outed

I tell you, sometimes it's just hard to get going in the morning.

Take yesterday.

The early morning was a haze -- I think I might have hit my head rolling out of bed, which led to a debilitating coma -- and while I know that I posted an entry sometime before noon, I'll be damned if I know what the hell I wrote about. I could simply open my web browser and check, but I'm struck by a nervous fear that I might have written something disgruntled and bitter about the fact that I'm the only employee left at my company, which will inevitably lead to some top executive accidentally dropping by my page and discovering that they actually missed one on campus. The ultimate end to that would be for me to walk in to work tomorrow and discover that all my belongings had been neatly deposited into boxes and dropped into the lobby, four hundred and fifty pounds of paper, pencils, binders, toys, crackers, cereal, baffled black ants, and kites that I will then have to carry home on top of my head because I'm too poor or too apathetic to buy a car.

In other words, I'm too scared to look. It was probably about the RIF. Was it about the RIF? I'm guessing it was about the RIF. I do remember that it was depressingly quiet for the first part of the day, save for a spurt of nervous excitement around noon when ....

....oh. Oh, my. Now I remember. I just got a little shiver down the spine.

This morning, the Firecracker found out about the journal.

I'll be the first to admit that this is an irrational fear, not wanting the Firecracker to find out about the journal. It's not like I've ever written anything bad about her; I don't have anything bad to say about her, so I would be hard pressed to say anything negative that I wouldn't want her to read later. On the other hand, I've written everything -- insofar as she's concerned -- fairly truthfully, faithfully documenting most of the foibles that make her unique and entertaining, down to her avaunt garde interpretations of English grammar. I'm not exactly scared of the Firecracker finding out about my journal.

I'm scared of the Firecracker reading my journal and then coming after me to hurt me.

We gathered at my cubicle this morning, in the aftermath of yesterday's RIF; the office had nagging gaps in it, empty holes where there used to be bodies. My teammates huddled around the blazing warmth of my personality for comfort. An obligatory interval was spent marveling over the fact that the Firecracker had suddenly lost inches again. Having gained ground several days ago by wearing elevator shoes for a solid week running, she had suddenly started to wear flats again, and I found myself standing side-by-side with her, staring down at the top of her head.

"Were you this short before?" I asked, without thinking.

It's important to set up a scene. Picture it, as Sophia Petrillo used to say. The Firecracker seated herself on a case of water bottles at my feet, and began telling me very seriously that I was just like her husband. It was a fairly confusing subject change from some previous conversation about empty cubicles and hardware-raping. There was no segue. As always with the Firecracker, one minute you're on one topic, the next minute you're on another. It's like trying to put an I.V. into a dwarf hamster on pot. She called me a cow.

"--BOTH OX," she was saying decidedly. "BOTH READ SAME MAGAZINES, BOTH SAY SAME THINGS, YOU SAY HERE, AND HE SAYS SAME DAY WHEN I GO HOME."

There was another little confusion of words while I objected over her ongoing commentary, "You don't like your husband. You had a fight with him. He threw food all over your baby and it got all on the walls. You had to wash the baby. I remember you telling us all about this."

It's part of the Firecracker's charm that she can quite happily continue speaking at the top of her lungs while one tries to reply to some question or some comment of hers; not one word will she listen to until she's done having her say, at which point one suddenly discovers that she's been listening all along. Seamlessly attached, a response to your comment will come tumbling out of her mouth, an avalanche of words that might or might not be related to each other, but which all share the dubious honor of unjumbling to form a complete sentence in some alternate reality in some alternate variation of English on a theme by Picasso.

"--NOOOO. WHY YOU SAY THAT? IF I DON'T LIKE, IT'S PROBLEM FOR ME TO HAVE HUSBAND IF I MARRY HIM AND DON'T LIKE. KEEP JOURNAL LIKE HIM," the Firecracker plowed on, happy as a clam. "I FIND OUT YESTERDAY."

Indian Mom's eyes flew open and engulfed her nose. All the blood in my face pooled down around my feet. I could feel my ankles start to swell.

"Who told you I kept a journal online?" I sputtered.

"--KNOW ABOUT WHAT? KEEPING JOURNAL, I LIKE ONLINE." The Firecracker's eyes turned into shiny little marbles. "YOU WRITE JOURNAL? IT'S ONLINE? CAN ANYBODY READ? CAN I SEE? YOU WRITE ABOUT ME? WHAT IS URL? CAN YOU GIVE TO ME? I'M FAMOUS?"

It was a revelation to the Firecracker. She hadn't been talking about me at all. I'd been nailed by the oldest trick in the book: English by Fractions. "YOU WRITE ABOUT ME?"

I was caught, strangled on my own tongue. I cringed. "I'll give you the URL if you promise not to hurt me."

The Firecracker frowned. "I'M NEVER ANGRY. I'M VERY NICE PERSON. I'M NEVER MAD." She made her hand into a little fist and thumped me on the arm. I instantly started to bruise.

""You're a dead woman," the Guy told me over Yahoo Messenger. "It was nice knowing you."

Yeah. Normal boyfriends would come running if they thought their girlfriends were in imminent danger of losing an eyeball or two. Thanks for the moral support, you scrotum.

The Firecracker trotted off to investigate my web site. "I KNOW WHO I AM NOW!" she yelled over the cube wall, while I crawled over Indian Mom, trying to find someplace strategic to hide. "I'M FIRECRACKER. I AM VERY VERY FAMOUS! MY HUSBAND WILL BE JEALOUS! I WANT TO WRITE OWN JOURNAL, ONLINE. CAN I?"

Much of the rest of the day was spent arguing about which country made the best cooking knives: "CHINESE KNIFE BETTER!", or "What planet are you from, 'Cracker? Everybody I know who cooks worth a damn uses Japanese or German."

The Firecracker's argument was that the Japanese had learned to make knives from the Chinese during the first century B.C., so Chinese knives were therefore better. She became violently vocal on the subject, raving defiantly on the subject alone in her cube. She Who Will Be Obeyed, in the next cubicle, listened blankly for a while before plaintively lifting her voice over the partition. "She's crazy. What did you let her eat for lunch ?"

Last Saturday I went back to my mad Hairdresser in San Francisco to get my hair done again. End result: I now have a three dimensional head. In fact, it's a perfectly sphereoid head; by some artistic miracle beyond my capabilities to understand, the mad Hairdresser managed to cut my hair -- my aggressively straight Asian hair -- into such a fashion that it automatically springs out in one massive curl when I'm done washing it. From the back, it looks like a giant bowling ball has been strategically strapped on top of my stubby neck.

Would it be irrational for me to say that I kind of like this geometric look? Add my haircut to the 4'2" tit that everything below my neck has turned into, (refer to earlier pages for explanation), and my entire physical presence is now best described as a unicycle with training wheel.

It didn't have to be like this. Several weeks back I tried a new salon for the first time, a place called "Maneframe" located one block down from my sister's work, Lombardi Sports on Polk street: "Where Service Would be Great if it weren't for the Damn Customers." The Polk Street Fair was taking place at the time; I walked into the salon and discovered a rangy, grey-haired woman playing freecell on the reception computer. This, it turned out, was my hairdresser. She was an interesting character; she had lived the sixties, beat them into submission, and now wore the remains of that decade on her ears. The seventies were a pair of shoes and a jangle of jewelry; the eighties were the rest of her ensemble, skinned and tanned and tailored to fit. Not normally a chatty person with strangers, I found myself chatting, laughing, gibbering away like a stoned canary under her influence.

"I used to have long hair," she told me at one point, fluffing her short cropped 'do.' "I used to put it into pigtails and braid them. Then I'd do a hit of acid and go to a concert, and I'd wave my head around, and you know those streaks you get when you're high on acid? " -- it was a rhetorical question; in her world, everybody was an intimate of Mr. Lysergic Acid Diathylamide -- "I'd watch the streaks while my hair floated past my face. It was amazing."

101 Ways to have Fun with Hair. Posted by yhirata at September 27, 2001 12:37 AM