faulty vision

Monday.

Damn you to hell.

I don’t know, but it seems to me that if your entire life is one long weekend, Mondays should have absolutely no influence over the cosmic collective of your life. This is where I envy the Sims, who may live at the whim of a tyrannical and arbitrary deity, but are free of the quixotic cruelties of Mondays, living as they do from day to day regardless of the timing within the week.

Back up a bit to Saturday, which was Barb’s bridal shower. Barb and Karl, two of those annoying people that simply cannot be disliked, will be getting married in a couple of weeks. This is a cause for much celebration amongst friends and acquaintances; they’ve been engaged for three years now, after all, and people were starting to worry that they would never get up the momentum to actually toddle up to the altar. Barb and Karl, in collusion with Tara and Remington, were responsible for my introduction and subsequent bliss with the Guy. Needless to say, we will be there at the joyous event, some of us with far more grumbling than is really appropriate under the circumstances.

Enough with the accolades. Barb is cool. Karl is cool. Check. We’ve covered this. The bridal shower was cool. Did we cover that? Doesn’t matter. Check. The hostess was cool. The house was cool. The food was cool. In fact, everything was incredibly awesome, up to and including the one-eyed grey cat who cozied up to me, knowing perfectly well that I: 1) adore cats; and 2) am allergic to cats.

Even sadder than the fact that cat dander makes my two-dimensional face with its two-dimensional nasal passages swell up like Ann Nicole Smith’s breasts after marriage; the fact that I forget that I’m allergic to cats. Item 1 always makes it to my mind long before item 2, which is not so aerodynamic and has a bit of a weight problem, and thus has a hard time chugging it over the synapses to my cortex. Usually, by the time item 2 shows up panting at the door, item 1 has rendered the warning moot. In this particular instance, the cat made certain of item 2 by stuffing his tail firmly up both my nostrils before dessert was served.

It must have been a male. I’ve noticed males have a thing for stuffing body parts up unoffending nostrils.

Of note during the shower; the subject of men, books, and bathrooms arose, as is probably inevitable in a wedding shower that consisted almost exclusively of married women. Why, some of the women wanted to know, do men always go into the bathroom with a book or a newspaper and then stay there for hours at a time, just reading? The subject has reared its head several times so far in my book club, also made up solely of women. The closest my book club has come to an explanation is that it’s a more efficient use of time, though this hardly explains why a man would take two hours on the toilet.

One of the women at the shower was a loud, earthy, and hilarious character named Sonya. “I keep telling them, just relying on gravity isn’t going to do it,” she said. “You actually have to push to get something out.”

A whole new perspective on the age-old mystery.

So on Monday I was supposed to have my first interview of the unemployment season, and I woke up sniffling and sneezing. “Awwuhgies,” I thought dully, and scrounged for some leftover Allegra from the previous allergy season. Pills were located in a clear plastic container inside my pill cabinet in the bathroom. Hurrah. I popped one. Sneezed. Sprayed Allegra-flavored spittle all over the living room.

Point one for Monday.

The problem with my allergies is that once they get started, they just don’t know when to stop. This year’s allergy season was kicked off by the cat, and went seamlessly from animal dander to miniscule pollen specks. The histamine gods, having established their dominion over everything above the neck, inspected the Allegra and collectively thumbed their noses at it. (“What ez zis? Zis is ze pill they attempt to be subduing us weeth? We scoff at eet. Ptooey. We hurl our soiled frilly underclothings in eets general direction!”)

I borrowed the Guy’s car and headed out for the interview.

And got into an accident.

Really, ‘into’ is a misleading word. The proper way to describe it is ‘witnessed,’ as in ‘I witnessed a horrific car accident and the ugliness of Menlo Park suburban life.’ This is not something that one wants to have happen on the way to an interview. It makes the interviewer a little jumpy to receive a phone call from the interviewee that involves the word “police.”

“Uh, hullo? This is Yuhri. We had an appointment for one o’clock, but I’m afraid that the police have detained me and I don’t think I’ll be able to make it. Is it possible that we could reschedule?”

It also makes the interviewee a little jumpy, to put it mildly, when the interviewee is harmlessly tooting along to an interview and is forced to pull up sharply when the ridiculously expensive car ahead of her (the one she was not tailgating, let that be a lesson to you all) abruptly slams into the side of another ridiculously expensive car that is pulling out of a side street. Apparently, ridiculously expensive cars are not answerable to the vagarities of traffic lights and stop signs. This must be part of the contract signed when purchasing the car: traffic laws, optional.

Point two for Monday.

It makes the interviewee even more jumpy when she pops out of her car to make sure everybody is okay, only to be grabbed by two utterly psychotic, well-dressed suburban power housewives who subsequently scream obscenities at each other while wrestling for the rights to use said interviewee as a witness in her favor.

Point three for Monday.

When the police arrive and separate the two women and tell the interviewee to sit tight, well, that only frazzles the interviewee a little more because she’s going to be late to the interview. And when she discovers that she’s forgotten her cell phone at home because, after all, it’s Monday, so she won’t be able to call the interviewer to confess that she’ll be a little bit delayed, well. Isn’t that the icing on the cake?

Point four for Monday.

Interviewee cut loose by police, who — half an hour after the interview was supposed to start — suddenly can’t figure out why she’s there. Interviewee drives home to shake. Interviewee leaves babbling, abject message on interviewer’s voicemail, who subsequently calls back and kindly reschedules for Tuesday.

No marks on car.

Screw you, Monday. My game.

A little light in the afternoon for me; feeling the need to support someone who has, to all intents and purposes, all his cookies — of whatever flavor — in the right jar, I donated some of my hard-earned government unemployment to Lileks’ site, which has provided me with a textual gratification only matched by NPR’s aural hydration. It wasn’t as much as I’d like to be able to give, but I’ve chalked that up to the great cornucopia event I’ve scheduled for the day I receive my first new paycheck.

At any rate, I followed the links through his page to Amazon.com, which offers a transaction service for those nonprofits that are otherwise ill-equipped to receive credit card payments, and went through an exercise in tipping for the 21st century. Eventually, I reached the “Thank you” page, which promised to send me an e-mail confirmation shortly. Not entirely unexpectedly, Amazon had seen fit to add a few ads at the bottom of the page, a not unreasonable way of getting profit out of the overhead of supporting this worthy service.

Want to know what it said?

“Did you know that Amazon.com also sells books?”

Lunch with my old Excite@Home gang, dinner with Michelle and Greg, and an evening at Fry’s.

That’s what Fridays are made of.

Lunch: a small, Buddhist vegetarian place in Mountain View called “Garden Fresh.” For those of you who are interested, it’s on the intersection of Shoreline and El Camino.

“How do you know it’s Buddhist?” I asked the Guy.

“Do they have fake meat?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s Buddhist.”

I don’t really see where that follows, but the Guy is the authority on food, after all. I submit it to you as a Buddhist restaurant.

The vegetarian aspect of the place was exciting to the Manager (now the ex-), and Indian Woman the Second, both of whom were able to make it to the luncheon. For once, they would be able to order anything on the menu. The food was delicious for everybody, that is, with the exception of the Firecracker, who expressed a certain lack of enthusiasm over her Vegetarian Chicken Kung Pao.

“IT TASTE FUNNY,” she announced.

We all leaned across the table as one to ask, “You do realize that it’s vegetarian, right?”

“YES,” she declared. “I KNOW, VEGETARIAN EXCEPT FOR CHICKEN.”

“No, no meat,” we insisted. “It’s vegetarian food. That means there’s no meat.”

“NO,” she insisted, “IS MEAT INSIDE. IT IS CHICKEN KUNG PAO, VEGETARIAN.”

“Vegetarian means ‘without meat,’” the ex-Manager said patiently.

The Firecracker frowned. “BUT THERE IS CHICKEN HERE, SEE? THEY PUT IN CHICKEN.”

Confusion and merriment reigned until the Firecracker could be convinced that there was, in fact, no chicken in the Vegetarian Chicken Kung Pao; the realization brought with it a certain amount of disgust, and some dismay. The Firecracker is a strictly carnivorous animal.

“IN CHINA SOMETIME THEY SAY VEGETARIAN AND THEY PUT IN MEAT,” she explained to the rest of us with beetlings of amusement and annoyance.

“Here in California,” we pointed out, “you can get sued if you do that.”

Dinner was spent at a sushi place called Ariake’s, one of a small chain that served fast, inexpensive, and surprisingly good sushi. Several years ago I’d patronized the selfsame restaurant under the auspices of Michelle and Greg, who were kind enough to take pity on a lonely, poor, and disillusioned musician just moved down to California without funds or too many friends. It’s amazing the difference that a little self-confidence and a few years of experience can do for one’s perceptions of a place. The restaurant that seemed overwhelming and crowded, completely alien, and bizarrely neon, now seemed small and temperate and quaintly Californian.

The menu that I remembered from a few years ago involved sushi named after start-ups and neighborhood computer companies. The IBM roll. The Hewlett-Packard roll. The Sun roll. Nowadays, with software stock plummeting, those companies are being punished for their failures on the market, and have been replaced on the menu with harmless names that will survive the ages. The Sunshine Roll, for instance. The Pittsburgh Roll.

The day either of those start to fail on the New York Stock Exchange, we’ll know God has turned day-trader.

I fail to understand how it is that unemployment has culminated in a near-constant dependence on restaurants for sustenance. One would think that, as a person with copious amounts of free time, I would explore the parts of me that love to cook and end up spending most of my creative energies in the kitchen.

Of course, one would also think that I would live in a clean apartment, with a sink empty of dirty dishes, bathe regularly, and exercise. Not to mention learn exciting new technologies and keep abreast of cultural, technological, and social trends sweeping across the modern landscape. As opposed to, say, peeling dead skin off of one’s feet for an hour and a half while listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR.

One of the best things about being a grown-up with grown-up friends who have grown-up families and growing-up children, is that occasionally, if one is a very, very good little grown-up, one gets invited to High School theatre.

This is not to be mistaken for middle school theatre, which occasionally involves Orphan Annie (ubiquitous fat-headed Pollyanna that she is), or elementary school theatre, which always involves Snoopy. High School theatre is of a class all by itself, with High School voices and High School enthusiasm that’s unmatched anywhere in the drug-free world. Too, there are High Schools and then there are High Schools, each endowed with its own share of vocal and thespian talent. My own High School was notable for having a good dozen drama students who couldn’t sing, and another dozen choral students who couldn’t act. This led to artistic dilemmas for our Drama Teacher, who was invariably faced with the choice of putting on musicals where the leading lady and leading man could either sing like neutered penguins being slowly strangled by small, bald-testicled Scotsmen, or act like Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves.

What usually resulted was a combination of the two, a singing leading lady partnered with an acting leading man and vice versa, for two rotating casts. This worked out well for musicals such as Grease, which everybody has seen as a movie and therefore demands the lowest expectations. On those rare occasions that she managed to find someone who could both sing and act, the Drama Teacher usually became so agitated she would lose her grip and render up a serving of Hamlet: Part Two, the Musical.

San Francisco is fortunate in that it is the site of one of the worst public school districts in the civilized world. “Pish posh,” you’re probably thinking. “Don’t be silly. I happen to live in the worst school district in the civilized world.” Of course, you’re entitled to your own opinions. A couple of years ago, the San Francisco School Board discovered to their dismay that approximately a good third — or maybe even a half — of the high school seniors that year would not qualify to graduate due to low test scores and failure to meet the standards for graduation. Becoming alarmed that holding back these seniors would cause classrooms to become over-overcrowded and strain the already stretched resources of the public school system, the Board determined that the best solution would be to lower the standards for graduation and let them graduate.

It’s this kind of Thinking Outside the Box that’s needed in this world today. If you can match that story with another one equally as bad, I will publically acknowledge your public school district as bad, or inferior, to ours.

Anyway, San Francisco’s public school system is a byword for mediocrity, so it’s become the practice of San Francisco parents who have the money to enroll their students in private schools. Private schools, having both the means and the inclination to target their agendas towards specific subjects, usually have some sort of speciality: science, the arts, etcetera. The youngest son of my friend goes to Grace Cathedral school for boys, where he sings in the famous Grace Cathedral choir. The eldest goes to Lick-Wilmerding High School, specializing in arts, where once every two years, an ambitious musical production is staged for the delight of parents and family and friends.

Thus it was that on Thursday night, I trucked myself up to San Francisco to see the opening night of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” by Rupert Holmes, based on an unfinished story by Charles Dickens.

This is not a Normal Musical. I should’ve expected that when I recognized Rupert Holmes’ name on the program, otherwise celebrated in the Yuhri household for having created the series “Remember WENN.”

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a high school musical, and I hadn’t realized how much things had changed. When I was in high school, for instance, the principal and PTA would have had a coronary if the students had put on a musical in which the word “shit” was written into the music. They would have objected to high school girls playing the parts of prostitutes and propositioning members of the audience, conservatives that they were. Considering they even had difficulty with the musical “Grease”, believing it to be subversive and unnecessarily provocative, they would most certainly have had some serious issues with “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

The premise of this musical is that it’s based on the last story written by Charles Dickens, a mystery — no certainty whether it’s a murder mystery or not — about a young man who suddenly disappears. In the cast of characters: a young woman named Rosa Bud, a treacherous though publically affectionate uncle in love with young Rosa named John Jasper, young and hot-tempered Edwin Drood who plans on building highways through Egypt using stones taken from pyramids, and hot-blooded Egyptian Neville Landless. There’s also Reverend Crisparkle who was once engaged to Rosa Bud’s mother (until the tragic night when she mysteriously chose to go for a moonlight walk across some treacherous cliffs and fell to her Doom in the waters below), and Princess Puffer, who runs an opium den in London.

Yes, well, it was the Victorian Era. What can you do.

The play was hilarious; I laughed immoderately, at length, and loudly, embarrassing everybody around me. I don’t remember being so perky in high school. Neither do I remember being so talented, and I don’t just say that because the son of my friend played John Jasper. Since Charles Dickens dropped down dead in the course of writing the play, it required audience participation to arbitrarily select those characters responsible for the surmised death of Edwin Drood, as well as a happy ending. All musicals are required to have a happy ending, involving two characters in a love duet. For the purposes of this musical, the audience selected the opium den owner and the Reverend Crisparkle, evidently feeling that an opium den owner who could sing the word “Shit” and a Reverend who wore bright red glitter on his collar deserved each other.

Need I say it? I enjoyed myself hugely. I’d give a, well, not a lot, but something, to see the musical performed by professionals with a professional budget and setting. After all, it’s from the same person who brought us “Remember WENN.” How could we lose?

Interview scheduled for Monday.

Do you suppose that’s bad luck? I mean, we all know about Mondays, don’t we?

Last night, my roommate and I wandered over to the little independent movie rental place that lives on the corner of El Camino next to Taqueria el Greasinit, (my name for it, not theirs), and came triumphantly away with three DVDs and a flirtatious film nerd. That is to say, we actually retained the three DVDs. The flirtatious film nerd was my roommate’s acquisition, proving — as though we needed any proof for something so self-evident — that even film nerds can have a soft spot for gorgeous Korean women with perfect teeth.

I have a personal fondness for small, independently owned video stores, the lifeblood of the film rental industry and the salvation of the film goer who wants to watch a movie that is more than six degrees from Kevin Bacon. Being just off of a main thoroughfare, we have easy and convenient access to both a Hollywood Videos and a Blockbuster, both dimly lit and poorly stocked, not to mention homogenous in their selections.

There is no excitement in going to either Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. Our local Blockbuster attempts to minimize all possibility of interest by filling out its staff with horny acne-riddled teenagers, who ogle the large-breasted jailbait that occasionally come giggling into the store. As a general rule, they pretty much destroy all my best hopes for the future of humanity. The movies that can be picked up in Blockbuster are precisely the same as the movies that can be picked up in Hollywood Video. There is no surprise. “Oh,” you’ll never think, picking up a DVD case. “This is that rare, uncensored recording of ‘La Boisse’ that made such a sensation in France and began the whole neo-ferrari-poop movement in film.” The films at Blockbuster and Hollywood Video are of a far more mundane sort, available even in the checkout lines of Safeway. Incidentally, they are also the same movies that came out on video and DVD as blockbusters four years ago, still inexplicably listed under the “New Releases” section of the rental display.

Independently owned movie rental stores carry independent films. They carry television series not seen since the ’80s, and foreign films that won awards in foreign places, where foreigners actually watch movies. They carry films that might have dubious artistic merit, next to movies that revolutionalized movie-making. They have movies that have never hit the american movie theatre chains, (being too artistic or too foreign or, horrors, too intelligent) and even better, staff themselves with people who actually care about movies.

In fact, the only complaint I have with independently owned movie rental stores is that it’s usually very difficult to find anything there. This is because they actually carry movies, plural. The reason it’s always easy to find everything in Blockbuster and Hollywood Video is that they don’t carry movies, plural. They carry four hundred copies of movie, singular, incidentally the top block buster draw in theatres across America half a year ago.

It is the unavowed resolution of Blockbuster and Hollywood Video to eliminate the independent movie rental store. It is our mission to stop them.

So anyway, we patronize the Movie Groove, down the street. We got three DVDs. We’ve watched two. They’re due today. I’ll get around to the last one tonight.

That’s all.

What, you want more from me? Give it up. I’m sleepy. I’m going to take a nap.

I can do that, see. I’m unemployed.

No, wait. I do have one more thing to say on the subject of movies. I have a pretty vanilla taste in my films; all I demand is that it not be actively insulting to my intelligence, and I’ll be okay with watching it, more or less.

On the subject of the Academy Awards, I would like to announce that I have absolutely no interest in who wins and who doesn’t win.

This is why.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been in multiple piano competitions, and I’ve won most of them. This is because I was (cough) really a very good piano player. However, the thing about any artistic medium is that the stuff that’s really great, the brilliant work, the groundbreaking work, is also usually the controversial work, the stuff with personality.

Committees hate personality. It’s the nature of committees to punish personality.

Even if a committee wanted to, they couldn’t do anything else. Any work that’s outstanding enough to be brilliant is also, by the very fact of being brilliant, going to inspire strong emotions: passionate love, equally passionate hate. Passionate loves score high. Passionate hates score low. On the other hand, art that’s not brilliant but rather Good, in the sense that it doesn’t really offend but is actually quite good on its own merits, is not going to inspire the depths of passion that brilliant work does. Thus, it scores above average across the board.

You see how that works out? The brilliance loses. The pretty good wins the day.

I’m not even going to go into the Cliburn competition and the past two or three winners of it. I’m just saying.

Yeah.

Naptime now.

Guess what.

No, really. Guess what.

I’m going to have an interview.

For a real job. Aren’t you proud?

(Go, me!)

Actually, it’s a screening interview, and actually, it’s not scheduled yet, and actually, I have to make a phone call today in order to set it up. But on the plus sides, someone actually wanted to talk to me about a job, and it’s not one of those “Work from Home and Make Thousands!” schemes, nor is it a dubious corporation that claims to be able to double, triple, quadruple my investment (if I only buy three thousand dollars worth of their product and sell it on the streets, I, too, can be Rich! And here are all these success stories to show you other happy veterans of our company!) which I think bodes well for the first interview of this unemployment season.

I shan’t tell you much beyond that, because honestly, it would be Bad Form. However, I will tell you that it’s going to be very fun — because I like interviews, I really do — and very exciting, because I can dress up again, and very promising, because I wasn’t expecting responses to resumes for at least another two weeks. I’m ahead of my schedule, arbitrary though it is.

Oh. I never showed you my schedule, did I?

My theory is that there’s really nothing about unemployment that can be rationed or rationalized out; so much of unemployment involves sitting around and picking your nose, so you really have to make an effort to set goals for yourself. Knowing the incredible brain-sapping qualities of my flannel Tweety pajamas — those of you who’re on my notify list will be pleased to know I found it at the bottom of my laundry — I made sure not to set any goals that required actual, you know, discipline on my part.

My schedule therefore appears as follows:

One week after realizing unemployment: Start looking for jobs.

Being intellectually cognizant that one is unemployed, and actually caring that one is unemployed are two different things. After all, I had Seattle to go to, and Mauritius to debunk, then jetlag to recover from after my layoff, so all in all it was a pretty substantial amount of time before I really had any breathing room to give a damn that I had no more steady income. I set this day at February 8. The reason I select February 8 is because that’s the day I applied for unemployment.

Initially, I was thinking that I wouldn’t apply for unemployment at all. After all, I had my — hah hah! — my pride to think of, and taking handouts from the government smacks so much of welfare that I had trouble wrapping my — hah hah again! — pride around it. That was until one hazy day during my jetlag fugue state, when I optimistically decided to start doing my taxes.

One look at that IRS form, and I instantly trotted back to the computer to look up the California Employment Development Department. I made that phone call and got my unemployment check started, dammit, and I haven’t looked back since. $660 every two weeks. Pays for my rent, pays for my credit card minimum, pays for two student loan checks.

Hey, it’s my money. Why shouldn’t I get some use out of the services I paid for, dammit?

Two weeks after realizing unemployment: Start applying for jobs.

I figured it would take at least that long to finish fixing up my resume and actually sending it off. Of all the things that I hate, resume-writing for myself is on the top of the list. I can write resumes for other people, no problem; in fact, much of my last three weeks at Excite@Home was spent fine-tuning resumes for people. On my own, however. . . well. Let’s just say that I would have had difficulty getting noticed for even government work, and leave it at that.

Plus, I wanted to take some of those unemployment quizzes just for kicks; you know the ones, “What should you really do with your life?” Back in high school, we took these vocational exams at a fairly regular interval. High school administrators are big on showing their students that if they don’t shape up, they’ll end up bricklayers in sewage treatment facilities.

Personally, I think the people who make up those tests are the same people who make up the personality tests for Scientology and Dianetics. You know the ones, the ‘What Will Fulfill the Void Inside?’ where the final response informs you that the only way to true happiness is Ron Hubbard and alien invaders, give us your money and buy your soul some peace?

(What would really fill my void right now: a hamburger and fries.)

Two months after realizing unemployment: Start interviews.

Two months. Woo hoo! I’m a few weeks ahead. Properly, two months would mean the beginning of April. Who rocks the house, baby? Who rocks the house?

Three months after realizing unemployment: Get job offer.

I have no idea. I know three months is optimistic in this economy, but screw it. Three months. That’s what I did last time, that’s what I’ll do this time.

If I don’t make that, I’ll demand presents of consolation.

On Friday I was applying to jobs like a good little unemployed girl, when something inside my brain just — for lack of a better word — snapped.

Specifically, over cover letters.

“Hello! Saw your job opening for a Software Trainer online, and am attaching my resume beneath to join the thousands of other resumes you’re no doubt wading through by this point. Allow me to achieve uniformity with the rest of the interested parties by stating that, despite the breezy and regrettably informal tone of this email, I am in fact very much interested in this position.

I’ve spent most of the last eight years in the field of education — the teaching side, that is; we shan’t count the learning side — giving lectures to large audiences, heading classes, conducting seminars, and giving private classes for individual students. I have hands-on experience in the development and operational side of software production, a passion for customer satisfaction and troubleshooting, and a proven ability to learn quickly and adjust to new environments.

I also have a valid American passport, which allows me to travel anywhere I won’t get shot on sight.”

I’ve always been a bit dubious about cover letters, by far one of the most onerous facets of unemployment — a near miss behind resume-writing, applying to jobs, and eating dry sourdough toast in one’s pajamas at four in the afternoon — because there is no part of the cover letter process that I haven’t been part of. I’ve read thousands of cover letters in my time on the hiring side, and written several hundred for myself and for others as part of my employment search and my stint as an employment specialist at Career Planning and Placement, that snappily titled employment office affiliated with the Eastman School of Music.

In general, cover letters are professional courtesies extended to employers, an extra measure by which they can reject you out of hand without ever having to come face to face with what might be too charming a personality to withstand in person. A good cover letter combines equal part professional chatter, self-marketing, good grammar, flawless spelling, and expression of a confident, yet charming and humorous personality.

Unless it’s for a financial institution, in which case the “charming,” “humorous,” and “personality” are all contra-indicated. Or Fry’s, in which case the grammar, spelling, self-marketing, and professional chatter can be removed as well.

“…a relict of the lately defunct Excite@Home, where I programmed software for monitoring services and servers in case they went boom. These monitors were obviously low-level code that resided directly on the machines themselves, sadly not scaleable to the more endemic problems that eventually destroyed the company.”

Out of all the requirements for a cover letter, it’s the last — the personality — that’s hardest to achieve. In the space of a single word, you can pop over the boundary from “confident” to “arrogant son of a flatulant monkey.” “Charming and humorous” can come across as “unprofessional and inappropriate.”

I can’t count the number of painfully dull cover letters that I’ve read over the course of my career. On the other hand, I’ve encountered maybe three cover letters that actually interested me enough to inspire me to an interview. Okay, so it’s usually very difficult to get an interview anyway, but a cover letter can inspire me to actually look at the resume with more than half a brain cell. If the base requirements for the job are there, I’ll call the person in.

You have to understand, I’m not a good judge of character. I like pretty much everybody. If Jeffrey Dahmer had made me laugh by cracking a joke when I passed him on the sidewalk, I would’ve thought he was a nice young man, too.

“Despite the lamentably irreverent tone of this email, allow me to assure you that I am in fact greatly interested in a position with your company. I have a great deal of respect for your company and its services, as evidenced by the vast amounts of money that have been seduced out of my wallet by them in the past.”

Back to the issue of cover letters. After having applied to several jobs using the tried and true formula of Professional No Personality, I finally snapped. “Why bother?” I asked myself. “Most cover letters never get read anyway. Most online applications aren’t ever processed. Why not indulge a little and write the way you are?”

Yeah.

There are some companies out there that aren’t going to call me in for interviews. At least I’ll know why.

“Also, despite the best efforts of Japanese parents and a formal education, I am possessed of a lively sense of humor. To wit: how many mice does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

Imagine though, just for a minute, that you could actually write an honest cover letter. Not the type of honesty that makes you look good, but the type that’s the absolute and unvarnished truth, the kind that lets you be completely frank and yet land you a job as well. A pipe dream, sure, but just think about that. No more anxiety about how you’re presenting yourself, no more worries about how the other person will perceive it, no more hiding the desperation of unemployment behind a veneer of shiny, attractive self-confidence.

Imagine being able to tell an employer exactly what you think.

And then, get this, manage to get hired anyway.

Some of you guys are thinking, gosh, four entries in five days, what the hell’s up with that? Leave for a few weeks and bang, great literature is born.

Yeah, well, (nudge), for those of you who weren’t in my notify list, (nudge), serves you right. (Nudge).

Moving on. . .

I was wandering the narrow passageway of my kitchen preparing my Saturday morning meal, when it occurred to me that toast plays a role in my life far out of proportion to its actual value. In the movie version of Annie the Musical, available on both VHS and DVD from your friendly neighborhood amazon.com web connection, plucky, lovable Orphan Annie jumps into the pool with crotchety, heart-of-gold Daddy Warbucks and attempts to soften his more tender sentiments towards his personal assistant, what’s-her-name. “She thinks you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread,” she tells him, much to his discomfiture.

“Sliced bread?” I used to think, every time I squirmed through this movie. “Why the hell sliced bread? Why not penicillin, or Teletubbies, or indoor plumbing? Why the hell am I even watching this? What I wouldn’t give for Orphan Annie to drown right now. C’mon, Orphan Annie. Drown. Drown. Drown. Drown. Drown. Dammit. She got out.”

That was until I started living the unemployed life in Redwood City, one block away from an Albertsons that glares polite daggers at a Safeway across the street.

Both stores are on the “wrong” side of the tracks, “wrong” being the side that I live on as opposed to the other side, where there are small, whimsically named stores that actually use the word “Boutique” in their signs, and the streets are paved with colorful, artistically layered bricks that are slippery and litigious when wet.

Of the two stores, Albertsons is more ghetto. Argue as I might with the Guy, there really is no getting away from the fact that my neighborhood runs between ghetto and pure blue collar; that is to say, by day it’s at the bottom of the hill where Professor Utonium and the Powerpuff Girls live, while by night, it’s a trolling ground for cop cars, though that could be partly the responsibility of the 24-hour doughnut shop down the block. (NB: Always thought the whole cops-and-doughnuts thing was an urban legend perpetuated by people who looked down on both cops and doughnuts and thought the best way to damn them both was to link them together. Who knew?)

Albertsons is more ghetto. It uses less lights — which I applaud, save electricity, all that — and less cashiers, (one, sometimes even two people on a busy night), and actually manages its inventory in the aisles as opposed to leaving it all locked away behind great metal swinging doors parked right between the meat and fish departments, if you’re willing to call a glass case and a short man in a greasy apron a “department.”

The worst thing about Albertsons is that they have a very poor selection of groceries. If I were in the market for a bucket of lard and burrito beans that make you pass gas on a regular, explosive basis, Albertsons would be the place to go. In the pages of Yuhri-cooking, however, farting and lard are not movers and shakers.

As it is, I usually make most of my grocery purchases at Safeway, where they carry brand names I actually recognize and groceries I actually use. Significant to this whole story is the fact that both Albertsons and Safeway carry Santa Rosa Sourdough Bread, pre-sliced, a great big massive lump of sourdough-y goodness that can be yours for only $2.39!

Sourdough bread is my personal equivalent of cocaine. At any given time there are two bags of bread on my kitchen counter: one nearing completion; another ready to go. Twice a week or so I make a trip to one or the other of the grocery stores to purchase my next bag.

My eating habits have been a source of constant conversation between my mother and her relatives over the years; during the period when most other children were busily launching their vegetables into Jackson Pollackian artistic renderings on kitchen walls, I was obsessively attempting to eat every non-animal green or orange thing in sight, part of my fierce ambition (mentioned in previous entries) to become a rabbit. There was another period of time where I would eat absolutely nothing but fruit in one form or another, while all other types of food were anathema.

At all times during my childhood, I had a strictly non-Japanese habit of eating everything separately, neatly dividing every possible divisible foodstuff into component parts and eating it independently from its fellows. This used to infuriate my mother, who would watch me painstakingly clean up my little palm-sized dish of pickled whatsit before even starting on my rice.

Japanese cooking is full of little dishes of little things that one is supposed to eat with the rice. The rice and the little things are intended to make a harmonious whole in one’s mouth. To put it in a western context, my eating habits were rather like requesting spaghetti and meatballs with the spaghetti, meatballs, and sauce all served in separate containers and eating each in turn without ever letting the three mix. My mother worried over me constantly, and there was many a meal that was destroyed by a battle of wills between the two of us, both yelling at the top of our lungs while my father and sister stoically ate what they could reach before taking refuge in the TV room.

Nowadays, it’s bread.

You realize of course that my roommate almost never eats sourdough toast. Each of those loaves weighs at least three pounds. Every week I managed to inhale approximately five pounds of toast, outside of any sourdough I manage to filch from bread baskets in restaurants I happen to visit with the Guy.

I’m starting to wonder if this might not be some sort of foreshadowing. I should start tracking the bread consumption trends across the world. Last night I had an ominous dream about alien body-eating jellyfish from outer space who descended on us en masse and started popping video store clerks as after-dinner mints. It’s possible that the dream was somehow related to the spicy Szechuan we had for dinner, but it would make some sort of cosmic sense if they were planning ahead by conditioning us to pre-stuff ourselves with sourdough, wouldn’t it? I mean, just look at what Stove Top is made out of.

Doesn’t it more sense than the idea that I might be some kind of crazed sourdough addict? Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?

The Guy consistently complains about the way that I portray him in my journal, as though I were in some way deliberately twisting facts to create an unflattering persona. I’ll admit that there is a certain amount of liberty to the conversations that I’ve transcribed for use in the journal; for instance, I normally don’t write conversations word for word, lacking the photographic memory that particular feat would require.

In the common way of things, I remember a conversation or an incident and sketch it as best as I can in my fickle memory. When I get back to the computer, I perform the online journalist’s version of reconstruction: without notes, without conscience, without help. Whatever eventually makes it to the Great Web is what lasts in the archive of the ages. That’s what’s going to be used as ammunition later in the game, should I need it, and he knows it.

Thus, the constant complaints that I misrepresent him. One vaguely misleading journal entry — two conversations that could be misinterpreted as having taken place as one — became the fodder for the entirety of his objections. Knowing perfectly well that, on the subject of my depictions of him, most of his arguments have the holding power of a wall of yogurt, he invariably retreats to that single instance and waves it triumphantly.

It serves him right, then, if he starts badgering me in my own room, within easy access to my own computer. My fingers are like the wind across the keyboard, and they take no prisoners.

Tonight…

The Guy was supposed to help me look for several game CDs that I’d suddenly discovered missing this afternoon. I stood by my bed, muttering; he peered at me and knocked me headlong into the bed.

I squawked and poked him — no smooching until those CDs are found, dammit — and he bounded off to tear my room apart.

“You pushed me,” I accused reproachfully.

“I didn’t push you. I caressed you.”

“You pushed me. I fell down.” I sat up as proof. Down, then up. I fell down. Now I was up. Voila.

“You have bad balance,” he said smugly.

I frowned. “No.”

The Guy was already giggling. More disturbingly, he started to do a little dance. “I rewrote history,” he congratulated himself.

I headed for the keyboard.

The Guy watched over my shoulder as I typed. He made little sputtering noises in my ear, like a tea kettle with a broken spout.

“You’re mean,” he whimpered.

“I’m not mean.” Tippety-tappety tip tap. (”Y-o-u h-a-v-e b-a-d b-a-l-a-n-c-e,” h-e s-a-i-d . . .)

“You’re mean,” he asserted sorrowfully. ” Little old women curl up and die because of the things you do.”

He eventually found one of my CDs, which he’d inadvertently left in the CD-ROM drive and transferred to another computer without bothering to plug in the drive to the new power source, requiring him to dismantle the computer in order to extract the disk.

He puffed up. “Any other problems you want solved? Small children executed?”

One of the other CDs lost was a disk full of pictures taken in Mauritius. He’d wanted me to send them to his brother in Ireland. No problem. If I knew what his brother’s address was.

“You know,” he said, methodically wrecking my orderly CD collection, “I asked you to do this many many moons ago. And yet, somehow . . .”

“Bite me.” I gently poked him in the ribs.

His eyes brightened. “Where?”

I frowned at him.

He started to chuckle. “And yet, somehow, I’m going to end up responsible.”

Not being able to find the pictures, we moved on to other things. The Guy hovered at my elbow while I typed; the case for the game Black & White was in my CD rack. He opened it. “Oh, look,” he fluted, showing me the CD inside. “Here it is.”

I gave it a cursory glance. “Yeah, because I put it there.”

Too late. The Guy was already doing a little dance, voice in squeaky falsetto. Obviously, he was laboring under the delusion that he was executing a satirical impression of the fragile flower of femininity that is yours truly. “‘Oooh, I can’t find it. I don’t know where it is.’”

He sounded like a stomped rat. I sniffed at him.

“I put it there,” I repeated, patiently. “I found it earlier and I put it there.”

“Yeah, right. You never write about those things. Why don’t you write about that?”

He was still doing his little dance. My fingertips on the keyboard were starting to hit the keys a little bit too hard; combined with the speed of my typing, it was beginning to sound like a machine gun was strafing the walls. Presenting the latest musical to hit Broadway: Valentine’s Day Massacre.

“Shut up,” I squalled.

The Guy wiggled happily. His subsonic voice was starting to attract bats, cats, and dogs all the way from Nevada. “‘Oooh, I couldn’t find it. Ooooh, there it is.’”

He came back later to watch me type some more. “Are you collecting evidence for your court case?”

(This is an entry about my trip to Mauritius. I know I promised to hook them all up together, but to be honest, I’m a lazy rat-bastard of a writer, and I’m letting things slide. It occurs to me that if I really want things to be posted at all, I should post them as I get to them. So. This is about Mauritius. Be warned.)

I started noticing it on the third day.

I wasn’t getting bit.

All around me, the foreigners — the Guy, his brother, his sister-in-law — were scratching desperately at each other. In the Super-U, a massive air-conditioned supermarket that turned into our Mecca in Grand Baie, requiring a daily pilgrimage and dispensation of cash at 30 rupees a dollar, they would take turns hovering wistfully in front of the anti-bug display. Every bug repellent and anti-itch creme there, they bought. Citronella sprays and citronella candles all made their way into the grocery carts. Vape, a sweet-smelling coil of mosquito repelling incense put out by the Japanese, (those clever Japanese!) was bought by the pound. Leaving the Super-U the second day of our stay, Lydia — the Guy’s sister-in-law — was stopped by a tired-looking white woman in a mumu and asked something in French.

“I don’t know what she said,” Lydia said uncertainly, when we arrived to rescued her.

“She wants to know if that stuff works,” her husband told her, gesturing to the citronella spray she was clutching possessively in one hand.

“Oh. — Je ne sais pas,” she told the woman, adding helplessly in English, “Please work.”

And I wasn’t getting bit.

On the fourth day, I commented on the fact. “I feel sort of guilty,” I said, watching In-Law Lydia squeezing out a tube of anti-itch creme onto the welts covering her legs. “I don’t seem to be getting bit. It’s weird. Usually I’m the first one they come to; I can’t tell if I should be offended or relieved.”

“Relieved,” Lydia said, with the dark shadows under her eyes. “I can’t sleep because I’m itching so much.”

“Do you suppose they just don’t like Japanese food here?” I asked, anxiously. “I feel sort of left out.”

She smiled wanely. “They like Irish just fine.”

“Weirdo,” the Guy muttered from his Gameboy, and scratched absently at a growing sore on his arm where a mosquito had managed to reach bone marrow.

A long while back, my sister and her boyfriend had pressured us to purchase an herbal mosquito repellent called “Green Ban” from Australia. In the name of ‘Better Safe than Sorry,’ I lathered it on my arms and legs the second we passed mid-afternoon. We lauded the benefits of the concoction to all the Guy’s relatives, who watched me continue to be unbitten with something approaching awe. “Maybe Mauritian mosquitoes just don’t like the way my blood smells?” I suggested.

The Guy’s mother, in a crafty, absent-minded way, borrowed the Green Ban and disappeared with it altogether. It was days before we retrieved it from her. “Oops,” she said, when questioned on it; her eyes opened wide and she giggled. “I sink I leave at Veggie Tombeau.”

That night I got bit for the first time. I crouched in front of the rotating fan and watched a thumbnail-sized mosquito land on my hand. It might have been male or female; I didn’t give it time to sort out its gender issues. Slapping at mosquitoes has become a reflexive response, and before my conscious mind had time to register that it was in fact a bloodsucker, my other hand was already sending it to the big blood bank in the sky.

Me: “There’s a black thing on my–” slap “–ow!”

My Left Hand: “Son of a bitch!”

My Right Hand: “You’re welcome.”

My brain: “What just happened?”

A tiny white bump grew in the middle of the big red welt I made on my other hand. Having gotten initiated to the Company of the Bit, I promptly celebrated my new association.

“FUCK.”

I waved the carcass of my first kill between thumb and forefinger, feeling as though it should be mounted somehow, and all within earshot gathered to admire the size of it.

Mauritius, it turned out, was a little out of the common way in its mosquito development. Among the rare birds and foliage that it produced, it also happened to have developed a special model of mosquito: the stealth mosquito, capable of silent flight and non-intrusive vampirism. It’s amazing how much fear is taken out of the whole mosquito experience if one can’t hear them coming. It occurred to me that I hadn’t gotten malaria pills before leaving for Mauritius; I crossed my fingers and relied on the lack of bites to keep me from catching anything dangerously related to dysentary. Even though there was some water available for the flushing of toilets, it wasn’t meant to be used every time.

“You can’t get AIDS from mosquito bites,” I told the Guy in exasperation, when he threatened to come down with the disease then and there.

He eyed me with skepticism. “Are you sure?” he demanded. “Are you sure sure?”

“It’s impossible,” I said, firmly.

“Sure,” he grumped. “Say that again when I’m dead.”

I was walking through downtown Redwood City — all four blocks of it — on Monday, and suddenly realized that I needed to cut my hair. That’s the way it happens sometimes; you’re doing something harmless like finishing a meal or tying tin cans to a puppy, and bang, all at once, you want to do something life-changing, or at the very least mutilating, to your personal appearance.

Maybe it’s just me.

So I was walking through downtown Redwood City, and I decided to get my hair cut. “The very next place I pass,” I told my companions, the Norwegian and Vak. Fate, who has a sense of humor, decreed that the next hair cutting place should be a little hole in the wall on Broadway, near the “Sushi by the Pound” place. Tara observed a while back that I seemed to have luck with little holes in the wall when it came to my hair. Puffed up by self-importance and that particular piece of dangerous flattery, I walked in.

This is why today, four days after the haircut, I look like a geriatric, angry budgie. Lucky me.

I’m not going to talk all that much about the haircut, which wasn’t fine, or the nice lady who cut my hair, who was, okay, nice, but no graduate from Vidal Sassoon if you get my drift. I will mention that she used a neat pair of scissors with gold handles that looked like they had made it through both World Wars and were worth several thousand dollars on eBay. None of that seems particularly important and while I’m sure you’d enjoy the story — which I’ll tell to anybody who asks, and don’t you wish you knew me in person? — it just seems to pale besides the fact that at this point in time, with the exception of the whole Being Asian thing, I could march into any mullet-afflicted trailer in the state of Alabama, crawl into bed with any of the residents, and be accepted as a potential breeder.

Flamingo sent out emails today announcing that she’s now employed, which picks up my spirits enormously. In terms of vicarious living, I’m one of the past masters of confiscating others’ joys for my own; it comes of being a musician and never having the time to live a life that actually involved, well, living.

On the home front, I’m heartily sick of being unemployed. On Wednesday I woke up late, and at three o’clock I wandered out of my room — for the first time that day — in order to make breakfast. At some point in time, long before we’d moved in, some sadist had attached a full-length mirror on my door. I came back with my nutritious breakfast of sourdough toast and cheetos, and was brought up short by my own reflection.

Y’all, it was like coming face to face with the leviathan from the laundry room lagoon.

Item: One pair of sweatpants, mostly black, with holes attached. Very much in need of washing. Item: One Hawaii T-shirt, backwards, with tag showing. Also very much in need of washing. (Note to self: When was last time this T-shirt was removed? Wasn’t I wearing an undershirt at one point?) Item: Two socks from different sets, one white, one not-so-white. One sock rolled over the hem of sweatpants because apparently this is easier way to don socks when unemployed and not giving a damn about personal appearance. Both socks unreasonably clean. Item: Hair. Oy, eighties flashback. Hairbrush has obviously not been in vicinity for very long time. Item: No glasses. No wonder everything seemed blurry. How long ago did we last see our glasses?

I’m tired of being unemployed. I don’t think I’m going to make it through a long unemployment, either. I need help, somebody. Send beauty care supplies. Note to self. Find job.

In point of fact, I’ve narrowed down my list of Places I’d Like To Work. Initially, it started out fairly simple.

Ahem.

Places I’d like to work:

Anywhere.

Now that I’ve had some time to really look at companies though, I’ve narrowed it down to a list of places I really don’t want to work — Exxon is on that list, for instance, as is McDonalds — and a list of companies I’d give my eyeteeth – (Note to self: What the hell are eyeteeth? Look up in dictionary sometime) — to work at.

So, if anybody out there works for the following companies, please feel free to inspect my resume and give me a call. I promise I’ll be your ultimate employee. I’ll be cheerful, helpful, intelligent, hard-working, entertaining, service-oriented, and friendly. I’ll get emotionally attached to the company and develop ridiculous loyalties to business plans, no matter how irrational or inane.

I specialize in troubleshooting and developing good relationships and lines of communication. I can speak English, simultaneously translate Canadian to American, and can write in all three languages with varying degrees of fluency. I’ve programmed, managed projects, reviewed software, done release engineering, trained, edited, published, tested, deployed, and designed. For a new job, I’ll do all that and more.

I’ll even bathe and put on clean clothes. And get a new haircut from someplace that costs more than Supercuts. Really, what more could you ask for in an employee?

Tara’s mother was in town on Thursday, and Tara — you remember her, right? — wanted to redecorate her bathroom. That is to say, she wanted to repaint it, which entailed stripping the walls. Somewhere along the line, stripping the wallpaper off the walls led to taking the cabinets out of the room, and taking the cabinets out of the room led to replacing the tiles, and replacing the tiles led to removing the toilet, and. . .

. . . we all see where this is heading, don’t we? I poked my head in the bathroom on Thursday, and all it was was four bare, plaster-patched walls and a hole in the ground. Oh, and some little plumbing shiny metal things poking out of the far wall.

It had only been a couple of months ago that she’d finished redecorating the other large bathroom down the hall in her new house. I even helped her paint.

“I asked her what she’d do when she finished redecorating all the rooms in the house,” I told her husband at dinner.

Tara’s mom grinned. “I told her, you start all over.”

Remington flinched a bit, I think.

“You should consider yourself lucky that it’s just the house she wants to remake in her image of perfection,” I pointed out to Remington. “It could very well have been you that she decided to remodel.”

Remington exchanged a look with his mother-in-law; the both of them grinned, a secret little grin that gives evidence that this pair, at least, are tuned into the same channel. I think the grin meant, what makes you think that she didn’t? What he actually said was, “You don’t think I’m perfect already?”

Anyway, Tara wanted to redecorate her bathroom. I went with her to look at things and make supremely unhelpful comments about ugly things.

That’s all.

In the years between middle school and graduate school, I was a pilgrim on the great slopes of sarcasmus, a traveller over an ascending road that many disenfranchised, post-modern, disillusioned specimens of teenage-hood have hiked before me. In middle school, I could raise welts on thinner skins with a sentence. In high school, I could flay the top two epidural layers off any target in under a minute. In college, I annihilated freshmen with a choice word or even, sometimes, a blink. I was a master of the art. I shrivelled souls into tiny cumin seeds.

Until one day, when I became so sarcastic, I wasn’t anymore.

I can’t even remember the conversation clearly. I was talking to a freshman at the time, a cheerful youngster who really didn’t know much better. It was something stupid, I think; something about the late-night cafe, which provided deep-fried everything and pizza for those who were lagging behind in gaining their freshman ten. Their daily menu consisted of cheese pizza, fried cheese sticks, french fries, and onion rings. If there happened to be anything else in the freezer, that would also be fried by request.

“Do you think they’ll have french fries tonight again?” he might have asked.

“I don’t think so,” I might have replied. “They never serve french fries.”

“That’s not true,” he might have argued. “They served me french fries last night.”

At which point, I’m fairly sure I said, “Dude. I was being sarcastic.”

Out of the entire conversation, this is the part that I remember most clearly. He looked at me with sympathy, patted me kindly on the shoulder, and said, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but . . . you’re not very good at being sarcastic, Yuhri.”

Sarcasm is an art that requires a sense of the dramatic. To be successfully — or stereotypically — sarcastic requires an ability to overact. “Nooooo,” I should have said, if I had truly thrown myself into the role. The ‘O’ in ‘No’ would have dragged out for a city block, on a descending note accompanied by a look of profound exasperation. All things are exasperating to the Sarcastic. Rolled eyes help in conveying this overwhelming annoyance with the world. “They neeeeeeeeeh-ver serve fried food.”

Elongated vowels are important in sarcasm; likewise, the emphasis on negatives. Nooooooooh. Neeeeeeeeh-ver. Noooooah-t.

What happened that night opened my eyes to a whole new realm of sarcasm: the Sarcasm of the Elite, also known as “dry wit.” Where sarcasm itself is the property of slovenly dressed teenagers who smoke and have poor posture, dry wit elevates one to the world of grown-ups, putting one on a level with great minds like the Algonquin Round Table.

Dry wit is when one says exactly what one would have said were one being sarcastic, only without the sarcastic tone.

For instance.

Freshman: “Do you think they’re serving french fries tonight again?”

Me: “No. I don’t think the cafe likes to fry things.”

Freshman: “But I had french fries yesterday.”

Me: “Are you sure?”

Freshman: “Like, yeee-ah-uh.”

Me: “How very peculiar.”

Freshman: “Were you kidding about the cafe and the frying thing?”

Me: “No.”

Freshman: “You’re pretty dumb for a senior, aren’t you?”

The difficulty with dry wit is that occasionally, if one isn’t careful, it could lead to terrible, good-intentioned mistakes being made. An unwary dry wit could get a reputation for being something of a nincompoop, particularly if said wit is in a position of power. The new Director of my college was possessed of a dry wit, which — I’m told through the grapevine — led to the acquisition of forty American Sign Language manuals. Apparently, someone made a sarcastic suggestion that the school teach the vocalists sign language just to get them shut up once in a while. He allegedly responded with a whimsical, “Good idea. Let’s bill them to the Choral Department and call them ‘Vocal Rest Facilitators.’”

I bet the Voice Faculty got the joke.

The Guy is worried about my propensity for biting the things I love.

The people I love.

No, sorry, not my family. People outside my family.

Not friends.

Specifically, the Guy is worried about my propensity for biting, well, him.

(Get your mind out of the gutter.)

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and since I’ve never had a boyfriend before, I can’t tell if it’s a Thing that’s unique solely to me, or if it’s somehow related to the whole being-in-love experience. The only thing that I’m perfectly sure of is that when I’m around the Guy, my teeth itch. Not in the unpleasant, ‘I Hate You, You Vaginal Blood Clot on the Sanitary Pad of Humanity’ way, mind you. It’s more in the ‘Gosh I’m Happy, Let’s Gnaw on Him’ way.

I suspect that there are a lot of things about me that set off his self-preservation alarms, but none of them gets quite so noisy a claxon as this particular habit. Unless, that is, it’s that other urge I have to tickle him while he’s driving on the freeway.

If he weren’t stronger than I am and prone to running away shrieking like a little girl every time I eye his arms — he persists on wearing short sleeves, and is that my fault? — I suspect that at this point in our relationship his arms would be covered with perfect little semicircle bruises from where I’ve been gnawing on him. I have no idea why I have this urge. This is a normal thing, right? Women just like to do that sort of thing, right? This isn’t a result of having read the occasional vampire mystery novel and not eating beef regularly, right? This is a biological imperative passed down through the ages from monogamous women who used to feel the need to mark their men, right?

Hm. It’s starting to disturb me, too.

Dating is full of these little social traps that I would probably never fall into if I weren’t dating. For instance, how does one introduce one’s boyfriend at a party where he doesn’t know anybody? As “my boyfriend”? Or by his name? Is one supposed to get jealous if he looks at other women? Is it inappropriate to point out beautiful women to him? Is it inappropriate to admire a random man who is aesthetically pleasing in his presence? Should I demand jewelry? What if I don’t like jewelry? Should he be buying me flowers at Costco when I’m the one who owns the membership?

Also, one doesn’t have the following sorts of conversations when one isn’t dating.

“I love you. You’re like that poppy plastic packing material you use for fragile things.”

“. . .”

“You’re not going to say thank you?”

“I’m not sure. I’m trying to figure out if that was a compliment.”

“It was.”

“Does that mean I’m round? Or that I’m comforting?”

Communication is suddenly a big thing. The Guy, being considerate, always asks me if he’s attentive enough, or around enough, or if we go out enough. It never occurs to me that he might not be doing everything exactly right. What the hell do I have to compare with? In the meantime, I, being an egotist, (not to be confused with “egoist”), assume that I’m doing everything perfectly and . . . wait. It just hit me. When he asks me those questions, is that a hint for me to ask the same thing back so he can answer in the negative?

Make note: ask the Guy.

On top of that, there’s the morbid fear of being cute, God forbid, something that would make my friends laugh for years. I used to watch sitcoms and be utterly disgusted by the squeaky cuteness of couples. (”No, you hang up.” — “No, you hang up.” — “You first.” — “No, you first.”)

Now I find myself doing the exact same thing with the Guy.

“Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

pause

“Hang up.”

“No, you hang up.”

“You hang up first.”

“Okay.”

click.

Isn’t it nauseating?

My balcony has become a graveyard for dead plants.

A few weeks back, the Guy and I went out and saw Brotherhood of the Wolf, which is a French action flick. NPR did an interview about it with the director, who claimed that it would open up a whole new genre; the French are stereotypically artistic with their films, so he said that he was getting a lot of grief from the French critics about having made an action movie “like the Americans do.” He told NPR’s interviewer, in polite language, that the French critics could shove it. After all, there were lines all around the movie theatres in France of people waiting to buy tickets to see this film. The critics could say anything they liked: he would laugh all the way to the bank, thank you very much.

Flamingo wrote to me several times, reminding me about this film. “Every time I see a preview for it,” she told me, “I think, ‘Yuhri!’ I have no idea why.”

So, I saw it. It was fun. It was a little artsy with the slow-motion camera shots, (very nice when done once for dramatic effect. After the ninth time, it gets a little old.) It’s also sadly obvious that French directors don’t have much experience with filming martial art combat scenes. But hey, it was a relatively entertaining couple of hours. I’m not complaining.

Here’s what gets me. During the NPR interview, the director was commenting about the Mark Dacascos, (aka Eric Draven from the TV series “The Crow: Stairway to Heaven”), the Hawaiian who was cast to play Mani. Mani was the Native American Indian Tonto sidekick of the main character, Gregoire de Fronsac. (According to his bio on imdb, Dacascos is mixed Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, Irish, and Japanese. Interesting to know. To make one Native American: blend equal parts . . . .) He did some real ass-whupping in the film, which isn’t spoiler information because after all, the dude is a kung-fu champion and who the hell knew that Native Americans knew kung-fu?.

Back to the NPR interview. The director was commenting that Mani represented the Eastern harmony with Mother Nature, where the Gregoire de Fronsac was supposed to represent the Western philosophy of cold hard science.

Guess which character dies before the end of the movie.

So let’s bring this back to me and my balcony.

Somewhere along the line, Asians — at least my type of Asian, the Japanese-Asian — has been associated with gardening. Bonsai, Japanese gardens, flower arranging, yada yada yada. It’s one of those things that I’m apparently expected to know, automatically. Plants are supposed to sprout spontaneously in my footsteps. My mother, never one to swim against the stream, obligingly perpetuates this stereotype by having the mutant green thumb. She could spit genetically altered sterile apple seeds onto a concrete mixer and have orchards in a week.

Somewhere deep inside my little black heart, I have the vague feeling that I’m supposed to be adequate with the whole Nature Nurture Nutter thing as well. Every time I wander by a nursery, I buy something fragile, vulnerable, and green. I buy a little pot to put it in. I decorate a window sill or a tabletop, and at some point, inevitably, it gets moved out to the balcony.

With the rest of the dead things.

How is it possible that with all these good intentions, this genetic predisposition towards raising little sprouts into magnificent flora and fauna, this ancestral inheritance and inclination towards aesthetic arrangement of the natural world, I’ve somehow become like George Dubya Bush and civil liberties: fatal?

“What’s that called, that place they sell plants?” I asked the Guy, who was busily Lolling. “Greenery? Greeneries?”

Ha. This’ll show him.