September 12, 2000

ants

The ants are back.

(Dammit.)

It's not my fault, though. After I cleared them away the first time, they boycotted my kitchen for the rest of the week. Then, last night, I came home to find that the building manager had come in to my apartment to "fix" my stuck window in the kitchen, and had left a thick coat of dust and paint chips all over the room.

The ants were exploring. New stuff. Redecorating. Sensation in Bugsville.

After four weeks, the kitchen sink is still leaking, sending a steady stream of water through the cabinet into the roasting pan that Smurfette plugged beneath, for water collection. The ants seem to find that fascinating, as well. Every time I go near one with a piece of paper -- maybe they have bad, hive memories about me and pieces of paper? -- it ducks behind the sink, ostensibly to investigate my plumbing problems.

I'd like to note that every time I see the manager, he insists he's going to fix my sink: "Tomow." I've been translating that as 'Tomorrow,' but maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe it's actually Tagalog for: "When you grow round, firm breasts like canteloupe and pink pigs do somersaults in the blue San Francisco sky."

I should buy a dictionary.

On Friday, I went in to work and was greeted by a sign in the glass door. "Electricity is not active in buildings 450, 440 .... Pacific Gas & Electric is aware of the problem, and working on a solution. Estimated time for resolution for Building 450 is 8 - 10 hours. Resolution for Building 440 is ...."

And so on.

My building, (which just figures), wasn't listed, and I came in to a near deserted floor. Which is the way that it should be, again; it's a relatively new building, the one that I'm in, and it's sparsely populated.

One of my coworkers met me at my cubicle entrance with big eyes. "Did you see that there is no power anywhere?" she asked.

"Yup. Good thing we have power, I suppose."

"They sent everybody home," she informed me, wistfully. "In the buildings where there is no power."

"Crap."

I keep meaning to go through and introduce my coworkers, giving them nicknames and the like. Somehow I never get around to it. Somehow, too, people keep leaving and coming and leaving. Our manager, just the other day. Now, the next one; one of my fellow workers was talking about moving to a different group. "Because there is no direction for us," she told me, when I protested, and added, sadly, "I like this one."

It's partly a morale issue. Speaking of---

--have to go to another meeting.

Phone call from my sister.

"I thought you were going to be home early last night," she said. "I was waiting outside for you and stuff."

(There was a message on my telephone machine from her. Time: 3:45 pm. As if.)

"I told you Monday was a bad day for me," I said, patiently. "Besides, I was home by 7:30. What do you want from me?"

"I wanted to take you out to dinner or do something."

"Why?"

"Yuhri! I wanted to bond!"

"That's not my problem," I said, feeling aggrieved. "I told you before, Monday and Tuesdays are bad."

"How about tonight? When are you coming home tonight?"

"MONDAY and TUESDAY are bad. Today is TUESDAY."

"It is? What time are you coming home?"

"I have class."

"What time are you coming home from class?"

"Uh. Ten o'clock."

"Ick."

"Can we just do this some other day? Maybe tomorrow? Can you do Wednesday?"

"No. Tonight."

"I'll be tired, though."

"Okay, so I'll buy you dinner, and...."

"At ten o'clock, you're going to buy me dinner?"

"I'll make you dinner, and you can sit around and watch tv and veg or something."

"Why are we doing this, again?"

"So we can bond. Oh, and I'll bring you some red wine for dinner."

"I don't drink red wine."

"So I'll bring you red wine for me. And dinner...."

Smurfette is coming back to town on the 21st. I should clean the apartment or something. Somehow, I just can't quite work up the energy to care.

As anybody who knows me well can attest, I have a notorious difficulty with the simple task of clinging to a single subject and following through from end to end in a conversation. Like Masako, much of my conversation tends to be spotted by diversions from the main track, by tangents, by forays into the unknown, and by complete hops off the road of purpose altogether. "--And I can't get it to work, so it's really frustrating. I suppose if I just remove the record deliminator, I could . . . hey, is this a rubiks cube? Does it work? Can I play with it?"

Those are my conversations, the ones that I produce. Everybody else in the office has rolled their eyes, looked resigned, and steered me gently back to the topic before I get too excited by bright colors and shiny objects and disappear altogether.

Until now, that is.

On Friday, I was patiently explaining to my coworker that the reason I was having trouble with a Perl script I was writing was that it was doing this and this and the other thing, when in fact I wanted it to do that and the other and this new thing, and could she help me?

I fell silent, looked at her expectantly, and she stared back, blank.

"What day is it?" she demanded, abruptly.

Normally, please understand, she's a one-track mind. Tenacious. She forges her way through the twists and turns of my normal conversational patterns and emerges, unscathed and triumphant on the other side, information in hand. If Ruth had had her determination when she was gleaning that floor, she'd have emerged with an entire silo of wheat.

"Uh. Thursday."

"What's the date? Is it the 9th?"

She turned away to check on her computer, and I peered over her computer, hopeful. Who knew, maybe she was following some solution for me that I couldn't quite see yet.

"It's the 8th," she decided, and refocused on me, blinking. "The woman on the train punched my ticket for the 9th. Does that mean my ticket is good for tomorrow, too? Probably not."

Another small silence fell, while we stared at each other. Disappointment was starting to gather on my face: it wasn't a miraculous solution she was offering me, after all.

She blinked. "What just happened?"

"I think you had a Yuhri moment."

"How strange. I've never--- what were we talking about?"

I started to laugh. "Have you ever done that before?"

"Never," she swore, and started rubbing at her forehead.

"I'm contagious."

I bought a copy of the Dark Crystal last Sunday on my way home. It was a good day; I spent the first half of it at the Dojo, then went to Golden Gate Park, where I and 30,000 others sat in a sunny meadow and watched the San Francisco Opera and Orchestra perform selections. I got sunburnt. It was thoroughly satisfying; they did my all-time favorite trio, the final one from Rosenkavalier. If you've never heard it, I highly recommend it. The other favorite ensemble of mine is the quartet from the Marriage of Figaro, but they didn't perform that one.

One of these days I'll start telling opera stories in my journal. That's for another day.

As I said, I got a copy of the Dark Crystal on my way back home, something I've been planning to do since I picked up Labyrinth at Target a few weeks back. The two of them make a new, happy duo on top of my television; I have to confess to a feeling of some disappointment when I watched the movies again, though. When I first saw them, I was young and easily impressed. When I saw them again the other night, a little niggling voice kept harping on discrepencies and flaws in the filming.

Look at those beetle things, it complained, bitterly. You can see the puppeteers' legs.

Or: That's not a him. That's a person, dressed up like him so they can film it running.

Or, worst of all: That's a puppet.

Suspension of belief. I used to have it, somewhere. If anyone's seen it roaming around, please send it back to me?