some cosmetic points

My car looks like it's been attacked by the sugar sprinkle fairy. From a distance, anyway. It's a red car, it has lots of white streaks: they look like sugar sprinkles.

Closer up, it becomes evident that my neighborhood is home to several flocks of disgruntled seagulls. Why being disgruntled should be so closely associated with diarrhea is, in my mind anyway, one of the great medical mysteries of our time. At any rate, there you are. Me and my red, white sugar-sprinkled car. I haven't washed it since a week before my wedding, which is now over three months gone.

Along the same lines of cosmetic delinquency, I am still wearing the last, determined shreds of toenail polish also originally donned for the aforementioned nuptials. Only four toes (distributed across two feet) still retain traces of that bright red lacquer. One big toenail is, I suspect, glued together by the stubbornness of the pedicure. Since I have taken up Aikido again, I have found that bits and pieces of me are prone to breaking (or scraping) off. The exercise of being tumbled across a warehouse floor like the eponymous star of armadillo bowling has a wearing effect on one's appendages; to add to this, a thick coat of nail polish can be deceptive on the subject of nail length, which would explain why I neglected to clip my toenails for far longer than was either healthy or appetizing. If I peer at my big left toe nail, I can see dim fracture lines spiderwebbed across the polish, too deep to be simply surface faults. I'm afraid I have a San Andreas fault cleft in my toenail, and I'm too much the coward to brush off the detritus and peer into the abyss.

Purely cosmetic issues have not been in the forefront of our minds of late. Domestic tranquility is a far more urgent matter. The Guy has thwarted yet another of my strictures with that eel-like slithering that he has mastered so well. Dealing with him is an exercise in exactness, a test of precision I presume all new wives and lawyers must undergo before being accepted into their respective fellowships. That it is karmic retribution on me for some prior injury cannot be doubted. While the memories are dim, I cannot deny that it is quite likely -- almost inevitable, knowing my personality -- that at some point my mother told me strictly not to touch something-or-another, which command I followed to the letter by simple expedient of acquiring a stick to poke said something-or-another with.

The rule at hand was the law laid down in our apartment that further computers were henceforth unnecessary. "No more. Why anybody would want or even need seventeen computers is beyond me, but--"

"Not seventeen," he interrupted, much injured. "I don't think we have more than eleven."

"--BUT," I said in turn, raising my voice to the shriller heights of authority, "you don't need any more computers. No more computers."

My assumption was that I had made it perfectly clear he was to acquire no more computers and yet, what seemed to rational and straightforward to me was not, perplexingly, quite so straightforward to the Guy. Having been given borders over which he was not to cross, he promptly found a stick with which he poked triumphantly at the territory of the forbidden. "It's not for me, it's for you." he assured me, after heaving computer #12 atop my desk. It was certainly disingenuous, and clearly an act of sheer defiance on his part. Nonetheless, the sheer shamelessness, the effrontery with which he called it a gesture of generosity on his part was disarming. To add insult to injury, he stood back and stared at me with sparkling eyes, clearly expecting to be lavished with praise and adoration. "It's a birthday present," he added proudly.

The acquisition of the new computer was vexing, in that it showed my dictatorship over the household has not been solidified. On the other hand, it has allowed me to purchase Sims 2 and exercise my tyrannical rule over sprites. While not quite as satisfying as flesh-and-blood, the surrogates I manufactured in the game did somewhat alleviate my frustration.

That is, until they started behaving ... oddly.

In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to create Sims characters based on the Guy and myself; it is not a mistake that I will make again. It was satisfying at first to find that my little electronic proxy was the subject of much male admiration, which -- considering the brutal honesty with which I initially designed both her face and figure -- says much for the desperation of the little male Sims. The Guy was a less successful experiment, as during the design of the character I became abruptly aware of how unfamiliar I was with his face. This may seem an irresponsible declaration on the part of someone who plainly loved it enough to marry it, and yet, there you go. Given an opportunity to mold a likeness, I was left bereft of any clear image of it save for the dim recollection that the hair was black and the eyes were brown. As the Guy is Asian, this feat of memory is hardly an achievement worth noting. The final result was mysteriously Hispanic and fleshy.

When the Guy came to inspect his electronic representation, he professed himself entirely unimpressed. "You think I look like that?" In actuality, the resemblance was extremely slight. I consoled him by telling him that my version of him was simply a rough draft, and that at some later date I would kill him off in some gruesome fashion and recreate him as an ideal. He wandered away, not much comforted.

My Sim and his Sim started out quite affectionate of each other, which was hardly a surprise. Every thought e-Guy had revolved around e-Me, which was gratifying. By some unfortunate circumstance however, every other thought e-Me had involved money or, if not money, the latest male to walk into the building. e-Me was, to put it baldly, a slut. An expensive slut, at that. It occurred to me that it was perhaps fortunate that the flesh-and-blood Guy had very little interest in the Sims, though he drifted into the bedroom from time to time to gloat in my use of the computer. The e-Guy proved strangely independent of the original as well; while e-Me began to retain water and displayed a perverse fascination for the toilet, e-Guy began to work out fanatically, to the extent that he eventually lost weight and became quite annoyingly buff.

e-Guy admired himself in the mirror and dreamed adoringly of e-Me. e-Me made hamburgers, sat down in front of the television to eat, and admired a friendly male neighbor's ... eggs.

For whatever reason, of all the vagarities displayed by the Sims representations, the one that was most disconcerting to me was the extreme bounty with which the pudgy e-Me had been blessed. It has always been my contention that, but for genetic misfortune, I would fit quite comfortably in an A cup instead of the Almost-an-A that has been my lot since puberty. At the breast of bounty, I am a -- excuse me my atrocious sense of humor -- teatotaller. And yet, e-Me has bumpers that could steer her through Brooklyn traffic without a scratch.

I have no doubt that this bestowal of plenty is the work of the Sims developers who, like all game developers, appear to have a breast fixation that neither the laws of physics nor simple common sense can shake. It is useless to argue with the game engine on this issue; while the rest of the character's behavior and appearance can be modified, this one particular situation is non-negotiable. It seems unreasonable. Here I am, a player, desiring to make the pixel allocation less than it is, reducing the ephemeral workload for the system, and it is a nirvana that is held just out of reach.

In all fairness however, the designers have been consistent: male characters cannot be, shall we say, "adjusted" to a larger mold either, thwarting the ambitions of many an optimist. This is no doubt through the design of the same game engineers. It may only be my imagination that perceives the female situation as an issue of desire, and the male situation as an issue of inadequacy.

It seems worthwhile to note that the spawn of the e-Me and the e-Guy appears to have inherited her mother's love of toilets. She spends an inordinate amount of time playing in them. (e-Me and e-Guy are, not surprisingly, inadequate parents.) I recall that my mother has several embarrassing stories of my own baby self and toilets, so I presume some cross-over between reality and fiction has taken place; still, it is a disturbing speculation on how our offspring might turn out.

The Guy: "Let's name our first kid 'powerful.'"

Me: "No."

The Guy: "C'mon. Powerful Li. Hah!"

Me: "No."

The Guy: "Or Happy. Happy Li. Or Smart! Smart Li!"

All in all, enforced sterility seems the most reasonable course of action.