faulty vision

Mauritius Air is a small company that provides the majority of service into Mauritius and out; bribery between local politicians and the owner of Mauritius Air limits competition, not that there’s necessarily a great deal of it into the country which is, after all, only a few miles wide.

The flight from London to Mauritius is twelve hours. The plane, when we boarded, was an old remodeled Airbus with wingtipped seats and footrests for shorter people such as myself. The passenger compartment was mostly empty, with the exception of a few Americans seated squarely across from us; first-class was dedicated to the stewards and stewardesses themselves, who lounged at the leisure behind the curtain and emerged to offer a minimum of sullen service to the customers insistent enough to have used their bells.

The flight crew were unenthused at the prospect of returning to Mauritius. There was a three hour delay while they replaced bits and pieces of the engine, stealing parts from another Mauritius Air airplane — the other Mauritius Air airplane — and then a hasty getaway before the flight crew of the other plane found out that their plane couldn’t fly anymore.

“Fucking amateurs,” the Guy grumbled during the first hour, after which a depressed pilot informed us that we weren’t going to be taking off anytime soon. “I hate Mauritius Air.”

With half the passenger list, I disembarked to wander the airport, riding up and down the motorized walkways singing snatches of Christmas carols in Japanese to baffle the security guards.

I would like to take this opportunity to make a comment here about motorized walkways in airports.

Airplanes are mysterious, noisy, and frightening contraptions to me; there is nothing quite so disorienting as getting into a box, being forced into inactivity for a period of time, then walking out to discover one’s self in a brand new place completely alien to the place one started out. I did some investigating online and, with the assistance of phobialist, I have come up with a name for my problem. I have, if you can fathom it, what can only be described as a mild case of claustrohodothanatophobia: fear of travel in vehicles which involve closed spaces that could result in dying. Elevators are a problem for me. So are cars. To a lesser extent, so are airplanes.

This is why the motorized walkway is, for me, the ultimate achievement in mankind’s ongoing quest to find faster, safer forms of travel.

There is nothing quite so satisfying as hopping onto the rubberized treadmill and being whisked along at a brisk pace of four miles an hour, the breeze whiffling through your cowlicks. Even better is when one starts walking, the rubber bouncing one up and ahead as gravity loosens its bond with one’s fat, jiggling ass. The world whips by: five miles an hour, six miles an hour. The rest of the pedestrians crawl to a standstill by comparison. On empty stretches, one can stretch out one’s arms and flap them, and maybe pretend to fly for just a little bit. On completely empty walkways, one can start jogging, flapping those arms, and bounce really, really hard, and maybe sing Japanese Christmas carols at the top of one’s lungs under the bemused stares of security guards who really have no grounds to make you stop. And on late nights on completely empty walkways, one going one way, one going another, maybe one can do this for half an hour or even longer, going around and around in a motorized circle while angry Mauritians steal engine parts from incompatible airplanes to stick into the airplane that is about to fly one five thousand miles to the other side of the world.

If all the airplanes in the world broke down and airline travel ground to a halt, it would still be worthwhile to go the airports, just to play on the motorized walkways.

It was only when several more security guards started to congregate in the halls, all with one eye fixed dubiously on my activities, that I stopped playing on the rubber. It occurred to me that as a foreigner in a strange land, I was a representative of my country and the British alreay had a low enough opinion of the intelligence of Americans. Being arrested for the molestation of machinery in Her Majesty’s Airport would hardly boost trans-Atlantic relations between the common people of America and the UK.

“American Embassy. How may I help you?”

“Uh, yes. I was given one phone call, you see, and I’m an American and I thought you guys could come get me out of jail.”

“I see. May I know what the charge was?”

“I swear I didn’t realize they belonged to the Queen. And why put them out there if she didn’t want us to ride them? Lots?”

The Guy came of the plane a few minutes after I’d settled down with a book in the lobby, carrying every single piece of luggage we’d boarded the plane with. “Fucking amateurs,” he greeted me, irritably. “I brought your passport. They weren’t sure if I needed it to get back on again, so they made me take everything off with me. I hate Mauritius Air.”

“They didn’t tell us we needed our passports,” I protested. “They said we just needed our boarding passes.”

“They changed their minds,” he said, sourly, and filled a chair to wait with his Gameboy.

A few minutes later, the attendents began herding us back towards the plane again. “We’re all set to go,” they assured us, and checked our passports. “We found the parts, and we’ll take off in just a few minutes . . . ”

It took another hour for them to finish testing the part and find the runway. By the time we hit airspace, I was sound asleep.

“Fucking amateurs,” the Guy was muttering next to me. “I hate Mauritius Air.”

These days on flights across Europe, airplanes feature personalized movie service, an in-seat monitor the size of a Danielle Steele paperback, matched with a remote control embedded in the seat arm. An assortment of movies begins every two hours, out of which the passenger can select the viewing choice using the remote control to flip back and forth between movies or even television channels if so desired.

Mauritius Air offered six movies, two of which were Hindi. Of the others, which included Planet of the Apes, the only one that interested me was The Blues Brothers, a classic that I’ve never actually watched all the way through.

All films were being offered on one channel dubbed in French, in addition to the original language on a different channel. I pointed this out to the drowsy Guy, who stirred out of his stupor long enough to point out that, after all, Mauritians all spoke French. I checked the in-flight magazine for the English Blues Brothers channel, and flipped to it expectantly.

Y’all, it was in French.

“Strange,” I thought, and flipped through the in-flight magazine to verify the channel. I was, in fact, listening to the English version of the Blues Brothers. The next channel was dedicated to the French version of the Blues Brothers.

I changed the channel to verify that the French channel was, in fact, playing the French version of the Blues Brothers, then flipped back to the previous channel to test the waters again. There, I discovered that the Blues Brothers was not, in fact, in French; it was in a French interpretation of an English version of the movie that sounded remarkably like a French dub. On another channel, Marky Mark was fluting something through his nasal passages to a large gorilla-like creature that was sounding surprisingly sophisticated in an emasculated Gerard Depardieu way.

I woke the Guy up to point this out.

“Fucking amateurs,” the Guy mumbled. “I hate Mauritius Air.”

He fell asleep.

In English, the Blues Brothers Jake and Elwood are a smooth-talking, humorous, dryly droll pair with some fantastic musical backups. In French, I discovered that the Blues Brothers are actually a pair of very angry Parisian Taxicab drivers, embittered by childhoods spent next to electric substations that have rendered them infertile and caused assorted cancerous polyps to spring into being all over their vocal cords. It’s all in the interpretation of the roles; it’s amazing the artistic turmoil that a small voiceover cast can do to a movie.

I woke the Guy up once more to point this out.

The flight crew, most frowning a little to discourage questions or requests for assistance, came around with offers of salted snack foods in foil bags and trays of lukewarm water to tide us over until the first meal. In a rather pointed jab towards the Americans on the plane, the snack food consisted of pretzels, all creatively shaped in Presidentially lethal folds. In point of fact, not once during my travels did I eat a single airline-distributed peanut. All of Europe and Africa appears to have abruptly become enamoured of the pretzel.

Not that this is a sign or anything, but it does bear some notice. I nudged the Guy to show him. He was uninterested; his were already eaten, without incident. But then, he’s British.

It was another eight hours before we spotted land, mid-morning in Mauritian time even three hours late as we were. The Guy, finally awake of his own volition, leaned over me to peer out the window as we circled overhead. The sea was a brilliant blue, an assortment of shades taken out of a box of crayolas and spilled across the horizon. The island itself was volcanic, lush and green, vibrantly tropical; from overhead, we could see reefs and the roll of white breakers curling towards spotless sand.

“Wow,” I said, and craned my neck to look.

“Oh,” said the Guy, breathing into my ear. “I forgot. They just had a hurricane a couple of days ago. I wonder if they got the electricity and the water up and going yet?”

My entire life I’ve never been able to really understand the British sense of humor. My friends used to be into the whole Monty Python craze, back when Monty Python was the world’s answer to sophisticated humor; they’d force me to sit down and watch John Cleese and dead parrots, coughing up internal organs in their paroxysms of mirth. Me, I’d join in the hilarity with a few token guffaws, never really heartfelt, but anxious enough to be part of the crowd that I’d pass up the incidental boredom just to sound like I Got It.

At the time, I suspected it was my Japanese-ness that prohibited me from really understanding the deep humor of the entire Monty Python hysteria. Japanese humor tends to be of the direct sort — witness my father’s conviction that the Three Dunces were God’s answer to depression — or of a more lethal Machiavellian subtlety, in which people usually ends up dead as a punchline. Later on, forced by these same friends to watch a tedious hour of Saturday Night Live — an incomprehensible hodge-podge of bad acting, uninspired scripting, and a flagrant dependence on teleprompters that somehow managed to survive two decades, and never mind the fact that my Cupid show with Jeremy Piven, hilarious, well-written, brilliantly acted only lasted a season — I became convinced that the fault lay with the fact that my friends possessed poorly developed senses of humor. I pitied them.

Now that I’m older, I know for a fact that my friends never really understood Monty Python either, and that they were laughing just as guiltily as I was, thinking that they were the odd people out who just didn’t Get It. It turns out that the true brilliance of Monty Python was that it was an entire cultural revolution brought about by the British exploitation of two simple American weaknesses: the guilty conviction that the British are superior to Americans; and a mortal terror of being thought stupid.

We got off the plane after an eleven hour flight from San Francisco to Heathrow, during which we established that the Guy had neglected to bring his best friend’s phone number, and wasn’t exactly positive that we would have a ride waiting for us at the airport. We were scheduled to have a two day layover, during which the Guy’s best friend, father of a new, three-month old son, would be putting us up.

“Is he okay with that?” I asked, displaying an odd, belated bit of social conscience. “I mean, if his wife has a new baby, maybe she doesn’t want to have to be a hostess.”

“It’ll be fine,” the Guy said, with the comfortable assurance of a person who will never have to endure hours of agonizing labor to squirt out a fully formed human life. “She won’t care.”

Compared to the Guy, I’m a Goliath of social conscience. And I kicked puppies when I was young.

The Guy’s friend was, thankfully, waiting for us at the airport. I dozed in the car ride back to his home, listening to their conversation with that half-inch of me that was actually conscious.

In two hours, I managed to establish a framework by which to assess British humor; a fairly reliable template by which to determine what topics will cause laughter in a pub.

• The Welsh.
  

• British politicians.
  

• Anything involving toilets or bowel movements.
  

• George “Dubya” Bush.
  

• Smelly cheese.
  

• Sheep.
  

• Anybody outside the immediate conversational circle.
  

We spent two days in the Guy’s best friend’s home, where we ate, chatted, and slept through the inevitable bout of jetlag. The new three-month old baby gave me a sidelong glance and smiled slyly, finding something privately amusing in my appearance. The Guy and the baby found each other equally fascinating, discovering intellectual equals in each other; the baby grinned happily at him for hours, willing to be hugely entertained by the Guy’s very large nose and complete set of teeth, while the Guy absorbed himself in favorably comparing the baby’s character with his godson’s, three years older and reluctant to warm up to the strangers who had invaded his home.

“Can I trade?” the Guy asked his friend, the proud father. “This one seems a lot smarter than the one I’m godfather to.”

I observed to the mother that the Guy was a bit of a prick. She laughed.

“You are,” I told the Guy later, reproachfully. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“Why not? It’s true,” the Guy said, blankly. “My godson’s whiny.”

“I hope you never breed,” I said bitterly, and went to play with the baby.

Despite only being three years old, bilingual, and inarticulate in both languages (English and Greek), the godson already had a distinctive British accent to his disjointed ramblings. “Wahnt to wahtch video,” he insisted, marching up and down the corridor with his trouser waistband clutched firmly in both hands. He was Masterpiece Theatre with dentures and verbal dyslexia.

I’ve always found the British accent to be sexy. Actually, like most Americans, I’ve always found almost any accent of any kind to be sexy; having grown accustomed to the relative blandness of the American cant, there’s something refreshingly sophisticated about the accents heard abroad: French, German, British, Irish. Listening to British men talk has always sent a little shiver up my spine, probably part of the reason I’m with the Guy, though six years in the United States and an unhealthy talent for mimicry has made his accent as bland and American as the next Joe. Hearing that same accent come out of the mouth of a three year old did something to disconnect the chain between my ears and the hairs on the back of my neck.

We fell asleep at two p.m. the first day, excusing ourselves from our hosts with promises that this would only be a nap, only to wake up at three in the morning in a household gone dead silent except for the occasional whimpers of the newborn in his parents’ room.

We crept downstairs, I with my book, the Guy with his Gameboy, and huddled in front of the television to watch BBC news and a bizarre set of cartoons about a falsetto fly and his great insectoid adventures. The British interviewed for a talk show were nearly incomprehensible, their accents were so thick; it was like listening to a language long forgotten: the vowels were rounded right, the consonants were formed correctly, even the pattern was familiar, but none of it came from a vocabulary I’d ever learned.

“What the hell did she just say?”

“I wasn’t listening.”

“How do they understand each other? How do you understand them? I mean, do you ever listen to one of your people and just say, ‘Huh’?”

“All the time . . . what do you mean, one of my people?”

“I swear this guy is about to swallow his own tongue. Somebody stop him.”

We head for Mauritius on the 25th.

EVANGELIST, n. A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religiuos sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbors.

– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

I have this personal conviction that companies conspire with each other behind our backs, creating databases of names and addresses of laid-off employees that they then sell to telemarketers, solicitors, and religious evangelical groups like the Church of Latter Day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Not a single day has passed since I was laid off that I haven’t been accosted in my own home by credit card companies, missionaries, salesmen trying to put themselves through college (straight of the inner city, and you can help, yes, you, by purchasing or renewing a subscription to one of the magazines on my list!), and once, a desperate technician from WebTV who really, really wanted to install a free WebTV try-it-for-a-month package.

My roommate and her boyfriend, both from Southern California and therefore accustomed to the wiles of door-to-door proselytizers and useless-commodity-hawkers, are both aware that I have a serious problem with house callers who want stuff from me. Namely, I’m incapable of saying no. We didn’t receive our first solicitor until five or six months into our tenancy at this apartment; the powers that be no doubt wanted to make sure that we were financially solvent enough to hold on to our rented real estate before trying to squeeze money out of us. It was evening when he knocked on our door; primetime TV was on, and my roommate and her boyfriend were finishing up dinner on the sofa.

“Who is it?” my roommate asked, while I peered through the eyehole.

“I don’t know,” I said, and gnawed on my lip.

“Salesman or something,” her boyfriend supposed.

“Just don’t open the door.”

“But he knows we’re at home,” I said regretfully, “and it would be rude.”

He was a young man, early twenties, “from San Jose,” he said in his practiced salesman’s chat. “I’m trying to put my way through college, and I’m doing it through a program sponsored by the San Francisco newspapers. I’m participating in a course designed to demonstrate that I’m a responsible and convincing salesman.”

“I don’t want a newspaper,” I objected, feebly.

He paused and peered at me. “I’m not selling newspaper subscriptions, ma’am,” he said, smoothly. “You see, the way the program works is that I collect twenty-three dollars from the people I speak to who have found me a good representative for the organization that I work for. Here’s my identification card, if you’d like to see it. Now, that twenty-three dollars is accepted by check or credit card, and I give you in return a signed copy of a receipt. At the end of the program, the amount of money that I’ve managed to collect is tallied, and the money is refunded in full to you, the donor. I then receive a recommendation to receive a scholarship from the newspaper company. That will help me pay for my college degree and eventually find a career in the working world.”

“I don’t get a newspaper?” I repeated. I was, yes, suspicious. More importantly, I was desperate to get rid of him. It was cold out; my roommate, in an attempt to rescue me, had asked me partway through this remarkable speech to close the door. Social coward that I am, I complied by putting myself on the wrong side of the door. The outside.

“No newspaper, ma’am,” he told me, glibly. “All you need to do is fill out a check and make it out to San Francisco Examiner, and I’ll give you a receipt.”

“I can’t give you cash?” I asked, fading but hopeful. Perhaps a bribe. . .

“A check is preferable,” he said, firmly, thus eliminating the last resistance. “Made out to the San Francisco Examiner.”

Defeated, I puttered back inside and filled out a check, for which I received his voluble thanks and a receipt.

He left.

One week later, I started getting a newspaper subscription to the San Francisco Examiner. I cancelled it.

They sent me back a check for $22.25.

Bastard son of an inbred howler monkey was a liar.

The word spread through the muddy waters of the street-hitting world: there’s a pushover at Apartment 105, 152 Jackson Street. I can’t count the number of times I answered the door, only to discover that it was religious people, who want to spread the word — their word — to my unenlightened soul. Knowing better, I still opened the door, unwilling and unable to be rude enough to not answer despite knowing what was in store.

In the evenings, it was the salesmen: make-up, bonds, charities, magazines. All were polite but persistent, with the exception of one purported charity collector who became quite rude when I managed to summon the backbone to say no. My friends informed me that he was probably a con-man; no true charity collector is ever rude.

At all hours of the day, it turns out, the preachers and ministers and Mormon Elders (all younger than I am, all white, all male) wander the streets. They split up the neighborhood on the street corner — I know this for a fact, because the Norwegian caught them at it, one Sunday — and disperse to inject a little bit of God in the unemployed or relaxing sinners of Redwood City.

I imagine them thumb-wrestling for the privilege of knocking on my door.

As of last week, I stopped answering the door; I cowered at the ring of the telephone, and only divine intervention (or my cell phone number) enabled anybody to get in touch with me.

After a particularly relentless and ruthless saleswoman managed to convince me to buy a subscription to ESPN Magazine — a purchase I sent to Flamingo, by way of salving my conscience — I sprinted to Office Max and bought a No Soliciting sign. This has effectively halted the pavement peddlers from knocking on my door. Unfortunately for me, it appears that No Soliciting only covers those people who want my money. People who want my soul don’t seem to feel that this prohibition applies to them.

Today, after unwarily opening the door to empty trash, only to come face to face with a beaming, holier-than-thou evangelist I believe claimed to be from Jews for Jesus, (explain that oxymoron if you will), I stalked back to my computer and got my revenge on the whole lot of them.

As of 3:50:02 pm today, I am an official, certificate carrying, holy-book-of-your-choice thumping Minister for the Church of Universal Life.

Jus’ call me Reveren’, chil’.

I am now officially licensed to perform marriages, funerals, and . . . well, other things. If anybody wants to come visit my confessional, feel free. I can keep a secret. (Unless it’s funny.) I can comfort the sick, give non-material consolation to the needy, and smite the wicked. Also, I can get a discount on cool ecclesiastical stuff like, oh, I dunno. Educational software about the Meaning of Life, “Ministry in a Box”, a Minister’s Manual, that sort of thing.

I’m excited. I’m feeling full of the power of God. I have been granted every right “to officiate, perform, and/or initiate — except circumcision.” I have joined a church that has only two tenets – “to promote freedom of religion and to do that which is right. It is the responsibility of the individual to determine what is right as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others and is within the law.” How can you not get down with a church like that?

Hallelujah. I’m looking forward to my new life in the sheltering arms of the Divine.

Most of all, I’m looking forward to the next evangelist who comes knocking at my door.

Me: “I’m sorry. I appreciate your hard work and intent, but I’m a minister, so I’m already truly committed to the church I belong to.”

Holybutt At Door: “Oh, really? You’re a minister? That’s wonderful. What faith do you belong to?”

Me: “The Church of Universal Life. I filled out a form online. They sent me a certificate through email. Have a nice night!”

God and me, we have a plan.

You, too, can become an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church! No fees, no tests, no commitments! Join now, and watch your parents’ blood pressures soar!

From your friends at Universal Life Church; 20 million ministers created since 1959.

Back in 1977 — the year that my sister was born, year of the Snake for all those who care — I suffered an epiphany of life-changing proportions.

That was the year that my father took me to see Star Wars.

The movie, what little I remember of it, was probably bad. As a grown-up, I definitely find it bad; I’m not sure how good I was at critical thinking back in 1977, but come on. I was three at the time. I have some distinct memories of the back of theatre seats which, let’s face it, is pretty much all a three-year old can see in a flat floor movie theatre. Even today I look at the backs of theatre chairs with a distinct sense of nostalgia. In fact, the only thing that I do remember out of that entire movie is monochrome.

I think my father must have momentarily lifted me into his lap during the scene where Darth Vader and his troops blow their way into Princess Leia’s ship, because that image stayed with me through the rest of my media-cloistered childhood. Darth Vader in his flowing black cloak and that heavy breathing, the ominous clanking of stormtrooper boots on the metal floor, the smoke billowing around them as they stalk down the corridor, and the dramatic music of his own personal leitmotif.

I decided then and there that I would grow up to be evil.

Being evil, to a three year old, meant being able to wear cloaks. I tied a baby blanket around my throat and goose-stepped around the house, strangling stuffed animals. For months. My parents, vaguely worried about this warning sign of latent sociopathic tendencies, replaced my stuffed animals with Barbie dolls and things sort of deteriorated from there.

I dimly recall making up a list of things that evil people could do, somewhere around age seven. Evil people got to stay up late. Evil people didn’t have to practice the piano. Evil people didn’t have to do homework. Evil people didn’t have to eat fish with the heads attached. Evil people got to be mean to people who were mean to them. Sometimes, evil people even got to wave their hands and have mean people taken away and kill in creative fashions that didn’t involve mussed make-up or body fluids.

And, most disasterous of all to the future of my social life: evil people got to wear cool costumes.

A seven year old child’s definition of “cool costume” is a far cry from a grown-up’s version of acceptable attire. Conan the Barbarian came out when I was nine, and even before then there was a plethora of poor costuming choices in assorted Wizard and Warrior flicks hitting the television and movie screen. My parents would send me off to school in the morning, little knowing that midway to the bus stop, the neatly dressed angel would make a miraculous transformation to creatively dressed Princess Maleficentitis wearing a tiara cut and pasted from a J.C. Penney catalog.

Once I reached school, I would use the classroom scotch tape dispenser to make long fake fingernail claws and threaten to scratch the eyes out of classmates I didn’t like. I would walk on my tiptoes, pretending I had high heels. Once I even braided myself a little whip out of construction paper, and wielded it with triumph over the alarmed shrieks of my imagined peons.

In retrospect, it’s sort of surprising I never got beat up as a child.

Wanting to be evil sort of set me up for disappointment as an adult. I must have realized that fairly early on. Evil people don’t really get to have many friends; this is because they’re evil. Evil people also have short lives; they always get blown up by the good people at the end, something I always resented because usually the good people were boring and blond.

Worst of all, at the age of ten, I learned about shades of grey. I learned that not everybody fits into the good category or the evil category, just somewhere in the middle, and that despite all the best efforts to the contrary, the world isn’t really worth ruling.

So at the age of eleven, I decided I wanted to be a bunny rabbit instead.

I told my friends. The male ones blinked. The female friends were appalled. “You want to be what?”

“That’s so . . . that’s just wrong,” some of them said, earnestly.

“I don’t see why,” I said, patiently. “It’s not like I’m expecting to turn into a rabbit or anything. I just sort of wish I’d been born one. Sometimes. You know, round, happy, bouncy,” — the boys glazed over, — “furry, floppy ears, little tail. . . ”

“We like bunnies,” the boys told me, as a group. ‘Go for it, Yuhri. Follow your dreams.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said the girls. “Don’t you dare.”

Mystified by my friends’ responses, I never mentioned it again. I locked the thought away as one of those wistful, I-wish-I-coulds, and ate carrots obsessively for two years until my fingernails turned yellow.

Seattle is one of, if not the, home of the Japanese-American intelligentsia. My parents, who enthusiastically mutilated the English language even then, were far more comfortable in the Japanese community. The Japanese Consul-General would come and hang out with their little gang; there would be game nights and wine drinking nights and dinner nights and sushi nights, centered around a small group of young, energetic, sometimes brilliant men: Paul Watanabe, George Tsutakawa, my father, Shiro-san, Kashiwaya-kun, Mr. Nakamura. Judge Sho. The Doctors Kurachi, now researching gene therapy at University of Michigan. There were more men and women, but I don’t remember all their names; my mother would, maybe. There are old pictures I can’t decipher.

Back when I was in Seattle for Christmas, my mom explained to me why they’d never tried to teach me English.

“We thought it would be unfair to you,” she said, simply. “Our English isn’t so good, and we were afraid that you would learn our poor English and end up not making any friends. So instead, we only spoke Japanese.”

For all the America I was exposed to, I might as well have been born and raised in Japan for the first few years of my life. I ate Japanese food, babbled Japanese baby talk, played Japanese games, and broke a Japanese loom.

I really met my first blond Caucasian when I was two and a half.

“You were so surprised,” my mother said, laughing. “I think you must have actually looked at her for the first time. You tried to pull her hair out because you must have thought it was fake. And then you tried to eat it because you thought it was candy. Then you tried to touch her eyes because they were blue.”

I was friends with Tara, blue-eyed Tara, five years before I could let go of the nagging fear that she wasn’t able to see. Surrounded by black-haired, brown-eyed Asians, I was morbidly convinced that pale eyes were somehow broken, that the difference in pigmentation — what seemed to me lack of pigmentation — meant that they couldn’t see as well.

I can’t count the number of times I involuntarily put out a hand to guide Tara around lampposts or across streets, worried that she would somehow miss seeing something dangerous out of those big, blue eyes.

“Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!”

I went to lunch today with my ex-coworkers. I persist on thinking of them in my head as coworkers, sans the “ex”; if there is any justice in the universe, we’ll eventually work together again somewhere.

It was the last day for College Boy and Indian Mom, who were laid off that morning.

“So the only real difference is that now you won’t have to come in to check your email anymore,” I supposed.

I would say that it was nice seeing them again, but for the fact that I’d somehow managed to lose my glasses between last night and this morning. As a result, gathered as we were around a large circular Chinese restaurant table, I was only able to distinguish vague outlines of faces. What little I saw of them proved to be satisfactory, as it was.

Conveniently enough, my fortune cookie fortune read: “That which the eye cannot see, the heart cannot grieve for.”

That pretty much covered everything.

My favorite fortune cookie fortune yet was the one I got in Bellevue one day, dining with my aunt and uncle and my entire as-yet-undead family during one of my vacations from college.

It read as follows: “The person next to you will pay for your meal.”

“What did you get?” my uncle asked, next to me. On the other side of me, my sister — still going through her vegetarian phase — was doing obscene things with a piece of kelp. She was still in high school, ergo, poor.

I therefore handed it willingly over to my uncle.

Who did, in case you’re wondering, pay for my meal.

This is a relevent story in that we ended up ordering rabbit for that meal; as a second year college student, I finally gave up my dream of being a bunny.

In college, I learned about Playboy for the first time.

I was, shall we say, a late bloomer.

Back when I was working at @Home and had just started dating the Guy, he took me out one night to an Indian restaurant down in Santa Clara called Pasand’s. I don’t think I’ve told this story before, have I? I went back to work and raved about the food there; my experience with Indian food was still pretty limited back then, but I was fairly sure that this place was quite good.

A peculiar expression crossed Indian Mom’s face, but she didn’t say anything.

A little while later, I went back to the restaurant and once more came back to work to talk about how good the place was. Once more that odd expression crossed her face. I paused.

“Wait,” I said. With the idea that half a brain is better than no brain at all, I finally hooked up the pieces. “Is that the place that belongs to that guy with the girls from India. . . ?”

“I didn’t want to say anything,” Indian Mom said apologetically. “You sounded like you enjoyed it so much.”

“Oh, crap,” I sighed. “Guess I won’t be going back there anymore.”

Back in 2000, this case made headlines; a real estate tycoon named Lakireddy Bali Reddy who, with his sons, imported underage girls from India, imprisoned them, and used them for sex and cheap labor. One of them died after being exposed to carbon monoxide poisoning in the Reddy-owned apartment where she was living with two other underage women also brought over from India; the police were called in after a passerby saw Reddy dragging two bodies — one girl dead, another unconscious — into his truck and then try to force a screaming girl into the same truck.

He and his sons, all eventually indicted, were the owners of Pasands.

“He used some sort of defense that cultural tradition made the whole underage children for sex and slavery thing allowable,” I observed to the gathered women of my group while I poked around sfgate.com to do some research on the case.

“He’d been living in the United States for forty years,” one of them objected.

“I’ve never heard that it’s part of our culture,” said one of the Indians, dryly. “Maybe he means the American culture.”

“Or the culture of men?” suggested someone else.

My stomach likes its satisfaction, but not at the cost of my conscience. As a consolation prize, Indian Mom gave me the name of an Indian restaurant right across from Pasands called Raparti; this proved an adequate substitute, and so the Guy and I went there last night.

That’s all. Just wanted to share that.

One of the problems with being Unemployed — still with the titular, capitalized first letter — is that there’s very little to talk about in conversation. When the Guy asks, “So how was your day?” I have to scrounge up something interesting out of a schedule that basically revolves around sleeping too much, eating too much, goofing off too much, and otherwise making a complete slug out of myself.

This is why I have substituted the radio for my real life. Not just any radio station, mind you. NPR. What happens on NPR is my life.

“I heard that Honda is coming out with a hybrid version of its Civic in a couple of months,” I burbled last night. “And Ashcroft stepped out of any future investigation involving Enron because of conflict of interest; they were some of his biggest contributers during his senate run. And Israel knocked down some refugee camp buildings as retaliation for a boat full of arms that was coming into Palestine.”

Suddenly, Unemployed, I’ve become a lot more interesting. I have. In a global scale, anyway. Oh, and educated. I’ve become a lot more educated, too.

More recently, the world has been conspiring to educate me about my racial and cultural heritage as a Japanese-American, something that I usually only think consciously about when presented with those racial profiling surveys put out by governments and sweepstakes. You know the one. “Would you consider yourself as: African-American, Pacific-Asian, etcetera etcetera.”

At one point, I held a joint citizenship with Japan and America. Whether that’s changed legally or not, I still have it emotionally set in my head that I’m still a joint citizen. I get as annoyed and rumpled about Japanese politics as I do about American, for different reasons; however, I’ll be the first to admit that everything about me, from my attitude, my cultural worldview, is more American than Japanese. Would I ever want to live in Japan?

No. But.

Here’s one for you. Go ahead and think of any mixed-race couple involving a Caucasian in the United States. If you know any, that is. Now, go ahead and describe them just as though you were going to talk about them to a friend. “I know this couple, he’s __________ and she’s ___________.”

You know what I say, without thinking?

“I know this couple, he’s American, and she’s Japanese.”

You know what I mean when I say American? I mean white. You know what I mean when I say Japanese? I mean Japanese-American.

Isn’t that wicky?

Here’s another one. According to NPR, children of mixed African and Caucasian heritage tend to think of themselves as “black.” Children of mixed Asian and Caucasian heritage tend to think of themselves as “white.”

Isn’t that another curious thing?

The other day, I was called on by Mormon missionaries who tried very hard to engage me in conversation over a religion I really don’t care much for. No offense to all you devout Mormons out there; I’ve read the Book of Mormon, I’ve talked to Mormons about their religion in the past, and I’m pretty sure that it’s really not for me.

Coincidentally enough, this visit occurred right after I’d read an article on anti-polygamy protests that would be taking place during the Olympics in Salt Lake City, and the huge mass mailings that were taking place by the Church of Latter Day Saints to journalists who were registered to cover the Olympics.

I ended up having quite a long conversation with my roommate’s boyfriend about Civil Rights and Mormons, which phased by natural conversational evolution towards the Japanese-American Citizen’s League and its role during World War II.

And this is where I got really — warning, bad word coming up — fucking pissed off.

The JACL, for those who don’t know, nominally represented the Japanese-Americans then and now, a membership league that claimed to look after the civil liberties and interests of Japanese-Americans in the United States. During the War, this involved working closely with the government, and pressuring interned Japanese-Americans to volunteer for service; no military historian would fail to know of the famous Purple Heart Brigade, the 442nd and 100th Infantry Battalion. Because of their close work with the government, leaders in the JACL were allowed early out of internship and given profitable jobs in the community; the brother-in-law of one is Norm Mineta, now the Transportation Secretary under Bush.

In 1990, faced with the Seattle Chapter’s attempt to pass a resolution apologizing to victims of JACL wrongdoing during the War and accusations that the JACL had in fact not represented Japanese-American civil liberties during the War, but had rather furthered their own interests as well as commit heinous acts of fraud on Issei, first-generation Japanese, the board of the JACL hired an independent investigator named Lim to research their activities during the war and report on what she found.

Once the report was finished, the JACL reviewed the document and — get this — edited it. Severely. They removed entire pages and rewrote others, substituting wholesale paragraphs with passages taken from a book that Deborah Lim hadn’t even used as a reference, cutting down a 154 page document to 28 pages.

Needless to say, the edits they made were in their favor.

This became the “official” release of the report. Over some controversy regarding an Internment Memorial in Washington DC, now built, my roommate’s boyfriend and his friends managed to dig up the original version of the report by contacting Deborah Lim directly. This is now available online, after almost ten years of suppression by the JACL.

It’s linked here. There’s an interesting article here that sums up some of the key points of the report. You’ll notice that the word “branding” shows up in there at one point, in the mouth of Mike Masaoka, the previously mentioned brother-in-law to Norm Mineta.

Then there’s the draft, enforced on young Japanese-Americans — you only needed to have one-sixteenth Japanese blood to be interned, incidentally; Hitler only demanded one-eighth Jewish — when they refused to volunteer for service after being imprisoned in camps, and charges of sedition brought against draft resisters in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. More information about that can be found here.

And of course there’s the story of James Omura, who defied both the JACL and the government in order to fight for the civil liberties of imprisoned Japanese-Americans during World War II, only to end up ostracized and punished by the selfsame people he’d tried to help.

The whole history of the Japanese-American experience in America is a complicated and convoluted thing; sometimes it seems like the worst damage done to Japanese-American interests is by Japanese-Americans. People are the same the world over, no matter how whitewashed the stereotypes are.

The Japanese-American experience during the War isn’t something that really impacts me personally; I’m only second generation, and my parents came to the US after the war was over.

Still, I suppose being part of being Japanese-American is being part of the community, and with that comes all the history.

I kind of miss being able to believe the public myth of the Japanese-American community united, uniformly victims to a government that ignored constitutional rights, and the image of a Purple Heart Brigade that was completely voluntary and willing to die for their country.

Truth sucks.

I got on the phone this morning after discovering that one of my vendors — you know, the people who bill me for services rendered — has some sort of delusion involving my gender. This happens fairly frequently, about once every two months or so; my first name looks like a misspelling of a male russian name, and there are some people who simply take it on faith that if it sounds like a guy and looks like a guy, it must be a guy.

Thanks to the whole Cold War business, people always knew U.S.S.R. names better than they knew Japanese. Kids in school would tease me. “So how’re the Russians today, Yuri?” they’d ask, or: “Fly me to the moon, Yuri!” Since our family’s television consisted of a fuzzy, post-War production black and white static trap, and my primary interest in our newspaper subscription was the two page spread of comics, I never really knew who or what my classmates were talking about. Even then, though, I was pretty intelligent and picked up from cues that they were making fun of me: the holding hands and dancing around me in a circle was sort of a dead giveaway. Subtle people, my peers were not.

As a sort of defense mechanism, I started reading the Oxford dictionary at the age of five. “Good idea,” you’re probably thinking. “The dictionary’s pretty heavy. One good blow over the head with that and pretty much anybody’ll stop teasing you.” Yes, well, this was my theory too. What actually happened, however, is that I learned all the other things they could have done with my name; I learned to be grateful that the best my classmates could come up with was “Mister Communist Evil President Poop Head,” which wasn’t even remotely satisfying in the way it rolled off the tongue; even they seemed to feel it, because there was a definite lack of conviction in the chant, and it usually dissolved fairly quickly so they could dance around some other poor kid and yell, “Lard Butt, Lard Butt.”

There was an additional benefit to reading the dictionary, in that I learned all these gorgeous, stilettoed, acid words that I could use in my own defense. My tongue became the byword of every school I was in; I could peel the skin off a boy from twenty paces, flay him to the bone, then chip away layers of calcification to get to the marrow inside. There was no opposition. Public school isn’t the stuff of which biting wit is created. I had the advantage over my schoolmates of knowing how to read. Plus, I had that whole “Hatred of Humanity, that Pus-Filled Sore on the Face of the Earth” thing going for me.

That’s not to say I didn’t get anything out of my public education experience, mind you. I picked up tidbits of information here and there. I distinctly remember having this conversation with a girl named Lynn in Mister Peterson’s third grade class.

“lada lada lada something something rape something something,” she said.

“Rape?” I echoed, puzzled. “What’s that?”

She looked at me strangely. “That’s how people have babies, stupid.”

I hadn’t reached the Rs in the dictionary yet.

Then there was the time in high school outside of Mrs. Moran’s German classroom, where a group of my friends were gathered waiting for the teacher to show up. Someone handed me a Christmas card to laugh at. It featured Santa Claus’ back, wearing his fuzzy red-and-white top and a pair of bloomers around his ankles. “HO HO HO,” it said. Inside, the card read, “Santa always says that when he’s coming.”

Everybody laughed. I remained bemused. “I don’t get it,” I said.

“Turn it over,” someone suggested. “OH OH OH.” They laughed again.

I turned it over. Now Santa was on his head. Sure enough, it read OH OH OH. “I still don’t get it,” I announced.

“Santa always says that when he’s coming, see?” somebody insisted, and nudged me with a knowing wink and leer.

“Okay,” I said agreeably, puzzled but game.

My class stared at me. “You don’t get it?” they demanded. “Why don’t you get it? Coming, see? He’s . . . you know. Coming.”

“Down the chimney?” I wanted to know.

“Didn’t you take sex ed?” they asked, harassed.

“Huh?”

Despite all their big show and talk to the contrary, it turns out that high school students are actually an extremely modest group of people. Faced with the challenge of providing me with sex ed in the ten minutes before class started, they proved woefully inadequate to the job. There was much blushing, and stammering, and peculiar nudges and winks, and some half-hearted gestures with fingers, and plenty of, “You do it. C’mon. You’re supposed to be the expert.” Our teacher eventually popped up in our midst to rescue them; I was left with the dim impression that the joke meant that Santa was heading to the bedroom to meet Mrs. Claus so that they could put Santa’s boxers back on because he was too fat to put them on himself.

Even translated, it wasn’t a very funny card. Like I said, public school didn’t furnish the average high schooler with a sophisticated or understandable sense of humor.

Anyway, the whole point to this rambling story is that once in a while, back before I lost track of the thread, my name is still associated with masculinity. Hence, bills that are addressed to “Mr Yuri Hirata,” or better still, “Mr Yhuri Hirata.” There are at least a dozen different ways to misspell my name. I’ve seen: Yhuri, Yurhi, Yuri, Urhi, Uri, Uhri, Yurih, Yeuri, Yuhuri, Yuruhi, Yurrhi, Yuhhri. There are probably more, but these are the ones that I remember, in order of frequency. It’s not a big deal, but every so often I feel some masochistic urge to call the company up and correct their misapprehension.

Usually, this is fairly easy. Most companies are willing to make the small change, especially since I’m paying them money for stuff.

And then there are conversations like the one I had this morning.

Mornings aren’t a good time for me; I’m slow to wake up, dislike sunlight, and sound like I have a bad cold until I start getting interested in something or, on boring days, until the clock revolves back around to the single digits again. Today was especially bad. My normal speaking voice is in an alto/mezzo range. This morning I was holding steady at bass-baritone.

Customer Service: Hellothankyouforcalling[deleted]thisisYavondahowmanyIhelpyoutoday?

Me: What?

Customer Service: Hellothankyouforcalling[deleted]thisisYavondahowmanyIhelpyoutoday?

Me: Uh…sorry. Hello?

CS: Hello?

Me: This is a real person, right?

CS: Yes.

Me: Oh, good. Sorry. Just . . . morning, you know. I wanted to change the name on my account.

CS: I can do that for you if you like. May I have your account number, please?

Me: Oh, sure. (I provide account number.)

CS: Just a moment please.

Me: (wait, wait, wait, wait, wait).

CS: Okay, sir. This account is listed under Mister. . .uh, Yu. . . Yu-hu-ri. . .”

Me: Yuhri. Yuuuuri. Hirata.

CS: Thank you. That’s a pretty name. Is it Russian?

Me: No, it’s Japanese.

CS: Really? I read somewhere that the Russians mixed with the Japanese but I didn’t know that they’d shared names and all that.

Me: They didn’t, actually.

CS: Oh?

Me: Yes, it’s a Japanese name meaning Homeland. Or, spelled slightly differently, Lily.

CS: Oh.

Me: And it’s Miss Hirata. Not Mister.

CS: What?

Me: Miss Hirata. Female. I’m female.

CS: Are you sure?

Me: I’m . . . pretty sure, yes. I mean, last I checked.

CS: When was the last time you checked?

Me: Um, last night.

CS: Oh. I suppose it couldn’t have changed since then, could it?

Me: Not really.

CS: Wow. Your voice is deep.

Me: Yeah. It’s morning.

CS: I mean, I thought you were a guy.

Me: Thank you.

CS: Don’t mention it.

Me: I won’t.

CS: Okay. That shouldn’t really be a problem.

Me: Cool.

CS: But first . . . are you absolutely sure? Because I’ve never heard that name being with a woman.

Me: Yes. I mean, I”m sure.

CS: I know about the Russians, like, Yuri Andoropov and that astronaut guy. . .

Me: I know, I know. But it’s also a girl’s name. At least, in Japan it’s a girl’s name.

CS: That’s really interesting. I mean, that the name could be for two different sexes in two different countries. What are the odds?

Me: Thank you.

CS: It means Lily?

Me: Homeland.

CS: Wow. That’s so totally deep.

Me: Thank you?

CS: Is this spelled right, here? Y-h-u-r-i?

Me: No, that’s the other thing. It should be spelled with the ‘H’ in the middle.

CS: Y-H-U-H-R-I?

Me: No. Take out the first H. Y-U-H-R-I.

CS: Y-H-U-H-R-I?

Me: Y-U-H-R-I.

CS: Which H do I take out?

Me: The first one. Take out the first one.

CS: Yu-hu-ri?

Me: Yuhri. You don’t aspirate the H.

CS: Why not?

Me: Why is Bush president?

CS: Because he won the election.

Me: Some things just don’t make sense.

CS: Y-H-U-R-I?

Me: Wrong H. . .

In about half an hour, I’m headed out to meet some of my old coworkers for lunch. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them until I talked to one this morning. College Boy still has to return some books to me, now that I think about it. No problem. I know where he lives.

Time to post. I’ve gotten some New Years resolutions from readers; if you want to make any suggestions, go ahead and email me. You have time still. I probably won’t get around to writing them up in an actual entry until the end of this week or the next.

My first, “official” New Year entry — ignoring the seven entries that are labelled December but actually didn’t go online until the 31st and after — requires that I start off with something funny, something representative, and something that’ll set the tone for 2002. Right?

So the best way to do that, I figure, is with someone else’se writing. Dave Barry presents: Dave Barry on Windows.

And now that I’ve done that, on with the program.

The Guy and I were having dinner with Tara and Remington a couple of nights ago. Least there be any confusion about it at all, let me clarify that Tara was, of course, the one who was doing the cooking; we were participating by eating copiously. I brought cheese, that I produced in cooperation with families of cheese-makers in Italy and France. (They did the making: I opened the package.)

Anyway, the subject of divorce came up. “But wait,” some of you are thinking. “Didn’t Tara and Remington get married just a few months ago?” Yes, they did. However, for those of you who are keeping track, Tara cooks really really well. So well, in fact, that when she was off in Germany for three months — that was the period when I actually had a car, mind, because she’d lent it to me at considerable risk to her insurance premiums — Remington lost forty pounds and came to the airport looking quite svelte. My mom’s neighbor, who is somewhere in his seventies, worked for Boeing, and now volunteers for the police, informed me that the women who get divorced are usually women who don’t even know how to boil an egg. Tara, who knows how to boil an egg, is therefore not in any serious danger.

Tara and Remington informed us that X and Y, who I don’t know, and N and M, who I also don’t know, were getting divorces. This made some sort of impression on the Guy, who knows X and Y and N and M.

At dinner the next day, the Guy was still vaguely disturbed.

“It just bothers me,” he said. “There are so many divorces taking place. People are getting married for the wrong reasons.”

I paraphrase, of course. The Guy didn’t actually say those words in that order, but the words were definitely spoken, in some arrangement or another.

“Pooh,” he said.

(He might not have used that word.)

“What about the sanctity of marriage? Isn’t anything holy anymore? Aren’t people able to take the time and effort to work at a lasting commitment, a synchronicity of mind, body, and spirit that will weather the test of hardship and travail?” he asked.

(He didn’t say anything remotely resembling that, but I’m sure he was thinking it so we’ll take it as given.)

In my high school days in Seattle, I had a friend who was much older than I was who, in the years since, had gotten married, divorced, and moved to Montana. She told me after the divorce that men and women got married for different reasons. “Women get married because they think they’ve found ‘The One,’” she said. “Men get married because they think they’re ready to get married and whatever woman they’re with at the time just happens to be convenient.”

She was bitter. It wasn’t a new concept, and I’m pretty sure I’ve read it somewhere, since.

I have nothing to say on the subject of divorce, either pro or con. My personal opinion is that all children should be rendered infertile at birth, in some kind of reversible procedure that’s only turned off when they can prove to the state that they’re financially, emotionally, and mentally fit to care for a child of their own, married or no. That’s because my chief interest in a divorce lies with the children, not the couple.

This all brings me to the subject that I was actually really interested in, which is the whole thing about fairy tales. This’ll make sense in a minute. I used to have this conversation all the time with my coworkers-that-were: Indian Mom, Indian Woman the Second, and the Manager. European fairy tales, the ones that half of my childhood grew up with, have a near universal theme. To wit: beautiful woman who might or might not be a princess. Handsome or intelligent or youngest boy, who might or might not be a prince. The two meet. The two overcome hardship. The two marry. They live happily ever after. The “happily ever after” is given, because nobody wants to hear about how Cinderella was obsessive-compulsive about waxing the floor, that Prince Charming was always off fighting dragons and collecting beautiful maidens he’d rescued to stock his castle with, how Cinderella realized that it wasn’t just a coincidence that all the maids were Sports Illustrated swimsuit models on augmented health plans that included contraceptives, and how the two of them eventually split up in a bitter divorce that made tabloid headlines and polarized the nation, eventually resulting in a vicious civil war that decimated the country’s tobacco crops and resulted in national bankruptcy and the rise of a military junta.

Nine out of ten European fairy tales are boy meets girl, boy gets girl, both live happily ever after.

Elsewhere in the world, in Japan, in India, and maybe even in China, the stories are different. The fairy tales from these countries seem to start out with the boy has girl. Boy has girl, boy gets separated from girl through the agency of a third party. Boy and girl struggle to find each other. Boy or girl annihilates third party, inflicting horrific karmic justice — or learning that the separation was through the auspices of a god, who just wanted to test their love for each other — and then boy gets back together with girl. Both live happily ever after.

Okay, so happily ever after is a trend. But here’s the point. Boy already has girl. They’re married. Or they’re betrothed. The point is, they’re already a pair. They’ve gone through something together already to get to where they are; what happens next is on top of that, and it’s in order to get back to a tested love that they go through everything that they do. The tests aren’t to get the girl in the first place for some amorphous “Love at First Sight.”

I’m just saying, you know. It’s worth thinking about.

It’s a short entry, because I’m still recovering from a serious bout with Playstation Two-itis. I’ve yet to finish my New Years Resolutions, which is about par for the way I usually do my New Years Resolutions. Last year I hadn’t finished writing them up until February 4th, and by then, I’d already broken about half of them. This year I’m taking recommendations from readers. Any ideas you have, please email to: yhirata1@attbi.com, where they will receive the respect and consideration they deserve. In fact, if they’re good enough, I’ll even post them, with credits. And comments, but that goes without saying.

Just so you know, line one is already taken. It reads: “Yuhri Hirata, Resolutions for 2002.”

Anything else is fair game.