, me! I’m the queen! I rule!”

“Don’t do that,” said the big feet.

“I’m going to show eeeeeverybody how bad you are at taking pictures and how much better I am,” the little feet cheered.

picture taken by big feet	picture taken by little feet

They all rode the motorcycle back home.

“Not again,” whimpered the buttocks.

“Shut up,” said the feet. They had a very very nice day.

And that’s the story of the feet.