August 27, 2001
rebuttal
I have this insane urge to yell "CHEEKY MONKEY! CHEEKY MONKEY!" and dash out of work in my bare feet today. I suppose it all comes of being a Friday. I have two tupperware containers full of leftovers on my desk, and one of them is full of two pounds of salmon. See, and I don't know what I was thinking when I brought it to work, hoping my coworkers would eat it. Like, half of them are vegetarian, and even though I tried to convince them otherwise, they don't seem to feel that salmon classifies as a vegetable.
Slushpuppy stood outside my cube for a long time playing with my magnetic-pen Playskool etch-a-sketch, and when I finally pounced out to investigate, I discovered that he'd drawn a picture of the 101 and a massive accident involving little cars and scottish terriers. "Happy Birthday," he said. "So, hey, you're old, aren't you? September 14th. That's when I turn 22."
Okay, so I've already written an entry for the day, but I don't care. It's Friday, and while I'm usually really productive on Fridays, today I feel a little bit, ho hum, not productive.
So.
Oh, that's sweet. The Intern just gave me a little box of Godiva chocolates. I like the Godiva assortment boxes; they're little and square and gold and neatly packaged; I promptly popped it open and found, in the selection of four, `one that was shaped like a pendulous breast defying gravity. Enchanted, I ate it. It was a white cherry cordial, apparently; I swallowed it quickly -- sweet! sugar! black dots dancing in front of eyes! -- and thanked the Intern.
Then I went back to my desk and thought out entertaining reasons why I should have decided to eat a breast-shaped chocolate. I once spent a twelve-hour day pretending to be lesbian, if you make faces like that, someday your face will freeze like that, but I'm pretty sure there were no lingering Freudian motivations behind the selection. Besides, being lesbian was just like not being lesbian for me, except that I got to wear Tevas. Of course, I was wearing Tevas anyway, and becoming lesbian was sort of an arbitrary decision I made between breakfast and lunch because I didn't have anything else to do but housework, and okay, so I didn't actually leave the apartment the entire day except to go out once to buy a head of cabbage -- do lesbians buy cabbage? -- so maybe it wasn't exactly an Event in the great books of social experimentation, but still.
Slushpuppy asked, "So what're you going to do for your birthday? You going to party? You going to paint the town red? Go dancing, dinner, what? Hanging out with your boyfriend?"
"I'll find out," I told him, and went home from work at around seven.
Straight home. The Guy and I held unenthusiastic conversation on the phone when I got home, "Do you want me to come over?" "It doesn't matter to me. Do you want to come over?" "I could. It's your birthday." "If you want to, come over. How do you feel?" "Nauseous."
Oh, right, so the Guy has been suffering food poisoning since England. He got on the plane sick, he got off the plane sick, and he's continued to eat and be sick all week. Solid food, it turns out, is a bad thing for those who have food poisoning. Go figure. He came over. I made him soup. I ate a tuna fish sandwich. He brought some comic books over that he knew I wanted to read. The Guy read comic books, then felt woozy and went to bed. My mom called; we talked on the phone for a while, or rather, I listened while she brought up every single embarrassing story of Yuhri-as-a-baby that she's ever trotted out of her endless repository of baby stories. I read comics until about one a.m., and then I went to bed. Also, the Guy ate the rest of my chocolates, but I think that might have been the next day so never mind.
...and that was my birthday. I'm a grown-up now. I do grown-up things, yo. (Ignore the bit about the comics. That was a flashback to my immature youth. Right.)
My sister called me at an obscene hour -- "Come up. Come up! What're you doing? You're reading? That's pathetic. Let's go do something..." -- and only backed down when she found out that the Guy was ill. In an abrupt, slightly surreal about-face, she directed me to take care of him. "Because that's what girlfriends do," she lied. Having finally seen me together with a guy, she suffers intense anxiety that I shall fail in my girlfriendly duties due to some lack of coaching on her part. Lacking any useful advice, or at least any advice that I would be willing to believe she'd ever practiced in her own relationships, she makes stuff up as she goes along. "Make him turtle soup. Heat him up. Um, Pat him on the head and tell him that he's a good boy. Oh, and get him vodka. That always works for me." Having ended on a note of actual verity, we made plans for the next day and she hung up.
After a course of my sister's cure, my boyfriend would end up a certified alcoholic Irish setter.
Saturday, to make up for Friday, I rolled up to San Francisco on the train, met up with my sister for lunch, bought myself an L-clamp adaptor for my binoculars, (it doesn't fit on the tripod sitting in my living room, which just figures), went to dinner with the Guy, my sister, and her boyfriend, and treated them all to a showing of Rush Hour 2. Then I looked at stars.
Grown-ups, I tell you. Grown-up things. Ignore the bit about Rush Hour 2. I'm sort of dubious about the maturity points I'd get for that.
I changed my mind. I don't like being a grown-up. I like hanging with my sister, but I did that before I was a grown-up. I like going out to dinner and going to movies, but that's not a grown-up thing either, is it? Oh, I got to ride on the train all by myself, but I did that when I was young and nubile, so that can't be a grown-up thing. Grown-up. 28. I changed my mind. I'm entitled to do that from time to time. I'm depressed. According to statistics, that means I'm, uh, let's see. 82 minus 28, which leaves 54 years left of my life.
My Life. My Life! My beautiful Life! It's almost over. Where did the time go? Dammit, I'm sure someone has stolen my youth. Someone must have, or I would remember more of it. I mean, I'm pretty sure that I wasn't some fall-down, black-out crack baby, which is the only reason I can think of for not having childhood memories. I wasn't in any major car accidents so I couldn't have amnesia; I'm also pretty sure I was never kidnapped and probed by aliens, which seems to be Most Popular Reason Number Three for not being able to remember the past. Of course, I'm not from Nebraska so I couldn't claim that excuse anyway. I don't even remember being potty trained! Don't you think I should remember something like that? My God. What if I was never potty trained? What if that was something that happened to someone else, and they only told me that I was potty trained, and I believed them because I'm JUST THAT SENILE?
Damn, I'm depressed. I'm not going to be able to let go of that, now. It'll haunt me for years. I'll never be able to look a toilet in the eye again.
Okay. It's morning, and I've changed my mind again. I can do that, because I'm a woman, and women do that sort of thing. I'm not depressed. I like being 28. You know why? Because until I'm 30, I can at least hold out hopes of a sudden growth spurt. I really could be 5'3" by the time I get to work tomorrow.
Also, I'm pretty sure that I was potty trained. I walked into the bathroom today and it all came flooding back to me.
I probably could have phrased that better, so we'll leave that where it is and move on to something else, which was the guy sitting next to us in the restaurant yesterday.
Halfway through dinner last night, I noticed that there was a solitary man eating dinner at the table next to ours. He was listening to our conversation.
"...because we were having this conversation, and Masako said I was one of the most stable people she knew," I explained. (Wait for it. This isn't a random segue. It's got relevence. Wait for it, wait for it.)
My sister was unwilling to commit that far. "Well, you're stable in a neurotic way," she amended. "You're really responsible. You'll always do the right thing, but you'll be all neurotic the rest of the time."
"That's my responsible girl," crooned the Guy. "It's the ox in her."
I paused, and eyed him speculatively. (Wait for it, wait for it.) "Did you just call me a cow?"
The guy in the table next to us -- I was the only one who was facing him directly at this point -- started to hiccup on his tea. He hastily covered his face with a napkin, and I could just see the muscles in his cheek while he grinned his head off. Ah ha, thought I. Audience. The rest of the evening was spent, on my side anyway, trying to entertain him.
"I object to the outright lying that happens in your journal," the Guy said.
"Lying? What lying? I never lie."
"You squished two conversations into one, that's what I call lying. Okay, so you misled---"
"What's this?" asked my sister's boyfriend.
"Yuhri keeps a journal online," my sister explained. "It's funny--"
"---Never lie," I said, firmly.
"---conversation in the grocery store, and then later on, when you stole the peach---"
"---she keeps it where?--"
"---two completely different convers---"
"---there's a web page, I think. I haven't read it in---"
"---who cares? Poetic license---"
"---email?---"
"---never said 'let's hear it for genetic engineering'---"
"---does she write about me?---"
"---I remember distinctly. I was just saving---"
"---selective memory---"
"---Aha! Selective memory! That's what it is."
"If you want, I'll let you rebut online," I said with dignity.
"Flatulant monkey," the Guy accused.
The man at the next table took hasty refuge behind his napkin again. And now I've presented the Guy's rebuttal to my previous entry, so we'll call it even.
Who, by the way, calls their girlfriend Flatulant Monkey? I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to do that.
Two items I consider worthy of note.
1. Jeremy Piven was in Rush Hour 2. I squeaked when I saw him.
"Jeremy Piven! I love him!"
The Guy volunteered the information, "He used to have his own TV show."
"What?" I said, stupidly. It was surprise that the Guy knew this at all.
"Cupid," he explained, and lapsed into silence while I digested the fact that I'm dating a know-it-all who knows the Right Things, and how cool is that?
2. I went to Costco and got Fruit Roll-ups. Life is sweet.