September 26, 2002
faulty vision
Tara has announced that I am a liar.
"You?" she announced in an email yesterday morning, "Are a liar."
Funny. The Guy keeps saying the same thing.
Her bathroom, Tara informed me, was painted -- I'd forgotten that detail; not having been in on the painting (and the inevitable reward afterwards, Tara's cooking, which for some reason is one of those few things that remain hallmarked in my memory) I'd lost that somewhere in the void of my mind. Also, she informed me, the hole in her bathroom is covered.
"You don't honestly think I'd let sewer stench into my house, do you?"
Well, no. My apartment smells funny, though.
"I demand a retraction."
So there you go. My bad.
We were at her place on Tuesday night in fact, invited over to dinner so we could meet up with a friend visiting from Seattle. Said friend was also the minister of Tara and Remington's wedding; she was down in California to take the GRE, one of those traditional New Life Adventures that take place after losing one's job to the new Bush Economy.
Before we left to the Coldstone Creamery for dessert, Tara took a minute to show us the marble that would be lining the floor and counters. They were veined, massive, delicious weights. My mouth watered over them. The Guy peered at the tile for the floor and ran an awed hand over the surface. "You realize after you're done with the bathroom, you'll have to redecorate the kitchen so it'll be up to the same standard."
I looked up. Tara had a gleam in her eye. Remington looked resigned.
Personally, I'm hoping that when she finishes redecorating the entire house, she'll move on to another house, and I'll have raised the funds to buy this one and enjoy the benefits of her redecorating. Anybody that wants to donate money for this worthy cause, contact me.
(But it's still Italian Rustic.)
On Monday, traditionally a busy day for us at work, I ended up dealing with a support issue and shuttling back and forth between several desks. For whatever reason, I took off my glasses and put them on my desk. People were in and out of my cube, picking up this, testing that, looking for the other. There was hardly any room for me there anyway, and I ended up on the phone to a customer at an adjoining desk.
An hour later, still on the phone with a customer, I heard a crunching sound and a dismayed, "Oh, no," behind me. I glanced around, and dimly beheld a colleague holding a tangled bundle of wire and glass in his hand.
Short-sighted, self-consciously attentive to the phone, I turned back to my work and steadfastly avoided looking at the scene of the accident. That is, until the scene of the accident came to me. A hand poked itself under my eyes, holding the fractured remains of my glasses.
"I stepped on them," my coworker said apologetically.
I glanced down. He had big feet.
While there are some things I get upset about, broken glasses don't number among them. My vision insurance, one of the (very) few perks of working at the Purple Slime-o, is thorough without being extravagent. I was due for a new pair of glasses anyway.
I'd noticed lately that driving in inclement conditions -- foggy days, for instance, rainy evenings, nights, sunny afternoons with blue skies, California -- is getting more difficult. I'd stare at a sign coming towards me at 65 miles an hour, and discover that the damn thing had picked up a paler twin brother. The two would caper from side to side, almost-but-not-quite behind each other, and only toe the line when I was close enough to complain. Meanwhile, street lights would magically sprout "NO RIGHT TURN ON RED" signs out of nowhere, right after I'd performed a "RIGHT TURN ON RED" in front of a motorcycle cop having a slow day.
Well, I mean, that isn't fair, is it? Hardly sporting. Trying to trick me into going the wrong way on a one-way street is one thing, but deliberately setting me up for high-speed chases isn't what I'd call a demonstration of brotherly love.
As usual, I picked my doctor by pulling up the insurance-approved in-your-area list from a web site, then calling down the list until I got an appointment that suits me. I hit paydirt on the first try. I drove my broken glasses -- shut up -- I drove with my broken glasses on to the clinic, a short ten minutes away. Like all the optometrists I've ever had, this one was friendly and likeable, the kind of person you wished was your primary care physician, not your eye doctor.
Like all eye doctors, the very last thing he did was render me sightless for the rest of the day. "Just a couple of drops," he said encouragingly. "You should be fine by this evening."
I've always assumed that the purpose behind dilating the eyes is to give the optometrist a good hard look at my brain on the other side. The fact that several optometrists have displayed bewilderment upon peering into my eyeballs has left me rather leery of actually inquiring into the procedure. My natural suspicion tells me that a little knowledge in this case could lead to serious damage to my self-esteem.
It takes several minutes for the dilating drops to work, and in order to pass the time, my very nice optometrist (ook me out into the front room to choose new frames.
He harvested a small collection of them. "These would look good, and these and these. Let's try these on. We actually have the exact same model you had before. Do you want the exact same look?" He sounded vaguely disapproving.
"No?" I said.
This was obviously the correct answer. He nodded in a nonjudgmental way that told me he wasn't emotionally involved (but as long as I had made up my mind, he was glad that I had made up my mind to do the right thing) and began playing musical glasses on my nose.
"These? Hm. No. These? These are good." I stared at him through the new frames, feeling them sliding down my inadequate nose. "Hm. Or maybe these. Let's set these aside. I think I might have a larger pair. These look good. Your eyes are centered in the frames." This is apparently the highest standard of opto-symmetric beauty. He began building piles on the shelves: these are good because your eyes are centered; these are bad because they make you look like a fat-headed, cross-eyed Mole Person.
"Hm. How do you like these?"
In general, the bridge of my nose and my ears conspire together to make any pair of glasses, no matter how well-adjusted, nostril-huggers. I poked the latest pair of frames back up to my eyes, and for the first time, inspected my reflection in the mirror.
A fuzzy pink blob face stared back at me with fuzzy dark blob eyes. Just to make sure, I switched the glasses with another set of empty frames and snuck another look. The fuzzy pink blob smiled encouragingly at me. Not being able to see my own reflection made it impossible to make aesthetic judgments about my face.
I was intensely relieved.
"I can't see anything. I think I'll go with these." I picked a pair at random from the Doctor-Approved pile and waved them at him. He popped them back on my face and stared at me for a long, critical moment.
"Do you like them?"
"Yes?"
"Yes?"
"Yes," I said firmly. "I like them."
I had no idea.
The optometrist placed them neatly on my face, stared while they slid happily down my nose, and began frowning. He plucked them off, adjusted the nose pieces, yanked at the ear pieces, then framed my eyes again.
Cowed by his ruthlessness, the frames stayed meekly in place.
He beamed a benediction at me. "These are a good choice," he said. "They're blend in a little with your skin tone, so they don't really draw a lot of attention--"
"That's good!" I interrupted, relieved. That's the last thing I want. Attention paid to my face.
"--to the glasses," he specified, finishing up. He confiscated the frames and jogged back to the front desk to place an order for me. I wandered around the front room while he filled out paperwork, making encouraging sounds to myself. (You know the type: "That's a chair! Stupid! Stupid!" "Is that's a wall?" "Ooh. I can see through my hand!")
The front desk attendent was sneaking surreptitious glances at me, torn between amusement and dismay. "Do you have far to drive back?" he whispered at me as I passed.
"I can't see a thing," I hissed back. "I think this is an improvement."
He sneaked a grin over the counter. "Nice meeting you."
September 24, 2002
two thoughts
I notice in my archives that the last time I reported on Tara's bathroom was back in March, and since I'm told that her family occasionally reads my journal, I thought I'd update them on the situation.
Tara has decided to go for a rustic Italian look in her newly remodeled bathroom, which is commendable because it was probably the cheapest way to go. She has stripped the paint from the walls so that they're now down to streaked plasterboard; she has removed the tile from the floor so that it now consists of uneven concrete with patches of adhesive. She has removed the toilet and fixtures so that there's now a big hole in the floor leading nowhere our imaginations want to go.
The removal of all these extraneous accoutrements has expanded the bathroom considerably. Whereas before it was roughly half the size of her coat closet, the bathroom can now fit six famine-starved villagers. And if any of them need to go to the bathroom, there's always the hole in the floor.
Tara claims this is not the final look she has in mind for the room -- her ultimate vision apparently involves a toilet one can sit on -- but I say, why tamper with a good thing?
When last we left my sister, she was heading off into the wild blue yonder -- namely, Mexico -- on a peculiar vacation specified by the whims of the International terminal at San Francisco Airport.
I got a telephone call from her the Sunday before last, right as I was walking out the door to dim sum with the Guy.
"I'm coming back," she announced. "I hate Mexico. It's all expensive and stuff."
"Are you in Mexico City? Why is it expensive? I thought it was cheap."
"Puerto Vallarta," Masako informed with disgust.
I sniffled in the car. "Isn't that, like, one of the biggest tourist attractions in South America?"
"Tourists SUCK."
"Oh." I considered what to ask next. "Do you need me to pick you up at the airport?"
I distinctly heard my sister consider this. "We're going to Arizona."
"Straight to Arizona?"
"That's where the plane goes."
"Do you know anybody in Arizona?"
"May Lee lives there," my sister explained. "Could you get her phone number for me?"
How I was to accomplish this, she had no idea. "You have an email address for her?" I asked a little desparately. I was hungry. Conversations with my sister, while always interesting, had a rather stomach-churning effect on my more sedate internal organs.
"In my email somewhere. I dunno. I'm in the airport. I can't check. -- If I give you my email address and password, will you get it? You can email her and have her call your cell phone."
"And then--?" I asked bitterly.
My sister was quite cheerful on the phone. "Then she can call you and give you her phone number, and then I can call you after we touch down. Oops. Got to go. The plane's boarding."
She tossed out her password and username for Yahoo, bid me a fond farewell -- "Bye!" -- and hung up.
May Lee, a sweet, somewhat confused young woman, called me later in the day while we were wandering Barnes and Noble. She's been friends with my sister since early grade school, and part of her enduring charm is that, no matter how many years of experience she has, she never fails to be astonished by Masako.
From her opening greeting on the phone, she already sounded vaguely worried. "Hello? It's May Lee?" The uncertainty over her own identity was typical. She rarely made any comment that was not phrased as a question.
"May Lee! Hey. How're you doin'? Listen, Masako's going up to Arizona from Mexico and she wants your phone number so that she can get in touch with you. Except that you just called me on my cell phone so I probably have it already. So I don't need it. Unless you're using a pay phone -- are you using a pay phone? -- in which case I'll need it anyway, or is this a cell phone?"
There was a moment's blank silence. Then, plaintive: "I don't understand."
There are only two phrases May Lee ever presents without the question mark at the end. This is one of them.
"Masako," I said slowly and carefully, "will be in Arizona. She wants your phone number."
"Is she there?" May Lee wanted to know.
"In Mexico."
"Why is she in Mexico?"
"Who knows. Anyway, she hates it there, so she's going up to Arizona--"
"To visit me?" She sounded alarmed at the thought. I couldn't blame her. Having Masako as a friend is like knowing Christopher Walken. You don't know what'll happen next, but you're probably guaranteed it'll be fun in a horrible way, and the power of God will be urging you on.
"That's what she said. So I need your phone number before she gets off the plane in an hour or so. Is this your mobile phone?"
Another small pause. "Yes?"
"And do you carry it with you everywhere you go?"
"Yes?" May Lee guessed again.
"Then I'll have Masako call you when she gets in."
"Today? She's coming today?" Already, May Lee was starting to sound resigned to the prospect. This is part of what it is to be Masako's friend. I'm told there are whole legions of people in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia that will put my sister-and-company on thirty minutes' warning. Well, the Europeans have the French, the Africans have the UN, and Southeast Asians have guerrilas in every tree; they're used to erratic neighbors. All we have here in America is the damn Canadians. Excepting the occasional immigration to the US, the last time a Canadian did something unreasonable, there were mammoth herds dropping turds all over Vancouver.
Masako called a half hour later, while we were driving back to my apartment. "So?" she began on the phone: no 'hello,' no 'how are you,' no 'I'm back in America!' "So?" she said.
"Hold up and call back in five minutes," I directed.
(click)
I pulled up my list of 'calls received from' on my cell phone, and flipped through them until I found the right one. "Okay," I told the Guy. "Memorize these four digits...."
September 18, 2002
stubble
Like a lot of I/T people, the Guy doesn't like to shave regularly. Back when we first started dating, his face was always cherub-like in its innocence, absolutely free of anything that suggested an acquaintance with puberty in his past. That was back in the courtship phase, of course, and now that we've moved onto the domestic comfort phase of our relationship, the Guy has shown a tendency to lapse back into old habits.
I/T habits.
Silicon Valley lends itself rather uniquely to the capture and study of I/T guys, and so far one of the great constants I've witnessed has been the near universal presence of malformed facial hair. In the four months that I've been working at the Purple Madhouse1, I can count on one hand -- on two fingers of one hand, one finger for counting, the other for backup -- the number of times I've seen our "Director of I/T's" 2 nose feature hairs that grew out rather than in.
I/T men seem to have an irrational attachment to beards-that-could-be, a chimera that they would categorically deny if actually pinned by the question. "I'd look terrible with a beard," the Guy says when I ask him, and I can detect a hint of wistfulness in his confession. "Besides, it never grows in." 3
All men at some point or another seem to have experimented with facial hair, either deliberately or out of sheer sloth. Women have makeup, or hairdye, or breast implants with which to create new personas: professional woman, alternative woman, big-boobed woman. Nature, being a lousy equalizer, has given men beards: professor man, street junkie man, Cro-Magnon man.
In point of fact, like most I/T people, my own personal Guy doesn't have the follicles to produce a full, dignified chin of hair. By his own admission, what eventually forms on his face after a period of aggressive apathy insofar as shaving is concerned, is a scraggly, slightly longer five-o'clock shadow most frequently modeled by professionally homeless drug addicts. It's fairly rare to find an Asian that can grow an acceptable beard; they tend to grow facial hair in patches, unevenly and without conviction.
The Chinese surrendered to the inconveniences of genetics quite early on by growing equivalent queues on both head and chin, creating an aesthetic out of anorexic length rather than thorough volume. Likewise the Japanese, who limited themselves to small mustaches and goatees, and boycotted male pattern baldness by shaving their heads and instituting topknots. 4
My personal opinion about I/T guys and Stubble is that they've somehow combined a personal prediliction towards sloth and an earnest need to be the lynchpin of a Babylon Tower, the foundation on which the edifice of commerce stands.
"Sure, so I'm a bit unseemly," says stubble, when an I/T guy wears it proudly through his company. "But the only reason I haven't shaved is because I haven't had time, because I've been battling day and night for weeks to keep this half-assed operation together on the crabgrass budget you've given me to work with, you ungrateful pricks." 5
I wandered into my bedroom a couple of months ago and discovered the Guy sitting at his desktop, unshaven, unshorn, a more robust version of Scooby Gang Shaggy. His stubble had been growing for days, and was now eating its unhealthy way across his cheeks and into his hair. The way my computer was set up gave me an excellent view of the right side of his face, so I stared at it for a few minutes before wandering into the bathroom.
When I came back, I had his electric razor in one hand.
The Guy didn't comment while I carefully ran the thing across his cheek. He was laboring, apparently, under the mistaken impression that I intended to provide an otherwise onerous service by shaving his entire face. Once I had a palm-sized patch cleaned of hair, I dusted him off, turned off the razor, and kissed him very cautiously on the newfound skin.
"You're only going to shave half my face?" the Guy protested.
"Your bristles hurt," I explained for his edification, and bore away the razor.
That night, he shaved and presented himself for inspection. As a reward, I kissed his other cheek as well.
A week later, he was back at the computer again, wallowing in half-centimeter facial hair.
Back I went to the electric razor, and once more I painstakingly shaved a palm-sized patch of his cheek, dusted it off, and kissed it. This time, the Guy started to giggle while I was on my way out the door. "See, the problem with your little scheme is, you think I'll be bothered that I look stupid with only a patch shaved, and I'll end up shaving my entire face."
I left him alone, still giggling over the computer, half his face bare, the other half covered with stubble.
He made it almost two hours before he caught sight of himself in the mirror.6
1. Churchhill on a blanket: I've been at this -- I would say "company," but it sounds like cruelty -- disaster for longer than my original estimate. In my first week here, the other new employee and I made a bet that the company would go under in three months, tops. I'm ambivalent about how I should feel, now that I find out we were wrong.
1. Quotation marks are more a comment on said "Director of I/T's" competence rather than his title. In four months here, I've yet to discover exactly what he does, since his typical modus operandi is to sit at his desk and read emails; anytime someone asks him to do real work, he delegates to hapless, competent I/T monkey under him. Yesterday, I/T monkey went home early because he was sick, and as a result our Internet connection went down and stayed down for nearly two hours. "Director of I/T" was on a long coffee break and, as usual, "forgot" to take his cell phone with him.
3. ...which implies that he's actually tried to grow a beard at some point or another. I, personally, think that this proves my point.
4. My apologies to the Koreans, who doubtless came up with something equally as brilliant. I unfortunately lack the immediate resources to learn what that 'equally as brilliant' was. Anybody out there with a background in Korean tradition is invited to educate me. I won't apologize for any omissions that slight other cultures; historically, Western cultures were dismayingly slow to adopt paper, printing, and bathing, and it seems like adding insult to injury to ask if any creative cultural bypasses were invented to deal with receding hairlines.
5.In more financially adventurous people, this instinct towards unappreciated self-immolation leads to careers as social workers, parents, and public school teachers.
6. He immediately shaved.
I always win.
September 11, 2002
september 11, 2002
Yes, goddammit, I know that it's September now and that my last journal entry was back on August 20th. Yes, I know I neglected to document any of the rich tapestry of my life in between, starting from my visit to Seattle for my birthday to the black pneumonic plague currently playing Strom Thurgood in my lungs. Yes, I know I've been horrifically irresponsible in not inviting you, complete strangers and friends alike, into the Cosmic Circus of my Adventures.
Bah.
Besides utterly destroying my sense of humor and stripping me of my basic English skills, my workplace has the added victory of having infiltrating my dreams. I know that I swore early on that I wouldn't talk about work too much in my journal, due to the not entirely unreasonable fear that my Big-Brother-is-Watching communist tyrant of a CEO would hunt me down and rip out my nasal hair. The CEO is, in case you haven't guessed, a bit of a micromanager. A normal CEO would send a peon to do his dirty work for him.
I remember my dreams fairly rarely these days, only retaining those that are just too weird or too relevent to my daily life that I wake up in the morning with an urgent need to jot notes on the first piece of paper that comes to hand. (This admirable instinct has led me to the discovery that rolls of toilet paper on pajama thighs do not a good writing surface make.) Nonetheless, despite travail and an inexplicable lack of scrap paper in my apartment, I've made a good show of making dream journals I go. Sometimes they're just too stupid not to share.
Take Monday of (two? three?) weeks ago. In response to a battery of complaints from one of our biggest customers -- let's face it, one of our only customers -- my coworker was sent on two hours notice to New York City. Our CEO's instructions: "Don't come back until it's fixed." My coworker came by to visit me at my cube.
"It's been nice knowing you," he said, gloomily.
As it turned out, between the two of us, we managed to do a lot of triage. It meant a stressful few days of jumping whenever the phone rang, and hunting down reluctant engineers to extract reasonable explanations out of hostile, mangled Chinese English. It also, for the first time in well over a month, meant something interesting to do that would actually make a difference to someone.
That first night, after negotiating my friend a hotel in the heart of Brooklyn, I went home and actually worried about my his reception and success in New York. I worried during dinner. Then I worried while playing computer games. Then I worried during study, and finally worried in bed. After a while, the worrying thing started to recede into the back of my less than tenacious mind, where it rummaged about in old memories and was touched by the spark of inspiration.
"Aha," it crowed. "Pretty Woman! Brilliant! The creation of a silk purse from a sow's ear! We will make use of this metaphor!"
(It will surprise noone that my subconscious is far more articulate than my conscious. Make of that what you will.)
That night, I discovered myself directing the boutique scene from Pretty Woman. As anybody old enough to remember Star Wars recalls, Julia Roberts plays one of the main characters in the Pretty Woman. She's an actress I actually sort of like, barring that odd way of walking which is rather reminiscent of some ducks I've eaten; about her real life personality, I have neither knowledge or speculation. In my dream at least, she was the mutant offspring of Coach Bob Knight and Darth Vader. She raged through my dream in a floppy white hat the size of my ass, screaming obscenities at my camera crew. Meanwhile, my friend from the office was darting furtively around the set, hiding behind scenery pieces.
"Dr. (name deleted) is chasing me," he hissed at me from behind a fake wall. He'd mysteriously grown a mustache. "Don't let him find me."
A few seconds later, Dr. No-Name came dashing around the corner, bearing his laptop in hand. "Where is he?!" he demanded crossly. "Never mind. Here. Yuhri. Fix this." He tossed the laptop at me and charged off to hunt my friend.
I woke up in the morning with a definite feeling of panic, and the uneasy suspicion that I would be humming the first twenty words of Pretty Woman (all the words I know) for the rest of the day. At the office, I shared my dream with the coworkers left to me.
"Do you want me to interpret it for you?" asked the bright-eyed Project Manager that sits next to me.
I mumbled something at him, head dropped in hands. The Pretty Woman song was starting to have serious reprecussions for my state of mind. Someone on the other side of the office, inspired by some psychic sadism, had started to whistle the first nine notes of the theme around 9 in the morning, and the effect after several hours was rather like the annoying pain one gets when one is stomped repeatedly on the ear by effete drag queens in stiletto heels.
The next night, I fell asleep to find myself in a mall, standing in front of a pet store. A closed pet store, it looked like; the grate was down, and there were forlorn little animals poking their noses out through the metal bars. It was like a low-budget recasting of Oz.
I pounded on the door, demanding to be let in. What would have been unthinkable in real life was perfectly reasonable in my dream world. Dream Yuhri has extra hard-working hormone infusion therapy on her side; if she were pumping any more testosterone, there'd be hair growing out of her nipples.
"Let me in!" I yelled.
"Let us out!" the animals yelled.
A nice looking clerk scurried apologetically to the door, and cranked up the grate to let me in. "Sorry, sorry," he said meekly. "Let me get the manager for you."
That was nice. In my dream, I was some sort of important big-wig. I sniffed imperiously at the clerk and sent him off to fetch the manager. Meanwhile, I investigated a pair of fat little dwarf hamsters, one beige and one brown, that were attempting to coax me over to their cage.
"Rescue us!" they begged, and did a little dance for me. One of them was beating a tom-tom; the other one was batting its shiny little eyes at me.
They were soft, they were fuzzy, and they were cute. I picked them up, thinking fond memories of Quibble and Quirk, and stuffed them into my shirt. "Yay!" they shrieked from my breast. "Rescue! Rescue!"
In the illogical logic of dreams, I rationalized the dwarf hamster theft by calling it punishment for the manager's rudeness. Sure enough, in a effect-ed/cause-al way that would have caused Descartes' eyeballs to bleed, I overheard the manager making rude comments about inconvenient customers that didn't deserve his time and effort.
I listened indignantly while the nice clerk pacified his manager and brought him around to find me. If he was going to be that way about it, I didn't want to have anything to do with him. Without a thought for the poor clerk's feelings when he found me gone, I flounced out of the pet store with the dwarf hamsters rummaging around in my clothes, and -- oh, as long as I'm at it -- picked up a five pound block of sawdust and managed, somehow, to shove that under my shirt as well.
"Yay!" the dwarf hamsters cheered.
I made it all around the corner before I heard the store manager giving chase. Suddenly alarmed that they would catch me with stolen goods, I popped open the sawdust bag and spread it all over the concrete for the bunny rabbits -- don't ask. Why the hell wouldn't there be bunny rabbits living in a Silicon Valley strip mall? -- and liberated the hamsters.
They scurried away, a mass of little fuzzy bodies. "That's odd," I remember thinking as I woke up. "They must have bred while they were in my bra."
Interpret that, why don't you.
This will be a long entry, by necessity. I have whole weeks of stuff bottled up inside, and September 11th appears to have, er, popped my cork.
A few minutes ago, I received a cryptic, poorly typed email from my sister.
so, we{re in mexico.
can you tell mom that i{ll be home on the 29th?
love you.
Want to hear the conversation I had with her last Thursday on the phone?
"I'm going on vacation," she said.
"When?"
"Tomorrow."
"How long?"
"Two weeks."
"Where're you going?"
"Don't know yet."
"Are you going to take a plane?"
"Maybe."
"Huh. What are you taking a vacation from? And how come you don't know if you're going to take a plane?"
"Just stuff," she said vaguely. "Um."
"Is it a secret?"
"We're going on standby."
There was a small silence. "To where?"
"I dunno yet. We're just going to wait."
"Wait ... for what?"
"For whatever plane has room for us."
"What?!"
"I have to go pack."
"What if you end up in ... I don't know, Afghanistan?! What if you end up in Israel and get shot at?!"
"I'll send you a postcard when I figure out where I am. Got to go. Bye."
"A postcard?"
"I love you. B'bye."
click.
Yeah. September 11th.
I came home from Vegas yesterday -- business trip, I'll tell you all about it later -- and collapsed on my couch.
I'll watch some stupid television, I thought blearily to myself. Something that'll make me laugh and then I can sleep. Maybe Will and Grace is on.
I flicked on the remote, deliberately going to live television rather than the safety net of my Tivo. The television was set to ABC; they were airing a special documentary, "Report from Ground Zero." For the next two hours I watched firefighters and policemen and assorted survivors and crew talk about their experiences on September 11th when the World Trade Center went down.
Will and Grace wasn't on.
I spent my birthday at Seattle with my mother, who made me clean out the garage.
Sadistic hobbit woman.
I have to tell you, there are few things more calculated to bringing home your advancing age than coughing up spider corpses and moving large monuments of power tools, unless it's opening up boxes and finding that toy you thought you lost when you were five -- "Mom! You said Santa Claus took this away because I'd been bad!" -- or discovering your younger sister's diary ("deer diry i had a fite with may lee and she kam ovr for slumber party and alice is heer i hit her by aksident i sed sory") from the creatively phonetic age of seven.
By way of celebration, she took me to Todai, her new favorite restaurant. Admittedly, Todai isn't that bad; if you want Japanese food and plenty of it, and aren't particularly critical about the quality, this is definitely the place to go.
"Is it somebody's birthday today?" the serving woman asked us on our way to a table.
"No," I said, automatically.
"Yes," said Mom. She nudged me happily. "That's you."
I stared at her blankly. "It is?"
"You get a free meal if it's your birthday," the serving woman prompted me, in case I needed encouragement. "Can I see your ID?"
I scrounged for my California wallet and squinted at the numbers. "I'll be damned," I marvelled. "It is."
Mom practically glowed. "I'm tricky," she congratulated herself. "Free meal."
The birthday card Mom gave me turned out to be a musical card. When opened, it shrilled 'Auld Lang Syne.' Interesting choice.
She sparkled with delight when I made that appalling discovery in the middle of a crowded restaurant; the little message she had written inside was in Japanese kanji characters, my weakest in terms of literacy, which pretty much guaranteed that I'd have to keep the card open long enough for the entire song to be played through from beginning to end.
I foiled her by snapping the card shut in the middle of 'And days o'lang syne.'
"I'll read it later," I promised, and glowered at her over the card.
She beamed and gave me a purse made out of white wicker. "Happy Birthday!" she carolled.
On the way home, Masako leaned into me and hissed in my ear, "Mom's a bit of a freak, isn't she?"
I'm griping. Sorry. You really need to know me in person to get the whole raconteur effect. I like telling stories, but somehow, lately, I feel like I've lost the ability to convey them online.
Is it old age? The creative flame is being blown out. Weird. It's harder and harder to laugh at things like I used to.
Nothing about the day, or the thoughts, or ... anything, really. Just trivia. Little bits of the comedy show that takes place in the odd, occasional sideshow of my life. I figure that's the best way to commemorate today.
I just spoke to the doctor in Brooklyn, the one that featured in my first dream. He was frazzled because of all the patients that were coming in needing care. A few hours later, he called back again about something else, and he'd calmed down considerably.
"Hey, babe," he greeted.
"Hey yourself. You sound better."
I could hear the shrug in his voice.
"Life goes on," he said.