August 29, 2001
a little italy

I was trying to steer my bike into the offices past the very heavy security door, when I heard this conversation from two men coming out of the bathroom.

"Dude, you never wash your hands?"

Okay, so it wasn't much of a conversation, but it was enough of one to get me started.

There are lots of disgusting things in this world. Leopard-skin baby carriages, for instance. Old Navy commercials. My tennis shoes. None of them hold a candle to Peepee Man.

He knows who he is. He goes to the toilet, does his thing, and then comes bouncing out of the bathroom with e coli under his fingernails. He's too much of a man to let soap and water touch his hands. "Hi, Yuhri!!" he yells, and comes charging up for a hug, and because you don't realize that he's the Peepee Man and that he's spreading dead cells from unmentionable body parts all over your clothes, together with a dozen other dangerous and potentially lethal diseases, you let him. And if you're really unlucky, I mean really unlucky, he's the guy who cooks in your cafeteria, or offers you a slice of his apple, which he peeled and sliced with his own bare hands. I loathe these men. In fact, I loathe the women who pretend to be these men. There is a special hell for these people, and someday, I will find out who they are and make them pay. They should have special tags identifying them so that non-Peepee Men and non-Peepee Women can decide whether or not they want to share their french fries or not. Peepee Men and Peepee Women should have special Peepee Clubs away from non-Peepee People where they can meet and breed and have ugly little Peepee Babies who will become experimental subjects for germ warfare programs.

It's revolting.

No, don't argue with me.

Ick.

A couple more scenes from work before I go on to the main body.

Max the dog came to visit us yesterday; we were busy celebrating Indian Mom's birthday with a pink cake, -- "since it's more cost-effective than handing out individual pink slips," someone joked, ha ha, very funny, bite me -- when the Project Coordinator brought her visiting dog Max into the conference room.

Max and Slushpuppy boy instantly made friends; there was much petting and panting and shedding involved on both sides. At one point, Max dropped his hindquarters on the Project Coordinator's lap and began busily cleaning any and all body parts that could be considered even remotely reproductive in nature; that accomplished, he promptly dashed up to me and planted his tongue and nose squarely on my lips. In view of my opinions expressed above, this was not a fun thing. Of course, nobody wants to look like an animal hater, so on the outside I laughed, while on the inside, I went to my happy place.

A small crowd of Excite -- not @Home, but Excite -- employees walked by outside, and Max trotted over to the window to stare at them.

"You want to meet them, Max?" crooned Slushpuppy boy. "Those are Excite QA engineers. They're going to be unemployed soon."

Our stock closed at 52 cents, a one-week high, and that's how morale is in my company. How about yours?

Scene Two.

Monday, I gave the Firecracker a belated birthday present. "I couldn't find the one I originally meant to give you," I apologized. "I hope this works out."

I got her a hat at Macy's, a red wool felt job with a curved brim on one side and a floppy thing on the other. "A hat's such a personal thing. I mean, not all hats look good on people. I know that on my head---"

I was going to say, 'on my head, most hats look bad,' but the Firecracker never let me finish my sentence.

"OH, HAT. IS GOOD. I LOOK GOOD IN HATS. SEE? IT FIT PERFECTLY. I HAVE NICE HEAD." She slid it on and regarded me complacently. It was true. She looked cute.

...so now I know my problem. I no have nice head. "Great," I said, weakly. "Glad you like it."

There's an Italian food chain up and down the west cost, possibly elsewhere as well, called 'Bucca di Beppo.' This is, without a doubt, the biggest, most extravagent, obscene example of family dining in the world. Italian food is served, not by the platter, but by the trough; each dish serves ten people or more, with leftovers. Those Italians can't seem to do anything in moderation. First they have to conquer the entire world, then they have to build a wall across England, then they have to run Catholicism, and now Bucca di Beppo's. Moderation is a totally foreign concept to them. I think if they had to participate in an American election, it would kill them, every last one.

The Guy's friend was putting together a party for after their weekly softball game, and I received an evite at work one day.

"Come," he urged. "You can meet all my friends."

My very presence at a social gathering where I know fewer than 95% of the people is a party foul. I have the people skills of a born-again fundamentalist at a pro-choice convention. Plus, there are stags during hunting season less shy of meeting people than I am. Compared to me, they're busy hauling trays of hors d'oeuvres to red-capped hunters in the woods. "So, you comfortable out here? Can I get you anything? Tea? Biscuits? Could I interest you in a bulls-eye painted on my ass?" Despite the fact that I've met four of the Guy's friends already and had thus filled my yearly quota of "New People," I RSVPed back and put the appointment in my Palm.

"Yo. What should I call [insert name here] for the journal?"

The Guy stares at me from the Harry Potter book. "Soprano girl? I don't know. Sweet Pipes?"

Um, okay. (Does he mean 'Soprano' as in the HBO series? We'll pretend that he does. We don't understand the Sweet Pipes reference.)

I rode down to Palo Alto on the train, a ten minute ride, and was met by my boyfriend at the station. We walked the two blocks to the restaurant, where I underwent the harrowing experience of meeting forty complete strangers and learning sixty names, all of them alien. Where are all the normal-named people? Where are the Bobs, the Jeffs, the Jacks, the Harrys? Why don't I ever get to meet any of them?

"Hi, my name is Mawahahilak'toi. You can call me Mawaha'toi."

Right.

The Guy introduced me to a nine-foot tall man who actually had a normal, human name, a name that I could retain for longer than it would take me to sneeze. "You know Yuhri?" he asked him.

"Oh, right, we've met before," the complete stranger said, and towered over me.

"Okay," I said, agreeably. "What's your name?"

"[insert name here]," the Tall Guy said, and, I swear to God, got taller.

I only just bit back one of those slightly hysterical, completely un-PC things that skip to the tip of my tongue in situations like this. "Sorry. I can never remember you white people from one day to the next. You all look alike." "Sorry," I mumbled meekly, instead, and committed his name to memory.

Maturity points for me! 28! 28!

Little John, it turned out, was a hilarious handicap to have inflicted on one during a foreign social situation; a half-second before I met another completely new person, my seventieth new person of the night, he swooped down on me; for a moment, the world was blacked out: so this is what it's like to get squashed by a falling satellite, I thought, vaguely. "Don't look this girl in the eyes," he hissed at me. "She's evil. She serves Satan." Then he was gone, and I found myself numbly committing some sweet-looking blonde's name to memory as 'Lucifer' and wondering exactly why I kept avoiding looking her in the face.

The rule was that the restaurant wouldn't seat a party until the entire party had gathered. Soprano Girl was the cruise director of the evening; she counted heads, did a Solid Gold dance on the sidewalk for the entertainment of bemused passersby, then disappeared into the restaurant to place an order for her favorite dish. Outside, the party grew rowdier. It was, hm, one of those nights. To wit:

"....every Canadian I know says that Canadian women are dumb," the Guy told all of Palo Alto, loudly, apropos some trip that Little John and his buddies had made to our neighbors to the north earlier in the year. "It's weird. Like, four Canadian guys I know all say the same thing, that the women up there are dumb."

"They have good beer, and that makes up for it, I guess," Little John joked.

"....must have had three or four," Little John's friend said, following some other tangent of the same conversation.

"Uh, beer--?" asked the Guy. "--Just checking."

"What do you do?" the others at the table asked when we were seated.

"She works for Excite@Home," the Guy told them. I started to laugh. In my youth, I would never have realized that 'work at' could be a relative term.

"Are you still employed?" everyone wanted to know.

Little John poked me, gingerly. "A real live Excite@Home employee. I touched one!" he yelled.

Soprano Girl roamed about the restaurant at will; she'd already bonded with the entire staff there, and was moving on to make conquests of the other patrons as well. While she seduced a slice of pizza off of a neighboring table, we inspected the black-and-white photographs covering the walls. To one side was a picture of Sophia Loren staring dubiously down the decollage of a very well-endowed blond woman whose dress looked like it was taped onto the nipples to keep from falling down.

On the wall directly facing us, another black-and-white featured a smiling woman in a low-cut dress holding up a fork loaded with enough spaghetti to feed most of the restaurant. As in the Sophia Loren picture, it was a very low-cut dress; in fact, the picture was chiefly noodles and breasts. The rest of the woman, smiles and clothes and all, were an afterthought.

"Who's that?" I asked the Guy and Little John in order to participate in the conversation, however inane my contribution. Both of them turned to look, and focused instantly on the woman.

"I want spaghetti," the Guy and Little John chorused in unison.

"I want breasts with mine," Little John declared.

Well, part of the woman, anyway.

Somehow, during the course of this conversation, Soprano Girl had managed to liberate the rest of the pizza from the complete strangers who were sitting at the nearby table.

I can just imagine the conversation taking place at that table once the pizza was gone.

"What the hell just happened there?"

"Did you just give our pizza to that chick?"

"Did I?"

"Where the f*** is the rest of our pizza? Is she going to return it?"

"Jeff just gave it to that girl."

"Goddammit, Jeff!" -- the four guys at this table are named Bob, Jeff, Jack, and Harry; the normal-named people went out together tonight, and that's why they weren't with us -- "We were going to eat that."

"You were not."

"Well, I might have."

"Who the hell gives away half a pizza to a girl?"

"Who the hell comes by and asks for half a pizza?"

"Did you guys see that girl?"

"Well, then. I think, under the circumstances, I was fully justified in giving away the pizza. You going to finish eating that piece of chicken there, Jack?"

"You try to give my chicken to her, Jeff, you're a dead man."

"I can't believe you gave away half our pizza to a girl, dude."

Soprano Girl's a babe.

After dinner, I found myself waiting for the Guy to say goodbye to his friends in front of a plaster Venus that some considerate soul had thoughtfully marked nipples on. One of his friends--

"Hey. What should I call [insert name here]?"

"Well, her Yahoo ID is Diva."

Vocalists. Ah, it takes me back--

--told us about her new fitness program, showed us the most frightening 'before' and 'after' shots I've ever seen, (though they give me hope. Someday, I'll be one of those. Look, ma! Before! Before! And af--no, wait, we're still at before. Before!) and then went on to say she'd been reading my journal.

"When I get bored at work, I reach over and click on Faulty Vision, get on the phone with Soprano Girl...psst. Yuhri's posted another entry...."

Readers. Hm. "You've inspired me," Soprano Girl said. "I started one. I call it 'Misadventures in Dating.' I'll link to yours off of it--" and off she flitted, to say good-bye to somebody else.

"Soprano Girl's going to have a totally big head after reading this," the Guy informs me.

"She's a babe," I tell him, and walk into the kitchen where my roommate is busily cleaning the oven.

Easy-Off is lethal stuff. I started cleaning the oven yesterday and accidentally breathed in some of the mist. My lungs still burn when I exert myself. I nearly coughed one of them up.

"Are you okay?" I ask her, and she stares at me blankly.

"What? I'm fine. I'm not light-headed or anything. Ooh, maybe I'm high off this stuff and that's where I'm getting all this energy." She waves the canister around with triumph and sprays some more while I make a hasty escape. 12:47 am.

One fruit roll-up, and then I'm going to bed.