faulty vision

In the last two days, every green and fecund thing in the state of California has released its pollen in an orgy of priapic ecstacy, and as a result, hay fever has taken hold of everything above my neck. My eyes are puffy and watery, my vision is blurred, my head feels swollen, my nose is stuffed and itching, and I’m not positive — I haven’t had the nerve to verify — but I think it’s possible that my left ear has fallen off.

Hay fever is one of those things that I conveniently forget during the fall and winter, when the pollen count is low and I can actually breathe. Selective denial is perfectly in line with my worldview; I maintain equanimity and harmony through the excision of unhappy memories. It’s always a shock at the beginning of the pollen season when I’m struck down by my own histamine production, and I flail for an astonished, self-pitying, miserable few days before I dimly recall a certain familiarity in the proceedings.

While I am gratified by my body’s prompt leap to the defences at the lasciviousness of the California ragweed — taking lessons from Bush administration and its attempt to expel the obscenities of both Janet Jackson nipples and gay marriage in a torrent of nasal pus — I could wish that it was a little more selective in its objects of offense. It is possible that there are cases out there of people who have died due to overdoses of ragweed pollen or that ruthless killer, Dactylis glomerata, known by its street name, “Variegated Orchard Grass.” If so, I haven’t heard of it. In general, I would be far more impressed by my body’s immune system if it reacted negatively to actual imminent death: attacking pit bulls, plummeting airplanes, black ice, that sort of thing. It would be nice to get a little sneeze warning system going, my body’s way of whispering, “I say old bean, you might not want to stick your fork in that socket. What I mean to say is, it’s the little sort of something almost guaranteed to give you the pip, what?”

My sister didn’t get the job in Yosemite, I’m sorry to say; she called me yesterday afternoon, vaguely mournful, to tell me the bad news. It’s unfortunate. While it’s true that I’m her sister and therefore afflicted with a certain measure of partiality for her, I think I can safely say — with no bias whatsoever — that she would have been excellent for the position. What was it? Okay, I admit, I’m not really sure. It’s possible that it’s the educator’s position she was talking about six months ago. “Educate?”

“Campers. Tourists. You know.”

“Educate them in what?”

“Why it’s not a good idea for little Billy to put a peanut between his lips and try to feed it to a bear?”

In the meantime however, she’s started applying to other jobs. She called me at work a few days ago in a highly agitated state to tell me about her experience with one of them. “They needed a drug test.”

“Crap,” said I, loyal sister that I am. “You failed again?”

Whether she had failed or not — she thought not — wasn’t the issue, as it happened. The point was that she had to go in to take a drug test. “They gave me a cup and there was a line on it, and she told me to pee in it up to the line.” My sister has no problem with the word ‘pee.’ “So I took it into the bathroom and I peed in it, and — you can’t see how much you’ve peed into the cup if you’re peeing in it, so I found out when I was done that I’d gone over the line by about double. I just figured they could dump out what they didn’t need. Better too much than too little.”

Reasonable. I made encouraging noises and started work on an e-mail to send a coworker.

“So the lady told me to come out when I was done, so I came out carrying this cup of pee without any lid on it, and right outside the door there was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.”

Pause for a moment. Picture this. My sister. Cup of pee. Beautiful man. This is obviously not a story that will end well.

“You spilled pee on the beautiful man,” I said flatly.

“He smiled at me,” she said. “He was a beautiful man with a beautiful smile, and he smiled at me and said, ‘Hello,’ and I was so flustered because he was really, really– oh my God, Yuhri, he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and I was carrying a cup of pee. I was so flustered — I’m still shaking — so I mumbled something back at him and I turned to go to the desk and turn over my pee, and ….”

“You spilled pee on the beautiful man!”

“Somehow when I turned my right foot sort of stayed where it was or it folded or something, and I fell flat on my face on the cup of pee. It didn’t have a lid on it.”

She did not spill pee on the beautiful man. “You spilled pee on yourself.”

“All over my arm,” she said mournfully. “And the guy came rushing up and was like, all, ‘are you okay?’ and the lady at the desk came out and was all, ‘did you hurt yourself?’ And meanwhile I’ve splashed pee all over my arm and I’m totally red-faced because, jeez, this guy is, I swear, the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen and I’ve just SPILLED PEE ON MYSELF–”

However, all’s well that ends well. She’d spilled out just enough pee that the level of pee in the cup was now perfectly aligned with the line marked on the inside of the cup. She had enough pee.

Isn’t it nice how the universe makes sure everything works out for the best?

“Oh God,” wailed my sister. “He was gorgeous! Gorgeous! And now he thinks I’m this spastic blubbering idiot!”

“You’ll be the Pee Girl forever,” I congratulated. “He’ll go home and tell all his beautiful male friends about this clumsy chick and her cup of pee. You’ll be a legend. Cool. He’ll never forget you.”

She made a whining noise and hung up on me.

I reviewed the e-mail I was typing to my coworker, carefully corrected the phrase, ‘provide support for the beautiful pee,’ and went on with my day.

My sister called me on Saturday to ask me about professional etiquette in regards to a job she’s interested in, and after we’d settled that subject, we moved onto the issue of my wedding registry, which is in week two of its disembowlment with nary a recovery in sight.

I had to explain to her what I’d done, as she hadn’t had a chance to go online and read the damage. When the narrative was finished there was a small silence on the phone, as though she were picking her words with care — although that couldn’t possibly have been the actual case because, come on, my family. What she finally ended up saying was, “You realize how 7-year old that sounds?”

Yes. Yes, I do. Thanks.

“Don’t mention it.”

“–But please. It was Mom. Tell me she’s never turned you into a raving idiot. And did you hear what she said to me?”

My sister admitted that she had heard, in that sympathetic and resigned way that sisters use when they, like you, still live under the manipulative thumb of an evil troll woman a pair of chopsticks could snap in half. “I put my head in my hands and was, like, ‘I can’t believe you said that.’ But, you know–”

“–Mom,” we said together in unison. We understood each other.

I mused, “I wonder which is worse? Jewish guilt or Japanese guilt?”

“Asian guilt,” Sako said instantly. She’s been living at home for the last month while she completes another class in her ongoing, 20-year Bachelor of Science program at University of Washington. “Turns out my advisor’s husband is half-Chinese half-Jewish. I went into her office and sat down on her chair and said ‘You have to help me, my mother is driving me insane,’ and she said, ‘Oh my God, I know exactly what you mean.’ She says she knew exactly how I felt because her husband was half and half. And I asked her which was worse, and she said it was definitely the Asian guilt, hands down.”

I felt so proud. Go, my peeps. Again.

To those who have been offering advice and encouragement on how to handle a mad maternal unit, I appreciate it. She called me last night to tell me that my grandmother had finished the calligraphy on the backs of the wedding favors she’s bringing from Japan: “Ken, Wa, Fu,” which literally translates to “Health, Harmony, Prosperity,” the three ingredients of happiness.

“She was up until three a.m. to writing them,” Mom said. “It taking her long time, but they are all finish. She says, maybe not so good writing, but you know, she getting old.”

Mom comes by it honestly, I suppose. I can’t wait until I have children I can wrack with pangs of agonizing remorse. It’s important for children to learn their cultural traditions. Guilt.

With a side of parricide.

The Guy’s wedding ring came in the mail a several days ago. I ordered it one night, having been reminded by some chance comment that a wedding ring is, in most cases, a useful accessory to a wedding.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, feel free to take a look. It’s titanium and platinum, and is inscribed inside with, ‘”I have spread my dreams under your feet.” – W.B. Yeats.’

I’ll give you a moment to recover.

Yes, it is a lovely sentiment. Yeats, I learned, is one of the Guy’s favorites. It’s a beautiful line, and a spectacularly deceptive one. Neither of us is romantic, or at least not successfully so, and it might have been more appropriate to inscribe the thing with a line of ingredients off a Cheetos bag, or an “If found, return to–.” However, I was planning ahead. It was with images of our children eventually reading that inscription and deceiving themselves that before they came along, their parents once had a life full of romance and sweet loving and, you know, joy, that I selected it. Bring on the guilt. My people plan ahead.

As I was saying, the wedding ring arrived several days ago at my workplace, and after I and all my coworkers had inspected it, I brought it home to show the Guy. He was very excited. He took the little plastic bag out of the little silver mesh bag, and he took the ring out of the little plastic bag, and he put the ring on his finger . . . and we found out that we’d ordered it a little big.

Well, okay. Fuck.

While I methodically bashed my head on the dining room table, the Guy experimented. He put it on and tugged it off, put it on and tugged it off, put it on and tugged it off–

“Stop that!”

–he put it on and tugged it off, then curled his fingers up and practiced typing. “It feels weird,” he announced.

“So take it off,” I said in a muffled voice. My face was still buried in the table.

The Guy, however, wanted to keep it on. “Just to see,” he said. He wore it for an hour. And then another hour. And at the end of the second hour, he scampered to where I was sitting on the couch and showed me, with great pride, how his finger had puffed up like a massive, engorged sausage so his ring would stay on.

He was very proud. “Do you want to wear it all night?” I asked, burying my face in the couch.

He did. He wore it while working online, pausing every few moments to starfish his hand under the lamp. “See?” He wore it while brushing his teeth, pausing every few moments to wave his finger in front of my face. “Shee? Shee?” He wore it to bed, and prodded me in the ribs to show me his hand. “See? See? Look! Look!”

I looked. I complimented. And then, because I really am not a romantic — though I really, really wish I was — I fell asleep.

The next morning, the Guy woke me up with his shrieking. The ring had stayed on through the night; it was now fitting perfectly. However, when he removed it, he found that the skin beneath the ring had gone white and moist. He was convinced his finger was going to turn gangrenous and fall off. “Look!” he wailed, trailing me around the apartment with the ring in one hand and the offending finger waving about with the other. “Look! You’re trying to kill me! This is what marriage is to you? It cut off all the circulation to my finger! It’s puffed up like a giant pickle! I’m going to be scarred for life. For life!”

It was useless to explain to him that the ring was just wide and had trapped moisture under it. He was still chirping tragically when I left for work.

…and that, I thought, was that. I went online at work to investigate ring resizing options and learned that titanium is an inconveniently difficult metal to negotiate. When I came home, I found the ring in its little plastic baggie in its little silver mesh bag, neatly tied with silver ribbon, on the keyboard of my laptop.

“Cute,” I thought, tossed it in its Fedex bag, and thought no more about it.

Except that night when the Guy came home, he demanded to know where his ring was and went rooting through my pile o’wedding crap to find it. He bore it off with him like a paranoid chipmunk convinced people are after his mouthful of peanuts. A few minutes later, he reappeared with it on his finger, unbearably smug. He wore it all evening. He wore it to bed. He woke up the next morning and wailed over his finger.

Lather. Rinse.

Repeat.

This is the way it has been for the last few days; there is no talk of resizing the ring now, as he is convinced that it fits perfectly — and, in fact, it sort of does, after his finger has had enough time to grow accustomed to the ring’s presence and (I’m convinced) expand to fit it. Some sort of psychosomatic response, I suppose: wish fulfillment. At any rate, that’s one more thing completed. Now all he needs is a tuxedo.

One night while I was watching TV, he trotted up to me and demanded that I put it on his finger. “Just to practice,” he said. Only dimly aware of the interruption, I slid it haphazardly onto the digit he offered, my gaze still glued to the television set.

“Goddamnit,” I swore at the TV. “Why’d they do that?”

The Guy looked down at his beringed finger and drooped pathetically. “That wasn’t romantic,” he said in a small, sad voice, and drifted away.

I love this man. He makes me laugh. I really have spread my dreams beneath his feet.

And what the hell are in Cheetos, anyway?

Flamingo gave me an interesting link the other day.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Wide disparities in income still exist between white men and women, especially women of racial minorities, a report released Tuesday showed.

The wage gap between Asian-American women and white men, however, isn’t as pronounced as that of other women workers, and Asian-American women are likely to earn more than other women, according to “The Status of Women in the United States,” published by the non-profit Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Asian-American women earned an average of $33,100 in 1999, the most recent year measured, compared with $44,200 for white men and $30,900 for white women, making them the most highly paid female subgroup.

For the rest of the article, see here. For those of you who are interested, the entire report is available at the Institute of Women’s Policy Research. (See the Full Report in PDF format.)

Color me — hah! — surprised, though not about the gap between male and female wages. Certainly I’m cynical enough that it came as no shock that that particular disparity, even after all our so-called progress, is a 25% gap. What I’m unaccountably impressed with is that the breakdown includes race, and that for a change, a minority group has out-earned the so-called majority. For that matter, it’s my minority group.

Go, peeps.

Yes, I should be ashamed that this particular fact gives me pride. It’s not an accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination, nor does it ameliorate the staggering injustice of the massive, massive wage gap between one gender and another. I should be ashamed, but I’m honest enough to admit that I’m not. Why should I be? Asian women are kicking some booty. I’m down with that.

Here in the Bay Area, a large proportion of the women in high tech are Asian, mostly of Chinese and Indian stock, though there’re plenty of other nationalities represented amongst them, Japanese being one of the more minor ones. I’m pretty sure that it’s us highly-paid, well-educated Asian tech women who are singlehandedly tipping the scales in women’s favor, because it sure as hell isn’t young black women in CEO positions across the country, or Japanese chicks winning Oscars and pulling in six figure salaries, or Native American women being voted into high-profile public office. I can give you one example of a Japanese chick winning an Oscar. Someone else provide examples of the other two. Anyone? Anyone?

Okay. Yeah. Long way to go. You know how I’ll measure when progress no longer needs to be made? When you’re never again asked, “Give me one example of….”

Jokes about feng shui aside, ever since I’ve started working here, there’s been a metal screw dangling from the ceiling, right over my coworker’s head. This is not an insignificant screw, mind you. It’s the length of a grown man’s arm, for one thing, and it’s solid steel, and it’s Dangling From The Ceiling. The only reason I call it a screw and not a fucking big pipe is that it’s got threads on it.

The three women in this block of cubes have been complaining about this pipe for the last two years; it’s become her own personal Screw of Damocles. We’ve taken to joking that our chief executives have buttons in their office that they can push to make those things drop on the heads of troublemakers; the other dangerously dangling pipe is right over the head of one of our more, shall we say, difficult engineers.

Today — CLANG!! — it fell. Splut. Came down like a javelin, straight for her desk. Smashed a gaping hole through her keyboard. Scared the crap out of everybody.

…except her. She wasn’t in her chair. She’d already gone home.

Much agitation ensued. The office manager came around the corner and gaped up at the pipes, while we jabbered excitedly.

“We’ve been complaining about this for two years!”

“–trying to KILL us.”

“Where the hell’s OSHA?”

“You should get your money back from that feng shui expert of yours,” I told the Office Manager.

“No! Why?” The thought astonished her. “The feng shui worked! She wasn’t in her chair!”

Personally, I’ve got to wonder about the talents of a feng shui expert who comes in and plants stuffed peacocks around the office, but neglects to notice the bad chi of a spontaneous trephination.

So in a fit of rage the other day, I deleted most of my wedding registry.

Oops.

My mother has a talent for pissing me off that is unsurpassed in Nature. I can only assume that 30 years of observing this particular monkey has given her a Goodallian sense for provocation. It’s rare that I get angry, and rarer still that I get angry enough to be completely irrational. The random acts of idiocy I perform in my daily life are the acts of a mature, self-aware human being; the things my maternally-inspired rage prompt me to do have their origins in childhood, an untherapeutic regression into the worst excesses of my youth.

It was my sister who made the phone call from Seattle. My cell phone registered her name in the caller ID, and I picked it up without any of the normal precautions I take before talking with my mother.

“Hey,” she said. “Mom wants to talk to you.”

There was a rustle. Then, Mom.

“Yuuuuhri.” This should have been a sign right there. The more ‘oooh’ sound there is in her pronounciation of my name, the more pissed off or irritated I’m going to be. “Yuuuuuuuuhri. Your register, it is so materialistic. You register for too much. People will thinking you for being greedy. It is so expensive. Why you registering so much? You not having room in your apartment. You should go change before people seeing.”

“–which is ridiculous,” Tara told me last night. “My mom looked at the list and was saying, ‘Yuhri forgot to register for this, and this, and this, and this, and this–’”

“–and your list wasn’t too long,” my ex-roommate protested as well. “I looked at it and it was tiny. It only had, like, six things on it.”

Unfortunately, this was later. At the time, all I was aware of was a sudden boiling sensation behind my eyeballs. I gritted my teeth. “It’s not too much, Mom. I went with friends, and I registered for stuff I needed.”

“But it is so much, I have shocking.” Her entire conversation was in italics. She heaved a heavy sigh, prompted by who knows what evil genius; it was just what I needed to be tipped over the edge of maturity back into the thrashing, vengeful abyss of adolescence. “Maybe you younger people, it is different. I know what register for. When I am register when I get married, I am not registering so materials and greedy.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll delete my registries.”

“Now wait,” said my coworkers, when I reached this point in my story. “How does that make any sense? She’d win if you deleted your registries. We’d have gone online and added more stuff.”

“You have to understand the way I was thinking,” I explained, “which is that I wasn’t.”

Life from the 7-year old’s perspective isn’t the same as life from the 30-year old’s perspective. If you’ve ever seen A Christmas Story or been younger than, well, 20, you know what it’s like. The 7-year old imagines wild thoughts of long-term punishment, where the parent is reduced to remorseful tears because washing her child’s mouth out with soap has resulted in him becoming a blind, saintlike homeless man. The 7-year old imagines how being forced to practice her piano like Mom wants, instead of hanging out with friends, results in her becoming a suicidal, emotional cripple without friends or loved ones. The 7-year old imagines how deleting her bridal registry so she won’t look greedy, results in her eventually causing mortification to the mother when she serves her visiting mother and sundry guests on mismatched cracked plates in a run-down tenement. If she’d only had a registry, she would have had dinnerware and been able to afford a house instead of spending all that money on plates.

“And how old are you again?” asked my coworkers.

Shut up.

My mother, on the phone, sighed a long-suffering, martyred sigh again, and said, “And now you are being angry. I should not saying anything. I should not have opening my mouth. I do not knowing anything. I am old. Maybe everybody is being rich where you live, and I am only surprise because I am poor, and I am thinking it so greedy. Your aunt and grandmother, they coming from Japan soon.”

You notice how, even after my mother says she shouldn’t say anything, she continues to talk?

I noticed that too.

After I hung up, I stormed to the computer, logged into my registries, and deleted — well, almost everything. The Guy, who was a witness to the rage and subsequent swathe of destruction, hovered anxiously (and timidly) in the corners of the apartment, curling into small balls of fuzzy alarm whenever my attention swung a too close for comfort. Every so often he would scuttle into the periphery of my vision, wrap a comforting hug around my shoulders, then skid hastily away before I could turn around. “I refuse to be sorry!” I yelled after him, triumphantly deleting my linens.

Prudent man: he said nothing.

It took several days for my blood pressure to stop rising whenever I thought of the woman; while I’m at the point where I’ll acknowledge that I might — just might — have overreacted (just a little), I’m still only just touching on regret for having done so. This morning I logged on and tentatively started piecing my registries together. Except it turns out that I can’t, because some of the stuff I picked in the first place isn’t available online. Brilliant.

How old do I have to be before my Mom stops being able to reduce me to a raving infant? Someone please tell me. I’d like to know that there’s hope. Anyone?

I have a new motto:

“There is a fine line between participation and mockery.”

I saw it in a magazine the other night, and it spoke to me.

That is all.

Taxes are done. My federal went off via registered mail on Wednesday; my California state taxes were done online. It would be too much to say I’m gratified by having to do taxes, despite all my claims in the past. For the first time in, perhaps, ever, I actually found myself in the position of having to pay taxes rather than get a refund. In fact, I’ve now pinpointed my reason for liking tax season; my protestations about having been delighted to do my taxes in the past were directly related to the fact I never had to pay any.

I choose not to consider myself a hypocrite. Simply . . . deluded.

For someone who’s grown accustomed to viewing April 15 as an extra holiday bonus for the bank account, this paying out of monies was something of a rude awakening. Considering I was expecting to get a refund and have had, in the past, something of a habit of not doing my taxes until the following year, I probably owe an extra debt of thanks to my purple monkey coworkers, who harassed me remorselessly until I caved in out of sheer exhaustion.

In total, the damage was about $800, nowhere near deserving of the drama I enacted when writing out the check. My bank account was barely able to suffer the agony, so I had my fair share of qualms when stuffing the envelope. Fortunately, payday came to the rescue, and injected a transfusion just this morning. This was something of a relief; ever since we moved to a new payroll company, our pay has taken on something of a teenage menstrual quality: always variable, never on time, inspiring panic.

This is the last year that I’ll be able to do my taxes without the assistance of some professional consultant. As of next year, I’ll be married, and while the marriage penalty is lower than it was, it’s quite possible that in 2004 we’ll find ourselves qualifying for the AMT. I’m not looking forward to that day. Having spent my entire life resenting the rich, I dislike the thought that I might, by marrying the wrong man, end up technically being one of them. “Rich,” of course, is relative, and by many standards I’m quite well-off, being able to pay off my debts (incrementally) and even buy things I want from time to time.

On the other hand, there’s no plasma TV hanging off my wall, Wells Fargo charges me $20 a month in service fees — need to move my accounts to Washington Mutual — and I’ve still got over $10k in student loans I’m laboriously paying off, bit by bit.

Wealth is relative. It’s just never been a relative of mine, is all. I find its inclusion in intimate family moments a little jarring, to say the least, like waking up one morning to find that Pauly Shore crawled into your bed overnight, and you’re left wondering if you accidentally, you know, slept with him–

…never mind. This post-tax season has me feeling a little woozy.

In other news, we found a stuffed peacock sitting in front of a light labelled “Do not turn off,” in the next-door office. Why? Why do you think?

Feng shui. I’m telling you, these monkeys are insane.

Warning: Anti-Bush sentiment ahead without political context.

So the other day I found a package waiting for me at the door. At the time, I was thinking about poultry, and how it must suck to have an entire skin condition named after your species, like “goosebumps,” and how close that distinction had come to going to the chickens, who display the same skin condition when plucked. Basically, if it weren’t for some odd eating habits in the middle-ages, we could’ve all been going around saying, “Look, I have chickenbumps!” instead of “Look, I have goosebumps!” and wouldn’t that have been weird? Because chickenbumps just doesn’t have the same ring as goosebumps. And what if the aliens who occasionally kidnap backwoods farmers out of their pickup trucks and impregnate their wives have a similar word coined off of humans, and go around their spaceships saying, “Ew, you have human-danglies!” –although hopefully aliens are both smarter and more sophisticated than your average fraternity boy, and would have come up with something a little more subtle.

And yes, it is confusing living in my head, and why do you ask?

So, as I say, I walked up the stairs to my apartment and found a package waiting on my doorstep, which pretty much derailed my thought processes for a little while. The box said Amazon.com. “Well,” I thought. “What if it’s a bomb?” because the ponderings about aliens had inevitably turned to thoughts about Dubya, and I was trying to pretend I was Dubya to see what sorts of thoughts might go through his head.

“It might be a bomb,” I decided, still being Dubya, and stood over it for a few moments, waiting for the Secret Service to come disarm it. However, it turns out that imaginary Secret Service agents presented with a potential explosive device at the feet of an equally imaginary Dubya, will display the same laissez-faire attitudes of Republicans towards corporate malfeasance or, say, Dubya’s dogs towards a pretzel-choking Dubya. After a disappointing period of unexcitement, I jumped up and down on the package, just to make sure it wasn’t a bomb, then brought it inside to see what it was.

It was a book, which I probably would have realized, if I hadn’t been pretending to be Dubya. As a matter of fact, a reader (whose name sounds a lot like “Joanna”) sent me Pigs Have Wings by P.G. Wodehouse, who happens to be a writer that the non-Dubya me absolutely loves.

Unfortunately, the Dubya me read the title, shouted, “I knew it!!” (presumably because pigs having wings somehow validated his worldview) and dashed off into the bathroom to devise a plan — beg pardon, I meant a series of actionable items — to invade Japan, for once attempting to kill his daddy with a bad steak.

It turned out that toilet paper isn’t exactly the best material for writing on, so I moved on and decided not to be Dubya after all.

There was no point to that entry beyond hi, I’m back from Louisiana, and thanks for the present, Joanna.

Just in case you were wondering.

Today’s theme: altered states of mind.

No segues, please.

My laptop has been whisked away so that engineers can investigate another bug. Our official release date was last Thursday; the fact that I am rapidly becoming one of the two most unpopular Quality Assurance people in the company is, I think, a testament to my ability to adopt the mindset of the Average User. The most unpopular Quality Assurance person was the subject of an Intervention the other day, as engineers descended on her en masse and wrenched her laptop out of her hands over her protests.

“If you wouldn’t test,” scolded a Purple Monkey engineer, “there wouldn’t be so many bugs.”

The Average User is, like Norm, as much a figment of Silicon Valley’s imagination as, I daresay, Heisenberg is of mine. Curiously corporeal for a fictional entity, loathed alike by both software engineers and support technicians, he muddles on his merry way, pushing buttons in the wrong order, ignoring help manuals, and in general doing all the things that software was most definitely not designed to do.

As an argument, protesting that a user would and should never do that is about as useful as sticking your finger in the dike crack; the Average User can, and therefore — inevitably — will, then turn to the enraged support tech with a bland innocence as unanswerable as any face of God, bleating foolish explanations that mingle apology with smugness. “I don’t know what happened,” he says, or, for variation, “I didn’t do anything,” as though computers are diabolical, self-willed avatars of Chaos, simply waiting for the innocent user to wander away so they can fondle their own Delete keys in an agony of masturbatory malice.

As an occasional support technician, I am to the Average User as the Orkin man is to the congregation of termites; my wrath is a mighty wrath, and smites with the vengeance of my people. More than once I have closed a bug ticket with the telltale line “PEBKAC,” (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair) which passes muster as an explanation provided no doctor — suspicious of acronyms himself, from long experience of his own use of them — spies it. Not soon will I forget the man who complained his software wasn’t letting him log in, hurling our entire company into frantic troubleshooting for a solid hour before he wondered aloud if, perhaps, the loss of power in his entire building might not be in some way related. I cherish, too, the memory of a doctor’s assistant, who called with questions about our registration process and eventually required us to spell out her own last name to her, letter by letter, so she would know what to type in the field labelled, creatively, “Last Name.”

Reluctant though I am to admit it, it may be that this antagonistic relationship between the Average User and me has bestowed upon me a deeper understanding of the way he functions. Certainly it seems to have endowed me with an approach towards QA that borders on genius. I find, not the bugs that the well-trained, disciplined QA specialist finds, but the one, critical show-stopper that rears its head after a user performs forty random steps, all utterly unrelated to the other.

In some ways, it is rather refreshing to discard the trappings of education and logic to frolic down the wayward paths of the Average User’s mind. Freed of all constraint, armed with indifference, mischief, and a triumphant certainty in my own superior intellect, I prance willy-nilly through the labyrinth of our software, leaving a breadcrumb trail of bugs behind me. Frustrated, furious, and frazzled, the engineers flock behind me like unionized pigeons, pecking and quarreling equally with each other and the world at large.

It is a heady and fulfilling experience, not entirely unlike the application of nitrous oxide on unsuspecting squirrels.

The onset of so much stress from so many different directions has had, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, a curious effect on my dreams. The night before last I found myself in a bar with two amorphous friends, an environment which my dream-self appeared to find absolutely unsurprising. The equanimity of my dream-self is admirable in many respects; she has wandered through elephant intestines, skydived off Mount Everest into a small tub of jello, and gone skinny-dipping with six-foot tall hamsters and Bob Dole in some strange ritual of purgation. I might wish that she had suffered a tiny qualm at the last, purely for dignity’s sake, but that’s a different subject altogether.

At any rate, my dream-self found herself in a bar with two faceless friends, and at the bartender’s instigation, agreed to participate in a drinking contest. A glass of some ill-defined amber liquid was placed in front of her; she guzzled it without comment, and lowered it to find her friends regarding her in some awe, their own glasses still full.

“I can’t believe you did that,” they chorused.

My dream-self, who had the key to epiphany in the curious way that dream-selves do, discovered that she had been peripherally aware that the amber liquid was meant to be diluted. She promptly became stunningly, impressively drunk.

Insofar as dreams go, it is true that this is hardly one to raise eyebrows, lacking any of the attractions of nudity, flight, or talking animals. The rest of the dream was spent in the unhappy awareness of being drunk. My dream-self is not of a typically uplifted nature, so the euphoria attendent upon being intoxicated was, sadly, not available to her. Instead, she remained bitterly conscious of slurred speech, lack of coordination, over-large limbs, lethargy of thought, and a loss of visual perspective. Her head lolled for no particular reason. Her feet dragged. She fixated on random objects and stared blankly at them until distracted by something else.

Unfortunately, when I woke up, I was still drunk.

I drooped in the shower, my mouth gaped wide, and swallowed half a gallon of water. I began braiding my hair with kielbasa fingers, and ended up with frizzy dreadlocks all over my head. I rolled down to my car and drove to work, puzzled over both the dotted lines on the road, and the curious fade-in/fade-out appearance of the other cars.

I slurred and mumbled at my coworkers and slouched in my task chair, weaving confused — and profound — fantasies about rabbits.

I chewed on a toenail until somebody noticed and made me stop.

I wandered into the bathroom and found a woman’s face in the speckling on the floor tile.

I wrote a journal entry.

Around three p.m., I sobered up and experienced my very first hangover.

I’ve worn glasses since I was about 7 years old, an unenviable inheritance from my father’s weak-eyed bloodline. My father’s side of the family was the noble one, being intimately acquainted with most of the blue-blooded families in Japan. The limited boundaries of the country, not to mention its isolationist practices before Admiral Perry dropped in to end the Tokugawa Era, guaranteed that the family trees in my paternal neighborhood resembled the spoon side of the silverware drawer, rather than the fork. Given the highly nervous state of Japanese feudal politics and the creation of alliances using convenient, incestuous marriages, it was perhaps a benefit for a scion of a noble house to have selective eyesight, at best.

My mother, coming from more hearty peasant stock, is herself blessed with a sharpness of vision guaranteed to make any child’s life miserable. She held no truck with the vagarities of genetics. She preferred to blame my failing eyesight on my propensity for reading under any conditions, whether that be in the car, at night in the dark, or under the dim glare of a flashlight.

One would think that my mother, clumsy with her own English, would have been better pleased to have such an avid little scholar of the language. She, unreasonable woman, preferred instead to object to my bibliophilism, lecturing me bitterly over the stacks of reading material that joined me at every bath, meal, and family outing. More than one book disappeared into the trash after her patience had crossed some ever-moving, invisible line. At one dinner my sister and I attempted to convince her that the dead mole corpse we’d seated on the dinner table was responsible for the presence of The Wind in the Willows, the explanation being that he wanted me to read it to him before we buried him. The subsequent meal was rendered acutely uncomfortable when we reaped the whirlwind; my father, who combined myopia with a perverse sense of humor, ate his own dinner in high enjoyment while the fury of the heavens was emptied over our heads.

Arguments abounded in our house during my youth, many of them clashes of will over my reading, which my teachers were united in condemning. I was not subtle in expressing my disapproval of the Recommended Reading for my age group, which had a debilitating effect on classroom discipline. From time to time, my mother would claim that the sight of me marching blindly down the sidewalk with my nose in a book while cars whizzed by was enough to make any real mother shudder. It is worth mentioning that she never claimed to be a “real” mother by her definition of it, and all her exclamations about the danger were more notable for their clinical curiosity than their sincerity. While adamant that I not read at the dinner table or in the car, she never ordered me not to read while walking to school, and at one point was overheard to answer a neighbor’s misgivings over my inattentive mode of locomotion with a bright, “Isn’t it interesting?”

…which is not the point. The real point of this story, mislaid though it is, is that after 23 years of glasses, I have finally made the transition from glasses to contacts, after several years of prior attempts where desire lost painfully to apathy. The wedding was motivation enough for the change, though the addition of exercise in my life has had its own impetus. My eye doctor, a shy, birdlike creature with a habit of meticulous perfectionism, has successfully upgraded me from almost-legally-blind to better-than-perfect-vision.

Here’s an interesting fact. Being able to see better than 20/20 is not all that different from being blind as a bat. Unaccustomed as they are to actually focusing on objects at a distance, my eyes have taken umbrage and gone on strike, registering everything in a dreamlike haze of colors and shapes that only gain meaning if they move.

I have mentioned before that the inability to see is, for me, approximate to being blond, or at least how I imagine being blond must be. Not being a blonde, I have to concoct a suitable fantasy of my own. A happy oblivion to my surroundings and companions seems to serve as a suitable replacement for active peroxide applications; being able to see no evil has as its corollary the ability to believe no evil, and I occasionally find myself humming to myself — yes, even while doing QA — snatches of Christmas songs that drive my coworkers mad.

It occurs to me that myopia is an inherently American condition, which perhaps explains so much of our foreign policy. In this state of visual oblivion, I can quite sincerely believe pretty much anything anybody tells me, up to and including my insane coolness when I don sunglasses, something that was hitherto an impossible dream.

It took me four hours to write this entry, sandwiched in between spurts of QA, upgrading software, doing more QA, reporting bugs, doing more QA, downgrading software, doing more QA, reporting bugs–

“Stop that,” a Purple Monkey raged, popping up over my cube wall. “What are you typing? Are you typing a bug? Stop it. No more bugs.”

Down pens. Time to do some real work. Coworker has brought in her four-month old baby. With a little application, we can ensure her first words are, “I quit.”