lines

We're conditioned to stand in line for things. It must have been one of those genetic traits integrated into the human genome through generations upon generations of civilized evolution. It's all about the survival of the species, see. If you broke out of the line and tried to cut in front, you got sent to the back of the line, or people hurt you; either way, you didn't get dinner. The people who didn't have the smarts to stay in queue all the way to the buffet table didn't get fed, and the people who didn't get fed, weren't strong enough or buff enough to date or rape fertile, bouncy women with wide hips and overactive ovaries, and therefore removed themselves from the gene pool.

Nowadays, we can look at Disney footage of lemmings piling in torrential floods over the edge of cliffs, feel a sense of superiority, and think, "There but for the grace of a few anal-retentive line-monkeys with clubs, go us."

We like lines. They give us a sense of order, of purpose. They give us a place to stand and a space to take up in the great scheme of things. We become part of a greater mechanism, and that makes us feel important.

This, in case you're wondering, is how I'm justifying having voluntarily stood in line for the random luggage security check line at Sea-Tac airport for an hour and a half, despite not having been told by the ticket counter that I'd been selected for a random luggage security check. It was a line. The woman two customers ahead of me had been told to go to the line. Damnitall, I was going to stand in line, too. Why should she get special treatment when my money was just as good?

I started at the back of the line and worked my way to the front in half an hour. Then, because my checked-in luggage hadn't yet shown up at the random luggage security check and people behind me were being called up to be present while their baggage was opened by security personnel, I left the line and started over again at the end.

Three times.

It took me a while to figure out that Sea-Tac security personnel weren't interested in searching my luggage. Want to know how I found out? The third time through the line I finally worked up the nerve to ask someone.

"Is this . . . does all luggage come through here?"

The ten-foot tall official in an Alaska Airlines uniform stared down at me from a great height. "Not all," he boomed. "It's a random check. Did the ticket counter tell you to come stand in line?"

"Oh," I said, in a very small voice, and waddled away. Shame-faced and only a little bit embarrassed at having stood in line for an hour and a half for no good reason, I plodded to my gate.

Shut up. I was doing my part for the greater safety of the American airways.

***

It was nice being picked up at the airport. Nicer still being picked up at the airport by the Guy.

Nicest of all, seeing him again.

My mom, ingenuous troll woman that she is, said innocently the night before, "I'm glad that you have someone to meet you at the airport when you go back to California. This is the first trip you haven't said how much you wished you could stay."

"Uh," I said, wittily.

Her eyes opened very wide. "Do you suppose Masako and John will get married soon?"

Enough of that.

***

We spent New Year's night at a party hosted by two of the Guy's friends, an energetic pair that both possess that unique gift of being able to warm a room just by being in it. As the permanently, divinely ordained designated driver -- in short, fiercely allergic to most kinds of alcohol -- I drove the Guy home.

I spent the first five minutes of the drive home taking driving advice from the tipsy guy next to me. Yuhri isn't much of a deep thinker.

Like my birthday, I always expect some sort of change to sweep across the world whenever the New Year starts. I don't know what sort of difference I expect to see or feel; a miraculous uploading of information to my brain, maybe. A sudden shift in perception, or an epiphany of global proportions to set things right and change the human condition.

Every year I'm disappointed. I'll keep hoping, though. Maybe there's a fuse blown in Heaven, and that's why it didn't happen. They'll get it fixed by next year.

For all of you out there, I wish you the best in 2002. Let's hope that it's better than 2001.

Akemashite omedeto!

grandmother

It's an odd thing, but one of the best dim sum restaurants I've ever eaten at happens to be in Bellevue, Washington, a short fifteen minute walk away from my mother's house.

The restaurant is called Top Gun, and it opened in a little, out-of-the-way place right off of Factoria. For someone who has the cream of cuisine available at the fingertips in the Bay Area, it's a disconcerting thing to discover that one of the best suppliers of one of one's favorite types of food is living in the wilds of Podunkdom.

The great thing about Top Gun, even greater than the food (which is in itself pretty damn impressive, being far better than anything I've yet to taste in San Francisco's thriving and creatively unsanitary Chinatown), is the fact that the waiters, having come from the aggressively civilized Eastside, are. . .

. . . get ready for this . . .

Polite.

They really are.

They're polite.

In fact, they're not only polite, they're nice.

In Chinatown, back when I lived next to the Chicken Family, there's a restaurant called Four Seas that I used to go to on an irregular basis. Not because the food was good, mind. No, the reason I went to Four Seas was to see if the waiters could be any ruder than the last time I went in. Every time I went in expecting to be disappointed, and every time they exceeded expectation. The level of service not provided at this restaurant had reached a level of artistry unmatched by Church tithe gatherers during the Spanish Inquisition. I can't read Chinese so I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure the characters behind the reception desk read: "Dine with us and we'll spit on your memory."

A Chinese friend of mine had once explained the stereotypical rude Chinese waiter syndrome to me. "It's not a stereotype," she said, kindly. "It's true. Chinese waiters don't really have any motivation to be nice to you. The pay sucks, the work sucks, the customers suck, so the thinking goes, why shouldn't they make your meal suck?"

"Do they actually hawk into my food before they serve it?" I asked.

***

The way back to the house is a meandering, slow progress; I match paces with my four-foot tall grandmother, while my mother zips on ahead, impatient with her urge to exercise. We trace a twisted path through the mall that interferes with a crow's flight path. In the lobby, while my mother and grandmother argue over which of them gets to hold the door open for the other, I make a brief cell phone call to the Guy.

"What're you wearing?" I say by way of greeting, lacking inspiration for anything more witty.

"Not much," he says, frankly.

Cell phones are dangerous things.

The last mile back home was spent side-by-side with my grandmother, keeping her company while my mom sprinted back home with morsels of food from the restaurant. She'd prepare it for the ancestors, laying it all out on a lacquered tray with a miniature glass bottle of warmed milk for the baby that died between my sister and me.

My grandmother commented on everything, breathless though she was by the walking. My old neighborhood isn't as hilly as San Francisco is, but it's hilly enough for an 80-year old woman. Even with full lungs, she was difficult to understand. Her English skills were nonexistent; as I've mentioned before, her Japanese was the kind that used to manipulate generals and the law of the nation, not converse with granddaughters who learned their Japanese from Doraemon comic books and old Japanese samurai flicks.

"Look, moles," she said, pointing out one of the neighbor's yards. Sure enough, a little semi-circle of mole hills was interrupting the smooth flow of grass.

We passed one driveway that was, in defiance of all anti-White-Trash rules, filled to overflowing with junkers and a massive, battered pick-up truck. I tsked my tongue, clucking like an old hen in disapproval. "Look at that. Bad driver."

My grandmother peered short-sightedly at the truck, then tottered a little closer to investigate. I had a brief, irrational worry that the owner of the pick-up truck would come charging out in red flannel to shoo us away with a shotgun and a basset hound. Surely not.

"It looks like my car," she marveled, and pointed, proudly. "To-yo-ta."

I gently steered her away from the house -- the realization that one of the cars in the driveway was a mobile home put the proverbial wings on my feet -- and set her back on the path to home. "You drive a pick-up truck?" I asked, baffled.

The little grey head shook. "No no. It has a great deal of damage, like my car. It has bumps and scrapes and scratches, my car, but I have never been in an accident."

I've heard about my grandmother's driving. There are some things too terrible for even my mother to keep to herself.

"It's the ditch," my grandmother says, bobbing her head back and forth. "Because I have to back out of the field and the road is so narrow, I sometimes go into the ditch."

"Forty miles an hour in half a minute," my mother told me when she got back from Japan on a visit to her mother. "She put the car in reverse, didn't even look into the rearview mirror, and pulled out of the house. I didn't even have time to scream."

"It's not a deep ditch, but the road is a little bit narrow" my grandmother explains, and is suddenly distracted by a pair of very big, very ugly birds staring malevolently at us from the curb. "Cute. . . "

"She almost killed us. We went backwards into the irrigation ditch. The front wheels weren't even touching the ground and she still had the pedal down. I had to jump out of the car."

"It's only that the road is so narrow," my grandmother finishes, pottering towards the curb to try to pet the birds. I wave them hastily away. They probably have rabies.

"The neighbor came and had to tow us out. Apparently, he does it three, sometimes four times a week. She doesn't know how to use the brake, so she goes around corners at the same speed that she does for the streets. She hits everything. Everything. Traffic cones, poles, walls, everything. The only things she doesn't hit are people and animals. I don't understand how she does it."

"I'm not a very good driver," my grandmother says, a bit apologetically. She inspects the yards that we pass, pointing to the ones on the other side of the road for my examination, which she insists be thorough and careful. "Do you see your mother's shoe, anywhere?"

"Even your father doesn't drive that badly," my mother said, fiercely. "And he's bad."

***

My mother woke up in the morning two days before and found two dogs cavorting in her backyard. "Brack and white," she explained in her creative English. "They were so cute, but digging up ther garden so I . . ."

She broke off and finished in Japanese. ". . .had to go out and ask them how they came in, but they wouldn't show me. So I told them to go away and shooed them out to the front yard. One of them," she added, indignantly, "took my shoe. I found it in the neighbor's yard later."

My mother is an avid gardener, and a less avid housekeeper. Her conscience in the latter department keeps the gardening sneakers outside, and the everyday sneakers inside. Everything has its proper place, after all. When we came back from mochitsuki, we discovered only one shoe outside the front door.

Mom stopped dead and stared at the single shoe that was left. "The DOGS," she sputtered.

My grandmother peered at the leftover shoe and wagged her curly grey head. "Why did you leave them outside?" she wondered.

"I didn't see them this morning," my mother fumed. "I got the shoe back yesterday, so I thought it would be fine."

I grinned. "They probably figure they're playing hide and seek," I suggested. "You're it."

"You probably shouldn't have left the shoes out," my grandmother said, gently skirting the borders of the critical.

Me, I was more blunt. "Stupid thing to do."

"My shoe!" Mom wailed, and that was it.

After getting back from Top Gun, I trundled Mom's kerosene tank around to the side of the house to fill it from the massive drum kept in a shed against the house wall. A high wooden fence separates our yard from our neighbors', a young couple from Mercer Island who haven't yet won the unconditional approval of the Snyders down the street and therefore haven't yet gained admittance into the mystique of Mockingbird Hill.

There was something whining behind the fence, and a scratching. I put down the kerosene tank and peered through the molding fence slats. Two puppes, one white, one black, were scrabbling at the wood, whimpering hopefully at me.

"Oh, hullo," I greeted. They whined again, the white one attempting to jump on the back of the black one. "Don't suppose you have my mom's shoe, do you?"

The dogs looked puzzled. They wanted to play with the kerosene tank. I took it inside.

"Two dogs, right?" I asked Mom, wiping off my feet. "One white, one black? Puppies?"

Mom looked at me blankly.

"They're next door," I told her, and went to put away the tank.

When I came back into the kitchen, Mom was just returning from questioning the dogs. She left her shoes outside, sliding the glass door behind her, and planted her fists on her hips to frown.

"Get your shoe back?" I asked.

She shook her head with impatience. "I asked the dogs, but they wouldn't tell me. They're so rude. I think they're being difficult on purpose."

My grandmother, dozing in a chair by the kerosene stove, jerked awake with a blink and smiled benevolently at her descendents.

mochitsuki

Back in the days when I was young, the Seattle Dojo used to be smack dab in the heart of the city, on a small street in a curious little apartment complex at the top of a broken down stone stairway older than dirt. The complex was a single-story circle, looped in low-rising red brick around an uneven courtyard featuring a cherry tree and mossy stones.

Each year, a couple of days before the old year ended, the older members of the Dojo -- older being in terms of history with the Dojo, rather than physical age -- would get together in the courtyard behind the two apartments we'd taken up for the Dojo. The morning of mochitsuki, mochi making, long wooden trays would be set out with mounds of rice kernels, washed and drying. Hoshikawa-san, an Okinawa man with a boy's grin in an old man's face, would pull out the huge hollowed-out tree stump we used for making mochi, and long-stemmed wooden mallets, (kine), for those men practiced enough to use them. The women would cook mochi rice, a different grain than we use in our daily meals, then dump the sweet pails into the bowl of the trunk.

Three men would stand around the stump, each holding a mallet. One by one, they would each pound the rice in an ancient rhythm passed down through generations of Japanese tradition. In between, a woman with a steady hand and rice paddle would reach in and turn the pounded rice over, splashing hot water on the mashed kernels and presenting a new face to the mallets. Thud-thud-thud, turn. Thud-thud-thud, turn.

My father was one of those who picked up a mallet for the traditional making of the mochi. My mother was one of the women who took turns crouching by the stump. Hoshikawa-san, grinning from ear to ear, would come out with his own mallet wearing the traditional Japanese garb: white cloth band tied around the head, breeches and sandals, a thin striped hakama with the sleeves tied back.

It was a festive occasion, mochitsuki; the Americans loved it as much as the Japanese. The neighbors would come out to participate in the feasting that surrounded the hard work of pounding the rice; there would be dancing later, in the island style. As the years rolled on, the wooden mallets were replaced by a gargantuan, mechanical monstrosity that Hoshikawa-san had discovered or created somewhere, a Frankensteinian tangle of pipes and pooting steam that would take in steamed rice on one end and vomit out strings of mochi on the other. The rest of us, those that looked on while the tradition was being practiced, regretted the picturesque ceremony. The feasting remained the same, and the dancing.

Hoshikawa-san died shortly after we moved to the new Dojo, a beautiful building in Mountlake Terrace. Our old Dojo neighbors regretted our departure; in our stay there, we'd cleaned up the neighborhood and initiated them in an alien culture. By the time he passed away, smaller machines had been developed, combination rice cookers and mochi makers that cost thousands of dollars but could be put into the back seat of a car. He left two to the Dojo, that are still being used today.

Nowadays, mochitsuki is done by the women. My mother is the center of a frenzy of activity, experienced Japanese hands that know rice like they know their children. Despite the fact that the Dojo is closed, people assemble, anticipating a lunch of freshly made mochi and its trappings: natto (fermented soybeans), daikoroshi (Japanese white radish with bonito and soy sauce), taroko and shiso (spicy fish roe and perilla leaf), shoyu (soy sauce), nori (seaweed), sweet kinton.

We gather in the kitchen when the mochi is done, and inhale one of the great traditions of Japanese culture. It's warm and cozy, and there's a wild babble of English crossing Japanese and Japenglish. Of the entire holiday season, this is the one I'll enjoy best, later.

Almost 2002. Let's hope it'll be better than 2001 was.

surcease

Masako left for Montana at 11 last night, bumbling over snowy mountains towards Montana, where her boyfriend and his family were waiting to go skiing. We fretted over her like old women, all three of us, before she left.

"Do you have enough food?" Mom asked, stuffing croquettes into the growing food basket for her. "Do you want some water?"

"Do you have a blanket in case you break down?" I demanded.

"Do you have chains for your tires? Do you want me to show you how to put them on?"

"Do you have insurance?"

"Do you have a phone card?"

"Do you have a first aid kit?"

"Do you know how to get there?"

"Have a nice time," said my grandmother, entering late into the conversation. She patted my sister kindly on the butt. "Where are you going?"

***

There was still a strange scent of bile in my nostrils through the morning, no matter how long I showered. At odd moments I would smell it; turning around too fast, or walking through a draft. It faded in and out, a bizarre memory of a smell.

Mom and my grandmother had left for the Dojo early in the morning, in order to prepare for mochi-making the next day. I wandered around the kitchen, poking into things; they'd thoughtfully left a covered plate full of food for my breakfast, and another one for lunch. The theme of my visits home is always food. Mom laments over my health, tying it in to lack of exercise and weight gain, then contradicts herself by forcing mountains of food into me, lauding each piece as a new miracle of empirically proven Good For You nutrition. For all her complaints, she eyes my body fat jealously; five-foot six and 90 pounds herself, she lives vicarious plumpness through me.

I wash dishes. I study Japanese. I read a book, still A History of the American People. I walk to Factoria Mall, a mile away, and consider going to another showing of Lord of the Rings, only to find that I'm fifteen minutes too late for the afternoon showing. I walk back home.

At four o'clock, my mother calls from the Dojo.

"Did you get my message?" she asks.

"Just got in," I tell her. "What's up?"

"Pamela died."

Sometime within the last twenty-four hours, I must have settled in my mind that Pamela was already dead; the fact is, I feel no surprise at all -- we were expecting it, after all -- and regret more for Connie and her husband than for Pamela. Under it all is a kind of relief, for her.

I almost say, "Good."

"We're going to the funeral home, but first we're coming back to get a bite, and so I can have a shower and change. . ."

I prepare dinner, sit down, and study Japanese some more. There is, I realize, a pimple growing on my chin. I spend a happy ten minutes poking it.

Tekazashi, literally translated, means "raised hand." It's a spiritual practice, for people who are members of our Dojos; for the first twenty-four hours after a person has died, we believe that the spirit is still, partially, attached to the body. We do tekazashi to the dead body, with the belief that it will lighten the afterlife for the deceased.

We arrived at the funeral parlor and made our way in; it was seven p.m. by then, and ours was the only group there. Jacquie-Marie was waiting for us. She'd flown in from Hawai'i to spend the holidays with a friend in Vancouver, and instead had come to stay by Pamela and Connie's sides in the last few days.

She remembered my name, though we'd only met once at the hospital the day before. She gave me a hug. "In here," she said, and led us through the hallways.

Pamela's father was sitting, shrunken and old, in a chair outside the chapel. I passed him and lifted a hand in an automatic greeting, not registering his presence; he smiled back at me and lifted his own hand in salute, the hand dangling at the wrist like it was too heavy for him.

My mother and Mrs. Ito, who had carpooled with us, were less oblivious. They stopped and stooped over him, offering their condolences in their own unique mixture of broken English and birdsong Japanese.

"How are they doing?" I asked Jacquie-Marie while I waited, leaving implied who "they" were.

She looked at me strangely. "So-so," she said, and lifted her shoulders philosophically. "As well as can be expected."

I peered at her. She was wearing the same clothes I'd seen her in the day before; even in that firm, American face, there were signs of exhaustion. "How are you doing?" I wondered.

She lifted a hand and wobbled it in the air. "So-so," she said, and turned away abruptly to lead me to Pamela.

Connie and family members were there, speaking in subdued whispers around the body like they were afraid they would wake her. It was quiet, and warm; a red-tinted lamp threw heat and color into Pamela's face. For the first time in months, she was resting comfortably: no more labored breathing, no more pain. After the memories of the day before, I had to take a moment to make a new memory: oh, so this is what she looked like.

Death, when he comes as a friend, leaves dignity behind him. The dead person doesn't care, but the people who are left behind do. Somehow, it matters almost as much as the fact of dying itself.

Something in Connie's face changed when she saw my mother; almost like a relief of her own, a flash of something behind the brittle resignation of her expression. My mother has that effect on people, like Paula, who was already doing tekazashi to the body. The two of them, Paula and my mother, are representatives of their people. Paula is like the Rock of Gibralter, solid, matter-of-fact, a shoulder to rest on; she was there when my father died, and made order out of chaos.

My mother is like water; she flows around things and wears away rough edges until they're smooth. She conforms to fill any container. Connie gripped her hands in welcome, vibrating like a string wound too tight, and then scurried away to find some other little task to keep herself occupied.

We gather around the body and start to do tekazashi; the conversation is, for the most part, in Japanese, since that's all Mrs. Ito knows how to speak.

"Her skin is so beautiful," she exclaims, and we peer down at what's left of Pamela with interest. Her cheeks are rosy and smooth, the skin almost transparent, lucent.

In the hospital, she was barely a bump in the bed. Here at the funeral parlor, she's still a vague outline of a body, but now her limbs are arranged neatly, formally. Jacquie-Marie comes into the room to give my mother information: when she died, who was with her, how she got to the funeral home.

"You know," I remember, "Connie once told me that there were four mothers in her neighborhood whose children all went to the same preschool. Pamela and she were one of them. I think she said that out of the four, three of the mothers had cancer, and all of the children had developed some sort of tumor or disease, leukemia, brain tumor, something."

"When did she start coming to the Dojo?" my mother wonders, puzzled. "I don't remember."

"Ask Jacquie-Marie," Paula jokes. "She knows everything."

"She was already diagnosed when she started coming," someone volunteers. "Connie had the breast cancer right before."

"What was that, twelve? Thirteen?"

"Twelve," Jacquie-Marie volunteers. "She started coming seven years ago."

"And she's twenty now?" I hazard.

Seven years of cancer.

The body looks like it's fallen asleep; from time to time, some trick of the light or a blink makes me think that it's taken a breath. Paula, sitting by, comments on the fact. "I keep expecting her to wake up," she says with a grin.

We laugh. "I'm glad it's not just me," I say.

We stay there four hours; members from the Dojo come and go, paying their last respects to the spirit of their friend and neighbor. When my father died, there was laughter and joking all night, a hilarious episode in the hospice kitchen; we blanketed the place in humor, out of respect to the way my father had lived. His family wanted it that way.

For Pamela, we were quiet. I drew Jacquie-Marie away to the chapel adjoining the room where the body was, and we listened to the hum of conversation coming through the door.

"They're too loud," she said, fiercely at one point. Takeshi was saying something in Japanese; Jacquie-Marie, not understanding, bridled protectively. "They should respect Connie's space."

"He's telling a Pamela story," I told her, and cocked my head to listen. "Something about a wedding, and dancing. . ."

She subsided regretfully, reluctant to let go of something to be angry about. "Are you sure?" she demanded.

I smiled in the dark, where she couldn't see me. "I'm sure. He's translating for someone." Paula's voice said something, recognizably hers, and Takeshi picked up the thread again.

It's hard to be quiet. I can't imagine Pamela enjoying the grave, haunted respect that Jacquie-Marie wants smothering the room, but we acquiesce as best as we can out of respect for her feelings. Connie has collapsed in the outer room, drowsing fitfully under a pile of coats.

I've rediscovered the storyteller's urge that failed me so miserably the day before, and I want to tell stories about Pamela that will make people laugh and remember the way that she was. These aren't all my people, though, who would understand; Americans, the ones who don't understand, grieve differently.

At ten, we leave. We have an early morning ahead at the Dojo, making miroku mochi for the New Year celebration. The room is crowded with Dojo members; before I leave, I give Jacquie-Marie my cell phone and home numbers to call in case they run out of hands during the night.

"Don't hesitate to call me. I'll come running," I tell her, already anticipating a sleepless night.

She takes my hand briefly in gratitude. "Thank you," she says. "I probably will."

We say good-bye to the people assembled in the room, and pay our last respects to Pamela before leaving. Her body is cold; her face is bright, almost happy. By our beliefs, her spirit has forty-nine days to explore the physical world, to go anywhere she wants to, do anything she wants to, see anything she wants to.

"She'll go dancing on the beach in moonlight," prophesizes Paula, chuckling quietly. "She said that's what she'd do first. Funny girl."

Pamela Voget, (1981 - 2001)

pamela

Pamela Voget.

This is her real name. Pamela Voget, age 20, daughter of Connie Voget and a father that I never really knew all that well, a brave, strong, quiet man I met for the first time today.

Pamela Voget was thirteen years old when she first came to our Dojo with her mother. "Dojo" is a term more commonly seen in association with martial arts studios; it means "training center," and this is what we -- the people of my faith -- call our version of church. To Christians, church is someplace to be visited once a week, a refresher, or a reminder. For us, the dojo is exactly what it sounds like, a place to train spiritually, to purify, to cleanse, with all the suffering and relief that comes with that. I don't remember what it's like to go to a regular church; I seem to remember activity happening only on Sundays, though it's quite possible that there are churches out there -- for all I know, all churches out there -- that are open during other days of the week. I don't know. The dojo, however, is open every day of the week. People come when they're sick, or depressed, or feeling at odds; sometimes they go away feeling better. Sometimes they go away feeling worse.

"Worse," though, is relative. Some of the people who come to the dojo come because they're suffering, physically or emotionally, and they want to know why. "Why me," or "why this," or "why not...." Knowing why is sometimes more important than feeling better.

Connie had breast cancer, or was in remission from breast cancer when she first came to the Dojo; I don't remember which. It was seven years ago, and I was living between college in New York and summers in Seattle. She was a small, pale woman, with deep shadows under her eyes; she looked like she'd been drawn in outlines with a pen too fine-tipped for shading. Her daughter, even then, was painfully thin, and pretty. I remember that she was pretty. When I first met her, she'd already been coming to the Dojo for a while. She knew the faces, knew the names, and had struck up friendships with the kids who always perform their little theatres in the hallways behind the altar room.

In the brief months I had between school years, I made friends with her as well. Not close friends. The age gap was bigger, or seemed bigger; I was twenty-one by then, and feeling the weight of years and responsibility. When we talked, we talked about silly things, girly things that I never talked about much with my own friends even when I was growing up, things that Pamela took seriously and clung to with both hands. Boys. Dances. Hair. Hats. She wanted to go to Paris and be an artist. She wanted to live the bohemian life.

Her tumor was something that we talked about unselfconsciously, with a bit of awkwardness on her side at first that rapidly gave way to something like relief. It would be a long time before she took the cancer seriously; at thirteen, it's hard to imagine death as having anything to do with the person in the mirror. Coming to the Dojo was something she did for her mother, not really understanding that coming to the Dojo was, for Connie, something she thought she was doing for her daughter.

In the years since we first met, Pamela went through several surgeries. The growth refused to stay docilely within bounds; she gradually lost the use of the right side of her body, and found it increasingly difficult to talk. The moody, earnest thirteen year old became a nervous, self-conscious seventeen year old. The possibility of death, never acknowledged, set her jaw and rounded her shoulders.

"I miss going to school," she told me once, with a sigh. Chemotherapy and surgery both had removed her from classes time and time again, until her parents had decided to pull her out entirely.

When she walked, she dragged her right leg behind her; she would have been easy to hear coming, except that she was too thin and light to make much noise as she moved.

She brightened whenever Masako told her stories about her boyfriends, the trouble she was having with them, or the things they did together. With that curious kindness that my sister knows, she would ask Pamela's advice. "What do you think I should do?" she'd ask. "Should I dump him? Or maybe I should give him another chance? Maybe you should meet him and tell me what you think." I took my cues from my younger sister and would share stories about college life, about being a musician and those philosophical questions that undergraduates seem to find so important about the world.

The brain tumor continued to eat away at her. Connie, who had originally come to the Dojo to find answers for her daughter, discovered she had also come for herself. She blamed God for everything, and fought a losing war. She kept coming to the Dojo anyway, and somewhere between one summer and the next, found the ability to accept the unacceptable. God and she were back on speaking terms.

Pamela went through several surgeries. Her illness had kept her from school enough that she wasn't able to graduate; she read the modern day equivalent of Sweet Valley High books and, discovering in them the dream life she'd never had a chance to lead, found them satisfying. A week before Christmas, my mother called me to tell me we would go visit Pamela while Masako and I were in town. She, like the others who are members of our Dojo, had been visiting Pamela daily.

"I don't think it'll be much longer," she said quietly. "She's not doing well."

On Christmas night, Pamela was admitted to the hospital.

If I've ever been in the Seattle Children's Hospital before, I've long since forgotten it; signs are posted low and in large letters, and the walls are painted with cheerful scenes out of children's books. The theme for the ground floor appeared to be "A Pothead's Safari." Two large statues of pink and grey zebras grazed in the lobby; a purple giraffe straddled air by the receptionist's desk.

"Third floor," the receptionist said when we checked in. She gave us directions to the elevator. "That's good that you're visiting her," she added. "She's been getting a lot of visitors. My computer's down and I know what room she's in, which all goes to show you."

The elevator sported a brightly colored train, manned by a green dog and carrying an assortment of pastel bears and bunny rabbits wearing jerseys and pearl necklaces.

"I find this disturbing," Masako muttered, staring at the paintings with fascination. "This is all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong."

We were headed for the Fred Hutchinson cancer ward. A sign at the entryway warned people with colds and throat problems not to enter; my mother recognized Pamela's father speaking to family members in the lobby, and went to greet him. Masako and I looked around, drawn close to each other for comfort.

Each of the rooms had been poster painted with bright, colorful characters; recent additions in terms of decoration, since all of them had Christmas themes to them. A couple of the doors were open, and we glanced inside as we passed to see children -- toddlers, adolescents, nobody over the age of ten, at best -- in hospital beds or cradled in parental laps. "Merry Christmas, Tim!" one of the windows greeted in a big bubble out of a painted Santa mouth. We caught a glimpse of a room that had been lived in for a very long time, decorated with paintings and flowers and furniture brought from home for a bald little boy of about six.

Connie came out to greet us; if anything, she was paler and more fine-drawn than ever. We gave her a tape that we'd brought for Pamela, a collection of Garrison Kiellor reading his favorite stories.

"That's wonderful," she said, brightening a little. "Thank you. Pamela listens to Prairie Home Companion with us every Sunday. She'll love it."

With a gesture to us to follow her, she padded into her daughter's hospital room.

Mom hadn't warned us what to expect. Maybe she hadn't known, either, how quickly Pamela would deteriorate. She was a bump on the bed, a bundle of sticks kept together by skin and tubing; her face was turned away from us, towards a handsome young man who glanced up as we entered and kissed her cheek good-bye.

"See you in a bit, kiddo," he said, finishing off a conversation. There was very little room on the side of the bed where he was; he vacated it quickly, dropping a hand on Connie's shoulder as he passed.

"You can go on in and say hello to her," Connie said, going to the near side of the bed to lay her own hand on her daughter's shoulder. "Pamela, Yuhri and Masako are here to visit." Pamela didn't move.

It wasn't until we reached the far side of the bed that we realized that Pamela couldn't move. What was left of Pamela, of the girl we knew, was gone. Or worse still, wasn't gone perhaps, but was trapped inside a body that no longer had the capacity to move or speak or blink or even breathe on its own.

I felt my face freeze into the smile that had already spread on my face before I'd seen her face. For the first time, I realized that the bubbling, rasping sound that I'd been hearing since I'd entered the room was the tube that was in her lungs, removing fluid and forcing air into her. Her eyes were both partly open, the right lid drooping further than the other; neither of them tracked movement, or blinked. If it weren't for the beeping and whirling of the machines, we would have thought her already dead.

I have no idea what I said to her. Something trite, I think. Something stupid. Mom had wanted me to tell her a story when I saw her, something funny that would make her laugh. "You're a good storyteller," my sister had agreed, and I'd resolved to do exactly that, only to find out at the last moment that I'd lost my ability to do anything of the sort.

"Can she hear us?" my mother asked Connie across the room.

"I think so," Connie replied, hopefully. "She seems to enjoy having visitors. Sometimes her eyelid moves, or she squeezes her hand just a little bit. . ."

On the sill of a whiteboard next to the bed, someone had put up pictures of Pamela as a younger, healthier girl. One of them was a prom picture; she was wearing a white dress and flowers, smiling next to a handsome young man that I recognized from the visitor before us. She looked radiant: it was a beautiful illusion of the normal life that she'd always wanted.

The nurse came and kicked us out. "I have to do a procedure," she said, revoltingly upbeat. My sister, almost speechless, touched the back of Pamela's arm and we said good-bye.

We paused outside the door to hug Connie and try to offer her comfort that she didn't want, but needed. Behind us in the room, the smell of bile suddenly bit through the air, acrid and metallic; the rhythm of the earlier bubbling sound changed to a steady, harsh sucking.

"Thank you for coming," said Connie, bright-eyed. "We'll listen to the tape tonight."

We rode down the elevator, my mother still cheerful, my sister and I both subdued.

"It's wrong," Masako said at last, glaring at the green train conductor. "The colors are just . . . disturbing."

"I think it's fun," my mother said, and patted the head of a purple rabbit carrying a purse. "The next time I get sick, I want to come here."

Death isn't something that we're scared of, in my family; it's the dying that worries us. Death is our friend. Has been our friend. Just like he'll be to Pamela. We sat in the car, waiting to pull out of the parking lot, and my mother said wistfully, "It won't be too much longer, I think."

"No," said my sister.

"Today or tomorrow," I said.

I hoped.

The smell of bile clung to my clothes for the rest of the day.

---

three generations

My sister came into town last night, and for a short while, -- at least until she leaves for Montana to meet up with her boyfriend and ski, damn her eyes, -- there are three generations living in my mother's house. Three generations of women, which is something older and honest than holidays or Christmas or even the birthing of new years.

Three generations of women.

That's two generations more than should ever be allowed to live in the same house.

This is a short entry, because this visit I'm the good daughter, a role that alternates between my sister and me depending on the time of year or, for that matter, financial status. Having my own apartment in California that I can return to, and a round-trip ticket already paid for, not to mention a boyfriend that will come pick me up at the airport and treat me like I no longer need to have my food chewed up for me in advance, can do wonders for the ability to endure maternal demands or grandmaternal affection.

I've washed dishes. I've pumped kerosene. I've loaded cars, written business letters, called insurance companies, and scrubbed toilets. I've even practiced the piano, which made my Mom cry tears of what she claims were joy but what I suspect were actually tears of pure rage over the tragic loss of skill that's taken place over the past year.

When my mother called my name, I jumped. When she asked me to empty one trash can, I emptied them all. "You're such a good daughter," my grandmother told me, fondly.

Somewhere in the back of my mind is the niggling suspicion that I'm being the good daughter to screw over my sister. Masako, who's going back on her nine-year Bachelor's program through University of Washington, will be living at home for the next six months while she finishes up two of her last three quarters.

Washing dishes in my mother's house isn't a walk in the park. Like the Koreans, the Japanese don't believe that a meal is complete unless there're at least nine little dishes per person on the table. Each little dish represents one appetizer or side dish or entree, which in turn requires the use of at least one, usually three, pots or pans. There's nothing that distresses my mother more than visiting my apartment, where I have a grand total of one bowl, one plate, one salad plate, and one mug per person. That's three plates per person, see. A little tick in her eye starts to jump. She usually goes out and buys me more little plates, fragile, beautiful things made out of china, replete with the Japanese aesthetic.

I usually manage to break them within the week. Dishes from Target, that's the way to go. Drop 'em off a skyscraper and they'll break someone's head. Then they'll bounce off the sidewalk. One bowl, one plate, one salad plate, one mug per person.

In Japanese, the word sunao means a combination of many things: obedient, honest, honorable, respectful, proper. My mother marvelled at me after I spent two hours and finished washing up after dinner tonight. "You're so sunao," she said.

"It's easy if I don't have to live here," I told her, spraying water on the floor. "I can always go back to California. If I had to live here, I wouldn't ever do the dishes."

My mother frowned; she likes to forget her daughters' character flaws in between visits. That way, she has nothing but happy things to look forward to when meeting up with them again. "You don't like doing dishes?" she asked, reproachfully. Everybody, in her mind, should like doing dishes.

My grandmother came up behind me and patted me gently on the bottom. "You're a good daughter," she said, proudly.

My poor sister. She'll have a lot to live up to. I wouldn't have done that to her on purpose, would I?

I don't think so.

Would I?

Hirata theory o' relativity

I slept until noon, and then got up to watch my mother clean the family altar in preparation for New Years.

How does the Hirata family celebrate Christmas? I'll tell you. We don't. That is, we used to, once upon a time; back in the days when my sister and I were young and liked getting brightly colored packages that either chirped or broke when shaken too hard. There was a time when we were actually Christian, to boot, which gave us an excuse to spend money we didn't have on presents we didn't really need. My family has always been pretty poor, so we usually made do with second-hand everything: second-hand clothes, second-hand toys, second-hand plants, second-hand pets. I tell you, you don't know what real hardship is until you've taken ownership of a guinea pig that was played with just a little too hard by the last owners.

Didn't matter. Not then. We didn't know any better. Presents were presents, and Christmas was Christmas, and everything was perfect. Every small, two-foot tree -- all my parents could afford -- was a giant. The handmade decorations had all the luster of store-bought ornaments. Santa had friends who worked at the mall, and once a year, he'd do his friends a favor and come to town so we could have pictures taken with him.

Back then, we used to chivy our parents out of bed at four in the morning so that we could dash downstairs and tear into presents. That was a long time ago. At some point, sleep got more interesting than the gifts we were going to get. Giving got more exciting than getting. And, to top insult off with injury, my mother started to sleep only three hours a night anyway, something she associates with old age but which I associate with a deep-rooted instinct for sadism. No child should be woken up at five a.m. because Mom has already made breakfast and is lonely for company at the breakfast table.

Plus, to be completely honest, Dad really made Christmas. To the very last year of his life, he was still a child about the holidays. No package was too fragile to shake, and no low-down, dirty trick was stupid enough to exploited in the interests of fooling gift recipients. He'd pack boxes in boxes in boxes, superglue ribbons onto wrapping paper and wrapping paper onto cardboard and cardboard onto boxes, and put jewelry in packaging removed from chisel sets. We celebrated Christmas even past our fling with Christianity because he couldn't stand the thought of missing it. When we grew old enough to think about college or graduation, he'd be the one to wake us up at the crack of dawn.

"Let's go see what we got," he'd chortle, and poke relentlessly through the covers until we groaned and mumbled and crawled downstairs in our pajamas. He'd joke, and laugh, and tear open wrapping paper, and tease Mom, and hurl things at us until resentment gave way to vague interest, and then enthusiasm. He had that effect on people. Friends who had bigger houses and deeper pockets would come to our house and celebrate the season, toasting our little tree and my parents' hospitality like it epitomized the holidays.

Christmas isn't the same without him. We've never celebrated it since.

I didn't mean to turn maudlin. Sorry.

Better start over.

***

I was watching my mother cleaning the family altar, in preparation for the New Year. New Years is a special occasion for the Japanese -- for Asians, really -- and it's surrounded by traditions and rituals, part of the whole cultural heritage thing.

"I don't have any presents this year," I said, apologetically, sitting on the tatami. "I figured, I lost my job, I should save a little. Plus, the holidays sort of jumped up on me. I almost forgot about them entirely."

"Me, too," my mother said in Japanese. "The winter has gone by so fast. Don't point your feet at the altar."

I curled my legs under me. "Sorry. -- I heard on NPR that it's sort of epidemic this year. That whole September 11th thing had everybody sort of trapped in time. We all lost September because we were concentrating on that date, and then we lost October because we were getting over concentrating on that date, and by the time time started moving again, it was already November, except in our minds it was October. There were interviews."

"I have a theory," Mom said, brightly. "I think it is because people generate so much pollution. The pollution, it expends energy, and it makes the earth speed up in order to get rid of the pollution, and so time goes faster."

"That makes perfect sense," I muttered.

My mother started to hum to herself. "You should tell your friends my theory," she said. "It will explain everything."

So I have.

***

My grandmother is in town, "town" being "Seattle," and came with my mother to pick me up at the airport. She is of Yoda's people, for those of you who've ever seen any of the Star Wars movies. For those of you who are deaf, blind, and have been in a prison camp somewhere outside of the solar system for the past four decades, Yoda is a little green alien sage who is very wise, very wrinkled, very cryptic, has bright eyes, no teeth, and strange hair.

With the exception of the skin pigmentation -- green is apparently a masculine trait for their kind -- my grandmother bears a striking resemblance to a certain old pointy-eared muppet.

There is a distinct language barrier between us, my grandmother and me. She speaks parochial Japanese, the kind spoken before the war, "The War" being -- to my generation, if not hers -- World War II. She speaks slowly and deliberately and gently; it's been a generation or two since she's raised her voice for any reason.

Me, I speak English. No, I speak American. I speak quickly and carelessly and loudly, when I feel like it. I've yet to actually articulate a single phrase all the way through; my tongue gets bored before I'm finished pronouncing one word, and usually skips on to the next, leaving it up to the listener to finish the word before or extrapolate some meaning in the overall sentence, based on context and body language. I speak Japanese, yes, but so do about a million three-year olds. The difference is, those three-year olds know what they're saying. Me, I'm making it up as I go along.

My grandmother'd been in town for several weeks now, and she and my mother hadn't yet exhausted all their topics of conversation. That's fortunate, because she's supposed to be in town for several more weeks.

Unfortunately, I arrived in Seattle just in time to reach that point in the conversational cycle that involved embarrassing stories about yours truly. We sat at the dinner table, and two of the three generations of my family began with: "Do you remember when Yuhri. . . ?"

"No," I said, hastily. "Would you like some more daikoroshi?"

"You were three years old, and . . . "

"Or maybe some genmai? Tea?"

". . . heard splish-splash sounds from the bathroom . . . "

"Oh, hey," I suggested desperately, "maybe I'd better start washing the dishes."

". . . in the toilet, and it was so cute. . ."

"Did you remember to offer some of this to the ancestors?"

". . . I still have a picture, somewhere. Let me think . . ."

My sister is supposed to arrive tonight. I can't wait for her to get here.

travel's a bitch

Travel was a bitch and she didn't mind showing it. I was in the news. Did you see me? I was the short, round-headed, dead-eyed one at the end of a nine-mile, two hour line at San Francisco Airport on Christmas Eve. It wasn't the security line, either. It was . . .

. . . Somebody better invent a teleporter, and somebody better invent it now, dammit.

I got to the train station in time to meet the 5:59 train, which would get me to the airport by 6:30. It was bitterly cold and dark; I was lugging around my mother's forty pound suitcase, originally designed by Samsonite to smuggle fat hockey players through customs from Canada. I'd borrowed it in a fit of madness on my way back from my last visit to Seattle, over Thanksgiving; only right that I should return it to her, where it could eat up space in her four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, half-acre lot house in the suburbs of Bellevue, as opposed to my nine-foot square walk-in closet that makes up approximately 30% of my total living space here in Redwood City.

Of course it started to rain halfway between my house and the train station. Of course I was wearing a white shirt that, when wet, became a radical proponent of the Freedom of Information Act. Of course my mother's suitcase has a total of, count them, three wheels, none of which point in the same direction. And of course, at five-thirty in the morning, there's some sort of cultural collective of wide-awake, horny young men drinking Zima on the corner by Albertsons under a schizophrenic street light.

And of course, the day before, a man was overpowered on an airplane with bad things in his shoes, bad things that would have made travel in the plane very difficult, holes and explosions and smoke inhalation aside.

"At least," thought I on the train, sinking down into a seat to pick at my shirt to create little tents over my nonexistent, yet somehow irresponsibly perky, breasts. "At least I'll have plenty of time to nap at the gate."

The free shuttle from the train dropped me off in front of the Alaska Airlines baggage claim. It was empty inside, from all I could tell. I felt much smugness. Airport was deserted. See? Nobody travels on Christmas Eve. It was a smart choice.

The complacency lasted until I got upstairs to the ticketing floor, where I discovered that the city of San Francisco had moved in for the holidays. That's right. Six million, seven hundred and eighty three thousand, seven hundred and sixty people. All of them, travelling for Christmas.

The queue for the ticket counter took two hours to get through. At one point, one of the customer service agents trolled the line, all four miles of it, calling out names of destinations. "Palm Springs, Seattle, Mexico City! Palm Springs, Seattle, Mexico City?! Palm Springs, Seattle, Mexico City!"

I perked up. Was it possible that there would be a separate line for those of us with earlier flights? Those of us whose planes were due to leave in exactly an hour and a half? Those of us who still couldn't see the ticket counter because it was on the other side of the airport, and wouldn't have been able to see it anyway because we were surrounded by nine-foot tall ex-Marines with big hair and body odor problems?

I waved my little arm and shouted after her. She ignored me and disappeared towards the end of the line. "I'll catch her on her way back," I decided.

Ten minutes passed. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty minutes passed. Then, suddenly, she was walking back towards me again from the other direction, still chanting her list of destinations. "Palm Springs?! Seattle?! Mexico City?!"

I yelped loudly at her and waved both arms, jumping up and down. She paused, mostly because I managed to hook her by the elbow and dragged her to a standstill.

"I'm going to Seattle," I said, hopefully. She was very good looking.

"Is that your final destination?" she asked. It was already eight a.m. I nodded brightly.

"You're in the right line," she told me, patted my hand to make me let go, and sped off.

I changed my mind. She wasn't good-looking at all. Also, I decided, I didn't like her much.

Hating her helped pass the time during the next forty-five minutes, which is how long it took me to get checked in, receive a boarding pass, and tell the customer service agent that I wasn't carrying anything that would blow up the plane and kill thousands of people.

They didn't believe me. They sent me through security anyway. Why do they ask if they're going to make you go through security anyway? It makes no sense. 8:40 a.m. I checked my ticket. Did I say I was leaving at 9:30 a.m.? I lied. My plane was leaving at 9:05 a.m. Goodie.

In order to find the line to get to the gate, the one that went through security, I had to actually start at the security gate. Then I had to trace the queue of people to Greenland. San Francisco airport isn't really that small; it's a long walk to go all the way around the airport. I had to walk all the way around the airport, up to the International wing entrance. That's because the security line stretched all the way to the end of the airport, and then looped around outside. It took me three minutes to get to the end of the line at a good, steady jog, ignoring pauses for crying babies, fat suitcases, and an enthusiastic security officer who thought I was running away from him.

When I found the end of the line, I was outside and getting rained on again. My shirt, which had dried during the ticketing wait, immediately began looking for bare skin to cling to.

"Please, please, please tell me this isn't the end of the line to get through security," I said, pathetically.

A small group of people standing under actual shelter waved me back. "It's over that way," one of them said, and pointed. "Welcome to hell. Merry Christmas."

At 8:50, a tall, muscle-bound man wearing a uniform of some sort came to collect me from the end of the line. "If your plane is leaving before 9:05 a.m.," he yelled to the masses, "Follow me!"

He took off. I checked my ticket. 9:03 a.m. I peeled out of the line to follow him, getting further and further behind as more people extricated themselves to join the ragged duckling chain. I fixed my eyes on back of this man's head, using it as a north star; it's possible that he had the most beautiful skull I've ever seen.

At 9:05, I was taking my shoes off for security, and padding through the metal detectors on stockinged feet. The shoes went through the X-ray machine, where they made unspeakable combinations with radioactivity.

At 9:06, I was on the plane.

"We saw it on the news," my sister told me on the phone that night, from her boyfriend's parents' home. "There were people missing planes, international flights, everything, because the security lines and stuff were so long."

"I told you so," said the Guy. He'd used the travails of airline travel as an excuse to get out of coming back to Seattle with me. Over the phone, he sounded unbearably smug. "I knew it would be bad. What did I say about airline travel?"

"I hate you," I told the Guy, conversationally.

Merry Christmas.

unemployment

Oh. About Lord of the Rings last night.

Saw it.

See it.

That's all.

***

After my rash talk of finishing another entry for publication on Monday night, my computer promptly suffocated itself into unconsciousness; how or why, we've yet to determine. The Guy, tormented beyond belief by the thought that there's a PC somewhere in his vicinity that doesn't work, has been hammering furiously on the case until all hours of the night. Sporadically, he'll come out and give me reports.

"I think it's the power source," he told me while I lay on the couch, watching 'Xena the Musical,' one of my many quality Unemployment activities. "We have to replace it. Your power source is bad."

The next day I had a new power source. The computer was still crapping out, hard.

"I think it might be the hard drive," he said, with a wrinkle between his eyebrows. I like petting people's eyebrows. They're so, you know. Fuzzy. "I have to run a diagnostic."

Then it was, "Maybe it's the CPU?"

Frustration rolls off him in a palpable storm, scorching the carpets where he stands. It's aging him. I'm watching him deteriorate in front of my eyes. This morning he patted me on the head, still with that furrow dug between his eyebrows. "You'd better use the Dell today if you want to get some work done," he told me.

Two computers. I have two computers. Life is good.

So, anyway, that's my excuse for not updating on Monday like I'd promised. Now, on with the show.

***

I received many encouraging words from people after the last entry; Tara wrote me an email telling me that she had giggled at her desk in Germany over the entry, and ended up having to explain the joke to her very proper coworkers.

They wanted to know if the company would sue me over the value of the whiteboard. "Why would she steal it?" they wondered, puzzled.

"Tweety bird pajamas?" they echoed, blankly. "Tweety bird pajamas? Tweety bird? Like . . . the cartoon, Tweety bird?" They appeared to be having trouble with the idea that a grown woman would wear Tweety bird pajamas to work. Or maybe it was the fact that a grown woman would wear Tweety bird pajamas at all.

"You know," one of them told the rest. "Tweety bird. The cartoon." He picked up a whiteboard pen to draw it for them.

It occurred to me yesterday, driving the car up to San Francisco to meet my sister, that I really like Germans. I was listening on the BBC news -- that's NPR, for those of you who actually do any listening to radios that isn't Celene Dion and 'NSync; NPR is cool for when you answer government-funded phone surveys about your radio listening habits and don't want to look, you know, stupid -- about the new Euro dollar, coming out in a couple of weeks. BBC was interviewing people in Poland, who relied heavily on the stability of the German mark for its money caching. The estimate is that approximately $1 billion German marks are circulating in Poland right now, or ferreted away inside mattresses and the like.

"How do you feel about the change of the German mark to the Euro?" the interviewer asked a banker from Frankfurt. "Do you have any emotional attachment to the mark?"

"Not really," the banker said, adding pragmatically, "really, there might be a little grumbling at first from the older generations, but once you receive a paycheck in the new Euro, those will go away. I know that it's more sophisticated than the German mark, but my objection is that it doesn't look real. Like Monopoly money."

Right then and there, I felt a sudden fondness for Germans. No reason why, in particular. It simply occurs to me that there's a great cultural affinity shared between Germans and Japanese. I can understand why they became allies in the last World War. Their stereotypes are similar: both are regarded as humorless, pragmatic, hard-working, and stubborn. Both have polite genes that dominate over all other genetic traits. Both are loyal to the point of stupidity. Both are traditionalists, leaning towards the implementation of large institutions. Both are heavy drinkers.

Both look pretty stupid in mustaches.

I imagined generation upon generation of non-mustached, poker-assed Germans and Japanese coming together in business formal attire to share bows and handshakes over legally correct contracts and business cards, and giggled myself the rest of the way to San Francisco.

***

I fail to understand how it is that being Unemployed (notice the capital letter; it's a job title, these days) requires me to be so busy all of the time. In five days, I've yet to have a chance to do my laundry, clean my kitchen, my room, the living room, the bathroom, finish my resume, unpack my boxes from work, or repot my plants.

However, I did have a chance to buy tickets for the premiere of Lord of the Rings on Tuesday.

The Lord of the Rings was my own personal Harry Potter; my normal opinion of movie premieres is really unrepeatable on a public forum. I've only gone to two premieres in my life, both of them radically poor choices: Bram Stoker's Dracula was one, where I found myself waiting in line with my friends, the only normally clad people in the entire square mile, surrounded by teenagers with white-mask makeup and hair dyed black, wanna-be goths who succeeded in looking less like elegant vampires than half-frozen ethnic chickens in the middle of a Rochester winter. I giggled through the entire movie.

And then there was the premiere of the first Star Trek Next Generation movie, also an abysmal failure insofar as class acts were concerned. Volunteers from the Klingon Empire Club staged a little battle for our edification in the theatre, charging up and down the aisles with toy phaser pistols and making grand, eloquent speeches -- in Klingon. I cringed through the entire movie.

Despite my past two disappointments, I was still intent on going to the premiere of the Fellowship of the Ring. I puttered over to the movie theatre on Tuesday afternoon, and found the place deserted; no line for tickets, nothing. I suffered, shall we say, a qualm, and fluttered in front of the only open window, where a pleasant-looking young man stared at me through the glass.

"Yes?" he said, politely. "I can help you?"

His English was broken, heavily spiced with the Spanish flavor.

I have a bad habit, when faced with a non-English speaker of turning into my father. This is understandable, I suppose; I used to turn into my father for the benefit of the two and three year olds I used to teach. Two and three year olds require something different in the way of communication; communication with the face and body, as well as with the voice. Every thought, every emotion suddenly requires a dramatic shift in the facial expression, or a change in the way you stand. I never talked any slower for them, mind. I just made faces, and comported myself like a Dr. Seuss character.

I could feel the change happening, and I couldn't stop it. My eyes got bigger, and I leaned into the counter, jiggling slightly on my toes. I was Communicating Emotion: hopeful excitement.

"Are you selling tickets for the Lord of the Rings, tomorrow?" I asked.

The cashier looked blank. He was wearing a garish, brightly-colored vest: part of the uniform for ticket sellers. I didn't notice the pin that said, "Lord of the Rings tickets available now!" until several minutes into the conversation.

"Lord of the Rings?" he echoed, looking worried.

"It starts tomorrow," I explained. "I wanted to get tickets . . . if there are any available?" I let my voice trail off, and settled back on my heels. My eyebrows were squishing together. I was Communicating Emotion: sudden anxiety.

The cashier frowned, puzzled, and stabbed at his computer keyboard a few times with a rather hopeless expression before turning away to confer with a coworker in Spanish. It was a long, involved conversation. I started hopping on my tip-toes while waiting. I was communicating either 1) Worried Anticipation, or 2) Need Restroom.

The two argued at length, and finally turned back to bang on the computer keyboard. It squealed at them reproachfully. "Tickets," he said at last, relieved. "Yes, tickets."

"Great!" Again, I was leaning into the counter, eyes huge. I bared my teeth in an exaggerated, delighted grin. "I'd like two tickets for tomorrow night, please. Er...around nine-ish, if you have them. I hear the movie is three hours long."

"Tomorrow night, all sold out," the teller informed, presenting the information to me proudly. See, he was being helpful. "No more tickets."

"No more tickets?" I echoed. I started to crumple, shoulders slumping, head falling, eyebrows furrowing. My lower lip was starting to wrinkle. He stared at me through the window, apparently worried that I would start to cry. "It's all sold out?"

My lower lip started to quiver. I swear it started doing it on its own.

The training provided to ticket tellers at AMC theatres obviously doesn't lend itself to crying women. He developed the deer-caught-in-headlights look of a PETA member caught boiling small puppies, and dove back onto the computer to smash keys some more. As I was turning away with a forlorn "Thanks," he called after me with relief.

"Two tickets left," he declared. "Is 10:20 okay?"

10:20 was okay. I paid him, beaming, and received a reciprocal, happy smile in return. We were buds. We'd gone through a traumatic experience together. I got my tickets. I showered him with gratitude, still bouncing on my toes, and turned away to trot back to my car.

As I left, I heard the woman who had been behind me in the line demand of the cashier, "Did I hear you say that the Lord of the Rings is all sold out?!"

"All sold out," the cashier repeated, firmly.

I think I heard his voice crack.

***

In the car on the way to the movie:

Me: . . . what I'm saying is that it's partly a convergence of circumstance. I mean, Lincoln might well have been a decent president, but circumstance dictated that the events that caused the Civil War would come to a head under his leadership, and he became remembered in history as a great president. It's the same with George Bush. I mean, until September 11th happened, he was well on his way to becoming another mediocre president, but then, bang, and now he's going to be remembered as a decent one instead of not being remembered at all.

The Guy: So you think Lincoln might have been a bad president?

Me: No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that circumstances being what they were, Lincoln had a great, pivotal moment in history to be leader in, and he rose up to it. That's why he's remembered.

The Guy: I don't understand yams.

Me: (small silence) What?

The Guy: I don't understand yams. I mean, if you have a choice between potatoes and yams, why would you choose yams? I just don't get it.

***

The movie was fantastic. I loved it. I did. It was very much Tolkein, the way I'd imagined it, anyway. I was even okay with the small changes they had to make in the book in order to make it fit the time frame or to augment certain developments they wouldn't otherwise be able to get to for another two years. I wanted more.

I want the rest of the story, dammit. I have to wait another year for the Two Towers? You have to be kidding me.

Note to all out there who have eyes: Legolas bad, man. He's my elf.

***

Time for me to log off and do something productive. You know the things I'm talking about: brush my teeth, brush my hair, put on real clothes, shower. . .

I've finished my CV -- that's curriculum vitae for you folks out there who aren't in the know; it's a one-page version of your resume -- and it's now online. Those of you who are willing and capable to offer me advice and edits, please feel free. Just be warned that it's in MS Word at the moment. Working on that whole convert-to-ASCII thing. Bit by bit. Byte by byte. Day by day.

Hard to be motivated in Tweety bird pajamas.

layoff

For the past two weeks, there have been security guards littering the @Home campus. Every time you turned around, there would be a four foot security guard hovering nearby, smiling hopefully on the chance that you had just been caught trying to rip off something expensive.

On Wednesday, they even installed motion detection cameras. "Closed circuit," trumpeted the email from Facilities. "In exit and entrance points throughout the campus."

As an upstanding member of society, the presence of all this security promptly generated in me an urgent, obsessive urge to steal something.

A whiteboard. Suddenly, I really, really needed a whiteboard.

"I'll buy one for you," the Manager said with exasperation, after listening to me plan the theft of a massive, wall-sized whiteboard for the fourth time.

"That's not the point," I had to explain. "It's the stealing part that I'm wanting to do."

"Then why don't you?" she wanted to know.

On Thursday, after the announcement of the closed-circuit security system, I planted my framed poster onto the eraser ledge of a smaller whiteboard and regarded it critically. "You almost wouldn't be able to tell that there's a whiteboard there," I remarked. The rest of my team eyed me owlishly.

I beamed happily.

I drove Indian Woman (the Second) to the train station after work; she carried the whiteboard, protecting me from possible prosecution in the event we got caught. "What'll they do," I scoffed. "Fire me? -- Here, you hold it." Indian Mom kept us company on the way down to the car, eyes bright.

We passed our group's network architect, who watched us carry away the whiteboard with a gratified, "So you're finally going to take it, huh?"

We passed three security guards on the way. One of them even held a door open for us.

The next day, on the way back from checking in my laptop with the Manager, I dove into a supply room and liberated a box of dry erase board pens and an eraser. We went on our way back to our desks; I began busily arranging them in my small purse so that no evidence would show. The Manager watched me with a grin.

"It's always interesting to see how different people will react to being laid off," she commented. "Now I know that Yuhri starts to steal things."

"I can't steal a whiteboard and then not have any pens and erasers for it," I pointed out, reasonably. "It's illogical. Besides. I'm not stealing them. I'm . . . liberating them."

They were my own, personal Afghanistan. Red-blooded American, that's me.

***

Friday was my last day as an employee of Excite@Home.

The Manager was informed about the layoffs on Wednesday, at her staff meeting. "You can't tell them until Friday," she was instructed. "Nobody is allowed to know until then."

"What, do they expect us to go online and ruin the network out of pure revenge?" we demanded when we cornered her, afterwards. "Don't be silly."

"There's nothing you could do to @Home to make it any worse than it already is," the Manager said, cynically. But she still refused to say. "I can't," she apologized to us all. "I'm not allowed to talk about it."

We dispersed to our cubicles to carry on with our intensive programs of goofing off. That evening, as I was leaving, the Manager stopped me. "I need to talk to you for a few seconds before you leave," she said, en route to a conference room with the Firecracker. "Could you wait for a few minutes?"

I curled up on my cubicle chair and spun slowly in circles, watching the carpet whiz by. Wheee! Indian Mom and College Boy were already gone. Indian Woman (the Second) came to hang on my cubicle wall and chat. After a few minutes, the Manager came back out with a bouncing Firecracker. I peeled myself off the chair.

"Thursday?" I asked, bluntly, "or Friday?"

She laughed and shrugged philosophically. "I might as well tell you," she said. "This is stupid. Don't tell anybody else; they don't know yet."

I have problems keeping secrets, but I kept that one, by gum. I closed my lips over it and squished down hard. The two who hadn't been told anything, Indian Mom and College Boy, were going to stay through to January; the Manager is supposed to stay until the final day. They weren't supposed to know until Friday. Heck, none of us were supposed to know until Friday. I laughed and chattered and did little dances and made people laugh and cleaned up my desk and I didn't tell. In the World o' Yuhri, this deserves a special award. Something in gold leaf, at the very least.

I wandered in to work late on Friday, wearing my blue flannel Tweety pajama tops and jeans. They were comfortable. I yawned hopelessly through the entire 'It was nice working with you, b'bye' speech we got from the Manager's Manager. As I wandered the halls, people would do double-takes to eye me askance. "Are you wearing pajamas?"

"I figured, what the hell," I'd answer. "I would have worn my pajama bottoms too, but they're too big, and they keep falling down around my knees. Not that I would have minded mooning the company, but I thought, hey, people are probably traumatized enough already---"

We went to check in our equipment and turn over our important badges and the like. I got my final paycheck, the cumulative vacation pay that I was owed. Remembering the lesson of the last group of layoff victims, I promptly deposited it in the bank: Just In Case. Wouldn't want there to be an accident if the company closed the bank account before I got a chance to validate that check, would we?

Everybody took us out to lunch. The Firecracker was already gone; she left on Thursday to head off to Hong Kong for the month. A group of us, coworkers from other teams and my own, trotted off to California Pizza Kitchen where we gnarfed down on vegetarian pies.

And then the day was done.

It was a tiring day; I laughed almost non-stop through the bulk of it, cracking jokes as I went. Every time I stopped, someone would place a concerned hand on my arm and ask, "Are you okay?" Plus, let's face it, I was having a certain amount of fun. I've never been laid off before; never been part of a company going bankrupt, either. It's one more experience to tally up on the life board.

I'm a little sad at leaving, sure. But that's outweighed by the fact that I got to sleep in until noon today. I'll miss the technology I was working with, and the fact I got to do it in a task chair that didn't spill me on the floor every time I leaned back. But most of all, I'll miss the people. Someday, I'll work with some of them again. They were the best. The absolute best. You don't get to work with people like that again in a hurry.

Not unless you're lucky.

***

Next chapter: Unemployment.

sound waves

The Guy hugged me from behind while I was at the computer.

"Bye," he said, and kissed the top of my head.

"Bye," I said back. Somewhere inside my mind, I was thinking along the lines of, aww, he's sweet. I love this guy.

Then, of course, he tried to stick his fingers in my nostrils.

There's something wrong with men. Something fundamentally flawed. I'm pretty sure God didn't have a design plan when he came up with them. You know how bad production can be if you slap something together without a design plan. Things turn out, you know. Wrong.

Seriously wrong.

***

I went into Sequoia Hospital for my ultrasound, carrying with me the same book I've been carrying with me since the last day of Thanksgiving Vacation: namely, A History of the American People by Paul Johnson. This is a fat, relatively heavy volume even in paperback, but an entertaining read, written as it is by a cynical and decidedly opinionated British guy with a low opinion of British history. Thus far I've gotten past initial colonial settlement of the Americas to the entrance of George Washington into the scene. When I walked into the hospital, he'd just started the Seven Years War in Europe.

I was supposed to have a pelvic ultrasound done two weeks after my initial appointment with the gyno, my first ever. I don't recall that I've done any writing about that particular visit; he was a nice, fatherly man, who kept pausing in the middle of taking my medical history to widen incredulous eyes to say, "What, never?" By the time we got around to doing a pap smear -- very uncomfortable, men. Don't ever have one -- he was treating me like glass, a rare specimen to write up in medical journals.

The gyno suspected ovarian cysts, and sent me in to get my ultrasound; with the threat of medical insurance being cut off at the end of the month, I made a hasty appointment for the exam, three weeks later.

The ultrasound discovered a small cyst on one of my ovaries, two centimeters across. I wasn't aware that my ovaries were big enough to contain a cyst two centimeters across. Live and learn.

"This is a cyst," the ultrasound technician pointed out to me on the screen. It was a black spot, in the midst of fuzz. "It doesn't look serious. It's only about two across."

Ultrasounds are funny-looking. They're like white noise, with ambition.

Thoroughly unimpressed by the signal failure of my reproductive organs to do whatever it is that reproductive organs do when they're not reproducting, I puttered back to work. On my way back in, my cell phone rang.

It was the Firecracker, calling from the office.

"WHERE ARE YOU?" she demanded.

"Why? Am I supposed to be at a meeting?"

"WHERE IS EVERYBODY?"

"Eh?"

"I LOOK, NOBODY IS HERE. WHERE ARE ALL OF YOU?"

I swerved to avoid a car. One way street. Jackass . . . oh. Oops. That's me.

"I'm not really good at talking and driving at the same time," I observed. "I don't know where the rest of them are. I'm on my way back from the hospital. Is nobody in the office?"

"OH. YOU BY YOURSELF?"

"Yes. Is nobody there?"

There was a small, sulky pause. "I DON'T KNOW WHERE ANYBODY IS. I THINK MAYBE YOU ALL GO OUT WITHOUT ME."

"Not that I know about," I reassured. "I'll be back in the office in about ten."

"HUH."

The Firecracker hung up.

I adroitly avoided an ambulance that was in an inconvenient lane. Mine.

Somehow or another, I managed to successfully navigate Tara's car -- did I mention I'm still driving Tara's car? -- back to work. By the time I walked onto the office floor, I was a slightly tense, nervy little round Asian chick. As the Firecracker had said, the floor was pretty much empty.

"Great," I mumbled to the Firecracker as I rounded the corner. "Did we all get laid off? Did someone forget to tell me?"

She craned her neck over her shoulder to stare at me blankly, like I was a complete stranger who had just dropped in to bathe her baby. "EMPTY," she said, suspiciously.

In my cube, a small brown package from Amazon was sitting on my chair. The Guy bought several video games and DVDs on my Amazon account to take advantage of a coupon, and Amazon has been shipping them to me piecemeal over the last two months. "You've got to be kidding me," I thought. "Another one?"

Folks, I got a book. From a reader. One that I actually wanted. "Thanks for making me laugh," the attached note read. "Happy Holidays. Meg."

The Indian collective -- Indian Mom, Indian Woman (the Second), and the Manager -- all came to hook over my cube wall while I cooed over my book.

"Did you see what I got?" I demanded.

A complete stranger, some unfortunate, Chinese passerby, listened with a slightly strained smile while I burbled happily to him about my new book.

I read at work for an hour, then went home after that, and that's what I did for the rest of the night. I finished it an hour ago, the first time I've read a book not related to American history or TCP/IP in well over a month. I've forgotten how much I enjoy reading. On paper.

To the reader who sent me a totally unexpected, totally appreciated gift: thanks. I really needed that.

***

It's Tara's birthday today, which means that I've managed to go yet another year without remembering a single important date correctly. I think this is important to note, as this is one of those skills that actually gets worse as one gets older. Old age comes with a lot of things, like faulty memory, deteriorating eyesight, weight gain, and hair loss. Oh, not to mention the sagging boobage, which isn't much of an issue for me because when Dolly Parton stole mine, she didn't leave anything behind.

Anyway, happy birthday, Tara.

Welcome to old age.

a little bit of everything

The team was sitting around the lab eating lunch, the tail end of a jaunt to Quizno's for sandwiches. It's impossible to get real food in the cafeteria anymore; that appears to have been the first casualty of our imminent company closure. The only things available to eat these days are a sandwich bar and a salad bar, both stocked by catering employees who have long since lost their enthusiasm for the job.

The conversation turned 'round to scarves in the way that it usually changes subject; namely, the Firecracker or I said something completely random and carried whatever thought we had to its ridiculous, illogical end. In the highway of discourse, the Firecracker and I are hairpin turns.

"I HAVE DEAD FOX AT HOME FROM GREAT WALL," she announced, in the middle of a conversation about Reality TV.

We all turned our gazes to stare at her. "What?"

"Why do you have a dead fox?" asked Indian Mom, innocently.

"MY HUSBAND GET FOR ME. I WEAR ON NECK. I REMEMBER BECAUSE OF GREAT WALL."

"You wear a dead fox on your neck?" Indian Mom was baffled. This was, to her, some hitherto unknown facet of Chinese culture. "Isn't it heavy? You wear the entire fox?"

"That's gross," I offered, politically correct animal lover that I am. "Poor fox."

"I think it's just the skin," the Manager told Indian Mom, helpfully. "And the fur."

"NO, IS HEAD ALSO, ALL INSIDE GONE."

"Is it flat?" asked the Manager.

The Firecracker frowned. "NO, IS ROUND. STOMACH ALL STITCHED TOGETHER. I BRING FOR YOU TOMORROW, YOU CAN SEE."

"Please don't," we all chimed in unison.

"Why the hell would you want a dead fox?" I asked, baffled.

The Firecracker made one of those explosive sounds midway between disgust at my obtuseness and amusement at my idiocy. "NO, MY HUSBAND GET FOR ME AS CHRISTMAS PRESENT. I ASK HIM FOR SCARF."

"We have absolutely got to have a talk to that husband of yours," I said, thoughtfully, while Indian Woman (the Second) said with some disbelief, "--And your husband gave you a dead fox?"

"IT IS VERY EXPENSIVE PRESENT," the Firecracker said, defensively.

I pointed out, "Yes, but there's a difference between 'expensive' and 'tasteful'."

The Firecracker blinked. "NO, YOU DON'T TASTE IT, IT'S A SCARF."

***

My resume is coming along; one page is complete, and even if it isn't the most well-designed thing in the world, well, at least it's something. I've gotten offers of help from some of you -- thank you, all; I'll take you all up on those offers -- and in theory, sometime before I get laid off it should be in a good enough state that I'll be able to send it out to uninterested employers.

I'm sort of looking forward to unemployment, actually. Really, I am.

Honest.

***

"You're a sweetie," the Guy said.

"You're a storm drain," I said sleepily back.

There was a moment of blank silence.

"What?"

"Or do I mean storm dyke?" I wondered. "Storm drain, storm dyke, same difference."

"They're very different things," he said, patiently. "A dyke is a female homosexual."

"Storm dyke," I articulated. "It's a hill or a wall to hold back flood waters."

The Guy brushed that aside, apparently thinking that inconsequential. "Why did you call me a storm drain? Is that a compliment? I don't know how to feel about that."

I gave it a little thought. "It's a compliment," I decided. "It's a subtle compliment."

"Uh huh," he said, sounding unconvinced.

"It is," I insisted. "It's just, you know, so subtle and above you that you don't quite understand it."

He started to laugh. "So subtle that it doesn't make any sense at all, you mean."

"I'm like intellectual tiramisu," I corrected, primly. "I'm many layers above you."

"More like trifle," said the Brit.

I sniffed suspiciously. "What's trifle?"

He was grinning. "It's like jello, with things floating in it."

"Tiramisu," I said, firmly.

"You're the floating things."

The Guy stuck his finger in my ear and wiggled it around. He does this from time to time; I've come to the conclusion that this must be some sort of male sign of affection. I notice that young boys do this to their siblings, though usually they lick their fingers first. The Guy was kind enough to skip the saliva portion of the bonding ritual.*

As usual, I submitted in meek, womanly silence while he poked about my ear canal.

"I don't understand why you never have any ear wax," he said after removing his finger and inspecting it. "Do you just not grow any?"

"It's a female thing," I said, kindly. "It's not to be understood."

Boyfriends are weird things. Somebody please send me a manual.

***

* Footnote:

"No, I don't," the Guy objected, upon reading the entry. "I do it to you because you do it to me. You keep sticking your finger in my ear, and I don't know why, because it's usually yucky."

"I'll put in a disclaimer," I said.

I'm a good girlfriend.

resume writing

I have to finish my resume by tomorrow. Indian Mom wants us all to get together and proofread each others resumes.

Here, in no particular order, is a list of things I rank higher than resume writing on my list of feel-good activities.

1. Coughing up a lung.
2. Coughing up a liver.
3. Putting a mirror on the floor and doing a belly dance over it.
4. Attempting to run for Congress.
5. As a woman.
6. As a minority woman.
7. In America.
8. Naming the belly fat rolls.
9. Walking by a construction site and getting catcalls.
10. Walking by a construction site and not getting catcalls.
11. Losing my pulse.

It's possible that I'm overreacting on this whole resume thing. After all, I'm still trying to recover from the purple virus of death that has seen fit to quash all signs of rebellion in my lungs. Being able to cough the refrain to 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' does things for one's ability to put things in perspective. All I know is, I don't want to write a resume. For three days now, ever since The Announcement -- you know, the one that basically told us we would be unemployed very soon -- I've been facing a white screen with the words 'Yuhri Karena Hirata' on top. Under that is my address and my cell phone number, not to mention the first nine letters of 'Work Experience.' Up to that point, I've done just fine with the whole Writing My Worth As A Person Down On Paper thing. It's getting any further that's got me stymied.

There's something about facing 'Work Exper' every morning that just punctures the desire to succeed. Hence the procrastination. Hence the journal entry, when I'm supposed to be doing something about finishing my resume in time for tomorrow's resume review.

It's ridiculous, of course. I've been at the company for over a year, and I know I've accomplished things during that time. I must have, or they would have fired me a long time back. I just can't think what any of that work was. I know I've learned a lot, too, because if I hadn't learned a lot, I wouldn't have made it this long. Is it a bad thing that I can't seem to bring any of this information to mind?

I don't want to write a resume. I want to meet my prospective employers cold, and charm them with my personality. I don't want them to ask me hard questions about my technical skills. I want them to be tickled by my sense of humor, blown away by my magnetic conversation, and give me a job based on my charisma alone.

Is that too much to ask?

***

I was talking to the Manager yesterday, when I suddenly heard a little mumbling at my elbow.

I looked down. Indian Mom's one-year old was very solemnly chewing on my chair's arm.

"Hullo, baby," I greeted him.

He gnawed away, leaving little half-moons of saliva on the seat. There was something gleeful about the grin he gave me around a mouthful of plastic, a sort of je ne sais quoi. I grinned back at him.

Children are weird.

***

It's been a strange few days following The Announcement; all development has stopped, and all desire to work has faded away into the nothingness, to boot. We have no direction, no focus, and no purpose to continue. As yet, we haven't even heard when our last day is going to be. Isn't that something we need to know? Upper management hasn't gotten around to determining the disposition of our unit yet, so we're left stranded, going through the motions of coming in to work and fiddling around with our resumes and job search sites until we hear something -- anything -- about what comes next.

There's bitter talk about AT&T around the office, though most of it is wry and entertaining in its way. My previous entry notwithstanding, I watch the Death Star bring its subscribers back up at a phenomenal speed and feel a certain amount of envious pride in their accomplishment. Say what you will about AT&T, they're smart. They have smart people. They know what they're doing, and they're good at what they do.

"If law offices were public, I'd invest in the lawyers representing them," someone commented cynically at luncheon. "They'll be making buckets of money from all the litigation AT&T is going to go through after this."

There's a peculiar, festive atmosphere in the offices of late, part of the Sinking Ship syndrome. Levity abounds. Parties do too, and parents are bringing their children -- newborn and otherwise -- into work so that coworkers can play with them. We wander in to work around 10:30 or 11:00 am and then toddle home at the decent hour of 3:00 pm. We go in to work for the sake of seeing our coworkers, nothing more. In the last four days, I've only been asked one work-related question.

It's a little bit too soon to start worrying about the future, for me anyway. I've got my eyes set firmly on a retail position at Fry's Electronics, which seems to me to have the potential for a whole lot of fun. Meanwhile, I'm hastily catching up with all the medical work I need to do while I have medical insurance: pelvic ultrasound for ovarian cysts, doctor's appointments for lab results, prescriptions for hormone treatments that might give me round breasts like canteloupe. (Joking about the round breasts part.) The Firecracker, who pays $4,000 a month on her mortgage, attempted to refinance and was summarily rejected by her agent.

"AGENT SAY, OH, YOU WORK EXCITE AT HOME. I HEAR ITS NOT GO SO WELL. WHAT YOU DO NEXT? AND DOCTOR, HE SAY OH, YOU WORK EXCITE AT HOME. I HEAR ITS NOT GO SO WELL, WHAT YOU DO NEXT? NOW EVERYBODY IN ENTIRE WORLD KNOW NEWS AND WANT KNOW, WHAT I DO NEXT?"

"Tell them you don't know, they're the experts, why don't they tell you?" I advised.

It's grim out there in the jobless world, or so one of our old coworkers told us. She was one of the two that were laid off two months ago; jobless still, she came back to visit today for an hour or so.

"Only one call back," she sighed, standing in the irregular huddle that my team seems to form more frequently of late. "I've sent out so many applications, I've lost count. I'm starting to think about Nordstrom or someplace."

If she's having trouble with a CIS degree from San Francisco State, it bodes ill for the rest of us. And by 'rest of us,' I mean me.

"Don't worry about it, I can take care of you," the Guy comforted, feverish on my sofa with his own case of the purple plague. "I make enough money."

I muttered darkly to myself and tromped back to my room to work on my resume.

"--IENCE. Excite@Home. Software Enginee--"

I lost my motivation and pillowed my chin in my hands to stare at my big, white, shiny computer screen. Yawn. Pencil on my desk; I poked the screen with the eraser end of it, and made a smudge over the letter 'O' in 'WORK.' Ho hum.

After half an hour I drifted back to the living room to see what the Guy was doing. He was busy playing his way through a feudal Japan Playstation 2 game. For some mysterious reason, the samurai he was playing was wearing a massive panda suit, straight out of Nippon Disneyland's creature wardrobe. A little baby panda was dangling from a pouch on the panda samurai's belly, flopping its little arms around with excitement.

I watched him smite several VR demons with a glowing samurai sword, then went back to work on my resume.

"--r. Redwood City, CA. Programmed things."

This ain't going well.

chapter end

I had stories for you all. Marvelous, hilarious, twisted stories.

Unfortunately, I forgot them all in my recent brain trauma. So sorry. Perhaps another time?

***

As part of my ongoing, losing battle with the assembled microbes of Redwood City, I've been bedridden for most of the past week. On Tuesday, it was a chill and a sniffle. On Wednesday morning, it was an hour-long conversation with a small nail I found in a wall, followed by a serenade of the first four notes of the theme song from Disney's 'Winnie-the-Pooh.'

I made it out of the house by Sunday, part of a short jaunt to Costco to buy toilet paper. The Guy drove me home after that and packed me on the sofa with a blanket, shivering, while he made dinner. Don't ask me how I spent the hours in between going home early on Tuesday and heading out to Costco on Sunday, because I honestly couldn't tell you. In fact, I'm still not sure I survived those hours; I'm fairly certain that any in-depth medical examination would reveal that I'm a corpse neatly stitched back together by a team of crack scientists for the purposes of research into the viability of rehabilitation of the dead.

Incidentally: boyfriends are good. They do good things. Take care of sick girlfriends, for instance. Cook them things. Cover them with blankets. Crochet and sing lullabies. That sort of thing.

Mine even does dishes.

Sometimes.

***

Anybody who's been reading the news knows by now that the Great Chapter Eleven is shortly to become the Great Chapter Seven. After a year and several months of employing yours truly, ExciteAtHome is going to close their doors and turn off their servers in approximately 90 days. In the meantime, they'll start layoffs, effective almost immediately. Any employee who isn't going to be part of the transitioning of subscribers from the @Home network to local cable provider networks will probably be considered unnecessary staff and become intimately acquainted with ye old pink slip.

That'll be me, folks. Give me a couple of days, and then you can welcome me to the ranks of the unemployed.

I wobbled my way in to work today, gathering no few stares of astonishment on my way. On Friday, I'd attempted to spend some time in the office, thinking that if this was to be the last day of our shared employment, I should spend the time at the office with my buddies. I lasted for all of two hours, after which I sent myself home due to their continuous disinclination to obey the simplest of quarantine rules.

"Badapa wad de kubukad," I croaked, flapping my hands at them between coughing and snorting.

Indian Mom and Indian Woman the Second puttered into my cube to feel my forehead, pat me on the head, and massage my shoulders.

"You don't sound good," Indian Mom fretted, and cooled my face with her hands.

"Bahada kubaka," I insisted, and hacked some more.

"Is she trying to say something?" Indian Woman the Second wondered to Indian Mom.

"YOU SICK," declared the Firecracker over the cubicle wall. "YOUR BOYFRIEND TELL ME OVER YAHOO MESSENGER TAKE CARE OF YOU."

Indian Mom shook her head reproachfully at me. "You should go home," she ordered.

"SDAY ABAY," I wheezed.

"What?" said Indian Woman the Second.

The Manager drifted over to dangle across the cube wall and regard me thoughtfully. "She wants you to stay away," she advised. "She doesn't want you to get sick."

"Oh," said Indian Mom.

"It's too late," said Indian Woman the Second.

The Firecracker disappeared.

"Yeb," I sighed, and went home.

Bankruptcy is a weird thing, one that I haven't really gone into here for reasons mostly to do with my tendency towards procrastination. It's actually not that complicated a subject; anybody who works in Silicon Valley these days is probably intimately acquainted with the way it goes.

ExciteAtHome, for those that don't know, is -- was -- a company run by a textbook conflict of interest. As a company, we sold our services to cable providers such as Cox, Comcast, Charter, and AT&T. We managed their broadband cable internet service for them. In return, they paid us a little over 30% of whatever they got from their subscribers. That's, you know, your next door neighbor, the one on the block who isn't an AOL and knows that the mouse isn't a foot pedal. The problem was, ExciteAtHome (which used to be just plain 'AtHome' until they made what turned out to be a disasterous merger with Excite.com for the purposes of content instead of linking up with AOL, who was also interested), only got 30% of whatever the cable company charged the subscriber.

For your average subscriber who was paying $40 a month, that'd be, what, $13? On the other hand, if AT&T decided to do a promotional deal by which anybody who signed up new to the service got two months free, followed by $20/month subscriptions for the rest of the year, guess how much ExciteAtHome got.

Yeah. 30% of nothing is awfully similar to nothing.

On top of this, AT&T owned something like 70% of the voting stock of the company. "How can a company that has to be your customer be in charge of your board?" you might ask. "Isn't that a conflict of interest?"

"For that matter, when the company goes into bankruptcy due to $1 billion in debt and hundreds of bad business decisions, and the company that controls the board tries to buy the bankrupt company for bargain basement prices, wouldn't it kind of look like the controlling company had an interest in having the bankrupt company go bankrupt?" you might also ask.

To which I would say, "Hey, look! Shiny things on my toilet!"

A company goes into bankruptcy with or without a sponsor. If a sponsor shows up, the sponsor is the one who gets final bid on the assets. In our case, this was AT&T. On the other hand, control of the company gets turned over to a committee comprised of the people that the bankrupt company owes money to. In our case, this means pretty much anybody in Silicon Valley who makes an actual, you know, product. The creditors committee was annoyed at AT&T, who offered $307 million for the entire company.

"Don't be stupid," said the creditors. "It's worth a lot more than that. This company could make money. It's worth at least $700 million."

"We're not spending any more than that," said AT&T, and did a little dance.

"You suck," said the creditors, and ran to the bankruptcy judge.

"We want to turn off access to the cable companies that won't negotiate with us," they announced.

"Okay," said the judge. "Go for it."

"Shit," said the other cable companies, who weren't, like, morons. They started making their own networks and transferring their subscribers out of @Home's network. It's possible this was sort of a breach of contract. Eh. Who's counting.

"We're going to turn off your subscribers," threatened the creditors, "and then we'll see who needs who."

"Just try it," jeered AT&T.

I gained a few moments of clarity on Saturday, long enough to attempt to download my email before AT&T decided to jump off of @Home, thereby losing all of my email.

No access.

"We're going to transfer you all to our new network," announced AT&T. "Don't worry. You'll get a couple of days of outage, but it'll be fine."

"It took us five years to create this network," I thought to myself. "There's no way they'll get it up and running in a couple of days."

On Monday morning I had access again.

"Hah," said AT&T.

"We're good," said AT&T.

"We're screwed," said Yuhri.

"How is it possible that a network that took five years to build can be replicated and transitioned in the space of a couple of days?" asked someone at work. "We developed a lot of this technology ourselves. It's supposed to be intellectual copyright. Can anybody say, suspicious?"

"Can anybody say libel?" asked someone else.

"Turns out we don't need you," said AT&T, and retracted their offer to buy the company.

"Well," said our CEO during the all-hands meeting today. "This is the end."

Yeah.

My yhirata1@home.com address, the one I thought would be mine to keep, is gone now. So are all the emails that have been sent to it since I got sick. There are people in the company that I work with, people who could get me my email. Maybe. Those who've attempted to send email to yhirata1@home.com since last Tuesday, the last time I was in the 99-degree body temperature demographic, should probably start poking through their 'sent' folders in their email applications and launch those suckers again, this time to the one email address I can be fairly confident will work: yhirata1[at]yahoo.com.

A bunch of us exchanged our personal email addresses at work, thinking that this way we would be able to stay in touch afterwards. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't. But I'll tell you what, out of that bunch of emails, only one of them wasn't with yahoo. And only one of them was with AOL.

And none of them were with @Home.

How's that for irony?