September 11, 2002
september 11, 2002
Yes, goddammit, I know that it's September now and that my last journal entry was back on August 20th. Yes, I know I neglected to document any of the rich tapestry of my life in between, starting from my visit to Seattle for my birthday to the black pneumonic plague currently playing Strom Thurgood in my lungs. Yes, I know I've been horrifically irresponsible in not inviting you, complete strangers and friends alike, into the Cosmic Circus of my Adventures.
Bah.
Besides utterly destroying my sense of humor and stripping me of my basic English skills, my workplace has the added victory of having infiltrating my dreams. I know that I swore early on that I wouldn't talk about work too much in my journal, due to the not entirely unreasonable fear that my Big-Brother-is-Watching communist tyrant of a CEO would hunt me down and rip out my nasal hair. The CEO is, in case you haven't guessed, a bit of a micromanager. A normal CEO would send a peon to do his dirty work for him.
I remember my dreams fairly rarely these days, only retaining those that are just too weird or too relevent to my daily life that I wake up in the morning with an urgent need to jot notes on the first piece of paper that comes to hand. (This admirable instinct has led me to the discovery that rolls of toilet paper on pajama thighs do not a good writing surface make.) Nonetheless, despite travail and an inexplicable lack of scrap paper in my apartment, I've made a good show of making dream journals I go. Sometimes they're just too stupid not to share.
Take Monday of (two? three?) weeks ago. In response to a battery of complaints from one of our biggest customers -- let's face it, one of our only customers -- my coworker was sent on two hours notice to New York City. Our CEO's instructions: "Don't come back until it's fixed." My coworker came by to visit me at my cube.
"It's been nice knowing you," he said, gloomily.
As it turned out, between the two of us, we managed to do a lot of triage. It meant a stressful few days of jumping whenever the phone rang, and hunting down reluctant engineers to extract reasonable explanations out of hostile, mangled Chinese English. It also, for the first time in well over a month, meant something interesting to do that would actually make a difference to someone.
That first night, after negotiating my friend a hotel in the heart of Brooklyn, I went home and actually worried about my his reception and success in New York. I worried during dinner. Then I worried while playing computer games. Then I worried during study, and finally worried in bed. After a while, the worrying thing started to recede into the back of my less than tenacious mind, where it rummaged about in old memories and was touched by the spark of inspiration.
"Aha," it crowed. "Pretty Woman! Brilliant! The creation of a silk purse from a sow's ear! We will make use of this metaphor!"
(It will surprise noone that my subconscious is far more articulate than my conscious. Make of that what you will.)
That night, I discovered myself directing the boutique scene from Pretty Woman. As anybody old enough to remember Star Wars recalls, Julia Roberts plays one of the main characters in the Pretty Woman. She's an actress I actually sort of like, barring that odd way of walking which is rather reminiscent of some ducks I've eaten; about her real life personality, I have neither knowledge or speculation. In my dream at least, she was the mutant offspring of Coach Bob Knight and Darth Vader. She raged through my dream in a floppy white hat the size of my ass, screaming obscenities at my camera crew. Meanwhile, my friend from the office was darting furtively around the set, hiding behind scenery pieces.
"Dr. (name deleted) is chasing me," he hissed at me from behind a fake wall. He'd mysteriously grown a mustache. "Don't let him find me."
A few seconds later, Dr. No-Name came dashing around the corner, bearing his laptop in hand. "Where is he?!" he demanded crossly. "Never mind. Here. Yuhri. Fix this." He tossed the laptop at me and charged off to hunt my friend.
I woke up in the morning with a definite feeling of panic, and the uneasy suspicion that I would be humming the first twenty words of Pretty Woman (all the words I know) for the rest of the day. At the office, I shared my dream with the coworkers left to me.
"Do you want me to interpret it for you?" asked the bright-eyed Project Manager that sits next to me.
I mumbled something at him, head dropped in hands. The Pretty Woman song was starting to have serious reprecussions for my state of mind. Someone on the other side of the office, inspired by some psychic sadism, had started to whistle the first nine notes of the theme around 9 in the morning, and the effect after several hours was rather like the annoying pain one gets when one is stomped repeatedly on the ear by effete drag queens in stiletto heels.
The next night, I fell asleep to find myself in a mall, standing in front of a pet store. A closed pet store, it looked like; the grate was down, and there were forlorn little animals poking their noses out through the metal bars. It was like a low-budget recasting of Oz.
I pounded on the door, demanding to be let in. What would have been unthinkable in real life was perfectly reasonable in my dream world. Dream Yuhri has extra hard-working hormone infusion therapy on her side; if she were pumping any more testosterone, there'd be hair growing out of her nipples.
"Let me in!" I yelled.
"Let us out!" the animals yelled.
A nice looking clerk scurried apologetically to the door, and cranked up the grate to let me in. "Sorry, sorry," he said meekly. "Let me get the manager for you."
That was nice. In my dream, I was some sort of important big-wig. I sniffed imperiously at the clerk and sent him off to fetch the manager. Meanwhile, I investigated a pair of fat little dwarf hamsters, one beige and one brown, that were attempting to coax me over to their cage.
"Rescue us!" they begged, and did a little dance for me. One of them was beating a tom-tom; the other one was batting its shiny little eyes at me.
They were soft, they were fuzzy, and they were cute. I picked them up, thinking fond memories of Quibble and Quirk, and stuffed them into my shirt. "Yay!" they shrieked from my breast. "Rescue! Rescue!"
In the illogical logic of dreams, I rationalized the dwarf hamster theft by calling it punishment for the manager's rudeness. Sure enough, in a effect-ed/cause-al way that would have caused Descartes' eyeballs to bleed, I overheard the manager making rude comments about inconvenient customers that didn't deserve his time and effort.
I listened indignantly while the nice clerk pacified his manager and brought him around to find me. If he was going to be that way about it, I didn't want to have anything to do with him. Without a thought for the poor clerk's feelings when he found me gone, I flounced out of the pet store with the dwarf hamsters rummaging around in my clothes, and -- oh, as long as I'm at it -- picked up a five pound block of sawdust and managed, somehow, to shove that under my shirt as well.
"Yay!" the dwarf hamsters cheered.
I made it all around the corner before I heard the store manager giving chase. Suddenly alarmed that they would catch me with stolen goods, I popped open the sawdust bag and spread it all over the concrete for the bunny rabbits -- don't ask. Why the hell wouldn't there be bunny rabbits living in a Silicon Valley strip mall? -- and liberated the hamsters.
They scurried away, a mass of little fuzzy bodies. "That's odd," I remember thinking as I woke up. "They must have bred while they were in my bra."
Interpret that, why don't you.
This will be a long entry, by necessity. I have whole weeks of stuff bottled up inside, and September 11th appears to have, er, popped my cork.
A few minutes ago, I received a cryptic, poorly typed email from my sister.
so, we{re in mexico.
can you tell mom that i{ll be home on the 29th?
love you.
Want to hear the conversation I had with her last Thursday on the phone?
"I'm going on vacation," she said.
"When?"
"Tomorrow."
"How long?"
"Two weeks."
"Where're you going?"
"Don't know yet."
"Are you going to take a plane?"
"Maybe."
"Huh. What are you taking a vacation from? And how come you don't know if you're going to take a plane?"
"Just stuff," she said vaguely. "Um."
"Is it a secret?"
"We're going on standby."
There was a small silence. "To where?"
"I dunno yet. We're just going to wait."
"Wait ... for what?"
"For whatever plane has room for us."
"What?!"
"I have to go pack."
"What if you end up in ... I don't know, Afghanistan?! What if you end up in Israel and get shot at?!"
"I'll send you a postcard when I figure out where I am. Got to go. Bye."
"A postcard?"
"I love you. B'bye."
click.
Yeah. September 11th.
I came home from Vegas yesterday -- business trip, I'll tell you all about it later -- and collapsed on my couch.
I'll watch some stupid television, I thought blearily to myself. Something that'll make me laugh and then I can sleep. Maybe Will and Grace is on.
I flicked on the remote, deliberately going to live television rather than the safety net of my Tivo. The television was set to ABC; they were airing a special documentary, "Report from Ground Zero." For the next two hours I watched firefighters and policemen and assorted survivors and crew talk about their experiences on September 11th when the World Trade Center went down.
Will and Grace wasn't on.
I spent my birthday at Seattle with my mother, who made me clean out the garage.
Sadistic hobbit woman.
I have to tell you, there are few things more calculated to bringing home your advancing age than coughing up spider corpses and moving large monuments of power tools, unless it's opening up boxes and finding that toy you thought you lost when you were five -- "Mom! You said Santa Claus took this away because I'd been bad!" -- or discovering your younger sister's diary ("deer diry i had a fite with may lee and she kam ovr for slumber party and alice is heer i hit her by aksident i sed sory") from the creatively phonetic age of seven.
By way of celebration, she took me to Todai, her new favorite restaurant. Admittedly, Todai isn't that bad; if you want Japanese food and plenty of it, and aren't particularly critical about the quality, this is definitely the place to go.
"Is it somebody's birthday today?" the serving woman asked us on our way to a table.
"No," I said, automatically.
"Yes," said Mom. She nudged me happily. "That's you."
I stared at her blankly. "It is?"
"You get a free meal if it's your birthday," the serving woman prompted me, in case I needed encouragement. "Can I see your ID?"
I scrounged for my California wallet and squinted at the numbers. "I'll be damned," I marvelled. "It is."
Mom practically glowed. "I'm tricky," she congratulated herself. "Free meal."
The birthday card Mom gave me turned out to be a musical card. When opened, it shrilled 'Auld Lang Syne.' Interesting choice.
She sparkled with delight when I made that appalling discovery in the middle of a crowded restaurant; the little message she had written inside was in Japanese kanji characters, my weakest in terms of literacy, which pretty much guaranteed that I'd have to keep the card open long enough for the entire song to be played through from beginning to end.
I foiled her by snapping the card shut in the middle of 'And days o'lang syne.'
"I'll read it later," I promised, and glowered at her over the card.
She beamed and gave me a purse made out of white wicker. "Happy Birthday!" she carolled.
On the way home, Masako leaned into me and hissed in my ear, "Mom's a bit of a freak, isn't she?"
I'm griping. Sorry. You really need to know me in person to get the whole raconteur effect. I like telling stories, but somehow, lately, I feel like I've lost the ability to convey them online.
Is it old age? The creative flame is being blown out. Weird. It's harder and harder to laugh at things like I used to.
Nothing about the day, or the thoughts, or ... anything, really. Just trivia. Little bits of the comedy show that takes place in the odd, occasional sideshow of my life. I figure that's the best way to commemorate today.
I just spoke to the doctor in Brooklyn, the one that featured in my first dream. He was frazzled because of all the patients that were coming in needing care. A few hours later, he called back again about something else, and he'd calmed down considerably.
"Hey, babe," he greeted.
"Hey yourself. You sound better."
I could hear the shrug in his voice.
"Life goes on," he said.