February 13, 2002
  jetlag

LOST: ONE WEEK.

Misplaced somewhere between 3rd & 10th of Feb. Last seen over Africa. If found, please call YKH in Cali. Reward if found.

I fell asleep at 6 p.m. on Sunday the 3rd, sprawled on the sofa while the boyfriend oozed his way across the floor. I remember saying something about Tara's Superbowl party.

It came out, "Doyuwunguh?" He gave it the response it deserved, saying something about danger, and the next thing I remember is waking up on Sunday the 10th thinking that the sun was up and how did that happen, exactly?

It took me days to piece together the week before, most of which was done by jabbing the Guy in the ribs at inopportune moments to demand, "Hey, when did we do this? And this other thing?" as flashbacks and random memories came back to me, piecemeal. This must be what happens to peyote afficionados after a day of high desert hog. My life since the 10th has been a series of cut scenes from the movie Memento, without Guy Pierce starring.

Significant in the real world that I woke up to is the fact that, when I first got back to the States, 107 messages awaited me in the free queue supplied by yahoo, with an additional 97 hovering in the wings of my own, personal account. On Sunday, mysteriously, this number had decreased. I shudder to think that I might have actually attempted rational correspondence with anybody during my fugue state; if in fact I did exchange emails with one of my readers during that time, please take anything that I might have said with a grain of salt, and give me the benefit of the doubt while I procure myself a lawyer.

I haven't seen my roommate since mid January. Dear God. I wonder if she's still living here?

The Mauritius tales are forthcoming still, but have been relegated to the back burner until the digital pictures can be removed from the obdurate laptop they call home. I'll get to them later.

In the meantime, I've taken to looking for work.

No, no, hold the applause, please. I've only applied to one job to date. I don't get credit for even looking until I've applied to at least three.

Or maybe two. We'll have to wait and see.

The chief motivation in the job search comes from the visit to the grocery store the other day, wherein I took advantage of the Wells Fargo ATM to check out my bank balance.

"Oh," I said, after realizing that the decimal place in the balance was, in fact, not a piece of grit on the screen. "Crap."

. . . and this is why Yuhri is finally looking for, yes, Employment.

It's discouraging, so far, and I've only been looking for employment a grand total of -- what day is this, Wednesday? -- two days. I've established the beginnings of a pattern to my day, because days need patterns and without actual work I could just stay in bed all day, eat soy beans, and eventually have a bright future as one of the floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, stapled on top of a Chevy station wagon.

Insofar as patterns go, this isn't a very good one. I wake up at 8:00 (ideally, since usually I still wake up at 6:00 am; I would like to point out that I wake up earlier now that I'm unemployed than I ever did when I was employed). I play Sims until twelve. I eat lunch and breakfast, and then I spend the afternoon doing job search things until approximately four or five. Then I do something else.

So far, in the two days that I've tried this schedule, it's working out okay. Except for the fact that it's only been two days, and during both days I've gotten discouraged with the whole job hunt by twelve-thirty and take a break to play in the refrigerator. These are only minor setbacks, however. I'm confident that we'll eventually settle on a mutually agreeable schedule that pleases everybody.

Unemployment and me, we're buds. We're tight. I don't bother Unemployment, and Unemployment doesn't bother me. In fact, Unemployment pays me to be mellow and fine with the world, and I'm down with that; my only objection is that Unemployment only pays my rent, and not all the other things that I need money for. My growing DVD collection, for instance. This whole new kick I have for clothes. Oh, and the maid. Unemployment won't pay me to get a maid.

Okay. Maybe I don't "need" money for the DVD collection. Or the clothes, which I have plenty of. Or the maid, which I've never had before anyway.

But crap. I mean, crap. The student loan gods are pointing their arrows at me. Is it my fault I went and got an education?

My roommate showed up at my door at around eight, looking puzzled.

"Yuhri? What happened to the toilet paper? Is it my imagination or has the toilet paper gotten -- smaller?"

In Mauritius, it turned out that paper towels weren't widely in use. Nor were facial tissues. The most practical form of paper around was the toilet paper roll, what the British affectionately call the "bog roll." Wherever I went, people were carrying little rolls of toilet paper with them. This was their catch-all, essential to pick up spills, wipe faces, blow noses, wrap candies, and go to do one's business in the bushes when the running water wasn't running.

"I think the Guy's relatives packed it in our suitcase for us," I explained to my roommate, apologetically, "so when I unpacked I found it there and I thought, better not to waste it, so I rotated it into the toilet rolls--"

My roommate laughed and wandered away before I could get to my afterthought. I addressed that to the empty doorway.

"--or else we packed it ourselves, accidentally. Although now that I think about it, I probably shouldn't have rotated it in, because, oh damn, I got that whole intestinal bacteria, explosive diarrhea thing in Mauritius, and what if I got it from the toilet paper? I mean, there could be scads of bacterial things living on toilet paper, couldn't there?"

It was just as well she'd left.