a little nothing

I have nothing to write about.

No, really. Nothing. There's absolutely nothing in my head. I can actually hear the draft hissing through my ears, in one side, out the other, a little pause for apartment shopping in between -- "Honey, look at how spacious it is." "Yes, but do we really like the neighborhood?" -- before moving on to brighter (no pun intended) and less echo-y pastures.

Barring any excitement that may come my way over the next few hours, this will be the Seinfeld episode of my journal. No story, no interest, no point. Barring commercials, there'll be about as much stimulation here as an hour of Saturday Night Live. Usually, I hear the theme music and change the channel.

Go ahead, then. Change the channel. Won't hurt my feelings.

I'll just be sitting here, thinking about toenails.

***

Happy Thanksgiving. Check your calendars. It's the 25th.

***

Last night, I received a phone call from my Dojo-cho -- Americans would say, maybe, "minister" or "priest" -- that informed me that I was in trouble. Of all the Doshis (Americans would say, "junior minister") and Dojo-chos (Americans would say, "multiple ministers or priests") that I've had in my widely-travelled career, none have intimidated me quite as much as the one stationed in San Francisco. Part of this is that she never raises her voice, being at all times very ladylike, very polite, and -- worst of all -- very much like my mother. When she was stationed in Seattle, she and my mother were great friends, which just goes to show you.

She's called me a couple of times before, both times to tell me in her gentle, Japanese way that I should show my face at the Dojo (Americans would say "Church") more often than the once-every-other-blue-moon schedule I was favoring. Naturally, when I heard her voice, I instantly launched into an apologetic speech about why I wasn't at the Dojo this past Sunday.

"I ended up having to work, you see," I babbled, nervously scratching the back of one leg with the toes of the other. "I meant to go, but I just wasn't able to--" True enough, every word. More or less.

But I'd moved beyond 'in trouble' to 'in serious trouble,' as far as Dojo-cho was concerned. "Guess who's with me," she said mildly.

I blanked. "Who?" God?

There was a moment's silence, and then a sudden bright, cheery, and stomach-droppingly familiar voice. "Harro, Yuhri!"

Mom.

Oh.

(Americans would say, "Crap.")

There was a moment's silence while I digested this information. Dojo-cho and my mother in the same city. Dojo-cho and my mother in the same room. Dojo-cho talking to my mother about my spectacular spiritual failures. It may sound strange and kind of hokey to say this, but even without being particularly religious, I actually do love my God.

On the other hand, I'm afraid of my mother.

"Mom?" I said in a small voice.

"Harro?"

"Mom?"

"Harro?"

I paused for a second, wondering if I could conveniently lose connection. It just goes to show how panic can disrupt your normal, intelligent thinking processes. I'm fairly sure that hanging up on my mother would have caused some serious reprecussions. I thought of a couple of them, and abandoned the idea rather hastily. "This ... this is you, isn't it? Uh, Mom?"

"Harro!"

Definitely Mom. "Hi, Mom," I said weakly. "So...you've been talking to Dojo-cho, have you? Wait." I thought of a diversionary tactic and pounced on it, ruthlessly. "What are you doing in San Francisco?

If she was in San Francisco, she hadn't told me in advance. If she was in San Francisco, she hadn't called me the second she got off the plane. If she was in San Francisco and not visiting me, she had something to feel guilty about. Ergo, I was now armed.

Should have known better. It's never that easy. "I'm in Ros Angeres," Mom piped, happily. "We are having miyakusha." (A meeting for Dojo staff.)

No defense for Yuhri. Nothing for Yuhri. Just Dojo-cho, and Mom in the same room with her. "Oh. That's nice. Because I was thinking, if you're in San Francisco and you didn't even bother to tell me in advance...." I laughed a little wildly.

When Dojo-cho got back on the phone, I was thoroughly squashed into submission. My mother can do that. She can do that without ever saying a word about it. My recollection is that in this particular conversation, she wanted to verify for the sixth time that we'd be flying up on Wednesday, and that she'd pick us up outside the airport.

It was enough that she was talking to me. Dojo-cho got me back, completely cowed, docile as a lamb.

"It would be nice if you could come to the Dojo once in a while," she said kindly.

"Yes, ma'am," I said meekly.

"Because we miss you."

"Yes, ma'am."

"It would be very nice," Dojo-cho said again.

I sniffled a little. "I'll come on Monday," I promised. Even to myself, I sounded pitiful.

***

In the past two weeks, I've eaten two small bags of McDonalds french fries, 1/64th of a piece of Coldstone ice cream pie, and fourteen pounds of fiber. "Fourteen pounds!" you're thinking. "That's a pound a day. What, was there a sale on metamucil at Costco?"

To be honest, I've enjoyed the french fries and ice cream pie far more than the fiber, consumed -- you will be delighted to know -- in varying shapes and sizes and flavors, and none of it name branded. Fiber in broccoli, fiber in cereal, fiber in fruits and grains and vegetables, oh my. The problem with fiber is that it's all hustle, no linger. Fiber does not stand about smelling the flowers by the side of the road. Fiber has a schedule set by Martha Stewart. Fiber wants to be out and doing things, the key word being 'Out.' In the Warner Brothers menagerie of Recommended Daily Allowances, fiber is the Roadrunner on crack.

Fiber wants to go out and see the world. If the only way to travel is through the septic tank, so be it.

I complained earlier that I had no "now what?" manual to know how to progress with my diabetes self-maintenance. My diabetes class is over two weeks away, with Thanksgiving in between and an overenthusiastic (if equally diabetic) mother chanting mantras about all the food she'd like to cook me. Being the daughter currently away from Seattle, I have been promoted to the status of "favored child," which means my past favorites will be resurrected and presented in front of the interested, possibly appalled stomach of the Guy.

Anyway, back to the "now what?" manual issue. A member of my notify list kindly sent me the names of two books, complete with ISBN numbers and prices at Amazon. Does it astonish anybody that it never occurred to me to look at actual books for information? I immediately went online and ordered them.

Today the box arrived, possibly the most important delivery I've ever gotten, excepting that care package I once got in college from my family that for some reason contained (compliments of my demented sister) a head of broccoli that was at least two weeks old. The books have the distinction of being the first "for Dummies" books that I have ever purchased, one of those red letter days I always hoped I'd manage to live life without.

There's something irritatingly condescending about the pointy-headed boy in the front of "for Dummies" books. "Got you!" he looks like he's saying. "You're a dumbass! You see? You admitted it by buying my book. Dumb, Ass. Let me wag my finger at you in a coy and enragingly smug way, and in exchange I shall write a book for your diminished intellect with simple words and saccharine humor."

And yet, I'm encouraged. The fact is, insofar as Diabetes is concerned -- and I simply can't write the word without giving it the capital letter it now deserves, Diabetes, Di-a-be-tes -- I really am absolutely ignorant. And while there are times when it's prudent to conceal one's ignorance, such as when one is standing before a bad-tempered judge, there are also times when it's just smarter to stand up and admit: I'm a moron. Educate me.

My reader promises education, a wealth of information, and recipes to suit my new diet restrictions. If this book can help me squash my sudden obsession with the Big Mac, it's a step in the right direction.

So hey, considerate reader. My pancreas thanks you.

good names

I've received permission from the Guy to use his real name in this entry, which opens up a whole cache of stories I've never been able to share.

It's no secret that my family has long been worried that I would never find love, or at least marriage, which is presumably more important. The older members of my family are ruthlessly pragmatic about separating the two, choosing to be remorselessly unromantic when applying the requirements of genetic continuance on younger generations. That they themselves married for love is beside the point; surely we, as children of the cold-blooded '70s and '80s, have overcome that confusing mishmash of hormones and neuroses that fueled so much procreation in the grim past.

(In all fairness, I should exempt my sister, my mother and maternal grandmother from this sweeping generalization. My mother has never wanted anything more than my happiness, which considerately included love with marriage. My grandmother has been perfectly happy to go along with my mother on this, adding complacently that I have the perfect, round-faced beauty of the Heian period and should therefore have no trouble ensnaring a nice Japanese boy. Paintings of Heian beauty mostly consist of long hair, long clothes, and dumpling faces. Meanwhile, all Nice Japanese Boys are actually Asshole Japanese Boys unless they're relatives, which necessarily excludes them from consideration. Needless to say, this is a dubious compliment.

I've never really asked, but I suspect my sister just wanted me to get laid.)

My friends haven't been behindhand in this ongoing drive to see Yuhri matched. Anyone will tell you though, that it's impossible to hook two people up when one of the people persists on insisting she is utterly asexual. "I don't need a guy," I kept telling my friends, patiently. "I have no interest. I have other things. I'm busy. Who has time for a guy?"

"Are you gay?" one of my friends asked anxiously.

"I was for a day," I admitted. "But my sex life stayed the same, so I figured there wasn't any benefit to it. I still had to shower."

"You're not asexual. You're obviously female. Christ, Yuhri, you have breasts," I was told in exasperation at another time, by another friend.

I peered down at my breasts and poked, gingerly. They'd always rather baffled me as anatomical appendages. "It's all cosmetic," I explained. "I haven't gone through mental puberty yet."

After 27 years, people were starting to wonder if maybe I weren't serious. Someday, they were thinking, she'll just split in two like a paramecium, and then there'll be two smaller, higher-pitched Yuhris. It'll turn out she was right all along and she never really did need a man.

Boy. She's creepy.

It was around this time that I decided that it was, in fact, time for me to grow a gender. I called my friend Tara, as documented elsewhere in this journal, and informed her of the fact. "You can start setting me up with guys now," I told her kindly.

It was a few months after this that Tara moved into a new house. A gorgeous new house, in Mountain View, a beautiful, lovely, splendid house that she intended to rip to shreds and piece together again in a new, Tara-motif. I didn't help her move, for one reason or another -- I seem to recall the phrase 'Professionals' entering into conversation when I offered -- but a few days later, she called to invite me to a party. A house warming party, I assumed.

"Do you like German potato salad?" she asked over the phone. An odd question.

I answered it anyway. "I love German potato salad," I assured her, trying to sort out what exactly about the potato salads I had sampled before made one more Teutonic than another.

"Good," she said brightly. "K. and M. are bringing German potato salad, and K. and B. are bringing Yan."

Yam? Yams and potato salad? Privately, I considered this an overenthusiastic representation of tubers. However, an evening at Tara's is always good on the taste buds, if hard on the diet. I promised faithfully to come.

I arrived with my ex-roommate, Smurfette, and Smurfette's boyfriend at the time, the Viking, who had just stepped off the plane from Norway a few hours before. Remington let me in, making way for Tara, who greeted me in her kitchen in a massive apron and a hug.

"Happy housewarming!" I saluted, with the perennial moocher's insincere apology: "I didn't bring you a present. I suck."

I unravelled myself to discover that Tara was regarding me with the sweet, hilarious guilty smile she dons when she foresees trouble ahead. I eyed her with foreboding.

"I have a confession to make," she said in a small voice.

She's Catholic. She will admit her faults, no matter how I try to prevent her.

"It's not really a housewarming party," she told me, half holding on to me as though worried I'd turn and run on her. "We're actually trying to set you up, K. and Remington and me. He brought a friend. He's really nice. We were thinking you'd be great together."

There was a small silence.

"Yan?" I said ominously. "Not yams?" Ah, you see? I caught on. Some dormant intelligence was dissecting the earlier invitation and remembering discrepencies. If I had hackles, they would have risen; I instantly started to curdle with hostility. Yan was not going to have a good first impression. In fact, Yan was not going to have a good night.

"He's really nice," Tara repeated desperately, still clinging to my arm. "He's really funny, too...."

I eventually skulked into the family room to join the others, brooding darkly over the treacheries of my friends. Yan, poor boy, I ignored altogether, glancing at him only long enough to register that he was male -- hope lived eternal in my friends' breasts -- before locking my eyes on his feet. I refused to look any further up than that, going home at the end of the evening with only the vaguest recollection of anything above his knees, but with his shoes committed to memory.

I awoke to the conversation just in time to hear the jet-lagged Viking quip, "Yan Can Cook?"

Yan laughed politely. Even then, complete strangers, I could hear the weariness in his voice. He was a Dolly Parton that's been asked one too many times: "Are those real?"

"Huh?" I remember saying blankly. "Yan can cook what?"

The other guests exchanged glances. "Yan's the name of a television chef with a TV show and a bunch of books," one of them explained. "His slogan is 'Yan Can Cook.'"

I blinked at Yan's toe. "Oh," I said, adding firmly, "Never heard of him."

I like to think the Guy fell in love with me then and there.

***

I was cautious with the new relationship, never having gone down this road before. I didn't tell my sister or my mother about it, for instance, beyond the initial disparaging news that Tara had tried to set me up with someone and that he "seemed nice."

When we finally established that we were in fact a couple, I broke the news to my mother in a long conversation that was complicated by her current obsession with the moles digging up the garden.

It might have because of that confusing talk that she went away thinking my boyfriend's name was "Yen."

"How is Yen today?" she started asking, when we were chatting on the phone.

"Yan, Mom. His name is Yan."

"Yen."

"Yan."

"Yen?"

"Yan."

I could hear her on the other end of the phone trying to wrap her tongue around the name, and finding the task oddly difficult. There is a 'ya' sound in Japanese. For some reason, it elluded her.

"Ye-an!" she said, triumphantly.

It was close enough. Until the next call.

"How is Yen today?"

Discussions with my grandmother weren't much better. Naturally, such exciting news couldn't be kept secret; though my mother denies it, I suspect she immediately called her mother in Japan the first night I hung up with her, and transmitted all the dirt, complete with the mangled first name.

To add to the confusion, my sister's boyfriend -- a charming boy that I like tremendously, since my sister hasn't called lately to tell me I don't -- is named John. There is no "John" in Japanese. There is a "chon" in Japanese. There is a "chan" in Japanese. If you have your dentures in, there's a "Jan" in Japanese. And then there's the Guy's name.

When my grandmother came to Seattle to visit, she called to ask about my boyfriend. In her typical, straightforward way, she managed to touch very lightly on the subject after a meandering, fifteen minute conversation about what a wonderful child I was, how kind everyone in Seattle was, how she was sorry for being such an inconvenience to my mother, how she missed my piano playing....

"How is your friend?" she asked slyly, in the middle of this dizzying saunter through inconsequentiality-ville.

"Huh?"

"Your mother said you had a very nice friend. His name is...chan?"

"Yan."

"Chan?"

"Yan."

"Chan."

I was starting to feel a little deja vu.

"Yan," I said wearily.

"Oh," said my grandmother, brightly. "Jan."

"Close enough," I sighed.

"His name is like Masako's friend. Jan," my grandmother discovered. She was feeling perky.

"No, not exact--"

"Jan," grandmother repeated, sounding quite pleased with herself. "It is a very nice name, Jan. What does it mean?"

In Japanese, all names mean something. At one point, the Guy had actually told me what his name meant. I'd forgotten. Something about ... gardens? Bad girlfriend. Bad.

I made something up.

"Pretty flower!" I said, obligingly.

There was a small silence on the phone. "How ... interesting," my grandmother said. Unspoken: how very curious the People-Not-Japanese are.

My sister got on the phone a little while later. Her voice was low and cautious. "Yuhri, I think obaa-chama thinks we're dating the same guy."

leonids

I crawled into bed at nine pm tonight, determined to catch four hours of sleep before my wake up call at 1:30. The Guy's friend R. was going to come by and pick us up in his SUV at 2:00 AM, and drive us up to the mountains so we could watch the Leonid showers, away from city lights.

"We should get a thermos," the Guy said, anticipating that R.'s fiancee would also join us. "We can bring soup."

"Ungh," I said politely, already cataloging in my mind the odds and ends of finger foods I could collect from my refrigerator. For some strange reason, this middle-of-the-night jaunt to the windy hills -- those same hills that Californians persist on calling "mountains," with more ambition than perspective -- was taking on the luster of a mid-day picnic, complete with blankets and sun and beach ball. Except I didn't have a beach ball. My hostessy feelings were attempting to recover from the shock of that realization when the Guy added, "If you don't mind."

Which meant I was to make the soup. Which is why I crawled into bed at 9 PM, well before the bedtime I intend to have even when I'm a 3-foot-5, white-haired irascible gnome woman that has lived longer than anybody intended or even wanted. The Guy, who was busily taking apart a computer in my bedroom, stared at me in surprise. "You're going to bed now?" he demanded, sounding affronted.

"Yes," I said, and firmly closed my eyes. This was a hint. The Guy doesn't do hints. He clattered away on the keyboard for a little while longer, then skulked away, turning off the bedroom lights behind him.

At around 11 pm, having established his independence of my sleep rhythms, he finally crawled into bed.

At around 11:30 pm, he lurched up in bed, uttered, "Damn," and disappeared.

When the alarm finally went off at 1:30 am, it was more an insult than an alert. My internal clock, which is reluctant to remind me about wake-up times for work, had no trouble jogging me out of sleep at exactly 1:28 am. The Guy was still missing, which should have disturbed me more than it did. Groggily caught between resentment at the hour and triumph at having woken up, I pulled on two pairs of pants, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, pulled a pair of socks up to my knees, and found a bandanna to wrap around my head.

The Guy was in the living room, playing Playstation 2. I conjured up what sleepy disgust I could, and stared at him with disapproval. He looked at me, inspected my outfit and, get this, started to grin.

It turned out that he had made a midnight run back to his apartment, where he had an assortment of odds and ends. A thermos, "without a bung," he explained. "But it won't leak if we put saran wrap over it." A pile of sweaters. Hiking boots.

"Stuff we'll need," he informed, hugging me. I glanced up to catch him giving my bandanna an offensive leer. For some reason, the bandanna amused him.

I puttered through the kitchen, gloomily popping finger foods into a bag for snacks. The thermos became the recipient of a pot of tea -- "Are you sure it won't leak?" "It won't leak." -- and I discovered some smoked salmon and water crackers to add to my growing bundle. Our little jaunt up the mountain was about to become a gourmet luncheon. Promptly at 2 AM, the Guy's cell phone rang; R. was waiting outside. His fiancee hadn't come along.

"She has work tomorrow," he said by way of explanation.

Of course, I did too. I just counted this more important.

The ride up the mountain seemed interminable, and reminded me yet again that I am not at my best before noon. My usual early morning sniffles were jolted out of their regular schedule by this unprecedented wake-up call; they humped into overdrive, panicked by the idea that they might have fallen down on the job. In short order, I was snorting and snuffling like an elephant with a head cold.

"Do you need a kleenex, Yuhri?" R. asked, sounding concerned.

I opened my mouth to say yes, please God, yes, give me a kleenex, but my Japanese genes got there before my brain could. "No no," I heard myself saying instead. "I'm fine. It's just early morning sniffles." My Japanese genes suffer from a delusion that they don't want to impose on anyone. My American genes, meanwhile, were hammering on the back of my nasal passages. Shut UP, damn you!

I held my breath for the rest of the trip up. My Japanese genes convinced me that if I didn't sniffle, I wouldn't be disturbing R. In the meantime, I became slowly aware that the thermos in my lap was not only leaking, it was leaking copiously. "Well, we can't have it dripping tea all over R.'s car seats," said my Japanese genes with great disapproval. I meekly cradled the thermos on my lap, where it rapidly soaked through my wool jacket and the two layers of pants underneath.

The car's dashboard display informed us that it was 47 degrees without wind chill, and it was 2:20 AM when we finally reached the spot that would give us the best view. It was a gorgeous place, one I've occasionally visited with the Guy on the back of his motorcycle. All of Silicon Valley is spread out underneath, while nearby trees make some small contribution in the way of blocking the wind.

The moon was phenomenally bright, and lit the entire sky. I had to blink to adjust my eyesight; in many respects, it was brighter than even the headlights on R.'s car, which meant the limited night vision I'd acquired during the ride up was a complete bust out in the reality of it. There were people parked all up and down the road, most of them clustered at a viewing point a little further down the road. We'd passed them without slowing. Both the Guy and R. knew the road better than I did, with their experience riding through these hills. The location they'd selected was less crowded, and quiet because of it. The view was better, being less lit by the city lights below.

The cold air was more bracing than a gallon of coffee; it hit me with a slap, and chased the last thought of sleep away. While we unpacked, I kept half my attention on the sky overhead, hunting for Leo. Orion was easy to identify, and gave me a jumping off point; further over was Ursa Major, and there, underneath, was Regulus. "Leo," I identified uncertainly, and sketched a vague polygon with it as a point.

Sure enough, a few seconds later, a streak flashed out from Leo's foot. The show was obviously going to be spectacular, full moon or no.

We settled down into our chairs. A little ways away, cleverly shaded by a tree, a couple was lolled out on sleeping bags. It was a smart way to watch the show; very shortly, my neck was suffering kinks and my jaw was dropped, simply because it was easier to stare straight up with your mouth gaping wide. The sky doesn't care if you look like a schmuck.

I had imagined that the sky would be full of streaking lights, but it wasn't like that at all. "There's one," one of us would say at first, and the other two would say, "Where? Where?" and turn too late to catch anything but the fading memory of it. Then it would be another person's turn. "Oh!" and the other two would demand, "Where?" After a little while, we caught the rhythm of it, and learned how to look not at a specific location, but let ourselves unfocus and take in the entire night sky.

In the cosmic scheme of things, what we were basically doing was rubbernecking, slowing down to stare at the remains of some cosmic collision tens of thousands of years on the past. All around the galaxy, celestial bodies were grumbling to themselves about the bottleneck around Earth. "Goddammit, woman," they were yelling out their windows. "Just fucking drive already."

But oh, what an accident. And oh, what gorgeous debris. About once every ten seconds, the sky would light up with a white flare, and with every single one my heart would leap. My mind, which has already established itself as low on the totem pole of intellectual mightiness, had arrived at a suitable mantra which it repeated with every single new meteor. "There's another one!"

Halfway through our Leonid viewing, a sudden, soundless explosion in the sky burned one of Leo's corners. A brilliant green-white flash of light puffed out in a glorious display of stellar violence. Whether two meteors had exploded in mid-air, or the meteor was headed directly for us and so had given us a unique viewing angle, we were unsure. Perhaps this morning all Cingular Wireless cell phones would be out of commission due to Act of God. We didn't care. It was spectacular.

We talked excitedly about it for the next half hour, while meteor after meteor jerked us this way and that with open mouths and delight. From time to time I would start to clock the number of meteors seen per minute, only to lose track of my second hand count when the next bright streak lit up the sky. All told we must have seen a hundred, or maybe more; a lifetime's worth of shooting stars, packed into one gorgeous night.

I rested my head on the Guy's shoulder. "We have to come up here some night when the moon isn't full," I said. My astronomical passions were being revived anew; I was already planning once more how long it would take me to buy myself a telescope.

Around 3:30 AM, when both meteors and viewers found themselves at low ebb, packed ourselves up and ducked into the car.

I dozed on the way home, the exhilerating effect of cold air not proof against the SUV's heater at full blast. We tumbled out of the car in front of the neighboring apartment, bid good-bye to R., and bundled ourselves up to bed. The second I walked into my warm bedroom, I was abruptly wracked with shivers. I changed my clothes hastily, and fussed the Guy into bed so that he could provide me with the body heat I so desperately needed.

"Wasn't that nice?" I said through chattering teeth.

"Very nice," he agreed. His lack of interest in astronomy aside, there was very little one could object to when treated to a display like tonight.

"Thanks for coming with me," I mumbled. His body heat was already pitchforking me back to sleep.

He poked his cold nose in my neck. "I'd do anything for you," I think I heard him say.

I fell asleep to him holding conversation with the back of my ear and dreamed about stars.

finger food

In other cheering news of the day, I appear to have fractured a finger.

My middle finger no less, and how I managed to do that I have no notion. I woke up one morning, found my arm under a pillow, and moved it. I said, "Ow." And that was it.

I'm baffled as to how, of all the fingers to be injured, my middle would be the one to step up to the occasion. I rarely use my middle finger, something that sets me apart from most Asians and New Yorkers. Asians use it to point with, not at all rudely, a habit I've tried in vain to persuade my mother to break.

Me: "Mom, please don't do that."

Mom: "Hm?"

Me: "Your middle finger. Please don't use that one. It's rude."

Mom: (peering at her middle finger) "Why this one rude?" (She waves it in the air.) "What does it do so rude?"

Me: "It's just ... rude. In the United States. It's not considered polite."

Mom: "Why?"

Me: "I ... it doesn't matter. It's just rude."

Mom: (interested) "Is it because of sex? Do Americans use this finger?" (She waves it again, experimentally.)

Me: "Oh my GOD."

New Yorkers, of course, use the finger for a completely different reason, which doesn't need to be mentioned here. But it does go to illustrate that I, who am neither a New Yorker nor -- well, I am Asian, but not a middle-finger-pointing asian, should suddenly fracture her middle finger.

No idea what to do next. Do I call my doctor? What would he do? Tell me my finger is fractured? Would he put it in a little splint? Will I have to worry about waving to drivers that let me cut in in front of them, lest they misunderstand the bulbous finger that gets waved at them and end up inflamed with road rage?

I tucked my finger back into my denial pocket and went on with my life. Two days later, I played a reluctant gig for a friend of my mother's: 3 hours pounding on the piano, more than I've played over the entire year and a half. The next day, I woke up to discover the finger was beginning to bruise. I poked it for a few minutes out of sheer curiosity -- ow, ow, not ow, OW -- and discovered just what I couldn't use it for.

I think I've mentioned before that I have a rather disassociative approach to my body. Lately, my relationship with my finger has rapidly deteriorated. It has taken on the enormity of a third party appendage, complete with its own malevolent personality and capitalized first letter. Somehow, in the casting of various body parts, the Finger was given the role of the enemy. I find myself doing things to spite the Finger or inflict pain on the Finger -- childish, I know -- and somehow never quite remember until it's too late that the Finger actually sends its "pain received!" messages up to my brain.

Sometimes I think about the Darwin Awards and worry that they're reserving a spot in their database just for me. "Don't worry," the editors are saying to each other. "She'll be along any time now."

***

Tonight is the Leonid showers, which excites me no end. Before, back in the day, I used to get excited about little things like dinner and television programs and, okay, kleenex. Nowadays it takes a celestial conflagration and tens of thousands of pieces of debris raining fire down on earth. Step back, boys. I'm hitting the big time.

In the meantime, the Guy and I have been struggling to make some sense of all the diabetes information we've fished out of the internet, and corrected our lifestyles accordingly. Kaiser was kind enough to send me a lab report -- no ketones, and it's confirmed that I'm Type II -- together with an informational brochure. However, I've yet to find any comprehensive "This is what you do now" manual anywhere, so life has continued to be a very clumsy collage of adjustments, sliced up with left-handed scissors and pasted together with Elmer's.

(Side comment: the cow on Elmer's glue has always disturbed me. He looks far too cheery for a cow, a uniformly morose species that finds little about life that delights and stimulates once they learn they're doomed to a lifetime diet of grass. I can't explain its presence on the label, and have an uneasy feeling it might have something to do with the glue contents. In my optimistic youth, I speculated that there was cow's milk involved in the making of Elmer's. Now, a few decades later, I start to have, shall we say, concerns. Doubts. Worries. Especially considering the amount of glue that I and my classmates consumed -- literally -- in our youth. Is ignorance really bliss?)

My friends are making adjustments as well, which makes me grateful that I have them. Tara, back from an international jaunt that encompassed New Jersey and Germany, in that order, called to invite me to dinner tomorrow. She wanted to know my new dietary requirements, and I was forced to admit I didn't really know for sure.

"No fried foods, stay away from carbs, limited sugar...healthy foods," I said at last, vaguely. And that's all I can do for myself, too.

Yesterday afternoon, the Guy and I went by Best Buy to replace my cell phone headset and car charger. While I drifted through the stacks of PC games, none of which I could rationalize with my credit card, the Guy scrounged about in the Playstation section and came bounding out with a look of smug triumph. Ever since I was diagnosed, the Guy has been fixated on getting me to exercise. Every internet source informed him that exercise and weight loss were vital to controlling diabetes. Damn them. So it was that we went home bearing a Dance Pad for the Playstation 2, together with a dance game endorsed by Britney Spears herself.

There are adolescents in Fry's Electronics who, with maddening calm, step efficiently through entire rounds of this game with the most bored of expressions on their faces. Ten minutes into it, the Guy and I were both prostrate on the floor, gasping for breath while sweat pores jockeyed for position.

"You have a choice now," the Guy said later that night, when we'd packed away the pad and placed it in its own altar of fitness. "You can go for a half hour walk every morning, or do this dance game for twenty minutes every morning."

"Twenty minutes?" I echoed weakly. "It'd kill me."

The Guy, who had not fared well against the dance gods, conceded this undeniable truth. "Ten minutes, then," he amended.

From time to time, if our neighbors peek in through our window, they'll be treated to a ridiculous spectacle of my flabby ass jumping in time to some aerobicized techno music pap. That's okay. I have reconciled myself to the idea of becoming a svelte, bopping, Britney Spears taming miracle of fitness using a game that ten year olds could murder me in. I figure, there'll be much, much worse things coming my way soon enough.

***

As a final note, I should mention that I received a call from Binky this past Friday. Binky, who reads my journal, had been on the phone with my mother shortly after reading my last entry.

"..And you know," she told me, "you weren't kidding about your mom and aroe vela."

"Huh?" Japenglish from Binky was a mental shock; I wandered the word around in my brain for a little while, hoping to get some sort of connection.

"Yeah, I called her and told her that you'd posted something about her and aloe vera, and she said, 'aroe vela? aroe vela?' -- you weren't exaggerating at all. If I didn't know that was what she was saying, I wouldn't have had a clue."

I've had a lot of experience translating 'aroe vela' to 'aloe vera' these days. Every since I was diagnosed, my mother has been waving the prickly stalks in my face as a panacea that might not only make me thin! but also lower my blood sugar! cure my diabetes! and make my hair lustrous and long! Every phone call starts on aroe vela, includes aroe vela, and ends with aroe vela.

"You scare me," I told her wearily on the phone in Safeway, after she held forth on the wonders of vegetative homepathics.

"Hm?" she said brightly. "Aroe vela is so good!"

aroe vela

  adversity: that which doesn't kill me postpones the inevitable

(Title taken from a poster by despair.com, which publishes posters perfectly suited to the faulty vision lifestyle. Please don't sue me, despair.com. See? Credits!)

My roommate emailed me last night with the notice that Bob, our apartment manager, would be coming by between 9 and 10 am with a crew to replace our shower door.

It's a pity I never took a picture of the old shower door, which had the look of the old mariner after a hard night with Mister Guiness. My roommate and I used to speculate that the last inhabitant of the apartment smoked cigars during his showers, which would have explained the heavy layer of dark yellow tar-like stains that indelibly coated the glass. A thick crack across one corner swallowed mildew like it was candy, giving it a sanctuary no amount of scrubbing could dislodge. The entire door listed drunkenly, making it a Herculean act to close it; you could often hear a series of BANG! BANG! BANG! coming from the bathroom as the bather of the moment would attempt to coax the thing shut.

Then there was that malicious streak it had, which would prompt it to pop open when you were harmlessly sitting on the toilet. If it did so slowly and creakily, you were suddenly visited with the appalling thought that there was someone in the shower, listening to you pee. If it did so suddenly and violently, you were left with a bright, deep red mark across the forehead where the metal edge had managed to catch you.

And then, of course, you were left with the unenviable position of trying to close the door while finishing your operations on the toilet. whiz BANG! whiz BANG! tinkle BANG! "DAMMIT!" whiz BANG! BANG! BANG!

Needless to say, I was grateful to hear that our manager was going to replace the thing. I even made a note. "Get up at 8," I wrote on the little post-it that serves as my appointment calendar. "Take shower. Shower door, 9 am."

At 8:10, right around the time I was rolling out of bed, the doorbell rang. I swore straight through my sprint down the hall and to the front door, where I flung the thing open with an offended violence.

My building manager was waiting outside with a pair of burly men, solid, earthy specimens that could easily have broken my head and yet looked instantly embarrassed upon seeing my Tweeties. Pajamas, that is.

"Ungh," I welcomed, and dove back into my bedroom while they tromped about my apartment to inspect my shower.

A small gap in their work while they went to get the new door served me in good stead. I did my early morning affairs, such as they were, brushing my teeth and washing my face (and other things, though not showering) while the Guy, chivvied out of bed, stood sentry-duty outside the door. "Don't you want to lock it?" he called from the hallway, sleepily.

"DON'T MOVE!" I ordered. Who knew; at any minute the shower door repairmen could come trooping back, and find out what embarrassment really was.

They did come trooping back, but only after I'd finished my, er, business. Since traffic is usually bad this early in the morning, the Guy and I sat around in the living room for the next half hour or so, listening to the growing consternation in my bathroom.

First, my old shower door was borne off. I waved it good-bye. Nerts to you, you piece of crap. Then the new shower door was brought in. I missed that part of the operation.

Then the muttering started.

Shower Man 1: mutter mutter mutter "...too big."

Shower Man 2: mutter.

Shower Man 2 tromped outside and disappeared. Clanging erupted in my bathroom. Shower Man 2 returned a few minutes later and disappeared into the bathroom again. Clang clang.

Shower Man 1: "No, man. It's too big."

Shower Man 2: "You sure?"

Shower Man 1: "Just look at it."

Shower Man 2: mutter mutter.

Shower Man 2 trotted outside again, and about ten minutes later, the building manager reappeared at my doorway. Shower Man 2 padded along behind him, his face peering over his shoulder. The building manager, it appeared, was to serve the twin roles of translator and buffer.

He grinned at us -- I do so like my building manager -- and went into my bathroom. Three big men, in my little pink bathroom. His voice is always loud.

Shower Man 2: mutter mutter mutter mutter "CLANG!" mutter.

Shower Man 1: "It's too big."

Shower Man 2: mutter.

Shower Man 1: "No, that one's too small."

Building Manager: "It's too big?"

Shower Man 1: "We could go back and get another one, I guess."

Building Manager: "And that one won't be too big?"

Shower Man 2: mutter mutter.

Building Manager: "Sure. I think we need to get a shower door that isn't too big."

Shower Man 1: "Or too small."

Shower Man 2: mutter.

Shower Man 1: "No, man, I'm telling you. It's too big."

Obviously, the pink tile was having a debilitating effect on the big manly brains. I went to work without my shower, abnormally aware of every foul scent that came my way. Dear God. Did that come from my pores?

***

Back to Wednesday.

Once the first shock had worn off, I was absolutely possessed with the idea that above all, I must not let my coworkers know. Why I came to this decision is anybody's guess; I've rarely been accused of working with a full set of name-brand brains. Whatever abhorrance of publicity motivated me to conceal my news hardly meshed with my subsequent post. This was rather like a streaker not wanting to have a prostate exam because he doesn't want to show a complete stranger his private parts.

All in all, I thought, I dealt with it rather well. My mood, it is true, wasn't quite as chirpy as it had been when I'd dashed into work, but it wasn't as though I was a salty-teared mess on the cube floor. And still, as intelligence slowly (and reluctantly) seeped back in through my ears, I was obsessed with the need to keep my situation private.

I thought everybody should be able to look at my face and see 'SICK PERSON!' stamped across my forehead and yet, get this, nobody did. It was written in invisible ink, laid down by invisible pixie people. As far as anyone was concerned, Yuhri was having a Female Day, and it was probably safest not to get too near her. My coworkers were mostly married men; they knew the score. I was both relieved and seriously, seriously annoyed by this. I felt like Tweety Bird might, if he'd been popped into a cage to test the gas fumes in mine shafts. Sure, he might still be cuddly and yellow and more than a little big-headed, not to mention awfully articulate for a canary, but Imminent Doom might be waiting around the corner and what the fuck was up with that?

It could have been so much worse. I should have been far more grateful than I was. It shows how amazingly childish people -- sorry, I -- can be that I forgot that.

Of course, after a while, there was the sudden panic. My mother was diagnosed with the same thing six years ago, so I certainly know better; still, my uncooperative brain fixated on a sudden thought. "Oh my God," it yelped. "What if my foot falls off?"

The abject, grovelling terror hit an hour after the phone call, at which point I leaped onto the web and began an insane search for the worst case outcomes I could find. If my eyeballs were going to shrivel up, my uterus was going to fall out, and my toes were going to turn black and explode, I wanted to know about it in advance. I knew perfectly well how poorly I handled surprise; I needed to be prepared, so if my right ear suddenly turned a lime green color and fell into some stranger's plate at a party, I could calmly pick it out, shake it off, and tuck it into my purse with a charming laugh and witty, "Well, I guess you really were able to talk my ear off."

Irritatingly enough, all the informational web sites I could find were uniformly upbeat and encouraging. The words "coma" and "death" were hidden between phrases like "just need a little motivation" and "education is power" and "lifestyle change that will ultimately leave you feeling better and stronger."

I read these cheering, encouraging pages chock full of valuable information about my illness and how to keep it under control, and how I could still lead a full and fascinating life, and to my absolute dismay, discovered I was starting to cry.

The entire day was full of syllogisms. Having broken the news to the Guy, I brushed off his concern with a flippant comment, then was offended that he accepted my indifference at face value. I refused to let my coworkers know what was going on, but was aggrieved that they didn't drown me in sympathy and send me home for the day.

Around noon, too irritated to postpone the inevitable, I scooped up my cell phone and headed for the car. There, in relative privacy, I called my mother.

The minute I heard her voice, I started to sob. There's something about mothers that can instantly reduce you to the status of toddler. I was surprised by how desperately I'd wanted to curl into a little ball and wallow in my misery. So much for being a grown-up.

***

That's enough of that. Navel-gazing is such an undignified occupation. There's always so much lint there. Better to just watch for slugs.

How about ending on a high note?

***

My mother is a great comfort to me. Flamingo made a request a while ago to hear more mother stories. "They crack me up," she told me. "Your mother's great."

A few days ago, Mom called me at work in the middle of the day.

"Harro!" she greeted, sounding quite thrilled at the whole experience of using the phone. "Am I carr you at work?"

"It's 2:30, Mom," I said cautiously. My mother's understanding of the 9-to-5 lifestyle is limited to noticing that lots of her students have parents that want to schedule lessons before 9 and after 5. "Work doesn't end until six."

"You are busy?"

I had a stack of URGENT! ANSWER NOW! items piled up on my computer. "Yes," I said, feeling obscurely moved to be apologetic about working when my mother wanted to talk to me. For that matter, I was feeling irrationally certain that hearing I was busy at work, my place of employment that supplied me with a bimonthly paycheck, would cause my mother to hang up and call me back later.

How little I understand the maternal mind.

"Do you know aroe vela?" she asked.

'Aroe vela'? Even my lifetime of translating Japenglish failed me for a few moments. "A-wha?"

"Aroe vela. You using for ther burns, like ther sunburn when you are in California."

Part of the trick to understanding my mother is to automatically insert the correct letter, 'r' or 'l' in the appropriate slot. Sometimes, this is easy; the ear hears what it expects to hear, and so obvious phrases like 'California' and 'sunburn' magically transform themselves into sense from the actual auditory input of 'Cariforunia' and 'sunubalunu.'

But 'aroe vela'? Shit. "Aroe vela," I said experimentally, rolling the word around in my mouth to see if any of it would taste familiar. "Aroe vela. Aloe... Aloe vera!"

"Yes," said Mom, happily. "Aroe vela."

"I know what it is," I said cautiously.

"You are having ther aroe vela plant?"

The head of one of my Chinese coworkers popped over my cubicle wall, looking hopeful. He wanted to talk to me. I waved at him desperately: call me for an emergency! Yell fire! Apparently, sign language doesn't translate into Chinese. He waved back, looking pleased at the attention. "No," I admitted. "I don't have an aroe vela plant."

Then, despite knowing better, I couldn't help but add a weary, "Why? Should I have an aro--aloe vera plant?"

Mother was sad. "Oh, toooo baaaaad." Mom likes that phrase. It's one of the few colloquialisms she is absolutely confident of, and she rolls it out across an octave or so, snapping her fingers as accompaniment like a slightly maddened Blues Brother. "I seeing on NHK, they did a program, right now very popurar in Japan."

"The plant?" I waved at my coworker again. For God's sake, man!

He looked puzzled, but waved amiably back. Strange Japanese coworker. Must accomodate their peculiar Imperial behaviors.

"You take ther leaf of ther aroe vela, and they chop it up into pieces, and then put in fleezer. And then you eat when they are being flozen."

Freezer. Frozen. Eat what? "Ew," I said reflexively.

"NHK says, it is very good for you," Mom insisted brightly. "It is making you very skinny."

Very skinny. Very skinny? "Are you saying I'm fat?" I asked, because I always ask, and because my mother always has a different answer, and because I was having an irresponsible urge to prolong the conversation with my strange, quixotic little mother.

"A rittow bit round," was Mom's answer this time. "So cute, like ther baby, hah hah! Except you are not baby anymore."

Definitely it was time to end the conversation.

"Thanks, Mom," I said politely. "I should really go..."

"Aroe vela!" she shrieked joyfully into the phone. "It is very popurar in Japan!"

november 13, 2002

A few days ago I thought I had a UTI. (That's Urinary Tract Infection for the bastard 50% of the population -- yes, male -- that pretty much never gets one.) Normally, I'm not a big fan of going to doctors, preferring to think of them as expensive and fragile ornaments to society: you can't afford me, do not touch. This is a throwback to the days when I was a musician and couldn't pay to buy aspirin, much less get medical attention.

Of course, as I think I've mentioned before, now that I'm a real grownup with a real job and real medical insurance, I have all sorts of ailments that I never had before. And for those of you that have never had a UTI, let me absolutely assure you that this is a condition that requires ... no, DEMANDS immediate medical attention. It wants drugs. It wants creams. It wants ungents and anaesthetics and good God, absolutely anything to get rid of the discomfort.

Sitting on the toilet for the twelfth time in the last twenty minutes, for a bladder your brain knows is utterly empty but your deluded body insists contains enough uric acid to poison the Atlantic, one starts to feel a little discouraged about the point of life. One begins to feel, urgently, that the human body is a poorly designed, lamentably maintained machine. There is no real justification, (one feels), for the human body to arbitrarily discard waste product in this fashion; wouldn't it be far more efficient to find some use for it? One starts to think gloomy thoughts about the fallibility of a divine being, and the idiocy that allows women -- who are already trajectorily challenged in regards to urination and are forced to sit down on dirty seats to pee -- to have this agony inflicted on them while slovenly men that don't even wipe, for God's sake, waggle away, fancy-free.

I've received outstanding care from Kaiser, who seem to have an overflowing vault of cheerfully sympathetic doctors and nurses. At the orders of my advice nurse, a nice young man I called up in desperation from my office, I went in to give a "sample" before the appointment he scheduled for me. "Your primary care doctor isn't in town right now," he told me, sounding as sincerely remorseful as though he'd shipped her off to Australia himself. "Do you mind being seen by a male doctor?"

I often get this question from medicos. The first time I was asked this, I was going to see a gynecologist. Out of bravado rather than any actual ease, I told them I didn't mind; possibly, I was still a little vague about exactly what a gynecologist does. My first gynecologist, not a Kaiser doctor, was a grandfatherly gentleman with a kindly paternal manner. He was extremely comforting. When my medical plan switched to Kaiser, I had to change gynecologists.

The standard rule with medical facilities is that if you are a woman, and you tell them you don't mind male doctors, you will inevitably get a male doctor. There are approximately six women in the world that do not mind having a male doctor look at their, shall we say, female parts. Comparing that to the number of eager male doctors that graduate in order to look extensively at female parts, one can see how this will cause something of a imbalance in the proportion of willing patients to willing doctors. As it turns out, my new gynecologist was a cheerful, extremely chatty young man about my age. He was very professional, and very nice. I liked him. All was well.

The doctor they sent me to for my UTI was an extremely talkative, chipper elderly man who was extremely high on the joy of life. Like the advice nurse, he apologized before asking me questions.

"I don't mean to sound like I'm prying," he said, eager not to offend.

"Please," I said politely back. "Pry. Ask anything you want. And then, if you don't mind, please surgically remove my urethra."

It was a quaint, old-fashioned courtesy. After all, once a person has offered a urine sample and sat down to discuss a Urinary Tract Infection, there just ain't that many barriers of modesty left to go through.

He riffled through a series of questions, all of which I answered willingly. Anything to get over the preliminaries and go straight to the surgical removal. He made utterly incomprehensible notes in my chart -- a doctor of the Old School; no need for this snarking, new-fangled 'legibility' that's destroying the world of medicine -- then tapped at my lab results.

"You don't have a UTI," he decreed apologetically. I mumbled pitifully to myself. Maybe a diarrhetic flu virus had taken up residence in my nether regions? "However," he added, "your blood sugar was at 261."

I was still absorbed in the thought that I might have something else wrong, something not diagnosed, to pay much attention to that. "Okay," I said absent-mindedly, willing to be accommodating. "Is that bad?"

He shook his head at me. "It's not good," he temporized. "When was your last meal?"

I cast my little yellow mind back over the last six hours of non-stop snacking. "Breakfast, I guess," I said cautiously. "I mean, I haven't actually stopped eating anytime in the last six hours. So breakfast sort of turned into lunch. So maybe ... lunch?"

The doctor failed to look comforted by this. "Well, it's possible that you have diabetes."

Diabetes. In the finest Hirata tradition, which seems to have taken a chapter or two from the book on the finest British tradition, I instantly dropped forty, sorely needed IQ points.

"Oh," I said thoughtfully. Wittily, I added, "Bother."

As an afterthought, I added, "I don't think I want diabetes."

The doctor decided to take a blood stick then, and ordered a hemoglobin and fasting glucose test. "You can do it on Monday," he said, kindly. "Or you can have it done later today if you can't wait."

If I can't wait? I stared at him, baffled. The idea of making haste towards bad news was a curious concept. Perhaps it was a white thing. "I'll come in on Monday," I promised faithfully. Already, everything he'd said that hadn't related directly to my urinary tract pains was wafting away in the convenient black holes of my memory. He dashed out, then dashed in again as I was leaving, waving the white paper he'd made notes on.

"It would help if I gave you the lab order," he noted wryly.

We parted, both of us as cheerful as when we came in. My memory about the entire visit was fading at an alarming rate. Part of the whole Hirata self-defense mechanism: if you can't remember it, it didn't happen. Take notes, people. Half the US government reads from the same manual we do.

I toddled down to the pharmacy, where I gaped happily at the sick people behind the plate glass; fish are more colorful and interesting, but I was having a Wodehouse moment, and the teeming masses of viral humanity were more in keeping with my jolly mood then, what?

On my way back to my car, I discovered a white lab order in my hand, and puzzled over it for a little while before stuffing it into my glove compartment.

I say, how jolly. I had my very own glove compartment! I busied myself with emptying it out, arranging all the items in a little fan on the passenger seat, then putting them all back in again. And on top of it all, my bladder discomfort was fading away. Smashing. I drove back to work.

Denial is a wonderful tool for people with small minds, like me. We're easily distracted by shiny objects, or moving objects, or colorful objects, or -- ooh! birdie! -- so retention of unpleasant facts is conveniently displaced by the more exciting, if equally rapidly-fading, enthusiasm of the moment. Unfortunately, there are some things that just can't be avoided forever.

This morning, my doctor called me at my office. "Your test results are in," he said apologetically. "I'm sorry. You have diabetes."

"Oh," I said, in the same, perky voice I'd used to greet him. There was a small pause while I considered. "Nerts," I added, for variety.

Perhaps the doctor could hear the shrieks of thousands of tiny, dying brain cells over the phone. It can't have been the first time he had to deal with giving out unpleasant news. "I'll talk to your regular doctor," he said matter-of-factly, making the entire thing inconsequential, mundane. "It's a fairly light case, so it's easily treatable. Do you want me to send you your lab results so you can have a copy?"

I dithered. Heaven help us, I dithered. "I don't know," I said vaguely. "Do I? No. Yes. No? -- Yes."

I had no idea what I would do with it. Maybe I'd stick it in a scrapbook somewhere. I perked up at the idea. Scrapbook!

I hung up with the doctor and sat in my office cubicle, pondering scrapbooks for a little while. A few minutes later, what remained of intelligent thought came wandering back. "Hullo hullo!" it said. "What have we here? Diabetes. Hm. Wait. We have what?"

Indifference turned out to be numbness, which turned out to be shock. Denial crumbled. Shock, it turns out, doesn't last forever.

Diabetes.

Well, nerts.

voted

I was busily typing away at nanowrimo when the Guy came in and plumped himself down on my bed.

"What am I going to do now?"

I stared at him blankly for a second and then turned back to my computer. "Hmm," I said. I wasn't really paying attention, I admit it. 8,500 words down! 41,500 to go!

A few seconds later, a finger poked me in the arm.

Then again.

And again.

It hurt.

"STOP IT!" I yelled, swinging around. "Is this what you've found to do?!"

The Guy was leering at me. "Pay attention to MEEEEEEEEEEE."1

***

Rant: On...

Voting was the first thing I did yesterday, my nod to the spirits of democracy. The rest of the day, which dragged as all the days have dragged since Daylight Savings started, was spent in predicting dire consequences for the rest of the world if the Republicans gained control of the House and the Senate, to add to their Supreme Court and White House. Sure. That'll never happen.

See, it's not that I'm a democrat, though I've registered myself as one, and it's not that I'm necessarily opposed to republicans. I dislike Bush with the passion of a thousand sexually frustrated preteen boys, this is true, but that's a perfectly reasonable dislike, based on the fact that the man is a nitwit. I put to you that I would dislike any nitwit that somehow managed to became president of the United States, Democrat or Republican. No, my primary objection to the results of last night's elections is that a single party now controls all three levels of government, to a great extent nulling much of the power behind checks and balances.

On the other hand, I'm also royally ticked off at the Democratic party, which has once again -- accolades! accolades! -- proven to the world that they have a political fortitude only matched by the military prowess of the French. Being a democrat has worked for me in the past because I was a musician, and as a musician I had Higher, Nobler things to worry about than sordid politics. Musicians are usually too poor to pay much (or anything) in taxes, and so are less likely to concern themselves with where the taxes will be spent. Here. Take my $5.62. Go wild with it; buy yourself a SCUD.

Now that I've actually got real money in the pot, things have changed. Ideally speaking, they should have remained exactly the same; my interest in American politics should have been based on my citizenship in the country, not dated on the night I opened my first paycheck from my first Real Job and yelled, "They're taking how much?!"

Sad to say, self-interest governs us all.

Gore was interviewed by ABC News on the subject of the elections, and was posed the question: What did the democrats do wrong? Tactfully, he sidestepped the question, observing that it was what the democrats should do in the future that counted. A prudent move for him, since he has to work for them; and sure, the future's important, but it's sort of time for the democrats to do a little self-evaluation, isn't it? The future's only relevant if there is a future, and while I'm not so doom and gloom about the Democratic Party's future as some people I've read on chat forums, I can't say that I'm optimistic.

The Democratic Party has not always upheld my interests or supported the things that I support, but it's been a Lesser Evil. On those issues that I could never see myself compromising -- issues like abortion, civil rights, right to privacy, the good of the one over the good of the corporation -- I've always felt fairly sure that the Democratic Party was on my side.

The problem is, now I'm not so sure I want it on my side. After all this time, it's started to occur to me that maybe the Lesser Evil isn't good enough. Maybe it's time to move on to something that I actually believe in, some party that will actually represent my interests and my concerns. Maybe if the Democratic Party rebuilt itself, like the Republican Party did during Clinton's era. Or maybe not.

Personally, I think the Democratic Party lost because they didn't try. Because they've gotten arrogant and forgotten that in order to win the competition, you actually have to compete. I think they lost because democrats don't come out to vote with the same dedication that republicans do, preferring instead to bitch and moan about how things would be so much better if the Republicans weren't in power. I think they forgot that in order to be a party, you sort of have to be a Party, one with a direction and a cause and a goal rather than a random group of people that eat from the same warchest and walk safely (if unspectacularly) in the middle of the road. I think they've forgotten how to inspire their members, because I'm sure as heck not.

Right now, I'm sure that plenty of recriminations and blame are flying around Washington, in expensive houses and campaign headquarters. To indulge in a game of What Ifs may seem like a luxury of self-pity, but we've plenty of time for that now. Two whole years. Clock starts now.

Rant: Off.

***

1. The Guy, watching me type this up in a flurry of flying fingers and revenge, began to poke me again. "You have to tell them that you always do it to me," he insisted.

"No I don't. This is my journal. Start your own journal."

He poked me insistantly. "No. That's not fair."

"Fine. I'll give you a slot. Write anything you want -- STOP IT!"

Poke poke poke poke. "No, you have to tell them that you always do it to MEEEE," he wailed. Poke poke poke poke.

"I'm going to hurt you," I threatened.

He sniffed. (Poke.)

Otello, starring . . .

Admittedly, opera has never been renowned for Great Acting, (capital-G, capital-A) in any sense. There's something about the effort it requires to learn how to Sing, with a capital-S, that just squashes whatever it is in the brain that's used to learn how to emote physically. It's like those experiments they do on guinea pigs. Your average guinea pig knows nothing more than eating and pooping and, occasionally, screaming at the top of its lungs because it isn't eating or pooping. Every so often a little scientist will come along that has been rejected by all the other little scientists, and in an effort to get back into the little scientist clique, he'll perform some variation of the frontal lobotomy on a guinea pig. Under the hopes that this will reveal some hitherto unrealized facet of human behavior that will let him back into the little scientist clique, he studies the lobotomized guinea pig and publish copious notes to astonish the world.

What inevitably happens, of course, is that the guinea pig will continue to eat and poop and scream, except it'll be all confused so that it'll eat its poop while screaming. Opera singers are sort of like that.

(Now that I read back over that, I realize of course that opera singers are absolutely nothing like guinea pigs, except in that they eat, poop, and scream a lot, and neither guinea pigs nor opera singers can act.)

Which brings me to how we went to Otello last Tuesday.

It was the Guy's second experience of opera, and for a marvel -- I really do have a brave boyfriend -- he wasn't put off (too much) by his first experience. Ariadne auf Naxos, while possessing that one trait that makes any opera a success -- it's short -- is not what one would call an entry-level opera. Richard Strauss is an acquired taste for most, rather like fugu and only moderately less lethal.

Otello, however, is opera on the grand, classic style. There are massive, lavishly dressed choruses. Massive, lavishly decorated sets. A massive, lavishly orchestrated score. Massive, lavishly dressed singers. It is, in every sense of the word, what a newbie comes to the opera house to experience: a visual spectacle, as well as an aural one. The Guy liked it.

In general, San Francisco Opera does a pretty good job with its productions, but no quality opera production is complete without one fatal flaw. It was only in the second act that I realized exactly what was going to go wrong with this one. The second act is when Iago starts working on Otello's feeble brain. It's a rapid transformation for the title character; Otello abruptly goes from being Triumphant Noble Lover Hero to being Agonized Jealous Tragic Hero. San Francisco's Otello instantly started staggering around the stage, Emoting.

"Oh my God," I thought, after twenty minutes of Stagger Here, Stagger There, Stagger Everywhere. "He took lessons at the William Shatner School of Acting."

The third act curtain rose on more Staggering. I waited breathlessly for Otello to take a single step that wouldn't actually hurl him into one of the set pieces, and almost suffocated before the curtain went down. As a climactic end-of-act, Otello is supposed to faint, unable to stand the emotional torment. Our Otello hiccuped his way down a staircase and twitched convulsively at the bottom with, I kid you not, one hand clutching at his breast and the other thrust up in the air: Lorne Green, to the life.

"Oh my God," I thought, as the curtain went down. "He got a Doctorate the William Shatner School of Acting."

In case anybody's wondering, he didn't improve noticeably in the last act.

Ignoring the irony of accusing any opera singer of overacting, particularly in a Verdi opera, I left the performance with an itching urge to send a note backstage. I even had the text of it worked out in my mind. "You sing good," it would have read, "but don't get acting tips from Star Trek." The tenor that played Otello was a Russian, specially imported for the purpose. Would it have been petty for me to be so disturbed by the acting in what snobs would insist is, after all, a musical production?

Yes. However, I've earned my musical snobbery badge; I graduated with a Masters from a conservatory, after all. Having proven myself qualified, I can now be one of the common folk, and nitpick with the best of them. After all, for me, opera without acting is like radio in drag. I have no desire to have sex with either of them.