pearl eyes

Japanese people serve fish much the same way all oriental people do, which is to say that they don't chop off the heads of the fish when they serve it. It's part of the presentation to serve the fish whole, (gutted and scaled and such, naturally) but with the tail and the head still attached. Not too many Americans, I've noticed, inflict this sort of display on their guests or family. I started school and learned a few things early on. Not useful things, but just enough things to pass muster among a crowd of American-bred children. For instance. I learned that when one stares at one's plate, one's plate should not be staring back.

Naturally I infected my little sister with these prejudices, and so whenever my mother served fish we'd get rather squeamish about the eyes. My parents never understood this; there was no real reason for them to, being relics of a different culture altogether. My father, who viewed the Three Stooges in much the same way devout pilgrims regard the Shroud of Turin, found this endlessly entertaining. My mother, who only occasionally had a sense of humor in those days, would get rather irritated when she'd glance up at us and catch us playing peek-a-boo with the fishes on our plates. We used to eat fish a lot, being Japanese, and oftentimes they would always be served whole. Smelt, for instance; Mom would batter and fry them up, and we'd come to the dinner table to find three or four little smelts sitting in a row on our plates. My sister and I would painstakingly eat the bodies, leave the tails, then line up the little smelt heads on the sides of our plates so that they'd stare away from us. Having thus removed the source of guilt from direct attention, we would continue on with our meals, perfectly content to have our mother be on the receiving end of several pairs of accusing fish glares. At some point during the course of the meal, Mom would look up and notice the array of fish heads gaping in her direction, and would scold us soundly for playing with our food.

My father had a habit of sucking on the fish eyeballs, something that I never really registered until rather early on in my sister's life. It's possible that he started the habit in order to tease us; it would certainly be in character with his sophisticated sense of fun. It never occurred to me to ask him. I have no idea if they tasted good or not; I've never had the guts to do so myself. Of course, I was grossed out, and made appropriate noises to convey the fact. My sister followed my lead and learned to be grossed out as well. Dad, naturally, thought it was hilarious. "They're pearls," he'd tell us. "You have to suck on them to clean them." He'd roar with laughter. Who knows if this is a Japanese thing. I've never eaten fish with Japanese men of my Dad's generation since. That's not the point of the story, however.

My gullible little sister, who believed implicitly anything that anybody told her, decided that she would like very much if she could make her Mommy a pearl necklace. We used to cut up the JC Penney catalogs that would get delivered to our house, snipping neatly around the jewelry and hoarding them away in pretty Japanese boxes that Mom would find for us. It was only natural that somewhere along that line she would learn that pearls are good things, and pearl necklaces are even better. Thus began the great fish eyeball collection. For several years she collected fish eyeballs whenever we had fish for dinner. My father would suck on one, discard it on his plate, and then my sister would sneak it away from the kitchen to hide it away in her room, secretly, so that Mom wouldn't know. She wanted it to be a surprise. Imagine how delighted Mom would be, if she were presented by a strand of bright, shiny, white pearls on a string that my sister had made all by her own, four-year-old self. At one point she had quite an impressive collection of fish eyeballs stored up in a little glass jar.

Naturally, it couldn't last forever. One day she found out that her carefully hoarded cache really consisted of nothing more precious than fish eyeballs. She was devastated.

When she was nineteen, I came back from college one winter and helped her clean up her old room in Mom's house. It was the year after Dad died.

I found a glass jar full of liquid, with little white marbles floating around inside.

I held it up for inspection. "What's this?"

"Oh. That." My sister flushed. "It's those eyes."

"You still have them?"

"I never got around to throwing them away," she explained, and tossed some crayons into a box. "I suppose I should, huh."

Sick and funny though the story is, I still occasionally get a little teary when I think back to those days. Another little story from the twisted archives of the Hirata family.

sleepover

I got a grand total of five happy birthday wishes, you know. Outside of work, that is. Everybody at work had gotten around to informing me that they wished me well; one of my coworkers materialized at my cubicle, solemnly shook my hand, kissed me on the forehead, and announced that I looked quite well, despite the grey hair and wrinkles. I got irregular email through the day from people that I had had meetings with, once or twice. How is it that half the people in my office don't know how vital systems work, but everybody knows when my birthday is?

Tara sent me a web happy birthday, my mom and sister called to inform me (in case I forgot) that they loved me, and my roommate left a quick message on my machine. I got an emailed happy birthday from someone else, who promised me presents -- Presents! Yay! -- as soon as I got him a mailing address, (Yuhri Hirata, c/o Excite@Home, 1st floor, 430 Broadway Avenue, Redwood City, CA 94063) and a glass pen from Tara that's way cool. I've put it someplace safe to take out and stare at from time to time. Oh, and my sister is promising me "Henry V", starring good ol' Kenneth.

...and that was it.

In retrospect, it's kind of sad how few people I know outside of work. Where are all my friends, my loved ones, my comrades?

(sniff.)

RealPlayer is blinking at me from the lower right-hand corner of my screen. It's mad because I'm using something else altogether to listen to the radio today. German Klassik, in fact; once in a while the music breaks off so the radio announcer can say something in Deutsch, with those mellow, "I'm a classical music DJ" voices.

No matter what the country, classical music DJs always sound the same. Soothing. The natural world's answer to Valium, I suppose it is.

August 29, 2000

Binky called and left a message on my machine, which I didn't get until late last night. She wished me a happy birthday, too.

I'm up to six.

On Sunday I dashed around like a headless chicken, getting a present for a co-worker, socks for myself, (didn't buy any of 'em), and then picking up my friend to go to the Dojo for an Open House, after which I got driven down by a fortuitous coincidence to Palo Alto, where I met up with Tara and Remington, visited the Palo Alto fair, spent no money, then ganged down to Cupertino for Henry IV (Part I) in Cupertino and back up to Redwood City to paint stencils before going to sleep at around twelve.

I actually got to sleep in on Monday, though. I didn't get up until 7:30. It was a sinfully luxurious experience, actually getting more than six hours of sleep. I'll admit that I'm pleased that I'm able to get by on less and less these days, though I'll also acknowledge that once in a while, without warning, my body will decide that enough is enough and crash, willy-nilly.

Henry IV wasn't terrible; it was a few hours of entertainment, and decent enough that I didn't begrudge the five dollars I ended up putting in one of the actors' baskets. It was Free Shakespeare in the Park, and any little bit helps. Besides, it was a nice night, and I hadn't ever seen Henry IV before. The guy who played Falstaff was pretty damn good, though a little of the staging seemed overdone, and the actors wore a bizarre mishmash of pseudo feudal samurai gear and GI fatigues that made them look like culturally adrift homeless people.

I'm tired. I don't really have anything to write about, do I? Except that I was tentatively planning on coming back to Seattle for a weekend, when my mother's birthday rolls around. My sister and I have it sort of planned out, where she'll arrange to have me picked up at the airport and shipped secretly to a restaurant. She'll invite Mom and some of her friends to dinner at the same restaurant, and Mom will walk into the place and find me sitting there.

I thought it would be a nice surprise. What do I get her for her birthday, anyway? It's coming up. I'm poor, though I can't understand how that always happens. I'm literally surviving on a hundred dollars a month, right now. My tremendous pay is all going towards Japan, (in November), and a sudden surge of student loan payments that have suddenly wrapped their fists around my throat. C'est la vie. Last night I ate a piece of toast and put little crystals of sugar on it for flavoring. Tonight I think I'll try red pepper flakes.

Starving and single in San Francisco. There's a song in that somewhere. If it weren't for the fact that I own a computer, I could sing the blues.

Had some tremendously bad, disconcerting news last night left on my answering machine. Ho hum.

I want more plants.

those passing decades

Here's a little bit of information not calculated to interest anybody whatsoever. Excite@Home just signed on its 2,000,000 broadband customer, which makes it the leading broadband supplier in the United States.

Want to know what the stock is at today? 14-1/8. It's actually dropped. Unfathomable are the ways of the stock market. How grateful I am that I don't have a clue. I think if I did, I might actually give a damn.

The way I spend my first two hours at the office pretty much dictate what sort of day it will be for me at work in general. (Oh, how cute. Fred's hind leg is dangling off the edge of my terminal. He looks like he's just hangin' out.) Yesterday I spent the first two hours reading Internet Requests For Comment, which -- as anybody who is serious about learning about the Internet knows -- are the standards written up for the Internet by assorted experts, codified into common across-the-board requirements. These are intelligent minds behind these documents, mind, and a lot of these are full of fascinating and useful information. The bad thing about is that they were writing for posterity, and so were weighed down with the need to make the reading as dull as humanly possible.

By the end of the first hour, my head was wobbling on my neck like one of those plastic hula dancers you stick on your dashboard if you lack taste. By the end of the second hour, I was down to reading the same sentence twelve or more times, just to register beyond the first two words.

The rest of the day was spent in a drowsy haze; people had to repeat things to me multiple times in order to get my attention. I was sound asleep on my feet, and every time I passed a patch of sun, I'd stop and just stand there, staring blankly into space like a dog hitting a brick wall.

"You're like a lizard, Yuhri."

The building receptionist accuses me of being cold-blooded. But then, he doesn't have to sit back here in the freezing air conditioning. He gets to be out there in the sunshine, next to glass windows.

This morning I decided that instead of doing the reading that I really should be doing, I would indulge myself and spend some time learning perl instead. I got through two chapters, drank some hot tea to get caffeine going through my system, ate a 250 calorie fat-free yogurt that was clumpy and weird, and discovered that RealPlayer 8 is on my system and allows me to listen to Classic KING-FM 98.1 in Seattle.

I also discovered that I had speakers wrapped up in twine on the desk behind me. I plugged them into a little socket I found on my laptop, and am now utterly reconciled to the fact that I have an NT machine. See? I can even get it out without choking. As a ten minute break, I uploaded new pictures to go in front of my journal entries to-date, so that they won't suffer by comparison to the first one and people can stop looking at the @HOME ball that was there, instead. All in all, I'm content.

My coworker keeps harping on the fact that I'm getting old. Easy for him to say; he's pushing the half-century mark. (Okay, so it's my birthday tomorrow. Fine. My driver's license says I'm turning 27. Bite me. Fine. Moving on...)

You know, I haven't seen my sister in three days. I wonder if that means she's gone back to Seattle? Except all her clothes and bags and shoes are still in my room. Hm.

Oh. New link: pinstruck.com, which allows you to send anonymous voodoo curses online. Cute.

I've been noticing that lately there are fewer conversations to report in my journal. I figured out why. The fact is, outside of work, I don't actually talk to anybody. Literally. I don't pick up the phone because it scares me, Quirk is fuzzy and brown but not big on reciprocal conversation, and my roommate's out of town. My sister's disappeared into the arms of her friends here. I think the only time I spoke yesterday after I left the office was to my building manager, who promised in his broken English to fix the leaking kitchen sink. Oh, and I said "Vallejo Street, please," to the cable car brakeman.

What day is it, anyway? Is this a Tuesday?

On my way back home yesterday, I stopped off at the Church Street Safeway, which is why the Safeway logo is up on the top of this page. Everybody was carrying one of those little red shopping baskets, so I got a little red shopping basket. Everyone was heading right, so I headed right. It wasn't until I found myself parked in front of the liquor section, staring blankly at a bottle of tequila, that it occurred to me that I didn't really need anything at Safeway.

Like I said, it was that sort of day: both that I would go to Safeway without thinking about it, and that I would end up spending a good ten minutes just staring at bottles of alcohol and thinking how cozy it must be to be rum.

Since I didn't need anything at Safeway, I only spent $26 and came home with a loaded backpack.

Here's the thing, though. The next morning I was back at Safeway, (which is where the shuttle picks me up, lest anybody think I have some morbid fetish regarding the place), and a random security man who's always there in the mornings when I get there was quite determined in waving at me to elicit a response.

I am not a morning person. I resent morning people, with that quiet, tired distaste of the eternally weary towards the eternally peppy. He thrust his hand at me on my way out -- I check the clock inside the store every morning, just to make sure I haven't missed the shuttle -- and introduced himself. Then he followed me outside and sat on the curb next to me, trying to make conversation. It's possible, (and again, I'm not a morning person so my recollection is hazy at best), that he was macking.

He asked for my phone number. I explained to him my phobia of phones. I came to work. It was just another little bit of weirdness to round out my week.

My coworker, the one who's babysitting Spid, came around the corner at around eleven.

"Mind if I water Spud?"

He does that on purpose.

I need to buy some foam bricks. I think that would be really cathartic, hurling foam bricks at things. People. Mostly people. Apropos nothing in particular, did I ever mention that two out of the three other women in my group are pregnant? Everywhere I look in this company, there's another pregnant woman wandering by. Is it just me, or is it that time of year? I've never been near so many baby-carrying females in my life. Not that I have a problem with it, per se. I'm just saying...

...Oh, and my suction cup ball that I got in Colorado while visiting the Flamingo is now stuck to one of the great metal pipes that run overhead in our office.

by the road

The Netherlands -- "Nederlands," as it says on the web page -- are being a perverse b*tch. Every time I try to do a network diagnostic, it keeps timing out. Well, fooey on them. If it doesn't want to be helpful enough to cooperate with a simple diagnostic, it doesn't deserve attention. I have better things to waste my time on. Useful things. Fun things.

Let me try that just one more time....

Damn Netherlanders.

Fred is sitting with a wide-open, pink mouth in front of the keyboard. He's staring up at me with shiny little black eyes. It's absolutely adorable. I went around the office to rouse support for his plushdom, and damned if I can find any sympathetic people out there in the cold hard world outside of my cubicle.

earlier...

Friday. There was a bottleneck on the freeway on the way out of Redwood City, which I only noticed because the new driver of the shuttle had such a frenetic stop-and-go quality to his driving that I was nauseous. Remembering the Flamingo's stories about perception of movement and physiological equilibrium, I made a determined effort to stare out the window. I had a headache, and the seats were inadequate with their head support, so I had it leaned up against the glass.

Bump-ka-bump-bump-thump. And that was just the glass against my skull. My headache was doing something else altogether. I could hear each little heartbeat in my temples. Thump-a-thump-a-thump-a. The combination of the two was like a nightmare out of an Indiana Jones movie, tribal drums pounding on all sides. Help. We're surrounded.

Bump-ka-a-thu--bump--nk-a-thunk-a-BUMP-BUMP-BA-BA-BA-("Crumbs.")-thunk-a--bump.

The bottleneck was more observable than physiologically noticeable. My head was still rattling on the windowpane. We were passing through a long stretch of those irritating hills that California should be famous for, the original landswells; long, rolling stretches covered by straggly yellow grass that can spike straight through bare feet, and shrubs that haven't seen rainwater since before the Great Depression. An advanced degree in music apparently does not involve training on rational thought; despite the fact the banging was making my headache worse, I felt too ill to actually lift it off the glass and deposit it somewhere else. This is why I happened to be conscious and open-eyed when we realized that the entire side of the road -- in fact, most of the hills as far as the eye could see -- were on fire.

There were a great many gawkers lined up on the side of the road. Cars were slowing down so the drivers could admire the smoky view. After all, if you had a chance of being caught up in a wildfire and dying a horrible, painful death from smoke inhalation, wouldn't you want to linger and smell the fumes? I would.

The driver performed his first and only intelligent deed that trip by honking the line into motion again. I settled back, nausea-stricken, and counted bump-kas again.

Bump-ka-a-thu--bump--nk-a-thunk-a-BUMP-BUMP-BA-BA-BA-("Crumbs.")-thunk-a--bump.)

Saturday. I was supposed to go to dinner with a few friends, but I didn't make it. There was a mixup about where we were supposed to meet, how we were supposed to meet, and I blew money on BART and didn't get anywhere that I apparently needed to be, so I finally got pissed off and came home and found a message on my machine from my friends I was meeting ("Where are you? We're sitting here, waiting for you...") that had come in on my answering service exactly -- and I kid you not -- one minute after I called in from the BART station to check my messages to see if they had called. In fact, they were probably trying to leave me a message while I was listening to my messages, and cursing the fact that I hadn't gotten a message from them.

So I went home, as I say, having blown a solid three hours traveling back and forth and waiting for them, barked at my roommate, and crawled into my bedroom to sulk for a few minutes. BART bites the big one. Of all the transit systems in the City of San Francisco, BART is the one that I loathe the most. Psychopaths are created on BART. I see the ads out for that new movie, The Cell, with Jennifer Lopez. You know the one: "Deane, a child therapist, uses her empathic "gift" to embark on an uncharted and perilous journey through a serial killer's demented mind." Screw the special effects. Just ride the BART train for an hour and you'll start seeing through those serial killer eyes.

That afternoon, though, I had lunch with my sister, and that was nice. She's been in town for two months now -- did I ever say? I'm big on the dashes today -- and she's heading back to Seattle this week, sometime. Maybe Monday. (That's today, isn't it?) Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Friday or Sunday. She's not sure. What she does know is that she's been spending so much time with her friends that she's made here, working at a sports store that she got hooked into by going to coffee with some random guy she met on the Internet, and...

...and I've lost track of that sentence. I'm too lazy to go back over it. Never mind. You'll just have to figure it out for yourselves.

Fred is so damn cute. Except somebody came by while I was in this last meeting and scotch-taped his mouth shut.

Sick. Sick sick sick sick.

Smurfette has gone to Arizona for a month to recuperate from her ex-job, (Britannica.com), and a chronic fatigue condition that's been going on now for, oh, pretty much forever. You know what I think it is? I think she's allergic to San Francisco. I'm not going to tell her that, though, because I like having her for a roommate.

Selflessness be damned.

There was a large white stretch limo stuck on Powell street, one block away from the cable cars. This was on Saturday, on my bad-tempered way back from the BART station and my abortive dinner-that-almost-was. (I ended up eating instant macaroni and cheese, in case you're wondering.) A radiant little bride and groom were standing up inside the limo through the skylight, waving happily to passersby. They got an ovation from a cable car. Several German tourists applauded them. A street vendor offered to buy the bride.

It cheered me up enough to go in to Burger King and buy myself a frozen coke, which promptly burned my fingers white and rasped the roof of my mouth.

In case anybody was wondering, I bought Starcraft at Costco. Not Age of Kings. I wish I hadn't bought it. I've been playing the damn thing, to the detriment of my homework.

Got my coworker a swiss army knife for his birthday, since I could afford it, and since my sister was working at the sports store and got a big discount.

Got five pound weights for me.

Need to cut my nails.

Back to Friday. After we passed the roadside wildfire, we traveled on without comment for another two or three miles before suddenly coming across a pensive looking man standing on a bed.

Another five miles after that, we passed a pickup truck parked by the side of the freeway, carrying a load of floral print mattresses, five teenagers, and a dog.

The shuttle was quiet for another five or ten minutes before someone saw fit to comment.

"Some weird sh*t going down today."

POSTSCRIPT : I was finished with this entry, but the Flamingo sent me a link to make me drool.

So follow it here, to one of my heroes: Ambrose Bierce and the Devil's Dictionary.

conversations

It's a well known fact, (at least well known to me), that piranhas can actually eat themselves to death. Back when I was in grade school, there was an Indian girl -- whose name is a complete mystery to me, in my old age -- who claimed that her cousin's best friend's brother once had one, a bright blue fish that kept eating all the other fish in the tank until finally it was the only one left. At some point in the history of the fish, some well-meaning soul dropped an entire hamburger patty into the tank, which the fish promptly consumed whole. Either hamburger patties are lethal to piranhas, or the piranha ate itself to death, or some other mysterious medium intervened to cut the fish's life short. One way or another, the maybe-piranha blue fish died, leaving me in sole possession of this interesting tidbit of information:

Piranha can eat themselves to death.

So, it seems, can I.

Having done so at this strange little restaurant that Tara and her fiance, Remington (sorry man, but you know who you are and why), took me to, I am now riding my non-corporeal little self back to San Francisco on Cal Train, entertaining myself by typing this journal entry through some convenient psychic's body.

Work continues to be fun, in a uniquely work sort of way that I really wasn't expecting. I was warned at the outset that there would be a certain challenge involved; all in all, I'm finding that that's sometimes the case, and sometimes not. The chief issue here, without going into too much detail, seems to be that there's a lack of communication going on between people and departments. Tara tells me that that's only natural, as any corporate structure inherently lends itself to stagnation, a condition which they apparently fight by reorganizing divisions and people as often as they can collect more than one chief into a room.

Unlike my last place, where the balance of chiefs to indians was roughly 19 to 1, this company seems to have a relatively good balance of actual Work people (who do stuff), and Management people, who just go to meetings. If my present schedule with them is any indication, I'm destined to become a Management person simply by default. 80% of work happens in meetings. The other 20% is spent wandering around looking for people to hook into meetings.

More and more I have to pick and choose the things that I decide to talk about in the journal. This is due only partly to the fact that I take so long between entries, something that never used to be an issue when I wrote more frequently. It also used to be that I had a more boring life than I do. Somewhere between all the traveling that I do between Redwood City and San Francisco, I turned into quite an interesting little character.

I beam in reflected glory, of course; there's always something interesting in someone who spends half of her life traveling, even if it's only between train stations. Today I spent part of the day on the phone to Australia, where mellow-tongued Australians wandered around their office, looking for coffee. At the same time (in between being on the phone to Australia and then getting back on the phone with the people in Australia), I attended an All-Hands meeting to learn that our division had been re-orged.

I tell you, it's an actual verb.

What's relevent here is that my manager, my previous manager before my first re-org, was going to be leaving the company to take a great job at a start-up, and as a result, my job responsibilities will now include the planning and prioritization for the Operations group that I started out in. This doesn't mean management, mind you; I lack the technical know-how and the experience to serve as a manager for a group of engineers. That's assuming that we don't follow the Dilbert Business Plan, of course.

As a result of my job, I've learned another phrase: "Brain Dump." Something which happens when somebody leaves and isn't coming back and happens to hold in his or her brain a wealth of knowledge without which the company will be reeling for days, weeks, even months.

I'll just shut up now about work. Moving on again....

Conversation with Tara.

"--who said that, hahaha. Do you think I'm an introvert or an extrovert?"

Dead silence. Peculiar look on Tara's face. She stares at me, blankly. She is thinking.

"What, see? It kind of depends on the situation, I think."

"I'd say ... an extrovert."

"Really? Weird."

"Because you're really interested in people."

"Am I? I think I'm actually an introvert. I mean, I talk a lot but I don't actually say anything."

Case in point.

"No, but .... I don't know. You just seem interested in people. You're always telling stories about 'this guy in my office did this' or 'this person did the other.'"

"Yeah, but they're stupid stories."

In personality tests, I actually score relatively high on the introvert side. Isn't that interesting? It is to me. Everything about me is interesting to me. I told Remington about the Slug Tongue man. He reciprocated by telling me about his friend, who happened to have a really pronounced connective tissue underneath his tongue that didn't allow him to push it out of his mouth.

"That's where it belongs, in the mouth," I announced, to the quiet amusement of the people in the booth behind us at the restaurant. "It shouldn't go out exploring. It shouldn't be wandering into other mouths. The tongue was designed to work with one mouth, and one mouth only. It's attached. It's committed. It's too late for it to go exploring for other options."

I'm still bitter about Slug Tongue man.

"I shouldn't read your journal," Tara apologized, after I accused her of ignoring my haircutf. "I read it and I find out what's happening in your life and then I assume that you've already told me in person, and we have nothing left to talk about."

I refrained from pointing out that it never stopped me from talking, anyway. "When I tell you these stories verbally, you get the personality that comes with it. It's a whole different thing. Exciting. Fresh."

"That's true," she said, kindly. "You certain talk louder than you write."

Oh. Remington thought I was an introvert, too.

OutTake from the restaurant:

Tara: "You look cute today."

Remington: (Head nods.)

Me: "Huh?"

Tara: "I think it's because you're wearing white. You should wear more white."

Remington: "Uh huh."

Me: "I'm qualified."

Tara: "What?"

Me: "Right."

Tara: "I don't get it."

Me: "Bleh."

Tara: "...Oh."

Me: "I just felt like sharing that little tidbit of information. Didn't that make your day just a little bit brighter?"

Remington: "Mm hm."

The point of that is that I looked cute today.

Incidentally, and this is another subject altogether, I had to farm out Spid to a coworker today because I'm suffering under a mortal dread that he's not getting enough light. He has strange dry patches on his leaves. My coworker, having assimilated a now-gone engineer's window cubicle, has plenty of light, and has thus far tended to Spid's needs with a paternal anxiety that I thought would have been more than depleted by the proud spawning of three children.

Apparently not. Perhaps he's overflowing, as Tara suggested. It's a possibility. Thus far, he's shown no tendencies towards it with me.

discoveries

It's far too late in the day for me to be coherent. It's an ambitious person who expects me to be articulate during the course of the regular day anyway; since I don't reasonably expect anybody in my acquaintance to be overly optimistic, I'll just meander in my normal way and leave it to complete strangers to be disappointed. They have no business being naive.

It's the beginning of the third week, and I've established the fact that the bagels can occasionally make an appearance on the second floor instead of the first. The doughnuts -- there are doughnuts as a weekly option, though I've yet to get in on that action, either because of a lack of interest or a lack of access -- tend to be on the second floor as a general rule. Today, for whatever reason, so were the bagels. I got a tip along that line from the receptionist, (named Leo, who told me that his weekend was great until he ended up pulling a leg muscle while jogging on Sunday), and pottered upstairs to investigate.

There was a small creche of British people standing around the bagels, slathering marmalade atop of cream cheese and debating the merits of movie music. I have no idea what movie. I hovered around the outskirts and felt wistful that my accent was nothing worth mentioning.

"In England, somebody told me that the American accents were so sexy," my sister told me once. There was a short pause while we made faces at each other: the 'huh?' expression.

"Why?"

"Who knows. They're British. I always thought Australians sounded hot."

There was another moment of silent contemplation.

"Weird Brits."

It's the beginning -- or rather, the end of -- the first day of my third week. Two weeks under my belt. What do I know now that I didn't know then? I know how the server architecture is designed. I know about NetX, a product put out by OSI. I know about Tivoli, another product put out by ... some random person. (It smells like chlorine in my bus. I know about that, too.) I know that Fridays at Four, the week-end get-together for all excite@Home employees, serves beer. I know that if you set up a class for 18 people who insist they have to be allowed to participate, only 10 will show up. Even if you order food. Because they're flakes. I know that 80% of business is done in meetings, and the other 20% of the business day is spent tracking down people to have the meetings.

I know that I don't know enough. I know I need to learn Perl. I know that if I don't learn Perl fast, I'll really, really regret it. And I know that my laptop's case is so damn heavy, in two more weeks I'll be Quasimodo.

Last Friday, the Director took a bunch of us out to lunch. That is to say, we got out of a slightly tense meeting, looked at each other, said "Whew," and then the Director announced, "I'm hungry. Let's go grab some lunch?"

After the final count and round-up was made, five of us went strolling down to the parking lot, an odd assortment of little characters. The Director, my ex-Manager -- did I mention I've already been reorged in a record one-and-a-half weeks? Apparently, this is a real verb in the world of corporate infrastructure; I now answer directly to the Director -- the other Project Coordinator for the group, and then a hilarious man, my height, who claimed to be "half redneck" and "driving the bitter bus." He offered to drive.

His redneck blood was his rationale for the monster truck that we ended up riding in, a behomoth in electric blue. It was a pickup with easily enough room in the cab for five people; there was enough room in the driver's seat alone for two solidly built bodies. "The cupholder expands," he told us with some smug pleasure. It was a truck built for driving down railroad tracks in, for shooting moose and tossing them in the back, for terrifying democrats.

On the way there, a small fracas occurred involving a Viking Delivery Truck and a hostile deliveryman. Our monster truck pulled off of a major boulevard with heavy traffic, turning right into a road that led into the mall. This, too, was a major intersection; there was a building on the right side that extended quite a ways, sidewalk next to it, one lane of road, then a thick concrete median filled with bushes, and on the other side of that two lanes going the other way.

We turned into the single lane to discover a delivery truck parked smack dab in the middle of the lane, blocking the entire road. There was enough room for us to pull up in behind it, and for two other cars to pull up behind us, effectively blocking us in. There wasn't adequate room around the truck for even a normal sized car to steer between him and the median; the immediate response of all the males in our truck was to start shouting. Instant hostility. Just add water.

While I cowered in my seat and snickered, our driver honked madly at the truck's driver, who stepped out of his truck in a leisurely fashion and proceeded to go about his business of opening up the back of his truck and pulling out a dolly. Across the boulevard we'd turned from, a city bus was parked, waiting for our lane to clear so he could take his green light.

"You're blocking traffic! Move your truck!" our driver yelled, leaning out the window.

The deliveryman shrugged. "Go around."

"We can't go around, there's an f***ing median, you dick!"

"Do what you want," the deliveryman said, unimpressed by this show of diplomacy. "The truck stays."

And so he went around his business, moving with deliberate placidity, while the guys in our truck frothed, the women in our truck laughed, and the bus driver across the street -- tired with waiting -- finally crossed the intersection to be stuck behind us and the two cars now sandwiched themselves. As there wasn't enough room for the bus to join us in the bottleneck, he ended up blocking two lanes of traffic in the boulevard. One of the blocked lanes held yet another city bus.

My old manager pulled out his cell phone and began, quite calmly, to talk with the Redwood City police.

"Look at this prick," our driver raved. "He's put a stop to the entire municipal transit system."

I craned my neck to look; the bus driver was red-faced and on a phone of his own, jaw set.

Not good with hostility or driving, for that matter, I made myself small on the back seat and laughed until I cried.

On Sunday, I went and got my hair cut (finally!) by the little Chinese man. He was in a talkative mood; for whatever reason, he was determined to get me reading some sort of magazine, and kept interrupting his clipping to trot back to his magazine rack and fetch me another periodical to replace the ones I'd already rejected.

As usual, I emerged with a great haircut, one that I hadn't asked for but that fits rather nicely on my bulbous head, anyway. In case anybody is interested in this tyrant of a man, -- who really is quite good-natured and perfectly friendly, if absolutely pig-headed on the matter of haircuts -- his name is John, and he works for Versailles on Clay Street, between Montgomery and Grant.

On the Saturday before, I bought a beanie baby, purely by accident. Having not bothered to look at the tags before purchasing the toy, I didn't realize it was a beanie baby (2000!) until standing at the bus station. I was mildly mortified; having sworn never to have anything to do with the beanie baby craze, I was embarrassed to discover that I'd been seduced to the Dark Side without even putting up a token resistance. My only consolation was that I'd fallen in love with the toy, irrespective of the label; it's a small polar bear sitting down, made of some polyester plush fabric that makes it feel like a mix between terrycloth and chenille (sp?)

I've bought a beanie baby, but I've renamed it. They wanted it to be named Aurora. Gag me.

He's named Fred. I've taken him to the office, where he's made fast friends with Spid.

On Sunday, I also opened up an envelope that was sitting in my 'came for Yuhri in the mail' slot, and discovered my paycheck. My first paycheck from my new job. In fact, it was a bit of a shock; the check turned out to be quite a bit more than I'd anticipated, ($300-500 more, in fact), that I instantly overreacted by going to Costco and spending $150+. I bought myself a computer game. And a backpack. And forty-six rolls of toilet paper.

That night, we went for dinner, my sister and Smurfette; there's a great Thai restaurant called 'Thai Spice' that lives right on Polk Street, near Jackson. The food was good. My sister, it turns out, never made it to Mexico. "We kept stopping to surf-kayak," she informed me. They returned two days late, anyway.

"Did you bring me back a present?"

"Yeah. Where is it--?"

"Give me my present."

"Hold on. I think I might have left it in his car...."

"Give me my present. Give me my present. Give me my present. Give me my present. Give me my present."

"Shut up!"

"Give me my present! Give me! Give me...!"

Speaking of, I never did get down to the wharf this weekend. Crud. And I have to remember to get the Flamingo's new address again. Hey, Binky! How do you feel about chocolate?

spid and commuting

earlier in our story...

The commute from Redwood City to San Francisco and back is a pain in the butt. It used to be that when I visited Tara -- who lives in Redwood City -- I would subsequently have to drive or train myself back to the City in order to get back home so I could go to bed so I could wake up in the morning so I could go to work.

Not last night.

On Sunday afternoon I went down to visit Tara. She picked me up at Sequoia station, (that's Redwood City for you not-in-the-know types), and we drove down to a massive Macys so we could look at china patterns.

There are many things on which I would consider myself knowledgeable, if not necessarily expert. Piano. I know education. I know Java. I know books, and I know that Andrew Lloyd Webber is the Antichrist. I do not know china, I do not know crystal, and I do not know silverware.

A long time ago, back in my college days, a really good friend who was also getting married hauled me out to the mall to help her register. "Because you're a girl," she explained patiently, when I protested. "You should know these things."

Know these things or not, very early on, we established that our tastes were nothing alike, and that if I loathed something, she was quite likely to love it. By the end of the day, she would come running whenever I made an "Ew" sound, because she would then be guaranteed to find something she liked.

"I'm never coming over for dinner if you're going to eat off of those," I complained, bitterly.

"I never cook," she told me, "so it doesn't matter."

Fortunately, Tara and I have relatively similar taste, which is a good thing because I really like her cooking and would hate having to miss out on one of her spectacular meals. We went through china. I had opinions. We went through silverware. I had opinions. Then we went through crystal, where she pinged things with her ring and I made baffled comments in the background.

I learned a neat thing, which is that those Palm Pilots I always see around can actually be used for more than just playing solitaire. I now have craving in my soul.

Anyway, last night I crashed at Tara's place, where I ate a lot, laughed a lot, drank a glass of red wine, mocked the parakeet, and bought a plant. Not from Tara, who was kind enough to lend me two Cuisinart cookingware things to temporarily alleviate some of the damage I did to our own supply with my pasta-cooking errors in judgement. We went down to Albertsons on her corner and there I bought a little tropical plant in a little plastic tub, which I promptly named Spid.

In fact, I named my new work computer Spod, so this works out quite well. The little magnet eggs that Tara gave me for Christmas are affectionately named Squid and Squod, so there's a certain pattern being set here that I'm unwilling to diverge from.

So now Spid is sitting on my counter, basking in the extremely weak sunlight that he -- Spid is male, I say -- can leech from the window on the other side. One of my group came by this morning to say hello and chortled over him.

"He's so cute!"

...which he is. Of course, all single men are, by definition. This is what comes of birthing so many women and gay men. My coworker is jealous of my plant. I shall get her one like him tomorrow.

According to the web, he's a Dieffenbachia. Coincidentally enough, he's deaf.

I expect my mountie to arrive soon in the mail.

Strange things were afoot in San Francisco last week. For one reason or another, I failed to document them as they occurred. I've time now to correct that omission, and a manual for my ergonomically enhanced Microsoft keyboard allows me to type in the fashion that is best suited for my physical build.

It seems that the shuttle bus service provided by my company for its long-suffering workers based in San Francisco isn't a heavily utilized thing. There are reasons for that. One: there's only one chance to catch it, and if you miss it, boom, you're stuck trekking back across the city to get to the CalTrain station before it gets too late. Two: it's freaking early.

I leave the house at approximately 6:45 a.m., and while I've been accused of many things before, being a morning person has never been one of those. The few minutes between the moment my alarm clock hauls me out of bed and the moment I hit the shower or face the outdoors are filled with a cold, malevolent hatred towards all things Man and most particularly all things Job.

It doesn't last, of course. Through most of the MUNI ride to the shuttle stop, (the Church Street Safeway), I nurture a deep, sullen annoyance no doubt experienced by many an early-roused bear. Bears are allowed to express their emotions by killing and mauling white-kneed hikers. Me, I have to suffer mute anguish until I actually crawl into the shuttle, at which point I curl up in my seat and pretend to be dead for an hour.

On the third day of taking the shuttle, it finally registered on me that all three people around me were reading Dorothy Dunnett books. In all my life, I've only ever known four people to read and enjoy the Dunnett books; now there is an entire creche of outsiders devouring them every day, an entire underworld of intelligent minds I was utterly unaware of.

Intelligent minds being frightening to me, I cowered in my seat and remained mute for the rest of the week.

On Sunday, as I dashed to CalTrain to visit Tara, I peered out the window of the bus and discovered a giant blue M&M belly-butting a large grey cat.

He was a very enthusiastic M&M. Passersby and small dogs were quite entertained and alarmed, respectively; he grabbed a startled tourist's hands and danced in little circles with her before smothering her in the throes of some sucrosian passion.

It was the opening of a new store, naturally. However, I saw no reason for them to hire M&Ms and drooling cats to announce the fact.

As of today, I now have email. The proper email, that is; not the email they gave me on Friday, which wasn't configured properly and ended up eating everything and anything that was sent to the address.

The work email will not be for popular distribution. Alas. As I'm already discovering, I am about to become a hub for a great many people needing a great deal of information. Irrelevent information -- spam, notes, the like -- will only confuse the issue. That doesn't mean I love you any less. Just that I'm learning to appreciate the value of separating work from life.

Or living.

Not that I have much of the latter two, anyway.

However, that's diverting from the point. As I mentioned before, I now (finally!) have my own computer; a very nice man from ICS, the Internal Computer Systems department, came by on Friday night and dinked around with my cubicle while I was off busily mocking something. When I returned, I found a docking station, a fat little Dell laptop, and a 20+ inch screen staring me in the face.

"Oh my God," I said. "I got a laptop."

My manager, who has been muttering insistently about the fact that I should be getting a Sun station, regarded my screen with blank disapproval before disappearing again.

I got Windows NT.

"Why do I have a laptop?"

"Maybe because you'll be traveling? Internationally?" suggested the Guy Next Door. "I mean, as International Project Coordinator---"

"Oh."

We stared at the computer thoughtfully for a long time before I said, wistfully, "I wanted a Linux box."

...which was just perversity on my part, if nothing less than the truth. I wandered over to the admin's desk and made plaintive little noises along those lines, only to stop halfway through the explanation to realize: "They'll take away my computer to change it to a Linux box, won't they?"

"Yup."

The matter stopped there. Having had to wait three days to get online, five days for a computer, and then another three days to get my email properly configured, I was in no mood to risk another month and a half without access just so I could get a Linux box.

"We'll get you another computer, later," the Guy Next Door said, comfortingly.

I sniffled.

of kitchen sinks

earlier in our story...

Jazz came by the apartment after we went to Ti Couz, courtesy of Tara's car. (In case anybody's wondering, I nicknamed my friend "Tara" because every time I think of her, I also think of the massive "Gone with the Wind" poster she used to have on her bedroom wall. This is rather beside the point, of course; still, it's interesting to note that she sort of exudes a Southern belle feminine charm, which only goes to show that there's still some poetic justice left in the world. And if you didn't know that Tara was the name of the plantation in Gone With The Wind, join the club.)

Anyway, as I say, Jazz came by the apartment after we went to Ti Couz, courtesy of Tara's car, and then ended up using our bathroom. Smurfette was already in bed; the apartment was dark and still, and not a creature was stirring. I puttered around in my room for a few minutes, trying to get my computer to boot up.

After a few minutes, I heard the roommate's door creak open. I was busy playing with Quirk, who didn't feel like being played with; a few seconds after that, Smurfette was standing in my door, sleepy-eyed and blinking and glamorous in a flannel nightshirt and pants.

"There's a woman in our bathroom," she informed me, hesitantly: just in case I wasn't aware of the fact.

My cue was to scream and call the police.

"I know," I told her. Smurfette looked relieved and twinkled at me.

"Okay. Just checking. How was your evening? Did you go dancing?"

We chatted for a few moments longer, while Quirk licked dolefully at my fingers; after a few moments, I became aware of Jazz's plaintive voice, calling me.

"Yuhri? Uh. Yuhri--? Could you come here a second? (Crap.)"

She-Ra and I poked our heads around the corner -- and around the corner after that, and the next one after that -- to investigate.

Jazz was standing in the bathroom, holding the sink. She'd been brushing her teeth, or about to; a toothbrush was waggling out between her fingers, but her primary focus of attention was the sink.

Which she was holding.

Up.

"I swear I don't know what happened," she gibbered, somewhere between apology and hilarity. "I tried to turn it on and it ... it came off the wall."

Smurfette and I stared at it. Then we stared at Jazz. Then we stared at the sink again. There were pipey things coming out of the back, dangling, and a fat U-bend pipe that was swiveling helpfully with her shifts in weight.

We started to giggle.

"Jazz, meet Smurfette. Smurfette, meet Jazz." It seemed as good a time to make introductions as any; being encumbered by a sink made it difficult for Jazz to shake hands.

"I really am a nice person," Jazz protested, and wobbled with the plumbing. "This is not a good first impression."

"We should be able to turn off the water down here," Smurfette said optimistically, while I snickered helplessly in the background. She bent and fiddled around with the water wheel on the wall pipe, while I mocked Jazz for having pulled the sink off the wall.

"I don't know, I don't know!" Jazz wailed under questioning, harassed and guilty and giggling despite herself. "How was it stuck on the wall to begin with? It doesn't look like there are any screws. It wasn't bolted in or something--? Take a look and ... back there."

The eventual assessment was that the sink actually hung on the wall, using two little metal hooks. No bolts. Nothing stable. Just hung. Dangled, more like, off the wall. With a little bit of effort, we managed to get the sink back on to its little ledge, somewhat crooked, but none the worse for wear.

"I feel awful," Jazz apologized, later. "I swear, I'm normally a really good houseguest."

Smurfette and I both waved the apologies away. "What can you expect from a tenement?"

Day two ended, and all was well with the world. Day two was made notable by the fact that I got a telephone in the early half of the day, followed by a computer shortly after. The fact that ICS, the Computer Systems support, wasn't the one that supplied the computer, takes some of the shine out of my triumph. The admin took pity on me and scrounged up a computer from a neighboring cubicle. It's a Dell with a massive screen and a superbly unremarkable system : Microsoft NT, I think it is. Still, it was a computer.

"I'm not supposed to do this," she told me, "but you need a computer. It's ridiculous. You need one to work."

...which, it turns out, wasn't quite true. On day three, I did quite a bit of work. I ran around and made meetings; I sat down and talked to people, learned more about what was going on, and hooked up some disparate entities so they could pick each others brains. When I reported to my Director, I was told I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

Always nice to hear. The glow carried me through the rest of the day.

Day three has been made remarkable in that I now have internet access, if not necessarily inTRAnet. I can't get my email. I can't get onto the company system and do anything remotely useful on their information sites, which aren't accessible otherwise.

But.

I'm getting there.