q-squared

The great tragedy of dwarf hamsters is that in addition to their charm and miniature size, they are likewise cursed with minute craniums capable of holding only the smallest of pea-sized brains.

Near the end of 1998, alone in San Francisco and estranged from the person who had inspired my move to the City to begin with, I conceived a sudden, demanding need for companionship of some sort. Quibble was the first acquisition, a newborn Siberian dwarf hamster with convictions of godhood. He eyed his new cage with a dubious eye, comparing it unfavorably with his previous place of residence, a giant glass aquarium that held two pounds of sawdust and twenty-seven of his brothers and sisters. During the first five days, he buried himself under the bedding and only emerged to glower at me and occasionally stuff seeds into his cheeks.

The next acquisition was a new roommate, the Marshmallow Peep. But that's another story.

Over the winter holidays I returned home to Seattle, leaving the apartment to the Marshmallow Peep, who was moving in, and Quibble, who became quickly convinced that the Marshmallow Peep was a rabid dwarf-hamster-eating predator, despite her anxious attendence on his every fuzzy need. He greeted my return with shrill relief, wrapping himself around the bars of his cage and hopping up and down in an attempt to reach me. From pint-sized deity, he turned into pint-sized worshipper, and bowed down at my altar with hosannas and burnt offerings.

Shortly after my return, a friend and I wandered past a pet store in Chinatown and bought another dwarf hamster. The new one was fat, placid, and undisturbed by his change of residence. Quibble was baffled by his new roommate, as his short memory precluded retaining any information on others of his kind; a few decisive encounters served to determine that Quirk, the new hamster, was Quibble's superior in size and muscle, if not brain.

One night after eating a makeshift dinner of rice, fried egg, soy sauce, and bacon, all diced up together in a cholesterol-rich mess, I fell asleep on the couch at an obscenely early hour. When I came to myself, my roommate had turned off all the lights, settled me comfortably on the couch, and was getting ready to go to bed herself. 10:30.

I brushed my teeth, changed my clothes, then fell into bed. At three a.m., I was suddenly awakened by squeaking from the hamsters. It was quite loud. It was also quite long-lived; after about ten minutes of World War Dwarf Hamster One, I dragged myself up, turned on the light, and went to investigate. Quirk was beating up on Quibble. Or trying to mate with him. Or her. The gender of the hamsters had been a mystery from the beginning; their aggression, according to the online help pages, were more indicative of females, although their behavior seemed to indicate more masculine qualities to my roommate and me. Annoyed by the noise, I reached in and knocked Quirk off of Quibble a number of times. The Hand of God reaching down from on high failed to make any noticeable impact on the rabid dwarf hamster mentality. After a few minutes, sleepily irritated, I finally ended up pounding on Quirk with the little wire ladder leading to the second level of their cage. Aggravated by the interruption, tubby Quirk attempted to squash his way through the railing, and waved his little paws at Quibble. Squeak squeak squeak squeak.

It was an educational episode. It would seem that the way that dwarf hamsters fight, (or mate; again, one don't know much about dwarf hamster mating rituals so one can only conjecture), is that the less dominant hamster rolls over, presents its stomach, and then proceeds to scream as loudly as it can while the dominant hamster jumps up and sits on it.

It could have been fighting, or it could have been mating. There was no way to tell the difference. Either/or.

Ten minutes later, the two fell quiet just long enough for me to turn off the lights and crawl back into bed. Two minutes after I'd pulled the covers up to my chin...

"SQUEEEEEEEEK!"

Once more I dragged myself out to kick some hamster ass. They were absolutely determined to quarrel so after a futile five or ten minutes of trying to separate them, I finally just picked Quibble up and stuffed him into his little nest at the top of the second story, then removed the ladder so Quirk couldn't climb up and get at him. The theory went that any sane animal with an instinct for self-preservation would consider this a rescue, and would remain in relative safety on the second level where the bully couldn't reach him.

This turned out to be an unfortunate error in judgement. The minute size of the dwarf hamster brain precludes the inclusion of self-preservative instincts and sanity in the dwarf hamster makeup. The second I got back into bed again, Quibble hurled his fuzzy little self off the second story and proceeded to get pummeled yet again. In a superbly Douglas Adams fashion, the closest it could come to self-protection was to squash itself under the treadmill wheel and squeeze its little eyes shut. If I can't see Quirk, Quibble was doubtless thinking, Quirk can't see me. The sad thing is, sometimes that worked.

Out of desperation, I dropped handfuls of food into their bowl, which broke up the fight long enough for them to crawl into the bowl and stuff their cheeks. Fight over, at least; there was relative quiet, long enough for me to once more snap off the lights and crawl into bed. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Then, just as I started really getting comfortable and drifting off---

By then, it was 4:30. I had to get up at 7:30. Thank God I'd gone to bed early. I reached into the cage, picked up Quirk, and stuffed him into a convenient shoebox. I poked some holes in the lid, closed it, then yelled at him for a solid five minutes while Quibble watched me and the shoebox with shiny black eyes through the bars of the cage. After about half an hour, hearing Quirk scrabbling piteously around in the shoebox, I again dragged myself out of bed. I opened the box and found the fat ball gaping up at me. "Have you learned your lesson?" I demanded. Quirk snuffled. I took that as a token of contrition and let him back into the cage.

I went back to bed. Two minutes later, Quirk and Quibble escalated their little war to sawdust hurling and shrieks fit to wake the dead.

This time I didn't even bother with the scolding. I fished out Quirk and stuffed him back in the box, closed the lid, and fastened it shut with a book. Quibble watched the process with great interest. "You're a bastard," I told Quirk, and put him on the floor under the cage. For good measure, I told Quibble, "You are too," snapped off the lights, and went back to sleep.

At no time did either of them even try to bite me, even when I kept knocking Quirk off of Quibble with my fingers. It is quite probable that they didn't have room in their tiny, itty bitty brains for the squabble and finger-biting to take place simultaneously. When I initially bought the pair, they used to nip me all the time and look puzzled when I swatted them for it. Cause and effect is likely a prefrontal lobe thing.

The next morning when I woke up, I checked in on Quirk and found him still sniffling at the bottom of the shoebox. I said a firm, "I told you so," and let him back into the cage before going to the bathroom for a shower. I came back dripping wet with a towel turbaned around my head, and found Quirk once more bouncing on top of a screaming Quibble. I gave up at that point. Why bother? There were bits and pieces of sawdust left at the bottom of the shoebox I'd used, so I dumped that out over the cage to rain down on the pair. It would seem that raining sawdust is a regular occurance in the dwarf hamster universe; they paid very little attention. What they did notice was an old care-and-fabric tag that had come attached to some shirt or another that had fallen into the shoebox and, subsequently, into the cage. They broke off their fight long enough to sniff at it. Quibble apparently found it of great interest; he picked it up in his mouth and ran around the cage with it seven or eight times. I watched, then went to dry off and dress myself. When I wandered back to the cage to investigate further, Quibble was still running happily around the cage with the tag in his mouth, while Quirk sat in the center of the cage, licking things.

I replaced the ladder to the second story. After a few tries, Quibble finally made his way up to his little nest, where he promptly added the tag to his growing pile of Important Things.

They went back to wrestling before I left. I could hear them squeaking. Sawdust was flying everywhere. Stupid little dustballs.

fish stalkings

Somewhere in San Francisco, there is a fish harboring a dark, obsessive passion for me. I know this. He stalks me.

I first encountered him while waiting for the bus to San Rafael. I say 'him' because I lack the capability to distinguish between genders when it comes to ichthyological life forms. Being a two-year resident of San Francisco, I am quite aware that alternative life styles are more the norm than not here; certainly, I'm not prejudiced against the idea. Since the primary challenge here is the concept of the interspecies relationship however, I'm more prone to stuff the subject under a 'he' appellation rather than a 'she,' and make everything easier for everyone concerned.

Anyway, as I say, I first encountered 'him' while waiting for the bus to San Rafael. It was fairly early on a Saturday; a regular MUNI bus pulled up and disgorged, in order, one old Chinese man, a fish, and two alarmed tourists with cameras. The fish padded around the little old Chinese man towards the corner, where he was obviously intending to catch a light across the street. The tourists hastily took a picture or two, sneaking in the shots with frightened determination as though worried that they might -- if caught -- be forced to acknowledge the incongruity of encountering a fish on the corner of Van Ness and Union.

The woman waiting for the same bus I was gaped after it, wobbling uncertainly on her heels. As a non-ichthyologist, I was unable to identify its exact type, (cod, pike, salmon, trout?), but was quite capable of identifying the legs, (orange tights), and shoes, (Adidas runners). The fish bobbled at the street corner, perhaps poking around in invisible pockets, then disappeared from view around the front of the bus.

"Chemicals in the water," I told the woman next to me, wearily. "Environmental sabotage and mutant growth, oh my."

Three days later, I ran across the fish again. He was walking along Van Ness Street yet again, trailed by a small herd of fascinated children. Oblivious or simply indifferent to his entourage, he stalked past Filbert and Lombard with great dignity. Halfway down the two blocks, he lost the train of children, only to pick up pointing tourists and some not-so-jaded City Citizens along the way. I lost him when our bus turned a corner. Behind me, a pair of plump, lobster-reddened tourists leaned precariously towards the window to stare out after him.

"You see that?" one demanded of the other.

"Is that a fish?"

The next day I went down to Chinatown, where rows and rows of scaled, sleek carcasses stare up at passersby, eyes glazed, mouths agape, tails shredded and frozen on shredded ice older than they are. The fish, that is. Live fish swims in tanks behind the counters; a cook diligent on the subject of fresh seafood will request a selection, and watch while it is netted out of the tank and its head whacked ruthlessly against the edge of the counter until it gives up the ghost.

I hovered over a flank of trout and attempted to match colorings to my twice-spotted walking fish. Despite myself, I was drawn to the staring eyes, and gingerly poked several of them with the edge of my fingernail.

One of the fish sellers chased me away, shouting angrily in Chinese. I fled, head down, hands in my pockets, and only later realized that the man had been asking me if I wanted to buy a trout. Over my shoulder I could hear him shouting in the exact same tone of voice at another, more obvious customer, a shriveled up little woman in a kerchief.

Once the initial contact was made, it seemed as though every time I turned around the walking fish was waiting for me. I caught a glimpse on Fisherman's Wharf, a little later; the next day, I spied him marching next to a naked man in Washington Square. A few hours after that, I spotted him in a completely different outfit -- a flounder, identifiable by the flat round body and the eyes on only one side of the head -- with the same bright orange tights and Adidas runners.

And yet again on Union Street, outside Coit Liquors.

Before I moved to San Francisco two years ago, a friend of mine came over to the house and played with my Tarot cards. "You'll find love in San Francisco," she predicted, gravely.

Just my luck; a trout man is dogging me.

the chickens

Part of the thrill of living in San Francisco is that the buildings are so close together, one often gets a perfect view of neighboring windows in next-door buildings. Case in point: our kitchen, my bedroom, and our closet-sized sitting room all look into the windows of a small apartment plastered next to our building. At any given moment there are clothes hanging out to dry on the windowsill. At present count, looking out my window as I type this, I see a black t-shirt, (inside out), an orange-yellow-white-green-blue-purple-aqua-brown speckled blouse that looks like the remains of a box of crayons, (hideous), seven bikini underpants in assorted pastel shades, (white, yellow, powder blue, pale green, pale green, powder blue-baby pink, lavender), and a massive pink bra that looks like it was used to smuggle nuclear warheads out of China.

Naturally, living with such intimacy with another family does a great deal to break down any natural reservations one might feel about idle speculation. Occasionally, when my roommate and I get tremendously bored, we entertain ourselves with trying to count the people who live in the other apartment, and wonder which piece of clothing goes with which person. Anywhere from four to nineteen people live in that apartment. Collectively they speak a Chinese dialect of some sort that involves a great deal of yelling, phlegm, and what sounds to my untutored ears to be homicidal fury. It was a language designed for working outdoors in farm fields. For yelling across crowded marketplaces. For testing the emergency broadcast system.

When I first moved into the apartment, I had a different roommate. By the end of the first week there, I'd dubbed our neighbors 'The Chicken Family.' At the time, my roommate worked days, whereas I, being a freelance musician, worked nights. I therefore got the full effect of The Chicken Family, and one bright summer morning, while I moped around in my room, I heard gobble-gobble sounds coming from The Chicken Family window. Cluck, cluck, squawk, gobble.

They were not, by any stretch of the imagination, human-generated sounds.

I was unaware, back then, that one can purchase live chickens in Chinatown. Apparently, it's one of those jealously-guarded privileges that managed to bash its way past ordinance rules regarding livestock within City limits. During the course of that morning, I listened to a live chicken clucking to itself, the chatter of the Chicken Family, and then -- around two in the afternoon -- a gradual crescendo of chicken noises, ("squawk, cluck, squawk, SQUAWK!"), followed by an ominous thud.

And then, no more squawking.

At that point, the nickname 'The Chicken Family' was absolutely inevitable. My new roommate laughed at me when I told her the explanation for the name, half a year later. Two weeks after she moved in, she met me at the door when I came back from Dominican, eyes wide. "I heard them kill a chicken," she told me. There were heavy, solid THUD, THUD sounds coming from The Chicken Family's kitchen.

"I told you so," I said, and went to hide under my desk.

The smells coming from The Chicken Family's kitchen at dinnertime are always mouth-watering. That worries me.

Nowadays I'm accustomed to The Chicken Family's ways. Every so often, the round-headed Chicken Children will press themselves up against the window and wave at us. We wave back, they beam, we beam, and then they go away to yell at their parents. At one point, some diabolically inspired sadist gave one of the Chicken Children a little toy record player that played well-loved nursery tunes. The one that the Chicken Children liked best was the tune for "This Old Man," which has apparently been corrupted by a certain purple dinosaur and retitled, "I Love You, You Love Me."

For twelve weeks in a row, every morning from seven until twelve, and every evening from six until nine, the Chicken Children would sing this song. They only knew the first six words, unfortunately. They only knew the first six notes. These were repeated without break, even for dinner, endlessly, over, and over, and over, and over again.

"I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me, I Love You, You Love Me...."

I have looked into the yawning gape of hell, ladies and gentlemen, and emerged pale and triumphant on the other side.

Now they're learning the alphabet.

"A B C D E F G...."

the icky feeling

So on Monday, I got a phone call from Jazz in Seattle, and talked with her for four hours.

I suppose it's a measure of my friendship with her that I'm willing to talk to her on the phone for so long. In fact, it's a measure of friendship with anybody that I'm willing to talk to them at all for anything longer than the space of time it takes to say "Hello, How are you? That's nice. What do you want?" Amanda gets that courtesy. The Flamingo gets that courtesy. I don't call her that often, but Binky gets that courtesy. So does my sister and my mother, though that's as much familial obligation as honest affection.

I hate my phone. Beyond hating phones in general, I hate my phone, which has very little by way of an actual handset, so that when I prop the earpiece between my shoulder and my head, my neck is slanted at an honest-to-goodness painful angle.

We talked, as the saying goes, of 'cabbages and kings and other things.' As any two professional, active, intelligent, self-confident women with postgraduate degrees would, we talked about boys. Lacks in our lives. Sufficiencies in our lives. Good things, bad things, potentials, careers . . . it's been a long, long time since I spoke with her last, so we deserved that time to converse.

I wished her a polite happy birthday, two months late. I'm bad at time. (We've gone into this before.)

"So are you coming down for the bar?" I asked her at one point, some inspired guardian spirit reminding me that she'd mentioned in some earlier conversation that she was thinking of coming down to California to take the bar exam.

"End of July. I have the dates here, somehow. I'm staying with my sister. I have her phone number somewhere, and her address. Around here, somewhere . . . "

There was the sound of paper rustling. Then: "Are you going to make me look it up?"

"Now, why are you doing this again?" I asked her.

It isn't my imagination, is it? The bar in California is one of the hardest in the United States? I don't think so.

I promised that I would take her out on Thursday, and maybe meet up with MOTU's cousin's barhopping club of twenty-somethings in startup companies. Jazz works for a start-up, as a QA person of all ludicrous possibilities. She's eminently well-suited for it, she tells me, which doesn't surprise me. She's good at details, and has a very disciplined mind. It's just ironic that she would have gone to MIT, gotten a BS in CS, then gone to UW for a law degree, passed the Washington State bar exam, then gone into QA for a startup.

Along those lines, I mentioned something about that to my sister, the Forest Manager in Training. There was a blank silence on the other end of the phone.

"What's a startup?" she asked.

Boy, you send a girl to live on Mount Rainier for six months . . . .

There was a party tonight at Haj's place. His mother was having a birthday, and everybody at the Dojo was invited. Somewhere along the line, they'd painstakingly written invitations for everybody, and I do mean everybody who is a member at the Dojo.

I count upwards of a hundred and fifty, easy.

The food was good, the people were hilarious, and all in all I had a smashing time. Quite an improvement over the morning, when I was feeling so ill I couldn't even go to Dominican to teach. I woke up at seven, changed my clothes, sulked my way down the hill, then discovered as I was waiting for the bus that I felt like death warmed over. A well-dressed, turbaned African-American woman was waiting for the bus as well; I plastered myself to the window of the restaurant on the corner, (closed at that hour, thank God), peered through the glass at the reflection of the clock, then creaked my way back up the hill to my apartment.

Then I huddled and shivered next to the phone until it was a decent hour, at which point I called all of my students one by one and cancelled the lesson. I have an uncomfortable feeling that I missed calling one, though I can't say for certain because by that time I was delirious.

I didn't bother changing my clothes again. Two minutes after the last phone call, I was asleep, curled up in fetal position with one sock on and one sock off.

That isn't the point, though. The point is the party.

Oh, but I got a phone call from my ex roommate at around what I thought was ten, but turned out to be two in the afternoon. It woke me up, obviously. She yelled at me over the phone.

"YOU DIDN'T CALL ME BACK! DID YOU JUST WAKE UP? ARE YOU STILL IN BED? Geez."

I groveled in a foggy, abject way, completely baffled as to who was on the other end of the line. I'm not good with phones. Somehow it seems like this entire journal entry involves phones, but that's another matter altogether. I'm just not good with phones. It turned out that the ex had a potential job opportunity for me, which was nice, though I can't remember clearly what she said because I was just feeling too shredded to retain any information. Something about her husband and his company.

I can't remember what company he works for, so that's a problem. I'll call her back Monday night, maybe, and ask her again. It's nice of her to be thinking of me, though.

After I hung up with her I padded to the phone, peered at it in a short-sighted way since I couldn't figure out what I'd done with my glasses, then padded in to investigate my roommate, who turned out to be in bed as well.

"Are you in bed?" I asked her.

She was a lumpy Thing under the covers. "Yes," it said, sleepily.

As a logical, albeit thoughtless next step, I asked, "Are you asleep?"

The lumpy Thing didn't bother to reply. I crawled onto the bed next to it, discovered I was only wearing one sock, curled up, and announced to one of the comforter-covered lumps: "It's two o'clock. Time to wake up."

The Lump moved. "I'm awake," it announced, fuzzily.

And then I fell asleep.

We had a meeting to get to at four o'clock at the dojo.

We got there at four forty-five. We were a little late. We had to be late. We stopped for coffee.

Which still isn't the point. The point is the party, but.

Oh, never mind.

After a long time of leaving messages at the Mount Rainier center, I finally got in touch with my sister tonight at around twelve. There was a message on the machine when I got home from the party that I'm not going to get into right now. It was from my sister, which just figures; I called my Mom, despite the late hour, (11:00 p.m., but the maternal figure might as well be a vampire for the hours she keeps, so I had no worries.)

"She was here this afternoon," Mom told me, "but she had to leave. She said something about Lara's birthday. . . ?"

I called her cell phone and cursed at her answering service. Two minutes later, the phone rang.

"Hi," the sister said.

"Hi," I said back.

And that pretty much exhausted the conversational possibilities.

In actuality, we chatted for half an hour or so, talking a bit about her own job search, and why I don't want to be a music teacher full-time. "The market's tight," I told her, meaning that I could be a blind, one-legged donkey without opposable thumbs and the temper of a camel, and could still get a job, provided I could use Microsoft Word and punch the number keys on a telephone. My sister, Mountain Woman, misunderstood.

"There have to be some rich people up there somewhere who need music lessons," she said. I think she was trying to be encouraging.

I gave her good, sound advice about how she should go about getting a job, advice that I'm not going to follow myself because I'm a moron. We hung up.

Then I wandered back to my roommate's room again, where she was already in bed with her eyes closed. It was twelve o'clock, midnight almost exactly. Hell, her light was on, so she was asking for it.

"Are you asleep?" I wanted to know.

"No," she said, which was a mistake. She should have said yes. So I crawled onto her bed and proceeded to talk at her.

The conversation drifted here and there, as conversations tend to do once the mind goes to sleep before the body has a chance to brush its teeth and take off its socks. The subject of the 'icky feeling' came up, wherein lies the reason for the entry's title.

Back when I was in college, a friend of mine once developed some sort of crush on me, which he never actually bothered to tell me about. No pedestals here, thanks. Not for us short people who need ladders to reach the top shelf in the kitchen cupboards.

What ended up happening was some subconscious alarm went off in my head and I suddenly decided that this hapless friend of mine was the most irritating, revolting, aggravating person on the face of the planet. It's possible that he started getting clingy. I can't remember, because everything about that period in time has been mercifully obscured by the haze of old age and decaying brain cells. I do remember though, that I could no longer stand to be in the same room with him. Every time he said something to me, I snapped something cruel and vicious back. Every time he touched me, I recoiled. Every time he so much as looked at me, I felt like throwing something at him. There was this crawling thing in the back of my mind, a squirming, revolted loathing that only disappeared once my friend got over his feelings and became nothing more than a friend again.

I later found out about his feelings for me. It explained something, but not everything. But that, again, isn't the point. The point is that that feeling became dubbed as my 'icky feeling' tonight, when I explained it to my roommate and then told her that it was a recurring sensation. Not about people, per se. Not anymore. Not since college. The icky feeling comes back when I get introspective. When I start thinking about stuff that really matters to me. When I get close to having a strong emotion, either happiness or anger.

What usually happens then is that I stop thinking about the thing that's bringing the icky feeling, because I don't like the icky feeling, and the icky feeling helpfully wipes out the thought that caused the icky feeling to begin with, leaving me free of any memory of it to prompt the return of the icky feeling.

This is Not Good.

My sister called back around twelve-thirty, and I spoke with her for another forty minutes. She was depressed and upset. I told her about the icky feeling. Back when I was younger I think it was the irrational snake that caused temper tantrums and the squirmies. "I don't wanna I don't wanna I don't wanna!"

We had a brainstorm, my sister and I, that we've learned something from our parents that we weren't aware that we had. If you're Japanese and you have a personal problem, you don't burden other people with it. Teamwork is all well and good, but that's in the professional, the grand problems. The personal problems are to be kept private, dealt with all alone without weighing down or inconveniencing anyone else with. Stoicism. The public face and the private face; the Japanese have a phrase for that, which I can't remember because it's 2:30 a.m. After a while though, the public face becomes the private face, and you lose track of the private altogether.

No wonder suicide rates are so high in Japan. Gotta wonder.

I tell you what, though. This is the last time I write a journal entry at 2:30 in the freaking morning.