too much honesty

I have this theory that there's a massive conspiracy going on, one of which I am not a part, in which the wide majority of people receive special x-ray vision that can see a certain type of indelible ink not visible to the rest of the population. I think that at some point during my childhood, a member of this vast conspiracy snuck into the high security of my bedroom window, usually open, and used that special secret society ink with a little rubber stamp to mark me as one of those happy few that you can say anything to without worrying about, you know, feelings.

It must have been pretty early on in childhood, because for as long as I can remember, the vast majority of people I know haven't felt the need to hold back on personal comments in the interests of not inflicting deep, arterial psychic wounds. I'd like to state here and now that if I did happen to be a bit of a feral, vicious destroyer bitch from the abyss of hell while growing up, it is entirely due to the thick scarring that made it difficult for me to flex my moral muscle of conscience.

Until this Thanksgiving weekend, I used to think that it was a flaw in my personality growing up, that I was just a black-hearted shadow of Damien before I hit my twenties. However, I'm not unreasonable, and the cries for justice raised by my younger self have not been in vain. I have seen the light.

My aunt, married to an Irishman by the name of Murray, somehow managed to raise five healthy and scarily charming sons, handsome men who came to my father's funeral dressed in black suits. They lined up on the stage during the memorial service, looking like Hollywood's incarnation of the genteel hit man; my sister's then-boyfriend leaned over and whispered in my ear, "I didn't know you were related to the Mafia."

Despite the fact that her sons obviously didn't starve, it never occurred to either my sister or me that the woman could actually cook. When we gave it any thought at all, we rather imagined that our cousins' lives were spent in an endless scrounging for canned goods in the kitchen, and that good fairies occasionally popped out of the woodwork to restock their pantries. Needless to say, we were both somewhat chagrined when Mom informed us we were going to the Aunt's for Thanksgiving dinner.

"Does she even know how to cook?" my sister hissed on the phone from her boyfriend's place, covering the mouthpiece so he wouldn't hear and take alarm. It was going to be his first chance to meet the rest of the family, and he was nervous.

If we'd realized they were all Republicans, we wouldn't have chanced it at all.

We were the first ones there, and the aunt and uncle greeted us with open arms.

"You're so handsome!" they declared to the sister's boyfriend. "We like you! Come in! Take off your shoes and have some wine!"

"You look so good!" they saluted the sister, giving her mighty hugs. "We heard you went to Bolivia! You're so adventuresome and brave! We admire you!"

"You brought us food!" they greeted my mother, accepting her gift of pumpkin pies and decorative rice with gratitude. "You cook so well! You've dressed so nicely! Please, sit down and have some of this Irish cheese! Would you like some wine?"

Out of all of my family, I'm the one who's spent the most time with the aunt and uncle. They were both my piano teachers at one point or another during my life, during the brief plateaus when they weren't in the middle of some vicious familial battle with my dad. They haven't seen me in years. "It's so great to see you!" my aunt enthused, offering me a hug.

And then she gave me another, except this one wasn't really a hug. This was sort of a -- how to put this -- a measuring. She squeezed my arm thoughtfully. "You've gotten fatter," she said, thoughtfully. "I would have thought you would get thinner, but you got fatter. What happened?"

The woman hasn't walked a mile within the last three decades. It's possible that a single bad cold could take her out. There are people featured on Richard Simmons shows who have a better pulse than she does. And yet, she told my mother later that my weight gain was unhealthy. "I'm worried about her," she told her, apparently. "It looks dangerous, all that fat. Normally she gets pudgier bit by bit, but this time it looks like it's unnatural. You should tell her to be more careful."

"You should watch your diet and exercise," my mother told me later, earnestly recounting the story. "If you don't do something about it now, it will get out of control and then it'll be too late."

Me, I was still stuck on the 'pudgier bit by bit' part. "She said what?"

See what I mean?

Dinner was fine, incidentally.

moles

I'm back.

(Miss me?)

We were walking to lunch today, mother and daughter, and I commented to her what a bizarre neighborhood we live in. It's still we, even though I haven't lived a year in my mother's house since the age of seventeen. It's been over a decade, and I still come back to that old neighborhood with that satisfaction of coming home. I can even notice the small changes that inevitably take place, and feel enough proprietary claim to the block that I can be indignant about them.

As I say, it's a weird neighborhood, because it screams "White Trash!" without ever, you know, actually containing any. Okay, so maybe the people living in the house with the pink flamingo lawn ornaments are white trash, I wouldn't know. But the rest of them, the normal, everyday neighbors that my mother has lived near for the last twenty-five years, they're all significant Non White Trashers.

Okay, except for maybe that one house that has painted itself flourescent pink.

And the one family that remodeled their single floor detached house to look like, well, a mobile home.

With the exception of those three families, everybody there is white collar, and I swear there isn't a single gun in the entire neighborhood. There are expensive boats in the driveways, and the odd Porsche, and while it is true that a lot of the people working in the yards are wearing red plaid flannel, I would like to point out that red plaid flannel is only to be expected when one lives in Seattle and it rains a lot. Nobody in that neighborhood is from Kent -- something that only those of you who've lived in the Seattle area would appreciate -- and that, in and of itself, just goes to show the absence of White Trashness from the neighborhood.

To be from Seattle is to be on a state of constant alert against the appellation of White Trash. Never mind the fact that I'm Japanese. There are only four options for a person from the Seattle area: White Trash is the least acceptable. Better to be a Java-head, a Granola, or ATF-bait.

There is a point to this whole story, and now that I'm reminded of that, I'll get back to it. As I was saying, my mother and I were walking up the street having a conversation about the neighborhood, when my mother stopped suddenly and pointed to one of the houses. "Oh, poor people," she said in her Japenglish, translated here for the benefit of those who aren't fluent in same.

A neat line of dirt piles, each about the size of a human head, marched in evenly spaced intervals across the perfectly manicured lawn.

Mole holes.

Not being a homeowner or gardener myself, I have no problem with moles. Moles are funny. They're small, and they're blind, and they're soft, and every so often one shows up dead in the backyard, which provides hours of entertainment for one and one's sister if one is bored enough. One can dress the dead mole in doll clothes and give them tea, or just pat them for long periods of time, or hold funeral services and then dig them up again to hold new funeral services, or go door to door and investigate The Death of the Mole by interrogating the cats of neighbors.

Moles aren't what you would call one of the great threats of the age. They're pretty simple little creatures, and require very little to keep them satisfied. They dig. That's pretty much all they do. Of course, all that digging they do creates a lot of dirt, which has to be removed from under the earth to above the earth. As a result, they periodically eject deliberately measured piles of detritus in scientifically calibrated distances that obviously have some relationship with the phase of the moon. It is pretty much possible to predict exactly where the next mole pile will show up using the location of the first two and a ruler.

My mother, who is a homeowner and gardener and yes, a mother, who doesn't quite get the charm of having a dead mole show up in the guest chair at family dinners, has -- for her -- uncharacteristic emotions regarding moles.

"Did I ever tell you, a few years ago I had a relationship with a mole," she told me as we walked.

"A war?" I guessed.

She shook her head dubiously. My mother isn't big into the whole conflict thing. "He kept digging up holes in my lawn, and everywhere, there were little piles of dirt. I became so mad. One day I woke up and there were so many piles of dirt on the front yard. I took the hose and I put it into one of the holes and I turned it on."

She nodded her head firmly, reliving the victory.

"You drowned the mole?" I asked, reproachfully. We're big on animal rights, in my family.

An expression of faint regret crossed her face. "I don't think so, but I put so much water into the hole. Like the size of the entire house. And I said, 'There, you see what happens when you do that to my lawn?' Except that night, I was walking to the restaurant for dinner and there was an earthquake."

"An earthquake," I echoed, blankly. Segue, anyone?

"Earthquake," she repeated. "I thought, mole, dirt, earth, underground, earthquake. Maybe the mole was angry at me. Uh oh."

We passed another yard covered in little mole hills, and again that expression of regret appeared. "Now I'm scared to hose the mole, because what if next time it is a bigger earthquake?"

@work

"I SO THIRSTY," the Firecracker declared in the back seat. "I SO THIRSTY I WANT DRINK SOMEBODY BLOOD."

The rest of us paused and looked at her, blankly.

"I SO THIRSTY," she said again.

We accelerated back to the office.

I haven't written about work in a while, and that would be because it's been a bit of a mess. For several weeks, the entire company has been busy moving into the buildings on our side of the street. Part of the bankruptcy deal was that we had to move out of the other half of the campus so that we would no longer have to pay rent on the leases, now severed. Three weeks ago, however, nobody had even a hint that the move was forthcoming. In any event, we presumed it wouldn't impact us, since we were in one of the buildings that the company was going to keep.

Out of perhaps the entire resident body of employees at the Titanic, where I work, it's possible that my group is the only one that has never been moved. At least, not within the last year. Corporate restructuring is a hobby of our upper management, something to do while waiting for the course to free up, or in between visits to the water cooler. Most restructuring usually comes with moves, so that a group can be consolidated into one area; the new home lasts for approximately three months, after which another corporate restructuring takes place, and one is assigned to a completely different group in a completely different department.

Through it all, our group has remained intact and silently glued to our seats, our little ranking of nine cubes -- three now sadly empty -- with only a modicum of shifting through the months. Each person's move, even to the cube next compartment over, costs the company $500. This is an incentive not to do much moving.

Our first indication that we were about to be bushwhacked happened when a pleasant gentleman came wandering by to look at our cubes.

"Nice cube," he said to us, looking thoughtful.

Indian Mom and I glanced at each other. "Can we help you?"

"Sorry," he said, apologetically. "I didn't mean to disturb you. I just wanted to take a look at the cubes we were moving into."

I blinked. Indian Mom blinked. "You're moving into these cubes?" I said, blankly. "Are we still going to be in these cubes when you move?"

He looked surprised. "Hasn't anybody told you that you're moving, yet?"

"When are you moving?" asked Indian Mom, prudently bypassing the question.

"End of the week, maybe?" he guessed. "All I know is, I have to be packed by Friday. They're moving us pretty soon."

He left. We dove over the partition to clamp onto the Manager, and wailed our little story into her ears.

"We're moving?" she echoed, bemused.

She picked up the phone and called her boss, the Puppetmaster. "Oh, I was meaning to tell you," he apparently said. "But don't worry, it won't be for at least two or three weeks."

"It won't be for at least two or three weeks," the Manager told us, helpfully. "We're moving upstairs."

As a group, we trooped upstairs to look at the new cubes we had been assigned.

"Yuck," said I.

"They're dark," said Indian Mom.

"Why are we moving?" asked Indian Woman the Second.

"I like my old cube better," said College Boy.

"THIS CUBE TOO SMALL," said Firecracker.

"Hm," said the Manager, and led our little company back downstairs.

For the rest of the week, the guy moving into our cubes came by to inspect them on a daily basis, sometimes bringing company. Our cubes were pretty choice, after all; they had abundant sunlight, were wide open, had plenty of space, and were quite clean. They kept remarking on the clean part, giving approving looks at the Indian Mom and College Boy and rather pointedly avoiding any glances towards my cube.

On the following Tuesday, they came down again. "When are you moving out?" they asked, worried. "We're supposed to move tomorrow."

Once more, Indian Mom and I climbed over the partition to tackle the Manager. "They say they're moving tomorrow," we wailed. "Are we supposed to move tomorrow? Why didn't anybody tell us we're moving tomorrow? Don't we get boxes?"

"Did you lay us all off and forget to tell us?" I demanded, suspiciously.

The Manager once more picked up the phone and called the Puppetmaster. "Don't be silly," he told her. "I would tell you when you're going to move, and you're not moving for at least a couple more weeks."

"He didn't tell us that we were going to move at all," I said, resentfully. "We found out from this guy who keeps coming around, and for pity's sake, would someone put up a gate so he can't get down here anymore?"

At twelve o'clock the next day, the Manager summoned us into a meeting. "We're moving tomorrow," she sighed. The Puppetmaster had just told her that morning. "They're sending down boxes. We have to be packed and ready to go by the end of the day. They're moving us tomorrow."

I strongly suspect that the way the Manager keeps sane is to smoke some of those ferns on her desk after work and keep inside her head an inpenetrable fortress of Happy, a redoubt that she can crawl into and fend off all alien, unwanted intruders. "Work is work," she's fond of saying with one of her little shrugs. "It's not real life. Why should it bother me?"

It took almost three working days for my computers to be reconnected to the network. The following Wednesday, I was talking to one of the people still remaining on our new floor, who had come by to investigate her new neighbors. "You're sitting there?" she said, interested. "Oh, So-and-so was sitting there before you."

So-and-so is now sitting in my old cube, one floor down.

We gradually determined that we were now sitting in the cubes of the people who had taken over our cubes, one floor below.

"What, exactly, was the point of this exercise?" I demanded the Manager, mildly annoyed.

The Manager shrugged. Inside her head, she crawled back into her fort. "This is the way it is where we work," she sighed.

breasticles

The Guy was poking me.

"How are your breasticles?" he asked.

I looked down. "Those aren't breasticles," I said, coldly. "That's boobage. They can't be breasticles. 'icles' are male things. These are female."

"Breasticles," he insisted.

"Boobage," I said, firmly. "'icles' are male."

There was a small silence.

"What about cuticles?" demanded the Guy.

"Cuticles. Cute, see, that's a female thing. So the combination of 'cute' and 'icle's, female and male, it sort of negates gender. That's acceptable."

"And follicles?" the Guy asked, triumphantly.

There was another small silence.

"Women don't have follicles," I said, firmly. "I've decided they don't. I know these things because I'm a woman, which makes me a Subject Matter Expert. You're not, because you're a man."

The Guy started to snuffle. Male mirth. "Breasticles is a perfectly good word. See? You know what it means. You just can't admit it's a perfectly good word from a superior intellect."

Yeah, whatever.

The Guy, whose tenuous grasp of reality leads him to insist that aluminium is a real word, continues to believe that I make stuff up. "You do," he says. "You write down these conversations that don't bear any resemblance to real life."

"I don't. I never make stuff up."

"You do," he insists. "You make up these conversations all the time."

"Name one instance," I challenge him. "One time when I've done that."

There's a silence, usually, and then he scrounges up his single, weak attempt at proof. "You concatenate conversations to make them look like a single conversation," he says. He uses the same conversation every time, having once detected what he views as a fallacy in one transcription and subsequently making that the basis on which he builds an entire world of imagined misrepresentations.

"I've never done that," I retort. "You just thought that I had. There was a very clear demarcation between the two conversations. You just weren't reading carefully."

"You did," he says, weakly. "I know you did. It looked like one conversation."

"It didn't, and I didn't. It should have been obvious to anybody that it was two separate conversations," I tell him.

"Well, it looked like one," he sniffs.

I eye him. "I can't be held responsible for the idiocy of some readers," I said, kindly, and he subsides, defeated.

We've had this self-same conversation, in one form or another, at least three times since we've started dating. Each time, he insists on using the same argument, and retires defeated, only to wipe his spongy, mad-cow brain clean so he can resurrect the same offending example again. This entry is the case in question, and I bring your attention to the phrase, "WHEN I stole it," thus implying a separate occasion. If I had written "WHILE I stole it," it would have implied the same conversation.

I would like to point out that this is from the same guy who ate crow yesterday because he wasn't paying attention during Iron Chef, and insisted on arguing with me about a previous Iron Chef battle; an incident wherein I proved the victor, yet again, because Tivo comes with automatic rewind. All I'm saying is, there's obviously a pattern of imprecise interpretation of media going on there. You can go follow that link and find out for yourselves. If I'm right, feel free to email me with your support.

Men hate to be wrong. It's sad, really. Me, I have no problem with being wrong.

It's just, you know. So rare. . .

art of the protest

Our entry today is brought to you from out of time, thanks to the wonders of modern technology and a general apathy on the part of the author when it comes to uploading material to the web. We, the editors, apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and assure you that in the future we will be more energetic in pursuing the author the next time she escapes us. We remain committed to our goal of bringing you the best and most entertaining aspects of the author's life, even if it requires inflicting severe pain and mental anguish on her. Thank you very much for your continued patronage. We now return you to your regularly scheduled journal entry.

So, our subject today is protestors.

Originally, our subject was going to be about racial identity. I had that entry started somewhere on my computer. Then something else happened, and this entry decided to be about the mysterious immigrant status of my clock radio, which could also be considered some sort of race-centered homily, if clock radios could be considered to actually have possession of race.

However, since then, several somethings new have happened, and as a result, several metamorphoses later, I've decided to write about protestors. There is logic to this because I've always wanted to be one. Back in ye old America, when my sister hadn't yet arrived on her two-week-to-two-year visit to San Francisco, she participated in what could fondly be referred to as the WTO 'demonstrations ' -- though it would be more accurate to call them 'riots' -- in Seattle.

I'm sure it will comfort everybody out there to know that she was not actively involved in any criminal activities. On that occasion. She says so herself. "I wasn't involved in any criminal activities," she says, firmly. "On that occasion."

My sister, when she is involved in actions of dubious morality or legality, is disarmingly ready to confess to her sins if asked. "Oh, jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge carrying thirteen thousand dollars and a human kidney from e-Bay?" she says, surprised. "What, I forgot to tell you I was doing that?" This is the same girl who used to volunteer for the unwilling City of Seattle by walking up to uniform policemen on the sidewalk, waiting until they caught sight of her, and then running away with an expression of alarm. It will surprise nobody that, even in Seattle, police tend to chase someone who looks guilty and then runs away. I've noticed that German Shepherds do the same thing with sheepish Mazda Miatas.

I reproached her on that particular hobby in her youth. "What?" she asked, puzzled. "I'm doing a public service. They need the exercise. What'll they do if a real criminal runs away from them and they're not in shape?"

Right.

So, as I said, the subject is about protestors.

I have a boundless respect for people who are willing to stand up and demonstrate for what they believe in. I've always had an earnest desire to someday number myself among their rebellious company, to stand on a street corner or in a park with a placard displaying a bold, brave slogan scrawled in permanent marker. The Bay Area is the ideal place for someone who wants to take an active part in the world of politics. Here, children are weaned directly from mother's milk to poster paint and environmentally friendly paste, and their first artistic efforts are displayed in bright colors on large cardboard signs announcing: "Womyn Unite, Boycott Viagra!"

I've always envisioned myself as one of them, that fierce and passionate company, bearing my own sign. "Free Tibet!" or "Free Afghani Women!" or "Free Vasectomies!" Because, to be honest, I'm big into freedoms, being particularly cheap myself. Admit it. When you've been stopped in traffic for a long time because of a demonstration, and you see them out there waving their banners and chanting for greater representation of whites in Hollywood, your first thought -- after, "Kooks. Get out of the effing road," -- is, "Wow, those people are really doing something about what they believe in. I respect them. I look up to them. I hope their voices are heard. They're part of what makes America great." And a few months down the line, when you notice just how strong the white presence in Hollywood has become, you think back to that small and hardy band of brethren exercising their American freedoms and realize that they did, in fact, make a difference.

It brings a tear to the eye.

This past week, after my first doctor's appointment, I was sent down the street to get blood drawn from a charming, flamboyant phlebotomist. It was all of a block away, in an utterly pacified neighborhood almost exclusively dedicated to medical offices. Half a block down from my doctor's office, in front of a dentist's office, a large, man-sized poster displayed in lurid detail a photograph of a bloody, deformed baby's head clasped in a pair of forceps. "Aborters are terrorists," it announced. "They deserve to die." Two more of the same poster were parked a few feet away from it, another one on the other side of the street, and two lanky men were busily passing out flyers to passersby. "Abortion is no better than WTC," one of them proclaimed to me, the only human in sight for miles around, and a squirrel who was busily inspecting his privates on the branch overhead. "It's a crime against God."

A pro-choice advocate myself, I still had to admire the strength of their conviction. I'm sure that everybody on that block, the dentists and the podiatrist and the blood lab I visited, not to mention the pre-school two blocks away, were all equally impressed by their demonstration. In fact, if there had been an abortion clinic or Planned Parenthood anywhere within the area, I'm sure it would have been impressed, as well.

I carried deep thoughts about the power of protest for the rest of the day.

The next night, the Guy and I drove up to Reno. "Harry Potter's out tonight," I realized, finally making the connection between a conversation I had had earlier in the day with a co-worker, and the bright lights of a movie theatre en route.

We pulled into a gas station to fuel up and there, on the street corner between the freeway off-ramp and the large parking lot leading towards the movie theatre, two dignified gentlemen were standing with makeshift signs, demonstrating.

Protesting.

"God does not approve of witchcraft," one of the signs stated, crookedly.

"Thou Shalt not suffer a witch to live," declared another.

"Harry Potter is the son of the devil!" accused a final posterboard, propped up against the man's beer cooler.

I was thrilled. More American action.

"Get out the camera!" I cried, happily. "I want to take pictures of the protestors!"

All across the United States, this band of brothers, this company of conservatives has been making its voice heard. Harry Potter is evil. Its movie is a corrupting influence on the young. Deeply impressed by this, I went to see the movie myself on Saturday night, and discovered it to be everything that the protestors had proclaimed, if not more. In fact, I'm going to see it again on Wednesday with all of my coworkers, just to confirm my initial impressions.

Protestors have spoken, and lo, America has listened.

It makes you proud, doesn't it?

blood & the babe

My doctor's office is very convenient to my apartment in Redwood City, and the reason for this is that this was part of the criteria I used in order to select him. I've never had a family doctor before, partly because us musicians are a hardy lot and can't afford insurance anyway. The whole "you pay us, we'll pay for your surgery" concept took a long time to sink in because, if you really think about it, I mean really, really think about it, it makes about as much sense as asking your parents to bathe for you.

No, there's no point trying to explain to me about how the ins and outs of insurance are important to my well-being. My rational musician mind can't take it. My rational musician mind points out that insurance is expensive, and there's a much better way to deal with medical needs; namely, don't ever get sick.

Did I say 'rational' musician mind? I know there's another word out there that'll fit in the blank so much better. I'll have to think about it.

Oh, right. Cheap. My cheap musician mind.

I have medical insurance now through my company, and only now -- two years after first getting it -- do I start to dimly see the possibilities.

This is the part where I start talking about, you know, the whole female condition thing. The night before last I was up until five a.m., obsessing over the thought that my belly button might be too deep. Oh, I thought blurrily while trying to measure it with a piece of paper and a pencil, around 4:30 a.m. This is PMS.

"You're so silly," the Guy said fondly, if not too intelligently, when I shared this little tidbit with him the next day.

If only he knew how close he came to having his brain extracted through his ear with an icepick.

Male folks, you might want to go away to your happy places now because I'm going to start talking about female stuffs.

No, wait. Come back, male folks. This is good for you. You should know these things.

I've had PMS now for two weeks. Two whole weeks. For me, this isn't a record; in fact, this isn't even tip of the iceburg. However. Two weeks. Of cramps. And, more recently, insomnia.

George Carlin has a monologue in which he comments on how the English language is being used to gradually talk down the ugly things in life until they disappear altogether. The example he uses is Shell Shock, a harsh phrase for an ugly condition. The government started calling it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. A nicer phrase, with more syllables. No more 'shock,' which was bad because it can be associated with disembowelment, with gushing wounds, with internal injuries. Now it's 'stress,' something that you can get by dropping your Palm Pilot and missing your hairdresser appointment.

In the same light, I think Pre-Menstrual Syndrome is a pathetic attempt by an unsympathetic male supremacy to try and play down the severity of what happens, once a month, to half the human population. Calling the weeks before menstruation 'Pre-Menstrual Syndrome' is like calling death an "Inconvenience." Nowhere in the description is there an indication of the type of experience PMS really is.

Any truly descriptive name would have to include sound effects and psychosomatic correlation. I would pay good money to have all males, at puberty, go through some sort of Clockwork Orange indoctrination. I think it would effectively eliminate all miscommunication between the sexes. No more of this men from mars, women from venus crap. No more burqas and Afghani women dying of medical conditions because they can't get a doctor.

In Yuhri's world, this is how it should be.

When I say 'Pre-Menstrual Syndrome' to a man, he should immediately feel someone plunge the jaws of life through his lower belly into the cage of the pelvis, and start to open.

He should feel someone reach in through the soft flesh of the stomach with a sharpened steel glove, and start to squeeze the bowels.

He should hear the popping of his intestines as the tissue distends with pent-up gas trapped between those fingers, and starts to rip.

He should taste bile in his mouth, from not-quite controlled nausea, and see black spots from the migraine that's rapidly annexing the entire room.

He should be unable to straighten or move quickly, because every draft, no matter how small, causes instant and explosive diarrhea.

He should be able to hear the thoughts of everybody in the room, because they're all chanting the exact same thing and the collective harmony of all those mental vibrations are enough to kill a moose at twenty paces: "Have you gotten fatter in the last two minutes?"

My theory is that this is nature's way of preparing women for childbirth, kind of like the way men are nature's way of preparing women for childcare. Another brilliant idea from the people who brought you the black plague.

So I went to my doctor because my period is acting up again, and this time it occurred to me that a doctor -- ha ha! -- might be able to do something about it.

My period is one of those bizarre cosmic jests that seem to happen to people from time to time, like premature baldness and beer bellies. It goes for months at a time without a hitch, once a month. Then, suddenly, it goes on holiday. Don't ask me where. Four months, five months, six months will pass without a sign of it, and then, bam.

When I say 'bam,' I don't mean a little bam. I mean a bam with conviction, one which involves pints of blood, nonstop, for weeks at a time. My record in that department is two months solid bleeding, two months that could quite possibly have been longer because after the second month, I just stopped counting.

At present I'm in one of my dry spells, which means that the PMS is more severe than usual. "You should menstruate," a friend at work told me, bluntly. "It's good for you."

Since she's a woman and therefore a subject matter expert, I took her at her word and set up an appointment to see my doctor.

My doctor is a very nice man. At least, I think he might be. I've never actually met him. The woman I've met so far has been the very sweet nurse practitioner, who told me in February that I didn't need a pap smear -- don't ask, if you don't know; never had one, so I couldn't tell you -- because I wasn't sexually active.

"She's on pot," my friend said, bluntly. "You're 28. You need to see a gyno."

(It turns out that a gyno isn't a greek sandwich of flavorful lamb's meat with creamy dill sauce in a plump yet supple wrapping. Apparently, that's a gyro. A gyno is a doctor who takes care of female-ish things like, um, female-ish thingies. The not-dangly bits. Who knew?)

My real objection with my doctor's office was, before I went this morning, the fact that they hadn't commented at all on the blood tests they ran on me back in February. According to Stanford University, the blood that I donated to them shortly after was chock full of unhealthy little cholesterol fairies.

Me, I thought that was important, and said so in my meek and ever-so-charming way when I was seeing the nurse practitioner. "Yes, that's right," she said, dismissively. "I'm a little more concerned about your blood sugar level."

My what?

"It's high," she said.

It is?

"We called you to come in and see us after the blood test," she said, kindly.

You did?

"When did you come in, last? Let me see. . . "

February. Thanks for the follow-up work. That's some sharp stuff.

She jotted me down for another blood test, "because you have diabetes in your family, don't you?"

Yes, I do.

She gave me a card for a gyno-something. "You should set up an appointment," she informed me, gravely. "What you're experiencing sounds like a condition called. . . " She started explaining something to me, and I went to my happy place, returning just in time to hear her say the word "ultrasound."

Huh?

"Then we'll be able to check what's going on," she finished, "and whether it's a case of ovarian cysts."

What's that?

"My mother had that," my roommate's friend told me tonight, when I related the story of my doctor's visit with many comical faces and entertaining asides. "She had surgery to have them removed. It was in and out. Nothing to worry about."

Surgery?

"So did my sister," recalled my roommate. "She had surgery for that, too."

Surgery?

With a knife?

Diabetes?

Is this fair to drop on top of someone with PMS?

1:11 am. Time to go measure my belly button again.

bedsprings

I should be writing nanowrimo today. I should. I'm 11,000 words strong, which means that I'm only 11,000 words behind as of today. Call me a procrastinator if you like. But I'm writing, aren't I? Doesn't that count?

"No," snaps Heisenburg, and inspects his crotch. "I have noble genitals," he says, complacently. "It's a good thing I'm imaginary, or I'd be spreading my seed all over Northern California."

There are, it seems, disadvantages to having cats, fictional or no.

But yes, I should be working on nanowrimo. I'm not. The reason, as it turns out, is that I came home tonight and found an email from Acanit in my inbox, a notification that she has posted another of her delicious journal entries. She has been selected for one of the three finalists in the "Best Writing" category of the Diarist.net awards. For good reason, as it happens. It occurred to me, after I'd sated myself on her phenomenal talent for writing, that she's been through recent surgery and yet manages to write these sensual literary feasts.

In the annals of journal product, I'm a footnote in a Far Side calendar. Yesterday, I stubbed my toe on a coat hanger. It was a wire coathanger, and I didn't notice that I'd done it until later. This, however, constitutes all the tragedy and awesome grandeur of my life. Eh. We do what we can.

Tara, who has been stranded in Germany now for almost a month, has been sending me hilarious, bitter emails about the state of the Teutonic Union. The Germans, she announces, may be good for a lot of things, but they cannot handle bed linens. Nor can they handle beds.

"The bed . . . um," quoth she, speaking of her new bed in her company-allocated apartment in scenic Heidelburg. "It's a queen-sized frame, with two twin mattresses on it. Each mattress has its own fitted sheet . . . the blankets . . . are twin sized again! Two of them, laid neatly side-by-side."

Of course, ever since I received this email from Tara, I've been haunted by imaginings of how the Germans conceived of this brilliant variation on a queen-sized bed. Perhaps they didn't realize that Tara's married, and that her husband could very well be coming to visit her? It must have been a compromise of some sort. "Husbands and wives don't sleep in the same beds," one of the German apartment planners says to his colleague. "Not in America. We've seen I Love Lucy."

"But American lovers do," counters his why-just-business-partner. "They have graceful, non-sweaty, odorless sex in large queen-sized beds. Tom Cruise did in Mission Impossible Two."

"Is she married or unmarried?" asks the first planner, troubled now. On this hinges the very layout of the furniture in the apartment.

The second planner shrugs. "Who can tell these days? Are Americans even getting married anymore?"

The two planners stare at each other, their German mind waves colliding and churning from their magnificent, Teutonic, thinker brows. "We'll put two single beds together in a queen-sized frame," they decide at last. "Then we've covered both bases. If they're married, they can be in separate beds. If they're lovers, then they're in a queen-sized bed. It's the perfect arrangement."

From the people who brought you Martin Luther and the cube: Tara's bed, ladies and gentlemen.

This is, by necessity, a short entry. This is because I'm sleepy and I have a doctor's appointment in the morning.

However, along the lines of making drastic, arbitrary, and wholly unnecessary, not to mention completely irrelevent changes in my life, I have made a new decision, one which I think will impact my life for the better.

I'm not going to do nanowrimo anymore.

After serious thought and a lot of typing and a lot of swearing, I've realized that I have a heck of a lot more fun writing journal entries. Plus, see, Tara's stuck in Germany and I'm her sole connection to the US. Well, me and the thousand dollar phone calls she's got going with her husband every night. Forget the husband. Let's get back to me.

It's a heavy responsibility, being a lifeline. It requires a dedication to the cause.

Therefore, I will no longer be doing nanowrimo. What I will be doing instead is writing at least one journal entry every two days for the remainder of the month.

Sound fair?

Yeah. I thought so.

Give the girl a cookie.

an interview

6,500 words.

43,500 words to go.

I was following a thread on three-way, a discussion forum for online journalers -- there's a community out there. Who knew? -- and came across a hilarious URL to an interview that stee did with his cat.

At any rate, being in the slightly delirious state of mind that comes with being sick, I promptly decided it would be a good idea to hold an interview with the tortoises living in the tupperware container in the living room.

Yes, I was sick again. Yes, it's only been a few weeks since I was sick last. Yes, I get sick a lot. My personal opinion is that this ghetto city I live in, ("Climate Best by Government Test!"), is trying to kill me. Rochester tried to do the same thing, except Rochester did it with snowdrifts that rose over my head and 90-miles-per-hour winds straight from your gusty friends in the North Pole. Oh, and that strange smell. That's right, Rochester had that smell.

Redwood City, on the other hand, tries to get to me through microbes and germy things, and viral contagions customarily found on the festering, pus-ridden corpses of alien ritual mutilation victims. This is the efficient way to go, as it requires less overhead and a heck of a lot less effort on the part of the city. Plus, the medium of death is small, which was what the 20st century was all about, yo. What can I say, we're in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley's into the high tech scene.

However, we digress from the issue at hand, which is the fact that I thought it would be a clever idea -- remember now, I was sick -- to hold an interview with the tortoises.

Now, ignoring for a moment the fact that tortoises can't talk, and ignoring for the moment that I have absolutely no training in the art of the interview, and also ignoring for the fact that with the state of mind I was in, I would have had absolutely no problem holding an irrational conversation with a potted plant, even one of the bulimic potted plants I always seem to be unfortunate enough to buy, I have to say that it went quite well.

All things considered.

Me: Hullo.

Lucky: (sniffles)

Seven: Hrp?

Me: Sorry to bother you. Wake up. Want to talk?

Lucky: What?

Seven: Hi, god. It's me, Seven. Give me lettuce.

Me: Talk. You know. Want to?

Heisenburg: Just eat them. It'll save time.

Me: Shut up, Heisenburg.

Heisenburg: I'm just saying.

Seven: Talk to who?

Me: Well, amongst yourselves if you want to, but you could talk to me instead. Something new.

Lucky: I was sleeping.

Seven: What did we do?

Me: Do? Nothing. I just wanted to know if you wanted to talk.

Heisenburg: To tortoises. Who talks to tortoises? Why can't I be an imaginary cat to someone who has a grip on reality?

Seven: Are we being punished?

Lucky: It wasn't me.

Me: No, I just wanted to talk. You're not being punished.

Lucky: We're being punished.

Heisenburg: Tortoises are stupid. You should pay more attention to me.

Seven: I don't understand what we're doing wrong.

Lucky: I think god wants us to sacrifice something.

Heisenburg: Tortoise sacrifice. Eenie, meenie, miney . . . .

Seven: No. She can't have our lettuce.

Lucky: (sadly) I liked being asleep.

Heisenburg: Moe. I'll eat that one.

Me: Shut up, Heisenburg. Sorry about that, Lucky.

Lucky: Why are we always being punished?

Me: Look, you're not being punished. I just wanted to talk.

Seven: I itch.

Lucky: I'm sleepy. I used to be asleep. Now I'm awake. It confuses me.

Heisenburg: You see what I'm saying? Tortoises, they aren't too bright. Now, cats, on the other hand. Cats are bright.

Me: You're not all that bright, cat.

Heisenburg: What do you want from me? I'm an imaginary cat.

Seven: I'm yawning. I'm yawning. Oh, look. I yawned.

Lucky: Your tongue is pink. Is it edible?

Heisenburg: I bet it is. Just push it along this way, why don't you?

Seven: God? Were you fuzzy before?

Me: Get away from there, Heisenburg. So, um, how are you guys doing?

Seven: Lettuce tastes better.

Lucky: We're being punished by god. How do you think we should feel?

Seven: I want that piece of lettuce on your other side.

Lucky: I need to dig.

Me: Yes, but you always sleep. I just thought you'd enjoy a little conversation once in a while.

Seven: No, it's okay, don't move. I'll just crawl over you.

Lucky: Ow.

Lucky: Ow ow ow. Dig. I need to dig.

Lucky: I'm dying.

Heisenburg: That's plastic. You can't dig through that.

Lucky: Dig, dig, dig. Ow.

Me: Stop that, Seven. (picks up Seven)

Seven: Help! Help! I'm flying!

Lucky: I wasn't dying. I was only pretending. I'm going to sleep now.

Me: Sorry. You were hurting Lucky.

Seven: (paddles his legs in mid-air) I'm getting away! I'm getting away!

Me: Um, right. (moves to put Seven back.)

Seven: Ooooh. Look how fast I am.

Lucky: Dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.

Seven: I got away from god! Ha ha! I ran and I ran. Did you see me? Did you?

Me: You're awfully cheerful for a tortoise.

Lucky: Dig.

Seven: It's the steroids.

Lucky: I thought it was broccoli?

Heisenburg: You see what I mean about turtles?

Me: Tortoises, Heisenburg. Tortoises.

Heisenburg: I say potato, you say potahtoh, I say soup, you say tortoises. I bet they taste like chicken.

I probably should have popped some aspirin.

nails

I was writing for nanowrimo, now 5000 eclectic and utterly irresponsible words long, -- for those who can count, that's 1000 words a day, which means I'll be done with the 50,000 deadline sometime in December -- when I realized that I would much rather be spending my time writing a journal entry instead.

So here we are.

I was going to write a whole heap of stuff about funny things, about the fact that Tara is in Germany and pining for the rest of us American speakers back here in the States; about the fact that Halloween came around and I bought fourteen pounds of candy from Costco, of all idiotic ideas, only to find out the day after Halloween that the reason we didn't have any (but one) trick-o-treaters was because someone was moving out the same evening and the movers were blocking the entrances to our building; about the fact that my manager made a joke about firing me and how I'm now convinced that someone is trying to make me think my polar bear beanie baby has come to life because every time I turn around it's in a different place and doing a different thing only always staring at me with those evil shiny black beanie baby eyes.

However, Heisenburg thinks that I should do something different, instead. Heisenburg thinks that as long as I'm in a relatively serious mood, I should write a serious entry about something serious, because -- I think -- he's tired of muttering in my ears and hearing echoes, and just once wants me to do something related to actual thought so that for a change he'll have something different to listen to when he presses his head against my skull.

What the hell do I care. Damn cat's imaginary.

My fingernails have grown to intolerable lengths, and every waking moment since I noticed the white at the ends of my fingers has been spent thinking about fingernail clippers.

It turns out that I'm obsessive compulsive about my fingernails, in the way that I wish I was about clean dishes or general slobbiness around the apartment or even, hey! quality of work at, you know, work. Normal perfectionists fixate on something that's actually going to be useful in their real lives. Me, I get hot and bothered over the length of my nails.

This all goes back to childhood somehow, because everything goes back to childhood. Psychiatrists are paid thousands of dollars to tell patients that everything wrong in their lives is the fault of their parents, and they can't possibly be wrong if they're paid that much. When I was a shorter, smaller, younger me, I used to take scotch tape and stick it to my fingernails, pretending to have long glamorous claws like normal people had. I'd paint them over with white-out and pretend it was nail polish. Don't laugh. A lot of kids did that in grade school. Drag queens in training, school freaks, that sort of thing. Except they were sniffing the white-out deliberately while they did it. I just did it by accident.

Back then, anybody who wore flavored lip gloss, painted their nails, or wore plastic jewelry was a normal person. I include the males in that. Me, I always looked like a reject from the bitter bus. My fingernails were a sacrifice to the piano gods, by decree of my parents. The rest of me was a sacrifice to the hard-ass demons of adolescence, yea, those who were jealous and mighty and didn't want their flock to, you know, be socially acceptable.

Now, in my old age, being able to see more than a sliver of white at the end of my fingernails is more than adequate excuse to trigger a hysterical fit. Long nails, -- and by long nails we mean anything more than three millimeters long -- press down on my fingers. They constrict the breathing. No, not my breathing; my fingers. My fingers breathe. You didn't know that fingers breathe? Damn straight, they do. If they don't get oxygen they'd turn an ugly purple-black color, and die. The poor stupid things are asthmatic anyway so extra fingernails with all that extra weight, well.

I had to rescue them. During lunch I threw myself on my bicycle and hurtled to a drug store, where I bought a nail clipper. I sat down in the parking lot then and there, and chopped those mothers off.

Now my nails are raggedy and sharp, and they could slice through glass if I turned them the right way. My arm was itching and I scratched it without thinking; it's possible I'll carry the scar to my grave. Just the way I like my nails. Let's hear it for instant gratification.

I walked into the bathroom at 11:43 pm, feeling unwell, inspected the bathroom counter, then wandered out into the living room. My roommate was in flannel pajamas, watching Golden Girls.

"I know I'm not all that experienced with the mysteries of beauty regimens," I said, carefully, "but it seems to me that I should worry when there's a tin in the bathroom called 'Bed Head Shine Junkie.'"

She stared at me. On the television, Betty White was sitting on a bed with her on-screen boyfriend, discussing something serious within the context of their sitcom relationship. In old age, this woman looks a hundred times better than I ever would in whatever the Department of Agriculture says is my peak.

"You mean you've never heard of it?" she asked, blankly.

Crap. Was there another memo passed around to all the women of the world that I missed? Betty White would have known. She was a Golden Girl. I bet they get all the memos.