June 3, 2000
the icky feeling

So on Monday, I got a phone call from Jazz in Seattle, and talked with her for four hours.

I suppose it's a measure of my friendship with her that I'm willing to talk to her on the phone for so long. In fact, it's a measure of friendship with anybody that I'm willing to talk to them at all for anything longer than the space of time it takes to say "Hello, How are you? That's nice. What do you want?" Amanda gets that courtesy. The Flamingo gets that courtesy. I don't call her that often, but Binky gets that courtesy. So does my sister and my mother, though that's as much familial obligation as honest affection.

I hate my phone. Beyond hating phones in general, I hate my phone, which has very little by way of an actual handset, so that when I prop the earpiece between my shoulder and my head, my neck is slanted at an honest-to-goodness painful angle.

We talked, as the saying goes, of 'cabbages and kings and other things.' As any two professional, active, intelligent, self-confident women with postgraduate degrees would, we talked about boys. Lacks in our lives. Sufficiencies in our lives. Good things, bad things, potentials, careers . . . it's been a long, long time since I spoke with her last, so we deserved that time to converse.

I wished her a polite happy birthday, two months late. I'm bad at time. (We've gone into this before.)

"So are you coming down for the bar?" I asked her at one point, some inspired guardian spirit reminding me that she'd mentioned in some earlier conversation that she was thinking of coming down to California to take the bar exam.

"End of July. I have the dates here, somehow. I'm staying with my sister. I have her phone number somewhere, and her address. Around here, somewhere . . . "

There was the sound of paper rustling. Then: "Are you going to make me look it up?"

"Now, why are you doing this again?" I asked her.

It isn't my imagination, is it? The bar in California is one of the hardest in the United States? I don't think so.

I promised that I would take her out on Thursday, and maybe meet up with MOTU's cousin's barhopping club of twenty-somethings in startup companies. Jazz works for a start-up, as a QA person of all ludicrous possibilities. She's eminently well-suited for it, she tells me, which doesn't surprise me. She's good at details, and has a very disciplined mind. It's just ironic that she would have gone to MIT, gotten a BS in CS, then gone to UW for a law degree, passed the Washington State bar exam, then gone into QA for a startup.

Along those lines, I mentioned something about that to my sister, the Forest Manager in Training. There was a blank silence on the other end of the phone.

"What's a startup?" she asked.

Boy, you send a girl to live on Mount Rainier for six months . . . .

There was a party tonight at Haj's place. His mother was having a birthday, and everybody at the Dojo was invited. Somewhere along the line, they'd painstakingly written invitations for everybody, and I do mean everybody who is a member at the Dojo.

I count upwards of a hundred and fifty, easy.

The food was good, the people were hilarious, and all in all I had a smashing time. Quite an improvement over the morning, when I was feeling so ill I couldn't even go to Dominican to teach. I woke up at seven, changed my clothes, sulked my way down the hill, then discovered as I was waiting for the bus that I felt like death warmed over. A well-dressed, turbaned African-American woman was waiting for the bus as well; I plastered myself to the window of the restaurant on the corner, (closed at that hour, thank God), peered through the glass at the reflection of the clock, then creaked my way back up the hill to my apartment.

Then I huddled and shivered next to the phone until it was a decent hour, at which point I called all of my students one by one and cancelled the lesson. I have an uncomfortable feeling that I missed calling one, though I can't say for certain because by that time I was delirious.

I didn't bother changing my clothes again. Two minutes after the last phone call, I was asleep, curled up in fetal position with one sock on and one sock off.

That isn't the point, though. The point is the party.

Oh, but I got a phone call from my ex roommate at around what I thought was ten, but turned out to be two in the afternoon. It woke me up, obviously. She yelled at me over the phone.

"YOU DIDN'T CALL ME BACK! DID YOU JUST WAKE UP? ARE YOU STILL IN BED? Geez."

I groveled in a foggy, abject way, completely baffled as to who was on the other end of the line. I'm not good with phones. Somehow it seems like this entire journal entry involves phones, but that's another matter altogether. I'm just not good with phones. It turned out that the ex had a potential job opportunity for me, which was nice, though I can't remember clearly what she said because I was just feeling too shredded to retain any information. Something about her husband and his company.

I can't remember what company he works for, so that's a problem. I'll call her back Monday night, maybe, and ask her again. It's nice of her to be thinking of me, though.

After I hung up with her I padded to the phone, peered at it in a short-sighted way since I couldn't figure out what I'd done with my glasses, then padded in to investigate my roommate, who turned out to be in bed as well.

"Are you in bed?" I asked her.

She was a lumpy Thing under the covers. "Yes," it said, sleepily.

As a logical, albeit thoughtless next step, I asked, "Are you asleep?"

The lumpy Thing didn't bother to reply. I crawled onto the bed next to it, discovered I was only wearing one sock, curled up, and announced to one of the comforter-covered lumps: "It's two o'clock. Time to wake up."

The Lump moved. "I'm awake," it announced, fuzzily.

And then I fell asleep.

We had a meeting to get to at four o'clock at the dojo.

We got there at four forty-five. We were a little late. We had to be late. We stopped for coffee.

Which still isn't the point. The point is the party, but.

Oh, never mind.

After a long time of leaving messages at the Mount Rainier center, I finally got in touch with my sister tonight at around twelve. There was a message on the machine when I got home from the party that I'm not going to get into right now. It was from my sister, which just figures; I called my Mom, despite the late hour, (11:00 p.m., but the maternal figure might as well be a vampire for the hours she keeps, so I had no worries.)

"She was here this afternoon," Mom told me, "but she had to leave. She said something about Lara's birthday. . . ?"

I called her cell phone and cursed at her answering service. Two minutes later, the phone rang.

"Hi," the sister said.

"Hi," I said back.

And that pretty much exhausted the conversational possibilities.

In actuality, we chatted for half an hour or so, talking a bit about her own job search, and why I don't want to be a music teacher full-time. "The market's tight," I told her, meaning that I could be a blind, one-legged donkey without opposable thumbs and the temper of a camel, and could still get a job, provided I could use Microsoft Word and punch the number keys on a telephone. My sister, Mountain Woman, misunderstood.

"There have to be some rich people up there somewhere who need music lessons," she said. I think she was trying to be encouraging.

I gave her good, sound advice about how she should go about getting a job, advice that I'm not going to follow myself because I'm a moron. We hung up.

Then I wandered back to my roommate's room again, where she was already in bed with her eyes closed. It was twelve o'clock, midnight almost exactly. Hell, her light was on, so she was asking for it.

"Are you asleep?" I wanted to know.

"No," she said, which was a mistake. She should have said yes. So I crawled onto her bed and proceeded to talk at her.

The conversation drifted here and there, as conversations tend to do once the mind goes to sleep before the body has a chance to brush its teeth and take off its socks. The subject of the 'icky feeling' came up, wherein lies the reason for the entry's title.

Back when I was in college, a friend of mine once developed some sort of crush on me, which he never actually bothered to tell me about. No pedestals here, thanks. Not for us short people who need ladders to reach the top shelf in the kitchen cupboards.

What ended up happening was some subconscious alarm went off in my head and I suddenly decided that this hapless friend of mine was the most irritating, revolting, aggravating person on the face of the planet. It's possible that he started getting clingy. I can't remember, because everything about that period in time has been mercifully obscured by the haze of old age and decaying brain cells. I do remember though, that I could no longer stand to be in the same room with him. Every time he said something to me, I snapped something cruel and vicious back. Every time he touched me, I recoiled. Every time he so much as looked at me, I felt like throwing something at him. There was this crawling thing in the back of my mind, a squirming, revolted loathing that only disappeared once my friend got over his feelings and became nothing more than a friend again.

I later found out about his feelings for me. It explained something, but not everything. But that, again, isn't the point. The point is that that feeling became dubbed as my 'icky feeling' tonight, when I explained it to my roommate and then told her that it was a recurring sensation. Not about people, per se. Not anymore. Not since college. The icky feeling comes back when I get introspective. When I start thinking about stuff that really matters to me. When I get close to having a strong emotion, either happiness or anger.

What usually happens then is that I stop thinking about the thing that's bringing the icky feeling, because I don't like the icky feeling, and the icky feeling helpfully wipes out the thought that caused the icky feeling to begin with, leaving me free of any memory of it to prompt the return of the icky feeling.

This is Not Good.

My sister called back around twelve-thirty, and I spoke with her for another forty minutes. She was depressed and upset. I told her about the icky feeling. Back when I was younger I think it was the irrational snake that caused temper tantrums and the squirmies. "I don't wanna I don't wanna I don't wanna!"

We had a brainstorm, my sister and I, that we've learned something from our parents that we weren't aware that we had. If you're Japanese and you have a personal problem, you don't burden other people with it. Teamwork is all well and good, but that's in the professional, the grand problems. The personal problems are to be kept private, dealt with all alone without weighing down or inconveniencing anyone else with. Stoicism. The public face and the private face; the Japanese have a phrase for that, which I can't remember because it's 2:30 a.m. After a while though, the public face becomes the private face, and you lose track of the private altogether.

No wonder suicide rates are so high in Japan. Gotta wonder.

I tell you what, though. This is the last time I write a journal entry at 2:30 in the freaking morning.