faulty vision

The Sims are dead.

Long live Tivo.

This could be my last entry for a while, since I’ve signed up for nanowrimo — like that was a good idea — which starts in all of twenty-four hours and forty minutes. For those who don’t know what nanowrimo is, it’s National Novel Writing Month, a spud of an idea baked by a man in Oakland, Chris Baty. (See? Even his name is reflective of belfries and flapping mice.) The theory behind nanowrimo is that, starting on November 1st, you sit down and churn out 50,000 words before the last day of November. Quality isn’t an issue. Quantity however, is. This is basically an event for all those who are big enough to have 50,000 words trapped inside their skulls, thanks to all those long and lonely nights during high school when other teens were out partying and enjoying their youth while some of us spent that time productively reading Webster’s Dictionary, Hardback Edition from cover to cover, instead.

“Do you get a prize at the end?” asks The Guy.

“No, no prize.”

“You don’t win anything? Do you get recognition? Does somebody read this?”

“No.”

A blank silence. “Then why do it?”

“For the sake of doing it,” I explain, patiently.

Plus, let’s be honest, at the rate that new addictions have been hurtling into my life, there’s no possible way that I could keep up a stringent schedule of writing journal entries every day, is there? I’m not a machine.

“It’s quantity that matters, not quality,” I tell him.

“Oh.” The Guy’s face clears. “If anybody can do that, it’s you.”

Bit by bit, I’m being consumed by the rampant materialism that is the religion of Silicon Valley.

I’m going to hell. At least I’ll have company. Somebody save me a booth seat.

We went by Best Buy after the gun incident, a stopover that was originally meant for the purposes of getting me a cell phone. As one of the last cell phone virgins in Silicon Valley, I felt it was my responsibility to perform thorough research on the subject of cellular communication prior to the purchase of a $200 radioactive, carcinogenic tool of Satan. The subject of getting a cellular phone has been hovering in the back of my mind for a while, much like the thought of purchasing a car has been hovering in the back of my mind. This is the same portion of my mind that squirms through security in the dead of night, prompting dreams in which I go to ‘NSync concerts and like the music, become Cruise Director on the Love Boat and flirt with Gopher, or — God help me — become a Pikachu and have an interspecies relationship with Hello Kitty.

I’ve always been a bit leery of telephones, ever since I played the part of an RA during my grad school years. There are few people more psychologically, emotionally, and professionally unstable than musicians; being assigned the role of caretaker for a building full of them was like being partnered with a colorblind technician in a bomb squad. Add in the bubbling putrescence of adolescent hormones, and the scatalogical immaturity of the average undergrad, and it’s no wonder that my heartbeat would triple every time I heard my phone.

To my roommate, who lives for the telephone, this handicap is incomprehensible. There have been entire nights when our wireless home phone will disappear into her room, affixed to one of her ears, while her cell phone is firmly pasted to the other. At one point, prompted by curiosity, I started tallying the total number of hours she spent on the phone during a week. Speaking on both the home phone and the cell phone at the same time counted as separate hours. I determined that she spent an average of eleven hours on the phone a night, and that was only the hours that I knew about.

“I worry about you,” I told her, gravely. “I’m afraid the electromagnetic pulses from the telephone are harmonizing in your head and causing destabilization on a subatomic level.”

My roommate, who does not watch Star Trek of any generation, grinned at me, baffled. “Brain cancer, you mean?”

Lately, the issue of the cell phone has been more urgent, thanks in part to a yellowjacket and a certain mother figure. Rational people, like Flamingo and the Guy, point out that having a cellular phone wouldn’t prompt my mother to call me if something happened. They use as proof of this argument the fact that she forgot to tell her daughters about her cancer, even while we were all living in the same building. I fail to find this a compelling argument against my purchase of a cell phone.

My point of view was that having a cell phone will effectively remove the last possible excuse from my mother’s copious repertoire of excuses. My entire life has been spent eliminating them, one by one; I feel confident that I have now come close to the bottom of the list. I knocked down the one about wanting me to be more independent. I blew away the one about getting an education. I made a living in music, and I made a living doing something else. I now scoff at the one about wanting me to get out, meet people, and fall in love. Been there, done that. The last one left is, ‘But I couldn’t reach you.’

On the phone a couple of days ago, I also crossed off the, “But cell phone calls are too expensive.”

“I make more than enough money,” I informed her, “and the telephone minutes are on a flat rate anyway. I’d pay the same whether you called or not. So you have no excuse. You absolutely have to call when something goes wrong. On my cell phone. And,” I added, triumphantly, “the phone number is really easy to remember, so you can’t use that excuse, either.”

The silence on the phone had, I thought, a feeling of defeat. After twenty-eight years, I had finally won.

And then: “I hear that with ther cerrurar phone, speaks, there is ther brain cancer.”

Another point for the mother. Her lead. Oh, well. The world wouldn’t have seemed right if I were ahead, anyway.

So, I said that my visit to Best Buy was originally meant for the purposes of getting me a cell phone.

What actually happened: I incidentally bought a cell phone. More importantly however, I bought one of the Sims Expansion packs, “Livin’ Large,” and I have to tell you, I’m not.

Livin’ Large, that is.

You know why? I’m glued to the effing computer.

Hard to live large when you’ve become monosyllabic, eat through a straw, and live vicariously through electronic people.

And when I pull away from the computer, I get sucked into all the programming that Tivo offers me with. My favorite shows, all collected into this glorious, silver box of hashish! All the worst, most secret televised passions, bundled up in this cyclopic wonderland brain! Xena! La Femme Nikita! Buffy! All strong and — let me point out, lily-white to boot — female characters. (I do my part for my gender, I do! Take that, Taliban!) The Guy, whose purchase the Tivo is, has gone slightly insane with its programming; at last count, it had somewhere near 30 season passes scheduled. For those who don’t know, it has the capacity to do what’s called a “season pass,” wherein it takes every instance of a certain show and records it for eventual viewing. Thus, if you’re at work and didn’t know that a lost episode of Babylon 5 is being played at 11:00 in the morning, you needn’t worry. No more manual programming required! After a long day, you come home, prop up your feet, and flick on the Tivo. Voila! It has recorded every single instance of Babylon 5 that took place that day! A touch of your fingertips and you can fast forward past commercials, stop watching to get dinner, then restart at the exact place you stopped watching before.

All this is yours, for only $9.95 a month, and an initial outlay of $200+ for the box itself.

On Monday, I caught up with a six hour Good vs. Evil marathon on Sci Fi channel.

Is it worth it?

Hell, yes.

I need help.

We were riding home in Bob, and I was massaging my sore hand. “Journal entry!” I declared. The Guy was busy watching the road.

“Are you going to write about going shooting?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you going to put in the part about kicking my ass?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I said. “Of course.”

“Is there any possibility you would leave that part out?”

So on Saturday, I lived up to my Washington State heritage — that’s the yankee, gun-totin’, flannel-wearin’, crotch-grabbin’, Coors-drinkin’ side that’s usually repressed, y’all — and went shooting in Milpitas. It was the Guy’s idea. For a rare change, he had a Saturday available; usually he has to work on Saturday, and crashes on Sunday, part of the exhilerating, rejuvenating Silicon Valley midlife crisis known as a start-up. We were originally thinking of going up to San Francisco to get some Dim Sum, but he called me up during the week to see if I would consider changing my mind.

“See, my friend Little John, he just got a new gun, and he was thinking of going to the shooting range….”

“Great!” the redneck within yelled, before the Guy could finish. “Let’s go!”

It’s been almost twelve years since I last shot off a gun. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s been more than twelve years, since I’m pretty sure that the last memory I have of shooting a gun was some false memory I made up by myself in cooperation with some NRA subliminal message advertisement campaign popular in the 1980s. Whether that’s true or not, it means it’s been at least a decade since I’ve shot a gun.

The shooting club we went to in Milipitas was a little hole-in-the-wall place, a small indentation in a We Be Men Mall that featured a gun shop, a martial arts dojo, a fish-and-tackle store, and an auto repair garage. Another of the Guy’s friends came last minute, one of the innumerable Cool People that seem to be tucked away in his wardrobe of friends, just so they can be pulled out at moments like this. This one came armed with an extra gun, which he lent us for the purposes of the trip.

Items of note in the shooting club:

1) A poster for the NRA, featuring Charlton Heston smiling benevolently at a politically correct mixture of children, who all gazed adoringly at him in return. He was their Messiah, their champion for the Second Amendment. I giggled.

2) Targets were on sale, paper sheets with bullseyes and assorted other marks. One large one, on sale for fifty cents each, featured the silhouette of a human body, waist up. Over the head, a giant X had been inked on, together with the word, “No Head Shots!” Does practicing head shots imply an intent to kill? What about my Second Amendment? I giggled some more.

3) I was the only woman present without a mullet.

We were assigned three lanes — the man selling us ammunition regarded me giggling at Mr. Heston with an eye verging on the hostile, while his co-worker offended us all by recognizing the Linux penguin on the Guy’s credit card, and then announcing that he was a Mac guy, himself — and we popped on our protection, and went in to shoot.

For those of you who have never seen a shooting range, imagine a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned bowling alley without the cool paneling and decoration. The only real items of note in a shooting range is that 1) almost everything is concrete, and 2) if you go over the gate into the range itself, you have just volunteered yourself for the Darwin Awards.

The second I stepped into the range, I wished I hadn’t. I don’t think a fear of guns can be considered cowardice. I prefer to use the word “self-preservation.”

No woman would have invented a gun. I believe this whole-heartedly. Efficiency in some things, yes, but in killing? That takes a man. Your average woman, if angered enough to want to kill, doesn’t want it to be efficient. Your average woman wants it to be painful, drawn-out, and tactile. This is why marriage was invented.

The Guy’s friend had brought an extra .45 for us to use. This, ladies and gents, is a honker. It’s one big-ass gun. It packs a kick. In the lane next to us, a stocky guy with glasses and a sunburned neck was using a shotgun to methodically annihilate one of the human-silhouette targets. There were seismographs in Napa Valley picking up tremors from the explosions. No head shots, hah.

He and the salesman helping him tore shot through the silhouette, and made a gaping hole that sent the bottom half of the target free-floating to the ground.

“He’s dead!” they cheered each other.

The rest of our group leaned out of our cages, eyed the back of the shotgun man’s neck, and went back to what we were doing. Yeah. These guys were gene pool material. Sure.

In my little corner of the shooting range, the Guy was patiently loading the gun and priming it for me. It was just like TV, except in TV, there’s a palpable aura of self-confidence involved in the act of loading a gun.

In my cage, there was cursing, and some frowning, and some tugging, and some clicking, and — okay, yes, I admit it, I couldn’t help it — flinching. I mean, there are some settings where “oops” isn’t really a problem, but in a target range with live ammo and a gun, well. Let’s just say I’ve been in more comforting situations.

“Here’s the safety,” instructed the Guy when he had finished sorting out which bit was what. “You sight down these, and you … you know all this, right?”

“Yes,” I lied. “I just forget a little. Which end do I point at the–?”

The Guy and I took turns. Each clip held seven bullets; on the first try, I scored a perfect seven. Seven bullets out of seven bullets failed to hit inside any of the bullseye circles.

On the other hand, the recoil managed to poke out my eye.

Score one for the gun.

On the second clip, I clipped the inside of the outermost ring on the target.

“Yay, me!” I yelped.

The Guy’s friend, who had been watching me with deepening concern on his amiable face, dove into the cage for a moment.

“Um, just make sure not to put your finger on the trigger when you’re not intending to shoot.”

Right. I knew that. Oh, and the safety. Need to remember the safety.

On the third clip, three of my bullets made it to the inside of the outer ring. “I’m getting better,” I declared, proudly.

“What were you aiming at?” the Guy’s friend asked, dubiously.

I pointed.

The next time, I aimed at my own target.

By this time, I had started to feel comfortable. The Guy’s shots were still going wildly askew; mine, on the other hand, were starting to get closer and closer to whatever it is that I was aiming at.

Before I went in with the fifth clip, the Guy’s friend retrieved the target and pasted stickers on it, two smaller bullseye patterns in different places on the paper. “It’ll give you something else to aim at,” he explained, cheerfully.

I laid a pattern of three bullets in the bullseye, close enough together that my palm could cover them.

Then I laid two in one of the other bullseyes.

I then laid the last two bullets into the first bullseye again.

“I think I’m getting better,” I told the guys, thoughtfully.

The Guy blinked. His friend sniggered.

“Remind me not to piss you off,” the Guy muttered, loaded, and went into the cage to prove his masculinity.

It was an ugly day for men.

All told, we shot off 150 rounds. I shot about 65 of them. By the end, I pretty much shot whatever I aimed at. I was bad, yo. I was being the kick-ass hunter-gatherer of Silicon Valley.

Shooting a gun is one of those rare experiences that let you step into the testosterone-filled shoes of men for a while. Not many things are so deeply ingrained in the gender role as gunpowder. Every woman should try it, at least once. I think it gives one a deeper understanding of the male sex. I think that, to reciprocate, we should permit men to experience life in the female condition. We could tie them down, insert a wire hook, and extract their large intestines through their urethra. That sort of thing.

It’s just a thought.

In the car:

“Is there any possibility that you would leave that part out?”

I squinted at him. “No,” I assured him. “There really isn’t.”

“I didn’t think so. I don’t really mind that you kicked my butt,” the Guy assured me. “I’m confident enough in my masculinity that it doesn’t bother me.”

“I know,” I said, kindly, “and I love you for it. Really, I do.”

Yuhri. Killer-Asian-Gun-Monkey.

I just want to say that I’m smart, yo.

In fact, I’m effing brilliant. And The Guy isn’t as smart as I am, even with the testosterone thing. I tricked him. I conned him. I led him down the garden path of trickery, and when he was firm footed on the concrete, I pulled it out from under him. He has met Loki, and she is Woman.

It was The Guy’s birthday yesterday. He’s 31 now. This means he’s older, and he’s feeling his age a little bit. It brings him down. He informed me a few days ago that he’s going bald. (He’s not.) Being a sensitive girlfriend, I promptly told him that if he attempts to comb his hip-length hair over his subsequent bald spot, it’s all over between us.

Anyway, it was The Guy’s birthday. Yeah, yeah, rah, all that. Some of the people on my notify list — let me plug that just for a second: notify list! notify list! (thank you) — offered some great suggestions for presents, both of which I used.

Well, one of which I’ve used. The other one is pending. I’m thinking Christmas, actually, because otherwise it’ll be back to the tootsie rolls lovingly molded into the profiles of 18th century composers. Anyway, back to the story about why I’m so cool and why The Guy is a mark, even if it was his birthday.

So the other day I was sitting harmlessly at my computer doing some sort of computer thing, and The Guy comes bouncing into my room. “I think I figured out what you’re getting me,” he announced. “Is it about so big, and so big, and can you do this to it?” and he waggled his thumbs in the air.

He meant a Gameboy.

“Shit,” I said, because I know how to keep a secret.

His face split into a huge, smug grin, and he did a little capering dance. You know, how chimpanzees dance when they have something — a stick, a pelt full of ticks, — that they think you want? Yeah, that one. He did that dance. “I figured it out!” he sang, because he’s just that kind of guy.

“You’re a schmuck,” I said, being the loving girlfriend, “and I hate you.”

The Guy did a bit more of the dance, notching up an extra special bonus point on my Irritating Monkeyshit scorecard, then paused to plant kisses on my round, pert little head. “I can’t help it that I’m smart and figured it out,” he crowed. “I just guessed.”

He hasn’t been reading my journal, or he would have realized that he had just condemned himself to a bag of tootsie rolls lovingly molded into….

See, here’s my thing. What’s the point of finding out what a present is before you get it? Doesn’t that take all the fun out of the present? It does for me. I like that feeling of surprise that I have when I open a wrapped box and find out what I got. I love the feeling of anticipation I have when I know I’m going to get something. When I’m giving a gift, I like knowing that the person I give the gift to is going to be surprised and delighted when he or she opens it. If there’s no surprise, well, what’s the point?

Giving a present to someone who knows what’s inside is like putting a prostitute through sex ed.*

*This Analogy was brought to you by the kind services of Geometric, of 3Way.)

It’s a hard thing to let go of a present idea, especially if it’s a decent one and you were so useless coming up with one yourself that you actually had to troll for ideas in a larger people pool. That night, I vengefully created a Master Plan. It’s not everybody who can create a Master Plan. It takes someone on the level of a Criminal Mastermind or, say, a Fraternity Boy. Or, like me, a Female.

I am Woman.

Hear me scheme.

A couple of days later I got a box for a Sony Playstation 2 steering wheel, an expensive thingy that works with this game called Gran Turismo 3. This is an impressive piece of work, let me tell you: it vibrates, it resists, it even has pedals so you can brake and accelerate. It’s colored blue. I brought home the box, put it in my closet, and then grumpily announced to The Guy that I had gotten his present that day, but what was the point since he already knew what it was?

He did the monkey dance again. “But I don’t want you to spend money on me,” he protested for show, in the middle of the monkey dance. “What color did you get me? Did you get me a girly color like pink for revenge?”

“What color?” I echoed, blankly. “Uh, blue. It only comes in blue.”

“Did you get me a color? Or an Advance?”

I opened my little Asian eyes wide so that, for a change, I could actually see his face in its entirety. “I got you a Logitech. Eh?”

There was a moment of silence while we stared at each other. “Logitech?” he said, thoughtfully. “Then you didn’t get me a Gameboy?”

He obviously needed a push. The mental gears were not turning as quickly as I wanted. I had dishes to wash. “Oh, shit,” I said. “You tricked me.”

I splashed moodily through soapy water while The Guy chortled merrily to himself. He’s so clever, oh yes he is; he kissed up to my rosy round ass, and consoled me on my slip-up. Then he capered off, crooning, “I have a cool girlfriend who gives me neat toys!”… and ransacked my apartment, trying to find the present. I caught him zipping out of my roommate’s bedroom.

“What are you doing?” I demanded, and narrowed my squinty eyes suspiciously.

He twiddled his thumbs. “Just thought I would wander in there,” he said, weakly. “Just … because.” And then he skidded away as fast as he could, tee-heeing as he went. I swear he was doing this. Tee Hee. What human being not employed by Santa Claus and taller than three feet actually does that?

He found the box, of course. I heard him announce it, because he’s got noodles for brains. “Oh!” he said. “There it is!” he said. And then, because they’re not just noodles that he has in his skull, they’re actually overboiled, old noodles, he left the closet door open so that I could actually see that he’d found it.

I present to you The Guy. Brain Trust for the ages.

After that, it was a simple matter to wrap up the Gameboy Advance-and-accessories I’d gotten for him, pop them into the Logitech box, and trick The Guy. He almost didn’t open it when I gave it to him at my apartment on Tuesday. “I don’t have my Playstation 2 here,” he explained, “so there’s kind of no point.”

Anyway. He was surprised. I got my kick.

Most importantly, I won.

You know, if you take the word ‘won’ and replace the ‘N’ with an ‘M’ and add an ‘EN’ at the end….well.

I’m just saying.

From someone else on 3Way chat:

[FreeRadical] Hmm. They’re handing out flags at work. They’re very new, and they smell weird. All I can think is, “Patriotism smells funny.”

I did it.

I went into the light. I did. They warned me not to, but I was weak, and stupid, and I made the mistake of millions of others before me. Yea, I did trip blithely into the valley of the damned, eyes open and blind. In mine arrogance did I trust in the strength of thy servant, and heed the whispers of serpents.

On Saturday, I bought the Sims. I have fallen, verily, and I can’t get up.

New rule: I will no longer buy computer games on Saturday. Or Friday. Henceforth, all computer games will be bought on Sunday. Late on Sunday. This rule will be added to my other Rule of Life and Living and Other Cool Things: Never drink orange juice after brushing the teeth. Both, I think, are good, sound, well-considered principles.

Needless to say, the rest of the weekend was a bit of a blur. Do you all know about this phenomenon called the Sims? It’s basically a simulation game, a next-generation Tamagochi fantasy. As god, you control the happiness of families of people, (which you create), in houses, (which you create), based on incomes from jobs that you help your little Sims find. They eat, they clean, they watch TV, they socialize, they bathe, — they poop! — based on your directions. Left on their own, most of them would much rather stink, sit around the house watching television or playing games, and avoid work. They’re a lot like me, in some respects. Bad Sims. They must be punished. They’re three-year olds, with money.

Part of me, the grown-up part that likes the healthy side of frosted shredded wheat cereal, points out that there are people dying in Afghanistan, and women being brutally oppressed under Taliban rule, and a social outrage of hypocrisy being practiced in Pakistan, Kashmir, Israel, and Palestine. The other part of me, the one that likes the frosted side, says, “But look! My Sims are dancing!”

I told the Guy that I wanted to buy the game because all my friends were talking about it, Flamingo in particular, and I wanted to know what was so exciting. I wanted social context, dammitall, and never even suspected I was giving in to the megalomaniac within. Who knew I had a yearning towards godhood? Watching the little people run around doing their thing has an obscure, voyeuristic fascination. I’m obsessed.

The Guy wandered into my room to watch me playing during hour 9, Saturday night.

“Boy, you like pushing people around, don’t you?” he commented.

Damn straight. And I want more.

I want the Living Large extension. And the House Party extension. And the new Hot Date extension. And, and, and….

(Somebody…help me.)

Bob — that’s the car, Binky — was in the shop this weekend, so the Guy and I rode the motorcycle to Costco to pick up the Sims. Never mind about the idiocy of riding a motorcycle to shop at Costco. The software was cheaper, there. At Best Buy, it was $49. Saved myself $12 by popping on over to your favorite family discount warehouse. Of course, at Costco, the software box was two feet by nine feet by four feet, and came with forty copies, but who’s complaining?

(Ignore that last sentence. It was a joke. Ha hah! It’s the kind of humor that keeps y’all coming back for more. Actually, the box was only two by seven by four, and it was only twenty copies.)

We parked the bike next to a large minivan containing: 1 Mother, 1 bug-eyed male toddler in child safety seat, 1 scraggly looking girl approximately age 5.

The bike was an immediate hit. The windows on the minivan were rolled down to prevent suffocation on the part of the 1 mother, 1 boy-child, and 1 girl-child. The bug-eyed boy-child wrapped grubby fingers on the window and peered over its edge at us.

“Motorcycle!” he identified, right off. Child of the ‘naughts, he is. First word any aspiring yuppie learns, after “stock portfolio” and “Porsche.” His big sister scrambled across the seats to investigate, while Mother glanced over to make sure we weren’t baby-eating Harley-Davidsons. Our innocuous charm assuaged her anxieties.

“That’s right, motorcycle,” she agreed, proudly. Look, my baby can talk.

“Is that two boys and a motorcycle?” the girl-child asked, craning her neck to see.

“Two boys,” repeated the boy-child, smugly. My brothers on a motorcycle. We bad, man.

The Guy and I started to giggle. The Mother kindly corrected her child.

“Nooooo, I think it’s one girl and one boy, honey.” She sounded faintly dubious.”I think their gear makes them look like boys.”

“Ooooooh,” the kids said in unison.

The Guy supported my shattered self-image into the store, snickering the entire way.

In fact, half of Saturday — the half that was pre-Sims — was a motorcycle day. We sauntered into Best Buy to try and buy me a cell phone, (abyssmal failure). The sales clerk, who wasn’t yet old enough to have reached his sexual peak, paused in the middle of his pitch to ask, eagerly, “DidYouRideAMotorcycleHere?”

Since this came hard on the heels and in the same breath as, “ThisServicePlanIsPrettyGood,” it took me more than a minute to figure out what the hell he was saying. I stared at him blankly; nearby loiterers could have heard my brain clanking as it shifted gears without using the clutch.

“Uh,” I said. I waggled a bit.

“WhatKindOfMotorcycle?”

“Superchicken?” I hazarded, remembering some random conversation with The Guy from ages back. “Er….superhaw–”

“IsItYours?”

“Um, no. I rode passenger. This phone, here–”

“AreYouGoingToGetOneOfYourOwn? IWantToGetOne. MotorcyclesAreSoCool…”

Anyway. It was a motorcycle day.

I love my mother. I really do.

Subject: Mother/ Deathly bee sting…

Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 19:00:37 -0500

From: “Binky” 

To: yhirata1@home.com
Hey there,
Your mom mention anything to you about getting

stung by a bee and being taken to the hosiptal

in an ambulance on the verge of death this week?

Saw her at the dojo yesterday…
Me

It’s just that sometimes, you know, I want to smack her.

on 10/15/01 6:29 PM, Yuhri at yhirata1@home.com

wrote:

WHAT?!
No, she didn’t. I hate that woman.

It should be a law: parents shouldn’t be allowed outside of their homes once their children grow old enough to leave the house. Not without a minder, anyway. It causes pain for everyone. Mostly the children. I bet ol’ Dubya would be willing to go in for a law like that. I bet his Dad’s doing all sorts of dangerous things, — cleaning gutters, driving, ACLU meetings — causing him grief. Of course, Dubya’s got the Secret Service watching out for his parents. All I have’s a trademark Crap-o-Matic wireless telephone from Radio Shack.

Brrrrrrring. Click. “Herro?”

“Mom! It’s me!”

“Oh, Yuuh-ri! Herro.”

My personal opinion is that the stress of parenting eventually causes some crucial element in the brain to fray, or bend, or snap in half. I never knew the Firecracker pre-pregnancy, so there’s no way to compare, but I’ve heard that great pain and suffering can change a person; I’ve never heard that labor was one of those post-lunch walks in the park. Then again, maybe only cracked people decide to have children to begin with. Do you think? There’s a thought to screw with Darwin. Centuries of intellectual frailty, reinforced genetically by the best that evolution has to offer. We were doomed from the start. Other species get wings or poison sacs to deal with a hostile environment. We got weak genes: humanity’s answer to ultraviolet vision.

Come to think of it, that might be an evolutionary advantage for us, all things considered.

“Mom? Is it at all possible that you were bitten by a bee and almost died this weekend without ever saying a word to me?”

“Oh. Yes, yes. I didn’t wanting to worry you. It is nothing.”

“You didn’t want to worry me. Mom. You make me crazy. Is this a bad time? I mean, you aren’t doing anything too important to tell your oldest child about your brush with death, are you?”

Somewhere along the line, my grandmother did something terribly wrong in the raising of my mother. Maybe it wasn’t her fault. Maybe one of the bombs being dropped in Japan during World War II actually hit my mother.

On the head.

Hard.

In my family, denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. Of course, it’s pronounced “ther nairu,” which makes it difficult to pinpoint in the dictionary. My family doesn’t believe in the existence of denial. Denial implies rejecting a fact. My family never rejects a fact. It just approaches it from a different direction. A parallel direction. In a flat universe. Maybe it’s a leftover self-defense mechanism from the war. Or maybe the lure of our collective Happy Places is just so strong, none of us are capable of dealing with the day-to-day crap that goes down out here in the real world.

In my family, there was no disease or suffering. My parents’ worldview went something like this: it’s all in your imagination.

For instance.

As a fairly inattentive person, I used to fall down the stairs on a fairly regular basis. This is part of that miracle of life called childhood. Naturally, once I’d reached the bottom I would start crying because, you know, it usually hurts to fall down the stairs. Gravity, who is a bitch, and stone floors, fellows of the bitch, will do this to you. My affectionate mother, hearing the thud thud thud BANG CRASH thud and subsequent wails, would abandon whatever she was doing and wander around the corner to stare down at my broken body with interest. “Did you fall down the stairs?” she’d ask. “Why did you do that?”

This melting display of maternal emotion would usually piss me off, because I’m, you know, sane.

When I was in grade school, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She got over it. She moved on. We, — my sister and I, members of a close-knit family that sort of included her, — found out purely by accident in college, in the middle of a conversation that started, “By the way, so-and-so told me that such-and-such has cancer,” and then abruptly derailed on her unthinking, “Oh, I’ve had that.”

Then there’s the whole diabetes thing, which to normal people would be a serious medical condition requiring discipline and strict adherence to dietary and medical guidelines. My mother finds it an outlet for her creative energies. “I cut ther medicine into smarrer pieces,” she said, proudly. “I think it is too much medicine, so I do not take so much. I do not rike medicine.”

“Did you ask your doctor?”

“Oh, no. He wirr worry. He thinks too much about ther medicar science. I wirr try this way first.”

“Mm. I am teaching. Can I carr you rater?”

“You promise? You’re not going to, like, forget or anything, are you?”

“No no, I wirr carring you rater.”

“Fine.”

click.

How do normal families do it? I really want to know. Is it strange to expect a mother tell her grown-up, independent children about trivial things like brushes with death? Is there some unwritten rule that nobody bothered to share with me? Is this one of the universal balance things that my mother’s always talking about, when children worry more about their parents than their parents ever worried about them? Why didn’t anybody tell me? I could have gotten even with them back then. I could have jumped off of bridges for fun like my sister, or taken up with a bad crowd, or learned clog dancing. Instead, I wasted my opportunity, my precious, vulnerable youth. My mom failed me. She neglected to give me a manual on this whole Parent-Child Vengeance thing. I want a Do-Over.

Re: Mother/ Deathly bee sting…

Date: Fri, 01 Jan 1904 00:17:57 -0700

From: Binky 

To: Yuhri 

Oooh. I wonder if she started telling me the story,

knowing that I would ask you about it. What a great

way to put a guilt trip over on you for not calling

your mother more often!!!
She seems to be fine now. She had an extremely severe

reaction, and was found on the floor after calling 911

on the advice of Len at the dojo (she called for

guidance).  He had gone to the hospital only weeks

before due to a severe reaction. It was extremely

painful for the emergency people to touch her, so

judging by her reaction when they touched her legs,

they thought she might have broken a hip….   She

now gets to carry around a bee sting antidote in

case this happens again.
On the good side of life, this month’s fresh, in season

oysters are keeping your mother’s blood sugar in check.

She doesn’t have to take medication as long as the

oysters keep having this effect.
  
Subject: Re: Mother/ Deathly bee sting…

Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 20:58:42 -0700

From: Yuhri 

To: Binky 
I’m talking to her now, damn that woman…!

When I was younger, my worst nightmare was that someday my parents would die before I did. No child wants that. Parents have nightmares that their children will die before they do. No parent wants that. What we have there is an unnegotiable detente, where both sides cling to the other’s lives with white-knuckled fingers of panic. That is, until the child starts to think, “Well, if one of them has to die first, I hope it’s….”

Of course, we pay for that later. That’s another story.

The Emergency Medical Technicians got to my mom’s house in the nick of time. They broke in the window; she collapsed while on the phone with 911. She had almost no pulse, and almost no heartbeat. Five minutes more, and she would have been dead.

I would have been an orphan at 28.

I’m too old to accept change in my life. Mom will just have to not die. Tough shit.

“I was on the head, sting, by yerrowjacket. I do not knowing I am arrergy,” she marvels. It’s a matter of newly discovered pride with her: she’s allergic to yellowjackets. Great. I’m allergic to Yanni, but you don’t see me going around risking my life to prove it. She’s ready to laugh it over with me. Ha hah, there was this duck and he walks into a bar, ha hah, and I almost died, very funny story. “It is very nice for amburance worker, that they are coming when they do, or maybe you wirr be pranning funerar now.”

In California, I busily start kicking my foot against my desk, trying to share the pain with the rest of my limbs.

“That’s not funny, Mom.”

“It isn’t?”

“No, it isn’t.” thud thud thud thud thud.

“…Oh.” She sounds disappointed. “I thought it were funny.”

My foot gets pissed — this isn’t her problem — and starts to turn black. “Mom. Please don’t do that anymore. I shouldn’t have to find out from Binky that you almost died.”

“Oh, but I didn’t die,” she assures me.

“That’s not the point. I mean, it is the point, but … it’s so irritating when you do that, Mom.”

My mother sounds sad. “I’m sorry. I didn’t wanting to worry you.”

I start smacking my other foot into the desk. A terminal case of TMJ is coming on, and little fragments of my molars are being ground into dust.

“Okay, Mom. That’s fine. Just … worry me, next time.”

There’s a little silence. And then the evil, manipulative twig woman pulls out The Card.

“I rove you.”

Well, that’s good to know.

I was reading a back copy of Discover magazine, one of the periodicals I’ve subscribed to in order to make myself a better, smarter person. The Guy was working on the computer, tickety-tackety on the keyboard. Every so often he would share a tidbit from slashdot with me, to which I would pretend to be interested in; every so often I would share a tidbit from my magazine, to which he wouldn’t pretend to listen.

“Did you know, there was an extinction before the dinosaurs?” I said. “It was called the Permian extinction. Wiped out 90% of life on earth. It happened 250 million years ago, which puts it, um, 185 million years before the dinosaurs.”

“Uh huh,” said the Guy. Tickety-tackety.

“Hm. Nobody knows how it happened,” I said.

“It was the Russians,” he mumbled.

Obviously, I haven’t died. I must have been imagining the anthrax thing. Silly me. It was a cold.

However, it could very well have been anthrax. It might have been. Sniffling, sneezing, coughing, achy head, fever; I had them all.

Wait. I’m getting my symptoms mixed up with some kind of advertisement. Drat.

Anyway, thanks for being worried. Or panicked. Mostly panicked. Or disapproving. So much for selfless friendship: I didn’t get one offer from any of my friends to rush over and give me the Breath o’ Life if I should need it. The love was sadly absent. In fact, some of you saw fit to mock me about the Kettle Korn.

Just so you know, some day, you’ll get what’s coming to you. Just you wait. You’ll want that Kettle Korn, and there won’t be any, and I’ll be hoarding my Costco-bought, nine-pound bags of air-popped yumminess, laughing my ass off at you….

In my own defense, I really was sick. I really was looking forward to death.

(Oh well. We can’t all get what we want, I guess.)

The Guy’s birthday is rapidly approaching, being two days before Halloween, October 25. It’s useless to tell me that Halloween isn’t until the 31st; several people have made that attempt already, and every time, my brain just ends up going to my Happy Place.

My biological clock, useless for everything else, is helpfully assisting by counting down days until I need to worry about special holidays. Conveniently, — at least for my biological clock, a lower-grade model most frequently seen in the sale bins at K-Mart — all important holidays are on the 25th. Didn’t know that, did you? Halloween, October 25th. Thanksgiving, November 25th. Christmas, December 25th. Valentine’s, February 25th, and so on and so forth.

As I said before, the Guy’s birthday is on the 23rd, two days before Halloween. I was briefly considering getting him a subscription to Playboy, but decided against it on the suspicion that this might not be one of those Smart Ideas that I occasionally have. It doesn’t rank on the level of, say, dropping my phone out the window to avoid telemarketers, or agreeing with my old roommate when she said she was a bad girlfriend.

Advice is welcome. Somebody give me some inspiration here, because otherwise, he’s going to end up with a bag of tootsie rolls lovingly hand-molded by yours truly into profiles of famous 18th century composers.

Sunday was the phantasmagoria that is the annual Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. As a cultural event, this is not to be missed. Music! Dancing! Folk art and folk crafts! Prizes! Raffles! Pumpkin hats! Farmer Mike and his Magical Giant Pumpkin Sculptures! And new, this year only, a prize-winning 1010 pound pumpkin! It’s a celebration of the squash that, truly, brings a tear to the eye. Nowhere else is our old, misunderstood, underrated friend, corcurbita pepo — scientific name provided by your friends at dictionary.com (scientific name of pig, incidentally, being sus scrofa domesticus) — given its due in so colorful, expensive a fashion.

Are all the fruits gone to Idaho? Wherefore the California celebrations of spices and decorative sideboard centerpieces? Why not a festival for the pear, or the peach, or for the watermelon? Or, if we absolutely must be unique, a fete for brother marijuana or sister weed?

I came away from the revelry unscathed, except for the purchase of two pairs of earrings. They’re charming things. They dangle from the holes in my ears, the artificial holes, the holes that I put in the lobes once upon a time several years ago, only to lose sometime over the course of the last six months.

I came home and showed them to the Guy. Then I showed them to my roommate. This afternoon, I showed them to the tortoises, who stared at them thoughtfully before mumbling amongst themselves.

“They’re really cute, aren’t they?” I encouraged. I dangled one against Number Seven’s head; he looked unconvinced. Lucky meandered gravely over to investigate.

“It’s not your color,” said Lucky. “It makes you look green.”

I have this pair of flannel pajamas that I bought at — okay, so I bought them at Target, and everybody knows only needy people with six kids and pickup trucks buy clothes at Target, but ignore that for the moment — so anyway, I have a pair of flannel pajamas that I bought from Target. They’re pale blue, with little blue stars, and Tweety Bird all rolled up in a blanket wearing pink slippers with Sylvester’s head neatly mounted on the ends. Tweety looks very cute. Then, of course, there are the words “Wanna snuggle?” scrawled here and there between Tweeties. The pajamas are two-piece, with an elastic band bottom and pant legs that swallow my feet and then trail after me in this ridiculous little train, and a button-up top with sleeves that do the same thing to my hands. When I wear them, I suddenly turn into a four-year old in Dad’s PJs, if a four-year old could ever be 5-foot-2, and if her Dad happaned to wear effeminate Tweety Bird pajamas. In other words, they’re too big.

I love these pajamas, and screw the fact they’re from Target. I’m wearing them right now, despite the fact that it’s 5:40 am on a workday. In a very short while, I’m going to be buried in them.

I have anthrax.

I’m dying.

(sniff).

It’s been nice knowing all of you. I mean, more or less it’s been nice. It’s been nicer to know some of you than others. I just want you all to know that I don’t blame any of you for my death. Really. I’m not sure which one of you did it, slipped the anthrax into my food, but that’s okay. I forgive you.

(achoo!)

I’m such a baby. I never used to be this bad. Back in the old days, six months ago, I used to laugh in the face of death. I did. If I had a headache, I’d deal with it. If I had a cold, I’d deal with it. I’d go in to work, impress everybody with my courage in the face of overwhelming pain, and get the job done. Now, I wilt like a fragile flower of femininity whenever I experience so much as a twinge. Whatever else I may be, I’m no fragile flower of femininity.

Yesterday, sick of watching me droop at my desk, the Firecracker drove me home in — a rarity — absolute silence. She bullied me out of my chair by the means of holding on to one arm and dragging me across the floor; my other coworkers watched with shiny eyes while she literally pushed me towards the door.

“I don’t want to go,” I whimpered. “Are you driving the evil car? I’m scared of you.”

“SHUT UP,” yelled the Firecracker, and hauled me another few feet. “I DRIVE YOU HOME NOW. YOU GO HOME AND REST.”

“Call me when you get home,” called the Indian Mom, unkindly amused. “Just so we know you made it home, um, safely.”

Considering I live only two miles away, this was hardly a recommendation for the Firecracker’s driving, or her frame of mind.

I got home at 4:45, fell asleep on the sofa in my clothes, and was woken by my roommate when she came home at 6:00. I crawled into my room and fell asleep again. At 11:30, I woke up long enough to take off my socks and wander to the living room to find my glasses.

My roommate detached her head from her cell phone long enough to inform me that the Guy had called.

Okay, then.

The telephone conversation went something like this.

brrrrrring. click.

“….?”

“….”

“….! ….? ……”

“…..”

“…..?”

“sniff.”

“…… …..?”

“achoo.”

“…..”

“…….?”

“…..”

“… love you.”

“achoo.”

click.

I have no idea what we said to each other. I think I was in my happy place. The only reason I’m writing an entry right now is that I’m too exhausted to sleep any more. One-fingered typing. Admire my perseverence. C’mon. Admire it. My head is too big to hold up with just my neck anymore, so my other hand is busy holding it up. In the past two hours, my skull’s expanded to the size of Shoreline stadium, and Disney On Ice is carving the shit out of it with figure skates.

Sniff.

1:05 pm.

I’m still in my pajamas.

Tweety is looking a little bit drunk.

I’m hungry, so I’m eating Kettle Corn, the only thing in the apartment that’s available for immediate eating. My pantry is in a sorry state. I was going to make soup, but there isn’t any left. I was going to make minestrone, but there isn’t any tomato. So instead, I’m eating Kettle Corn. I’ve got enough energy to be ambitious, so I’m starting to make Chinese porridge: rice, chicken stock, and lots of water. Except I don’t have any chicken stock, so I’m just making soupy rice with salt and seaweed. Julia Child, read it and weep.

Whatever. It’s hard to care. If anybody out there loves me, please send supplies. I’m pretty sure that Kettle Corn is contraindicated for cases of anthrax.

Big feet and Little feet went on a trip. It was little feet’s birthday two months ago, — (”One month and a few days ago! Not two months!”) — and the little feet had gotten a birthday present from their sister: a splendiferous trip to a lighthouse hostel for the weekend.

“Yay!” said the little feet. “We’re going to a lighthouse!”

It was supposed to be a secret between the little feet’s little sister, the little feet’s little sister’s little man, and big feet, but the little feet’s little sister was bad at keeping secrets. “You’re going to Montaaaaara,” the little feet’s little sister chanted one day when the little feet was visiting their little sister, and then the little feet’s little sister said, “Oh, shit,” and slapped her hand in front of her mouth.

That’s how the little feet found out that they were going to go to Montara Lighthouse, which is a very spiffy hostel on Moss Beach, right next to Half Moon Bay in California. “Have fun,” said the little feet’s little sister, before the little feet’s little sister and the little feet’s little sister’s little man went away on a trip to Bo-li-vi-a. “We gave all the information to big feet because big feet are more responsible than little feet.”

“Yay!” the little feet said to the big feet. “We’re going to a lighthouse!”

“Crap,” said the big feet. “We can’t find the stuff your sister gave me about this trip.”

“Oh,” said the little feet.

“We don’t like you anymore,” said the little feet.

The big feet swore a lot and cleaned up their apartment. Then they found the stuff little feet’s little sister had given them. “Whew,” said the big feet. “Do you like me now?”

“Okay,” said the little feet. “Yay! We’re going to a lighthouse!”

The lighthouse was very pretty. The sky was grey. There were birds. There were flowers. There was a lot of water, because the lighthouse was on the seashore.

“I like the seashore,” said the little feet.

“We’re glad you like the seashore,” said the big feet, politely.

There was a big whale on the path in front of the lighthouse. “I’m going to take a picture of the whale!” said the little feet.

They did.

This is the picture.

The little feet’s sister had made them reservations at a restaurant right on top of the water. The big feet called the restaurant while the little feet were doing a little feet dance. The restaurant said it didn’t know anything about the reservation, but it made a new one just for them.

The restaurant was very yummy. The little feet and the big feet ate a lot. They kept eating, and eating, and eating, and eating…

“Look,” the big feet said to the little feet. “In the brochure, it says that the restaurant is haunted.”

“Oooooh,” said the little feet, and stopped eating so that they could read the brochure.

The restaurant had four ghosts, and it was once on Unsolved Mysteries, a TV show.

The little feet didn’t see any ghosts. Neither did the big feet. The little feet were disappointed. The big feet weren’t.

“Happy birthday to me!” said the little feet. They wondered if the restaurant would give them a cake, but the restaurant didn’t. That was because it wasn’t really the little feet’s birthday. The little feet were just pretending.

The next morning, there was a great big yellow slug on the flowers next to the lighthouse.

“Ooooooh,” said the little feet, and they started poking its antennae. The big yellow slug was surprised, and it sucked in its antennae. Without antennae, it looked like a big worm.

“Don’t touch that!” said the big feet. “That’s disgusting.”

After they checked out of the lighthouse, the big feet and the little feet went for walkies in Half Moon Bay, where they saw many fish.

“We’re going to buy a fish for our friends,” announced the little feet, and they went into some stores and spent money.

“Let’s get some coffee,” said the big feet. They went to a cafe and the little feet bought the big feet some coffee. Then the big feet sat outside while the little feet went to visit the little feet’s room. The little feet went back outside.

“See? Here I am!” yelled the little feet. “What the hell is it with you and condiments? Why do you keep taking pictures of ketchup?”

The big feet and the little feet went for more walkies.

“Oh, look at that!” said the little feet. “A spider!” They bought the spider for their mommy.

By now, the little feet and the big feet were tired.

“Let’s go home,” the big feet and the little feet said.

They got into the car and drove home.

And that was how the little feet went to the lighthouse.

“Yay! Lighthouse!”

It was a very pretty lighthouse.

The other day I was going through my mail, and found five of the exact same carbon-copied, tear-off-the-sides-to-open slips normally used by sweepstakes, (”You might have won…!”) and third notice bills. (”You might be sued…!”) They were all from the local library system, usually a bad sign.

“Due to the following overdue materials….”

Oops.

“….and the following missing materials….”

Eh?

“….amount owing is….”

Shit.

Eight-seven dollars, ladies and gentlemen. Eight seven. $87. A nice, round number, wouldn’t you say? Divisible by three. 87.

Libraries and I have a precarious relationship at best, a sort of love-dislike-hate-collection agency thing that repeats itself wherever I move. It’s a failed experiment. The library system in Rochester has a contract out on me, for the sum of $2.13 that I owed for almost two years and finally paid in cash the day before I graduated. San Francisco’s library system added a wing to the North Beach library off of the funds it gathered from my overdue fines; the King County Library System in Bellevue, Washington, where I grew up, has me on a black list that will require me to donate vital internal organs before I’m permitted to check anything out again.

Basically, I live in my very own Salvador Dali painting, in my very own surrealist landscape with my very own surrealist time zone. Look, what’s that? It’s a clock! Is it friendly? Sure, it says it’s only August 4th, 1999. I have an entire nine months until the books are due.

It’s not like I have any excuse this time, either. The Redwood City Public Library is literally two blocks away from my apartment. Three blocks, if the partial blocks are compressed into one very short block. I walk the same distance to catch the shuttle to work in the mornings I don’t feel like biking, and the library is a grand total of one block away from the pick-up. On the days that I feel like biking, I pass right in front of the library — and it’s drop-box-when-closed — on my way to and back from work. God has stamped the word “LOSER” on my forehead, in invisible ink that will glow vermillion under black lights. This is how my kind recognize each other at clubs.

The missing books were under my bed. I turned them in after the library had closed so I wouldn’t have to face the librarians. I couldn’t handle the guilt. (Tangent: When the hell did I start feeling guilt? The Japanese aren’t supposed to believe in guilt. The Japanese believe in denial, and revenge, and “Don’t bother feeling sorry because we’ll be killing you to make it square anyway, so you might as well save your energy.” The way the Japanese brain works, if you’re still alive a month after your sin, it wasn’t much of a sin to begin with, and therefore didn’t happen. This is the way the Japanese invasion of Manchuria isn’t dealt with in Japanese classrooms, where Japanese children are taught that the Americans were mad because the Japanese blew up their fleet — never mind why — and so came and dropped atom bombs on them. The Japanese are masters of revisionist history.)

Now that the missing books are back, I figure I now only owe the library $27. And a lot of change, because I’m betting they’ll charge me overdue fines for the books they said were missing. Crap. I didn’t even like some of these books. I didn’t even read one of them. I don’t think they should be charging me an overdue fine for books that didn’t live up to my expectations, should they? It’s not American.

This is the reason I buy books, the reason I buy DVDs and videos. It’s too damn expensive to do it the other way. Imagine if I actually start renting stuff from Blockbuster on a regular basis. I’ll own the entire store in a couple of months. The store in Redwood City will be able to get by on my overdue fees alone, at least until my credit card runs out. Then they’ll start asking for payment in the form of my eggs. Two years later, the face of the Asian will have changed: suddenly 80% of all Asian babies will be round, squinty-eyed, and full of gas.

Firecracker stories.

Today, when the Firecracker dropped her baby off at the babysitter, she discovered him sitting in his baby seat in the back of her car, gravely eating a copy of National Geographic.

“I HOPE IT IS NOT POISONOUS,” she fretted to me on the way to the cafeteria.

“When I was young, I ate charcoal,” boasted College Boy.

Competitive people sometimes just don’t know where to draw the line. “There’s no need to be so proud of that,” I noted.

Men.

I’m not really in the mood, but I’m going to write anyway.

Y’all are going to be sorry. ‘cuz here’s the thing.

My grandmother used to cut my hair.

Short.

It’s the sort of thing that you remember when you’re growing up, if you’re the type that: A) remembers anything; and B) grows up. She was my paternal grandmother, which meant that not all her blood was paying its daily tithe to the brain.

My mother’s side came from good, hearty peasant stock. Japanese peasants had an alternative view towards genetics, at least by comparison to peasants in any other society throughout history. Japanese peasants actually watched the bloodlines of their animals — who knows what sorts of animals they had; samurai chickens, maybe — and noticed that families that mated together, mutated together. Being essentially pragmatic, pragmatism being the official religion of the peon, they put this into practice with their children. This is why you never see Japanese peasants with extra nipples and a mullet, a particularly common American homo bardus type I see quite often out here in Redwood City, California.

This is beside the point, however. The object lesson here is that my mother’s side of the family believed in having family trees that forked. My father’s side of the family was blue-blooded, which meant that they liked the symmetry of the spoon shape. As a result, the leading characteristic in my father’s family was a general inability to figure out how to put corks back into bottles. This led directly to heavy alcohol consumption, and a general cynicism regarding natural fabrics.

During the earlier part of my life, my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandmother used to trade off making visits to our humble home. At the time, we lived in Seattle off of Rainier Street, near the original Nikko’s. My father’s idea of babysitting was to take his children with him to Nikko’s, where we were sure to get an enthusiastic welcome. He and the original owner/chef/founder of Nikko’s were old friends, and they would take turns hurling food and beer at customers while I would jog around the tatami, playing with the owner’s son — Ryotaro, I think his name was — and chewing on the curly ends of octopus legs. At the age of four, I knew all the words to several Japanese drinking songs and knew the taste of an overripe tentacle.

It was to prevent this sort of deleterious education that my grandmothers came in turn. My maternal grandmother was a gentle woman then, and hasn’t changed significantly in all the years I’ve known her; on the other hand, my paternal grandmother was the type of woman that used to give large dogs and travelling salesmen nightmares. We referred to her as ‘Amen-obaachama,’ ‘obaachama’ being the Japanese word for ‘grandmother. The ‘Amen’ was due to her habit of sitting down at my piano — I had one even then; I was a pampered prodigy — and pounding out Christian hymns by the hour. The ubiquitous ‘IV-V’ cadence at the ends of hymns became inextricably entangled with my memories of the woman.

As far as I’m aware, she was never Christian. It was a cosmic joke that she had the largest repertoire of hymns in Japan. She attended church with a fine air of disapproval and enjoyment, the one arising quite naturally from the other.

Her usual first step when arriving was to tell my father to put her suitcases on the floor. Her second, to stare at my head.

“Her hair is too long,” she would say, with a steely smile.

My mother would hug my head protectively.

The next few days would be spent in an increasingly nerve-wracking fashion. My grandmother would stalk me through the house with scissors hidden behind her back. Every time she spoke, I could hear the snip-snip of shears through hair; at mealtimes, she would eye my head greedily. From time to time my guard would drop, and I would suddenly find myself alone in a room with her. This was the only time in my life that I would willingly dive for the piano, an unspoken safe zone: as long as I was practicing, I was allowed to keep my hair.

There was no reasoning with the woman. Long hair on a child, she was convinced, would stunt its growth and suck valuable resources from the formation of brains. In my own best interests, I needed to be bald. Every time she came we played this little cat-and-mouse, and every time she would win. A round-headed child with long hair is fearsome enough. Inflicting a round-headed child with hair that ends above the ears is the sort of thing that should only happen in third-world countries, to small dogs with lice that are destined for the pot.

Somewhere around my tenth birthday, both my grandmothers stopped coming to visit. My father, king of the family feud, abruptly decided he was no longer speaking to his mother or his younger sister, and that was that. The last time I saw her, I was thirteen years old, with an unfortunate perm and a tendency to eat pretty much anything. When my father died, my grandmother’s mental health instantly started to deteriorate.

It’s a terrible thing to outlive your children.

On Friday, my mother called to tell me that Amen-obaachama had died. “She was 94,” she said. “Did you know she used to teach the imperial princesses dancing? She was a tennis champion before women were allowed to play tennis. She was there for the creation of the Suzuki Method. She was a remarkable woman, you know. It’s too bad you didn’t keep in touch with her.”

My mother would have been a splendid Catholic priest; guilt is her plaything, and grovels at her feet.

“I should have,” I agreed, and instantly started making excuses for myself. “I didn’t have time to visit her when I was in Japan. I meant to write a letter….”

“She was always so cheerful, even during the hardest parts of her life,” my mother sighed. “She went from old-folks home to old-folks home. Some of them were absolutely terrible.”

“She used to cut my hair,” I said, mutinously.

“Yes,” she agreed.

What followed was one of those silences that they talk about in books, where you start getting introspective and examining the flaws in your personality, and entire conversations start and finish without a single word.

“She did it because she loved you. You were a terrible granddaughter.”

“–But she loved you.”

“Dammit.”

My religious beliefs — never mind where they come from — hold that the spirits of the dead remain on earth for over a month, watching their loved ones, going sight-seeing, doing the things they weren’t able to in life. I believe this implicitly.

I’ve started cleaning up my apartment.

“I meant to write you letters,” I told my grandmother’s ghost on Saturday, in case she was floating around. “You would have liked the letters. I write good letters.”

It might be too late to make amends. Who knows? Maybe she’ll give me another chance. If she’s anything like my father’s meddlesome ghost, she’ll be appearing in the occasional dream, stalking me through long corridors with a pair of kitchen shears in hand.

In the great, cosmic balance of things, will that be punishment enough?