happy birthday guy

It was the Guy's 32nd birthday yesterday, a fact I'd almost forgotten until the night before last.

I walked into the hallway, staring suspiciously at my watch. The watch, an earlier gift from the Guy, has a quixotic habit of lapsing into French, perhaps some allergic response to having been purchased by a Brit. That night, the date was displayed in English: Tue 22.

"There's something coming up on the 25th," I thought fuzzily. "That's right, Halloween." And it occurred to me that there was something significant about Halloween.

Of course. The Guy's birthday is two days before Halloween, and 25 minus 2 is 23. I bugled my discovery to the group in my living room -- we were holding a dinner party of sorts -- and they fell over the Guy in congratulations. He shrugged them off with discomfort. There's some itch of modesty in him, however small, that recoils at the attention that gets paid when birthdays come around. The celebration of an event in which one was only a marginal participant can make the most arrogant narcissist mildly selfconscious.

At any rate, it was his birthday last night, and I cooked him and my roomie an artichoke mushroom lasagna, clams oreganata, and spinach souffle with shallots and smoked gouda. Then we served him a massive key lime pie. Later, he opened my gift: a Playstation 2 network module. What it lacked in romance, it more than made up for in circuitry.

Happy Birthday, Scruffy Boy. I love you.

I haven't the intellectual discipline today to formulate a single thought and flow with it to the end. (Who do I kid? I've never had that.) I wrote earlier that I write -- and talk -- like a starving chipmunk after a long winter, dropped in the middle of a Star Trek convention: surrounded by nuts, none of them edible. Where, oh where, is the damned exit? At this point, I've ceased to care.

The earlier despondency is still hanging grimly on, clinging to the nape of my sweaters so it can catch me if I turn around too fast. Smack! Right in the face. It's climatic, I suspeect; out of all the days of good weather, Mountain View gets a grand total of nine days when the sun takes advantage of its accumulated PTO. (That's Paid Time Off for those out there unlettered in corporate speak.) In a cosmic sense, Mountain View is the anti-Seattle. When the sun isn't here, it's catching waves back in my hometown, seeing the scenery made special by my birth.

The last week or so has been full of peculiar, nostalgic epiphanies. At work, I was dragged out of my preoccupation with a project into a telephone conference that promised abject boredom. I dragged my feet to the conference room, trailing my boss, when it occurred to me that I saw an awful lot of the floor. My great-aunt, an avid birdwatcher in Chicago, spent most of her time looking up. This made her a chancy driver at best, and an erratic pedestrian.

On the other end of the spectrum, I always caught sight of the stray penny or the lost pencil. Not once had I spotted the diarrhetic pigeon sailing by overhead. Why, then, stare down?

"I got it," I blurted out as I walked into the conference room. My boss and coworker stared at me, blankly. "It was the slugs."

My boss has what I've begun to suspect is the 'Yuhri' look, a mixture of bewilderment, tolerence, and pity that always seems to show up on his face when I open my mouth. "Okay," he said pacifically.

Feeling that my outburst required some sort of explanation, I blundered on. "The reason I look down. It's because where I grew up, there were always slugs on the ground, and you had to keep an eye on the ground or else you stepped on them."

An odd expression slid over my boss' face. He had gone to his happy place. He's been doing that more since he started working here. My colleague, busily sorting papers in preparation for our conference call, expressed the sentiments for them both. "Eeeeeeeeeew. That's disgusting."

Crushed, I bumbled to my chair and sulked through the meeting.

A story from one of the few people at work I have any respect for:

He was driving with his wife somewhere; driving in the sense that he was actually a passenger in a car that was being driven, and therefore shared in the responsibility of the driving, if only by proxy. The driver was actually a friend of his, a male friend of the homosexual persuasion. This is relevent to the story, which is the only reason I remember it.

My friend was giving directions, and at one point, pointed ahead. "Go straight," he said.

The driver stopped the car and turned to frown at them. "Don't ever say that," he reproached. "Say ... 'gaily forward.'"

Well, I thought it was funny.

I received several baffled inquiries about female gonads after my last post, to wit: "Gonads?" Moved to show my superior knowledge, acquired after a sudden burst of energy expended on dictionary.com, I was able to educate my less biologically knowledgeable friends on the matter.

go*nad, n. - An organ in animals that produces gametes, especially a testis or ovary.

I have ovaries. I have lots of ovaries.

Go ahead, girls. Share the knowledge. Shock your friends. Titillate your neighbors. Tell 'em all about your home-grown, 100% pure gonads.

Side note: I've signed up again for nanowrimo, National Novel Writing Month. 50,000 words by November 30. Last year, as you'll all recall, I failed miserably. 20% of the way there, I crumbled under the strain and caved.

This time, motivated by the encouragement of Flamingo and a general lack of interest from the rest of my friends, I expect to do much better. I have reviewed the remains of my last attempt, and discovered pearls amongst the putrid droppings of pigs. This time, I shall endeavor produce more droppings, and proportionally more pearls.

Wish me luck. Or at least ... a little encouragement wouldn't come amiss, would it?