company rah-rah

Web sites to start with.

For those fortunate enough to have broadband access: toy wars on ifilm wherein Professor Evil unveils a new secret weapon at Evil-Con. Worth it if only for the Jar Jar references.

Also, the two posters that I bought from thinkgeek.com, one for myself called Adversity, and one called Ignorance. Adversity will be framed and put up in my cubicle, I think. Ignorance is going to a coworker whose birthday I've forgotten.

Two more that I want to get are listed on that web site. Heck: I want almost all of them, but I'm particularly intent on getting Incompetence and Cluelessness. Gifts for any corporate lackey, ready to hand. Who can say more?

Oh, it's been a good week. A really good week. New toys, new information, new skills -- and have I mentioned that I'm this close to finishing that dumb-ass Playstation game I've been playing for the last two months, Grandia? Excepting that this Saturday marks the last lesson I'll give at Dominican College as a faculty member, and that The Guy is leaving for England in under a week, everything is just dandy. I've started learning my Linux computer, making friends, and an insider at my ISP has promised to change my DNS entry for me so I'm no longer an arbitrarily assigned tag. I love my @Home service, and not just because I work there.

Despite the fact that I use Microsoft Outlook at work, (look, I have to. I don't have a choice. I mean, I do, but the Netscape on my computer looks funny), our mail system hasn't gone down due to yet another virus that Microsoft Outlook invites in and makes part of the family. Eight hours of slow mail, and that was it; our Operations people pounced on that sucker like feral dogs on a rabbit, shook it to shreds, and spit out the pieces. Other ISPs, -- we won't say "DSL" or "Pac Bell" because that would be gloating, though I might point out that The Guy's Pac Bell DSL service has gone down and been down for a while now, though of course that could be purely coincidental -- have bitten the big one.

I am not a good winner. I gloat. I do little dances. I am the proverbial lemon juice in the proverbial paper cut, and I rub it in but good. I don't think anybody will begrudge me. Our stock closed at under $1.50 today.

By way of morale boosting, my company hosted an ice cream social outside in the @ ball, complete with band and balloons. The Guy Next Door, remember him?, caught up to us in front of one of the Baskin' Robbins stands and merged seamlessly into our little clutch as though he'd never left.

Backing up a little bit here; at some point during the months when I was out of commission on the journal, the Guy Next Door was picked up and dropped into another engineering group. I say "another engineering group" to be kind. What really happened is that he was picked up and pushed into a group consisting of the following:

1. One manager
2. One Product Manager
3. Him.

An application that he once had two full-time people assisting on suddenly became the responsibility of him, and him alone. He fought a valorous rearguard action to try and drag College Boy and Indian Mom with him, but failed abyssmally. Now his team is bulked out by two half-time engineers. It is, he admits, an improvement. Nonetheless, he greets us with the enthusiasm of a parched castaway at an Evian convention, and in public, scorns all others.

He hugged us, grinned his gleeful grin, and sucked on a pink spoon. We had him surrounded in no time, attempting to cover his white, five-foot nine desertion with our black-haired minority, five-foot two average bodies.

Two scoops of mint chocolate chip ice cream. I'll take that in lieu of a raise.

I ran into a proxy engineer that we all like; he was greeted with delight by the whole lot of us.

"Sorry if I seem a bit dazed," he said, sheepishly. "I went and saw Planet of the Apes last night, and I'm still recovering. It was a bit of an experience."

"That good?" I asked. I'm not really keen on seeing it.

"That bad," he winced. "I think I'll need more time."

Midway into the festivities, a middle-aged man with an accent eerily reminiscent of Ah-nold "the Terminator" interrupted the band to make us play a 'getting to know you' competition.

He sorted us by building and made us gather around balloons, where we discovered straw baskets of party favors. I milled with everybody else, trying not to get involved, when the little Chinese Firecracker I work with came charging out of the crowd towards me bearing a blue felt beanie with a silver propeller in one hand.

"HERE, YUU-REEE, YOU PUT THIS ONE ON," she ordered. Everything the Firecracker says is, by definition, in caps. Like one of the Chicken Family, she lives her

life close to God: she yells, to make sure any celestial entities can hear through static. "IT MATCHES YOUR SHIRT."

It did indeed, and I put it on. Instantly, the little silver propeller started to whirl with desperate enthusiasm, catching the suggestion of a breeze from some corner of the lawn and translating it into a gale of tornado proportions. I was delighted. Some long-unsuspected hole in my heart was filled; it was a childhood need never yet fulfilled until now. I felt complete.

Still wrapped up in the misty distraction of bliss, I meekly submitted to the competition: a cheer, of all things, which we -- and our preponderence of little Indian women and equally little Chinese people -- somehow managed to win. College Boy, who half a year ago put on hiking boots over his bleeding feet because he was embarrassed to be wearing slippers, did a cartwheel on the lawn in front of the entire company and danced up and down, wearing a pair of springy heart-antennae and glittery gold gag glasses. My dignified manager, the Indian Woman, pogo-sticked up and down, yelling like a two year old denied ice-cream. Meanwhile, the Guy Next Door, who refused to join the team he really belonged to in order to cleave to us instead, donned a green wig and threw confetti.

Our stock is at 1.26, yo.

The Guy is leaving for England tomorrow, and my mother is insane.

On Saturday, I visited my sister in San Francisco and we had lunch together. Walking back to her work, she commented that mom had called her last night, and she was concerned "because you're not like we are. I mean, this is your first relationship, and you're not used to being separated from your boyfriend. 'Not like you,' she said. 'You're used to getting rid of boys, you've had so many, and she's not as cold.' And I was like, 'Thanks, mom.' So anyway, she wants to rent you a piano."

What the hell renting me a piano had to do with my sister being a Player had both of us stumped. My sister and I exchanged a look of blank incomprehension, united in our complete inability to follow my mother's train of thought.

"You realize that she's completely insane," I said.

"We could have her committed," she pointed out, hopefully. "We could have her put away--"

"--She'd drive us crazy."

"I suppose that's true." My sister sighed, wistfully. "I can already imagine the guilt trip. I guess we'd be safer just letting her run around free."

tortoise

Two nights ago, I was traumatized by a good dream. Ever have those? Something wonderful happens in the dream and you wake up, smiling, only to realize that it didn't happen. I used to dream entire Fridays that way, wake up smiling to greet the weekend, only to realize that I had to do the entire damned thing all over again. For the rest of the day I'd experience bitter, acid-tongued deja vu. It was even worse when it was Monday I dreamed of on Sunday night; my entire week would be disoriented; the Monday wouldn't be half as bad, by comparison to the overall disjointedness of the other four days.

The dream two nights ago was almost along those lines, except that time passed to an extreme that rarely happens to me. In my dream, I bought two kittens, which I subsequently raised for several years. I loved these cats. They were soft and fuzzy and didn't make me sneeze and trailed me around my apartment and then my house -- I moved in the interim -- with canine devotion.

Then I woke up and they weren't there and, oh, it was like I'd actually lost a long-loved pet. Two of them. At once.

I told The Guy about the dream last night, and he told me I should just get them. "You obviously want cats," he remarked.

"I can't. They'd eat the turtles."

Oh. That's right. I wanted to talk about the tortoises, and that's why I'm writing this entry. I knew I'd remember eventually.

I was sitting on a chair in my living room, doing what I usually do in the living room -- play the damned Playstation -- and I was flicking, bored, but hypnotized, through a combat sequence on Grandia when I felt a little tickling on my feet. I looked down, and found one of the tortoises gravely scrutinizing my sock.

"I don't think you can eat that," I told it.

The tortoise, paying no heed, opened his little mouth and began gnawing on the cotton.

There is a great dignity to tortoises; the ponderous way they move, the wrinkles on their little faces, even the way they keep their eyes half-lidded all point to a grand self-possession that is more commonly the domain of predators. That isn't to say that there aren't certain predatory instincts in tortoises, herbivores though they may be. The latest addition to the household, Seven, replacement for the overgrown Morla who was deported back to Southern California for constantly kicking poor Lucky around, has an insatiable appetite for anything at or below his eye level. He'll wander around the living room with the deliberation of a repo auditor, pausing every so often to nibble experimentally on the carpet.

At times, when there's nobody around and I've little better to do than watch myself breathe in a mirror somewhere, I'll sprawl down next to the turtle enclosure and watch them placidly going about their daily business of eating, sleeping, and crawling. At some point the trauma of being attacked by a well-meaning but overly enthusiastic dog traumatized Lucky, who lived up to his name by cracking his shell and living to tell about it. He spends most of his time burrowing in corners and watching his more ambitious brother eat his way through a Peter Rabbit story.

Number Seven owes his name to the number pasted to his back, a little tag that credits him with his order of egg cracking. "Like Voyager," I identified wisely to my roommate when she first told me his name. My roommate, a frighteningly fashionable, glamorous Korean woman with the body of a model and the brain of a business major, stared at me blankly.

"What? It makes sense, doesn't it? Lucky Seven?" She knows not Star Trek, and Star Trek knows not her.

The same weekend that my mother was here, my roommate's parents came into town from Southern California, and on some chance moment when me and mine were out of the apartment, her and hers descended en masse to inspect her new digs. Her retelling of the event was comical, to say the least; after checking over the well-being of the tortoises, her mother straightened to be confronted by a little array of toy turtles all neatly lined up and dusted on the media center.

"Who gave you these?" she apparently asked.

"Oh, they're not mine. They're my roommate's."

"Nice television. Oh, you have a DVD player...and a video player," her parents approved. Her brother sat down and started playing the Playstation. "When did you buy it? How much was it? Where did you get it?"

"I didn't," she said. "It's my roommate's."

"Whose sofa is this?" asked her mother.

"It's my roommate's."

"And this bookshelf? Is this yours? Are you reading all of these?"

"My roommate's," she said.

"This is a good-sized dining room table," her father approved. "The chairs are comfortable. Are these--"

"My roommate's," she said.

"What an interesting lamp...."

"My roommate's," she said.

At this point, her parents looked at each other and wrinkled their brows. "Is there anything in this apartment that's yours?"

She gave it some thought. "The bed in my room," she listed, "and this lamp in this corner, and ... oh, a few of the books are mine. And," she added, brightly, "this coffee table."

"You bought it?" they asked.

"Oh, no. The landlord called me up one day and said one of the neighbors was throwing it away, and did I want it, so I picked it up from the sidewalk and he helped me bring it up to the apartment."

"A roommate that loves turtles and brings all the furniture," marvelled her mother. "What are the odds?"

The Guy is headed back to England shortly to visit his family, and for the purpose he's gone and bought a used digital camera from a friend. Thus, the pictures of the tortoises, who doubtless regard this development in the same light that Europe views a Disneyland staffed by the French.

I originally thought it a fun toy, but now he's hovering over my shoulder taking snapshots of the back of my head. I'm starting to understand how the tortoises feel.

anniversary bets

Oh, but I'm a lazy child of a mongrel ferret. Tired as I was of converting old files into new, reformatting, adding tags in manually and catting headers and footers together, I finally gave in and perl scripted the entire HTML formatting process. Now all I have to do is write a text file and run a command-line utility, and bang. One journal entry, ready to go. Boom boom boom, I'll be able to knock these babies down one after another. As Flamingo says in her journal entry today, "I will sit alone in the corner with my geek bravado and be very happy, so there."

Habits are hard to break. Once more, out of sheer habit, I started out a line with a paragraph tag. Well, I don't have to do that anymore. Hah. Nobody may care but me, but hah. HAH.

Okay. Moving on....

Ironically enough, it's The Guy who's been most addicted to the Playstation now residing in my apartment. I loll on the couch in Greek splendour, while he mumbles to himself, dips, sways, kinesthetically involves himself in Castlevania. Me, I watch the pretty graphics on the screen and enjoy the adventure with none of the stress. "Go back to the chapel," I urge. "I like the stained glass windows." Feeling guilty over not spending quality time with me, he obliges, and gets hammered by a giant floating sword while I chortle happily.

We're a very domestic pair, The Guy and I; lately, I've been the one doing the cooking, while he loyally supports my attempts by asking for seconds and aborting advice before it reaches the useful level. A conversation in the kitchen usually starts with him watching me do something over high heat. A little wrinkle will appear between his eyebrows.

"Why don't you--" he'll say, and break off.

"What?"

"Never mind. I'm not going to interfere. You're doing fine."

'You're doing fine,' as everybody knows, is passive aggressive slang for, 'what are you smoking?'

"What? What?!"

"Nothing. I'm going to play Castlevania. Can I do anything to help?"

"No. What were you going to say?" At this point, usually due to my distraction with The Guy's unspoken criticism, whatever is on the grange will start to burn.

The Guy's nostrils will flare a bit, and he'll repress some other comment. I'll be able to see it hovering on the tip of his tongue.

"Chu," he'll say winningly instead, and escape into the living room.

Last night I made yakisoba, Japanese stir fried noodles, with portabella mushrooms, bean sprouts, and pork. I've had better. He kept sending me positive reinforcement in between whacking monsters in Dracula's castle. "Wow. It smells amazing." And, "How's it going in there?" And, "It's smelling really, really good in here." We went to Costco and bought twenty pounds of ribs. I was having a craving. Tonight I'm going to eat meat.

A few miscellaneous things:

The last night my mom was here, we went to the Delancey Street Restaurant, one of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco. The Delancey Restaurant is one of those rare creatures, a charity that fully funds itself. It's sort of a half-way house for people who have been 'in the system,' drug addicts, alcoholics, criminals; everybody who works there has been on the wrong side of society and is trying to rehabilitate himself or herself. The Delancey foundation offers them food, clothing, shelter, and vocational training; they learn how to operate the restaurant business from cooking, bussing, and waiting tables. The food is great. The service is even better. Never, in all my life, have I ever been to a restaurant where the waiters and busboys served with such style and willingness to please. All proceeds from the business go straight back into the foundation, including the tips. How could you not admire something like that?

That's not really what I was aiming to talk about, though. Actually, what I was more interested in was the bet that we made at dinner.

My mom, like most Japanese, -- like me and my sister even, sometimes -- suffers from a cultural condition called 'no-ism.' Anybody who has ever had a Japanese person over for dinner, or even to a party, will notice that that person never says 'yes' to an offer of second helpings, crackers, tea, the first time around. Or even the second. Or, sometimes, the third. Somewhere back in the dawn of Japanese history, some masochist decided that it was impolite to jump on an offer of food: it lacked dignity. (Or maybe he was just testing the sincerity of the host's willingness to serve food to the guest?) Anyway, since that time, generation upon generation of Japanese visitors to American homes have gone hungry because with Americans, one "no" means "no." With the Japanese, the fourth "no" means "no." "No"s one, two, and three mean: "Maybe. Ask me again?"

The problem arose with The Guy's knife. Dammit. Even when I want to, I can't keep him out of a story, these days. The Guy, anyway, bought a cooking knife from Macy's the other day; it's a gorgeous thing, made in Japan, and made of a single piece of steel from hilt to blade-tip. My mother, who cooked for us on Saturday, fell in love with it.

"Let's get you one," I urged. She agreed happily.

Thus, on Sunday, we wandered through Macy's in search of knives -- and incidentally, I managed to sit her down to have a makeover at the Lancome counter, where I bought her lots of expensive make-up. She was appalled. I was triumphant. The knife, when she found it, turned out to be more than her frugal soul was willing to expend on a knife, at least for now.

"Let me buy it for you," I urged.

"No no," she said. "It's too expensive. I'll get it some other time." No number one.

"No, really, it's no problem. It's on sale, too. I'll get it for you."

"No, I don't need it right now," she protested. "I have other knives." No number two.

"I've seen your other knives," I argued. "They're pathetic. They're falling to bits. The handles are worn clean through. Let me get it. It'll be your birthday present."

"I can get it in Seattle, maybe. There's a knife store in Pike Place," she said.

No number three.

"Bah. I'll get it for you."

"No. You've spent too much money on me already, today. I don't need it."

No number four.

Later, at dinner, I brought up the subject again, in case she'd changed her mind.

"You spent so much money," mom said mournfully, while trying to sneak her credit card past us to the waiter.

"I like spending money," I declared. "I enjoy spending money. I love spending money."

My sister interrupted. "You could spend some money my way."

I bought her a kayak for her birthday. What possible right does she have to complain?

The conversation turned towards exercise, and the fact that in silhouette I vaguely resemble an overinflated pig's bladder. "If you'd exercise more....we should make a bet," my sister decided. "I bet you, um...."

"Four weeks in a row of solid exercising, five days a week," I concluded. "And if I win..."

"Six days a week."

"Five."

"Six."

"More than five days a week is unhealthy," I objected.

My sister, the triathlete, snorted. "Six. And if you win, then what? I'm poor."

"If I win, I get to buy you something," I decided, smugly. My sister eyed me askance.

"And if you lose?"

"Then I have to buy you something."

My family blinked at me. My sister's boyfriend inhaled great, joyous mouthfuls of dessert while my sister was distracted. "Exactly how," asked my sister, more curious than objectioning, "do I lose in this deal?"

Eventually, we talked it around to my getting my mother the knife. Should I win the bet, I get to buy my mother the knife. If I lose....

"Exactly what happens when I lose?" I asked my sister in private, later. She grinned, toothily.

"You have to buy mom the knife."

Either way, I win.

Mom doesn't know this. Last night she called. I'll swear there was a trace of anxiety in her voice when she asked me if I'd been exercising. I knew she wanted that knife.

More miscellaneous stuff...

My father died seven years ago today, around two p.m. Hi, dad. Are there ramen shops in the afterlife?

quiche

I'm fairly convinced that I have a brain aneurysm, or maybe a stroke, I'm not positive. I was lifting weights in the gym on Monday, and suddenly got hiccups. Nobody's ever died from having hiccups; I'll be the first, which only provides dubious comfort. I automatically held my breath -- not the smartest thing in the world -- and kept lifting weights. Sudden sharp, stabbing pain in the head. I hiccuped some more.

The pain hasn't left yet, though it's muted itself to a relatively dull aching most of the time. It's especially bad when I've been lying down for a while and get up. For a few moments the entire world goes sort of black while Mr. Pain does a little tap-dance on the optic nerves. "Here I am, pay attention to Meeeeeeee!" Then it starts all over again.

I'm dying. I'm always dying. Now I'm dying faster.

Out of the four journal entries that I've started writing since I returned from Oregon, exactly one of them is more than halfway finished. My attention span has been permanently stunted by my apartment, more specifically by the Sony Playstation that The Guy brought over for me to play with. Diabolical bastard. He already owns a Playstation Two. "It's important to me that my girlfriend likes video games," he said quite gravely. "I'm not using my old Sony. I'll bring it over." And just like that, he ruthlessly sacrificed me to the death of all productivity for the next few months.

The only time I'm able to actually work on an entry without feeling the tug of the damn machine, (damn! damn! damn damn damn!) is when I'm at work, so here I am, taking a break from documentation to do...well, documentation.

...And, oh, but I had to. I have to tell everybody about Mom.

And The Guy.

I've always talked about my family to The Guy, because I love to talk and tell pointless stories, and if anything's more pointless than my family, I've not encountered it yet. They're dippy, tweaky little people; more like caricatures than real people, sometimes. My sister, for instance, is climbing Mount Rainier to commemorate my father's death some six years ago.

"I'm doing it in July," she said, "because I can't remember when Dad died. I mean, I know it's the 12th sometime, but I don't know which 12th. I keep thinking June, but it's actually July. At least, his gravestone says July, which probably means it's July. Mom wouldn't have been mistaken with that, would she?"

No, she wouldn't.

"...so if I climb Mount Rainier in July, I'll remember that it's in July."

(Actually, it's working. I can now remember that Dad died on July 12th as well. I couldn't, before. Mount Rainier, Dad, and July are inextricably linked in my mind.)

The Guy has met my sister. Insofar as I can tell, he likes her. "But I barely know her," he qualified just now over Yahoo Messenger.

Fair enough.

Over the last few months, I think I've built up my mother in my stories as a larger than life, quixotic, devious, manipulative, machiavellian puppet-master with a heart of gold. In fact, I know I have, and I can't say that that's far wrong. We sat down and watched the movie Shall We Dance one night -- a great movie, by the way; a feel-good movie, in a fashion that Hollywood is incapable of creating -- and I pointed to Tomoko Sensei, the older dance teacher. "That. There. See her? That's my mother. She's just like that."

Thus, when my mom came down to visit me for a weekend, The Guy was strung tighter than a piano string. He vibrated whenever I touched him.

"What if she doesn't like me?" he asked, his eyes shiny.

"She'll like you. She likes everybody." Which is true enough, with caveats. She likes everybody worth liking. "Plus, you're dating me."

"What does that have to do with it?"

I gave it a little thought. "She'd approve of anybody I was dating. The simple fact that you managed to get me to go out on a date with you at all is enough to vault you into the top of her favorites list."

He grinned. "So I could be a lesbian sado-masochist with piercings and a tattoo?"

"Pretty much," I admitted. "Yes."

Oddly enough, this didn't comfort him.

I told my sister and her boyfriend that I thought The Guy might be a bit nervous about meeting mom. They giggled their way through the rest of the week. We made arrangements, between the four of us, that we would have dinner at my place on Thursday night; mom was scheduled to come in that evening. The Guy would cook, I told them all. "He'll make quiche," I promised. "He makes fantastic quiche."

"Um, okay," said The Guy, when I told him. "I guess I could...."

Thus, the day before, we made a test run of it; rather, he made a test run of it, experimenting with my oven in order to make a quiche for a barbeque party we had promised ourselves to. He was gnawing his lips in frustration by the end of the experiment. He's a perfectionist in the kitchen. He stared down at the finished quiche, beautifully risen and perfect save for the fact it was completely brown on top.

"Look at this," he grumped. "I hate your oven. The heat's all wrong."

He rolled his shoulders and stomped around moodily, crashing into me every few seconds. I have a very small kitchen.

Not being so high a critic myself, I made enthusiastic sounds over the pie and promised him nothing but sunshine and roses for the next day. "It'll be great. Mom will love it. She loves quiche."

Mom, when she arrived, came trotting into the apartment trailing a massive suitcase that probably weighed more than she did. She's a scrawny woman: five-foot six and 93 pounds. She looks like a Bosnian refugee. The Guy could snap her in half with two fingers. Maybe three, just for leverage. He came creeping out of the kitchen to greet her, shyly, nearly blushed in her presence, then scurried back to hide in the kitchen. He's five foot nine and 190 pounds.

Everything went wrong for The Guy that night; the oven wasn't heating properly, and the middles of his quiches weren't cooked right. He stuffed them back into the oven, swearing horribly under his breath. My sister and her boyfriend looked on, hugely entertained, while he crashed about in the kitchen cooking up mushrooms and criticizing my asparagus. "Get out," he said at last, desperately. He swatted me away from the stove, where I was muttering over a pan and my unevenly clipped asparagus spears. "I'll do it. Trust me. Just ... get out. You're making me crazy."

I slunk out of the kitchen and curled up at mom's feet, looking forlorn. My own fault. I should never have admitted to him that I have problems boiling water for tea, even.

Despite all of his woes, dinner was a smashing success. Everybody ate too much; after his initial shyness and usual paeans about his bad cooking, The Guy settled down to try and socialize. He made a manful effort. My sister and her boyfriend helped out; her boyfriend has already gotten over the 'meeting mom' anxieties, and was quite comfortable conversing with her. Eventually, we played board games, and he loosened up even more. It helped that later on, my mother got quite tipsy on wine, and wobbled happily around the table playing Jenga and Chinese Checkers. There is nothing quite as comical or entertaining as my mother, tipsy.

"He's very nice," my mother decided the next day, while we strolled around San Francisco's J-Town (Japan-Town) looking at little bells. "He was a little shy, neh? His quiche was very good. It's nice that he can cook." It's possible that I imagined the slight emphasis she placed on the 'he' in the last sentence.

My sister started to giggle. "We laughed all the way home," she told me. "My boyfriend was, like, 'he was so stressed.'"

I made his excuses for him as best as I could. "He's not really like that. He was just nervous."

Mom opened her eyes really wide, and just for a split-second looked like a Hello Kitty doll gone terribly, terribly wrong. "What, of meeting me?"

That night, I invited him over for dinner. "Mom's cooking Japanese food, and we want to know if you want to come over and eat with us."

There was a small silence on the phone. I could almost hear him thinking, 'Oh, God.'

"Sure," he said, sadly. "I'll be there in half an hour."

It was the same voice Socrates used to say, "Fine, already. I'll drink the damned thing."