the one ring

I lied, last entry.

Meet the real one ring. Accept no substitutes.

Hurrah!!

"You know you could've just bought me one of those lollipop sucker rings and I would've married you anyway."

"Yes."

"But if you were going to do it, I'm glad you did it thoroughly."

"Heh. Happy?"

"SHINY!!!!!!"

"That's what I thought."

"Ooooh."

"Now you're mine."

"I love you. Shiny! And now I'm hungry."

The Guy presented the ring to me when I got home from The Cow. He'd called me last night to tell me it wouldn't come in until Thursday, and bewailed the delay. "It's okay," I consoled, rather inattentively. "I don't care. I won't be back until Wednesday anyway."

"I care," he said sulkily.

This afternoon, it was a completely different Guy on the phone. "Come by my work on your way back from the Cow," he coaxed.

"Will you come with me to the thing?" I asked him. One of the hotels we're considering for our wedding reception has a Wednesday evening open house, during which event coordinators give tours and visitors can sample the in-house catering. Just thinking about it made my brain ache; I was two hours into a three and a half hour drive, and the open house would be starting in another two hours.

Given this threat to his peace of mind, the Guy instantly backpedaled. "I'm feeling sick," he announced smugly.

"I'm tired. I think I'll just skip visiting you at work and meet you at home. I'll go straight to the open house thingy. If you're not going, I'll just see you at the apartment anyway."

"No!" the Guy interjected, hastily. "You have to come visit me at work!"

At the other end of the phone, his tail was beginning to wag.

Like I said, the Guy is constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret. After our initial post-trip reunion in his company's parking lot -- a revolting display of public affection witnessed by two middle-aged Indian men doing shots of espresso and a pigeon with a severe weight problem -- we settled down for a spot of hasty catch-up.

"I'm feeling sick," the Guy said again, when the subject of the open house resurrected itself. "I'm thinking I'll go home early, maybe stop by the Diva's place. I promised to help her with some software."

"Good idea," I congratulated mildly.

At which point the crafty Guy, laboring happily under the impression that he was being subtle, asked, "You want to go out and get some dinner? Maybe we should go out somewhere. Someplace nice."

I eyed him. He was already starting to chortle, apparently believing that this phenomenon would somehow slip by without my notice. "Did the ring come?" I demanded. And the Guy dissolved into mirth. That's my Brit. Stiff upper lip, my plump right buttock.

He came home with the box tucked in his pocket, where it had been warming his thigh all day. Supremely pleased with himself, preening contentedly, he dragged me to the first clean, relatively uncluttered space he could find, and went down on one knee. He giggled. I giggled. He presented me with the ring. We giggled some more.

We're not good at romance, the Guy and I. We try, but somehow our senses of humor always seem to get in the way.

I'm going to get married!

(Heh.)

engagement

The news may have hit the web site in September, but out in the real world, we got engaged back in August. August 24th to be exact, which spites my whole "Holidays are on the 25th" principle by being my birthday. This was apparently some sort of deadline for the Guy, who had been looking at diamonds for weeks.

Color me surprised. The Guy is constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret. He's the sort of man who will greet you at the door when you get home from work, tail wagging, and announce smugly that he's gotten you a present that you can't have until Christmas. It's hidden in the closet. Want to know what it is? Ask him. Ask him. Goddammit, ask him.

In point of fact, the ring hasn't arrived yet. It's literally being put together as I write this, and will theoretically arrive this week.

While I'm in the Cow.

Again.

The Island of the Purple Monkey King, also known as Work, exercised its right to sadistic humor again by sending me out to The Cow in the middle of one of the worst heat waves we've had this summer. This is the same heat that killed 10,000 Parisians a few months ago. Having run out of Parisians, it has moved over to the most convenient substitute for Paris: Silicon Valley.

An astigmatic logic could link Silicon Valley and Paris together, the sort of reasoning that would only make sense to a cataleptic mind. There are plenty of those out there in the world, God knows, part of the audience that would unquestioningly accept “Anna Nicole Smith” in a sentence with the word “Show” appearing either before or after the operative title. Both phrases are only tenuously related to each other, by a link that would require more optimism than imagination to understand; likewise Silicon Valley and Paris, which share a masturbatory passion for self-congratulations, but are hardly unique for their delusions of intellectual superiority.

Whatever the association in the mind of the weather gods, to Silicon Valley the heat came, and in Silicon Valley the heat stayed. Central Valley, the cradle of the Cow, is the barometric ceiling for what occurs in Silicon Valley. The biceps of heat that pump Silicon Valley bench press for the title in the Cow. The asphalt was molten outside my client's site, and clutched at my heels like a loan shark spying a Democratic hopeful; the impressions of my footprints as they zigged and zagged in a drunken search for shade are now permanently impressed across four rows of parking spaces. In after years when alien archaeologists investigate the ruins of The Cow, they’ll find those little holes in the tar and imagine some doe-footed biped, an alcoholic herbivore that was meat for larger, more sober predators.

Inside the client site, air conditioning. No measly department store air conditioning, this. This was Nature's post partum depression after giving birth to the Ice Age. My colleague and I wobbled through the corridors relying on jackets and body fat, respectively, and attempted to do our jobs through teeth that chattered like yahtzee dice.

Once of the nurses stared at my coworker in a dazed fashion while we waited for her doctor to get off the phone. "There's something different about your hair," she fretted. "Did you cut it? Did you dye it?"

"The color might be coming out a bit," my colleague admitted, "but it's not really different from last week."

"It's the ring," I suggested, and confiscated her hand to wave the diamond at the nurse. "All that glare makes her look blonder than she really is."

The nurse lunged for the hand, attention caught; it was an instinctive reaction and, like the next reaction, the same one that all the other women at the clinic had had. The nurse gaped at the ring and laughed. It was an If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed you could fit that in this orifice laugh, a disbelieving bark of mingled shock and incredulity. I'd already heard that laugh four times that morning and I'd enjoyed every single one.

"Holy crap!" she yodeled.

Two carats will do that to pretty much anyone.

The nurse's doctor eventually came out of his office and bore witness to my colleague's ring with a bemused, vaguely skeptical air. While most women's reaction to her ring has been of the merry, hip hip for the sisterhood! kind, the men's has been universally leaned towards self-preservation: the longer they've been married, the more unabashedly self-centered.

"If my wife sees that ring, I'm screwed," he observed, not entirely in jest. "When are you leaving?"

***

It was pure coincidence that both my coworker and I got engaged on the same weekend. I walked into work the following Monday, feeling like the thin skin that forms over cooling milk. My coworkers were already gathered around the ring, The One Ring, the two carat ring. My news seemed irrelevent compared to its shiny newness, and gratefully so; it felt fragile and delicate, and not up to the hard usage of public congratulations. I felt too disassociated from the event to consider it for any length of time, and the glaring light of other people's attention made me want panic and run, like a woman caught test-driving Kotex in Target.

My colleague's ring, while beautiful, turned ominous when I imagined something similar on my finger. It was massive and had the weight of responsibility to it. In my mind, size abruptly became synonymous with the reality of marriage: forever and ever, wasn't it? The bigger the diamond, the more immediate the engagement felt.

"If you get me a diamond that big, I'll kill you," I told the Guy, on a rising note of hysteria.

Initially there was a period of paranoid schizophrenia, when I would wake up and stare at the ceiling -- blearily, because I lacked glasses -- and think with a thrill of exhilarating terror, “I agreed to do what?!” Not because I don’t want to marry the Guy, exactly, but because getting married seemed like the ultimate, irretrievable step into maturity, like that last step off the roof. I discovered that the act of getting engaged had installed an incomplete flight-or-fight instinct in me, a shareware product that would only activate the "fight" part of the software if I paid $19.99 to the distributor.

I took to chanting, "I'm going to marry you," with assorted variations of inflection at the Guy -- "I'm going to marry you. I'm going to marry you. I'm going to marry you," -- under some hazy thought of reconciling myself to the idea. The Guy chafed restlessly under this treatment, eventually coming to view it as a threat rather than a charming new quirk of his beloved. I paid little attention to his feelings and continued my mantra for several weeks, as though the reiteration would somehow make maturity more palatable to my inner child, who was obsessively eating Elmer's glue.

Conversations about our upcoming weddings would draw a little wrinkle between my coworker's eyebrows; she was an organized woman, and a week after the engagement already had a list of guests, a possible caterer, the name of Tara's photographer, a date, and two potential sites. Me? My eyes would get big. Squinty little slivers of brown would start to get rounder and rounder and rounder, while my lower lip would slowly disappear inch by inch, sucked in between my teeth until I resembled a constipated goldfish straining on the toilet.

"Stop that," my pregnant coworker said at last, breaking off in the middle of a lecture about wedding budgets. "You're scaring me. Are you breathing? You're not breathing. Breathe, Yuhri. Breathe. Breathe."

Out of pity for me, matched by a worry I would eventually inhale my entire chin, my coworkers desisted with wedding talk, sneaking in bits of gossip like bonbons during my increasingly prolonged visits to the bathroom.

It took time for me to grow accustomed to the idea. Somewhere along the line, my repetitions of "I'm going to marry you," changed permanently to, "We're going to get married," an improvement in that I'd finally allowed the Guy to be a participant in the sentence, rather than a victim. The timbre changed as well. From a meditative, perplexed quality, it brightened and gained a declarative sincerity. We're going to be married, it said, and I'm happy.

I may have come to terms with the concept of getting married, but it took a little longer for the Guy. I dithered about telling others about our engagement, but despite my qualms ended up calling and emailing loved ones and relatives a short two days later. A month after he proposed to me, he still hadn't gotten around to telling his family.

"Are you planning on it?" I hinted three weeks into the engagement, not so delicately.

"Yes," he said, and added defensively, "My brother didn't tell me he was engaged until after he was married." British people. Warm as a llama's tit.

"This is your excuse?"

"It's not an excuse. I'm just telling you."

"So what, you're not planning on inviting him to the wedding until it's over?"

The Guy looked evasive. "Well," he began, and lost ground from there.

It wasn't until last weekend that he finally reached for the phone, with a feline air of I was intending to do it anyway that might or might not have been a result of my prodding over the last month.

It was an interesting conversation, from my side of it.

The Guy: "Hey. It's Yan. Is Mom home?"

The Phone: . . .

TG: "Oh. Okay. Is she heading out?"

TP: . . .

TG: "Tell her Yuhri and I got engaged."

TP: . . .

TG: "About a month ago."

TP: . . .

TG: "Dunno."

TP: . . .

TG: "Okay."

click.

I sat up on the loveseat, where I'd been pretending to play a video game. "What, that's it?" I demanded. "Did you talk to your Mom?"

The Guy was already crouched back over his laptop, head hunched between his shoulders like a triumphant tortoise who has snagged his piece of lettuce. "She was on the toilet," he said laconically. "My brother says congratulations."

"You couldn't wait for her to get off the toilet? Just this once?"

"She was on her way out," the Guy explained, in a tone of weary patience. Women are an irrational species. "She'll call back later."

I sank back into the cushions, convinced that we'd hear from my prospective mother-in-law the second she got off the toilet.

We didn't. I felt obscurely let down.

In fact, it wasn't until the next afternoon that we did, coming home from a long day of wedding-related errands to find the light blinking on the answering machine.

Answering machine: "Hallo?"

Silence. More silence. Heavy breathing.

Answering machine: "Yan?"

Still more silence. Heavier breathing. Lighter breathing. Thoughtful silence.

Answering machine: ". . . Okay."

click.

"Oh," said the Guy, unsurprised. "Mom called. See? Told you."

IRS

Thanks for the congratulations, everybody. I'll post pictures as soon as I get them.

The ring, see, is in the mail.

***

So's the check. I swear, Comcast.

***

Despite the fact that I'm going to be married at some time in the nebulous future, I'm going to try and refrain from talking about it here. There are some things that are better not discussed, perhaps, and I can think of nothing that would freak me out more than writing each detail down and realizing how much remains to be done.

Besides which, despite the fact that wedding plans have abruptly consumed my life almost to the exclusion of everything else, there are some non-wedding related things that I've been meaning to mention.

For instance, the IRS.

Have I mentioned about the IRS?

A couple of months ago, I received a letter in the mail. "We do not have a record of your 2001 federal tax return," it said in paraphrase, between all the light-hearted chatter about the IRS wanting to 'Be Of Service to You, the Taxpayer!' which is bait in the tradition of the herring they offer baby seals before angry, parka-bereft Canadians club them over the head. "Please fill out this form and return it to us if you think we are mistaken, together with a copy of your 2001 return to prove you're not a liar."

"--Which is weird," I said to the Guy, waving the forms around. "Because I did my taxes."

"You didn't," the Guy said. "I kept offering to help you with them, but you said they were boring."

I paused. I considered. I admitted, "That does sort of sound like me," and re-read the letter. "I remember doing it, though."

"You were missing a W-2 from one of your employers."

"I remember that. Wow."

"And you said you'd send it when you got it."

"I did? But I remember doing my tax return. I think the federal government owes me, like, money or something."

For the first time, the Guy showed interest. "A lot of money?"

"A couple of thousand."

"See, this would be a good reason to send in your taxes."

No letter from the IRS should be ignored with impunity. It was obviously something I should get on immediately. Being me, I forgot all about it.

I found the letter three weeks later, floating around aimlessly in my car. I had no explanation for how it got there; I can only think that I put it there in some fit of optimism, under the premise that if it was in my car I would remember it on my way to work and take it to the office to deal with. I moved the letter to my desk, obedient to my earlier self's plan.

And then I forgot about it again for another three weeks.

By the time I actually got around to calling the IRS, a month and a half had passed. I had no particular feeling of urgency in getting back to the federal government; after all, they owed me, and it didn't seem like I'd be doing any favors in point this out to them. To my reckoning, they should have been grateful that I hadn't called them back sooner. That was just an extra six weeks they could dink around with my extra money.

Besides which, I wasn't exactly positive that they wouldn't send me to jail. More than one government has thrown people in prison because it owed them money, and ours hasn't been representative of sound mind and stout thinking lately.

Our family's relationship with the IRS has always been a friendly one. Back in the day, they audited my mom and dad in one of those random, "Let's get to know our neighbors!" sweeps they periodically make through immigrant populations. My Mom is the queen of all packrats. Paper of all shapes and forms is holy to her. Her friends assure me that when she went to her audit, she carried fifteen years worth of tax forms, complete with original receipts, invoices, and stamped checks.

The IRS did her audit and actually gave her back almost $5000. She hasn't been audited since.

Naturally, that kind of history leaves one with a sort of careless, friendly attitude towards the IRS, an inclination to pat it on the head like some large mastiff, savage to others, but over whom you happen to have the goods.

I think the IRS guy I talked to was in a call center in India. I distinctly heard Hindi in the background. Not only that, he was polite and pleasant, which is a giveaway if ever there were one.

The IRS has outsourced our taxes.

Thank God.

"Am I in trouble?" I asked, after explaining the letter I had received. "Am I going to jail?"

Polite and pleasant though the IRS man was, he had no sense of humor. I could hear it in his voice. A born bureaucrat. "No, ma'am." -- Ma'am! -- "You just need to file your taxes for 2001."

"I don't think you want me to do that."

"Yes, ma'am. We do."

"It's just that I'm owed a refund, and at this point, don't you guys need my money?"

I waited for the laugh. Silence, except for the Hindi still reeling away in the background. Hm. Tough room.

"Please send your 2001 tax return to the address specified in the letter, ma'am," he said placidly. "We recommend that you file it as soon as possible."

"Or I'll go to jail?"

"Or," and here was the first hint of the Great and Mighty Wrath of the IRS, "or we'll do it for you."

"Cool!" I chirped. Free H&R Block service!

Added the IRS man, ominously, "You don't want that."

"I don't?"

"It'll be expensive."

"You'll charge me?"

". . . no. Not exactly. But we don't take the optimum deductables for you. We'll just use the standard ones."

"Those're the ones I use."

There was a small pause while the IRS man attempted to recover lost ground. "You won't like it, that's all," he said darkly.

You know, this threat never worked on me even when I was a child. When my Mom threatened us, she did it with details. With flair. With style. With the top register of her voice. She didn't trust our imaginations to do the job for her; she carried it a few miles down the proper avenue just to make sure it knew the road, then let it down to see how much further it could go.

"Why not?" I asked.

"It'll . . . if you're owed a refund, you won't get back as much as you should."

"So now you want to give me money?"

"We simply wish you to file your taxes, ma'am, and get what's owed you."

Now, that would have worked as a threat. Nicely ominous, has style, has class, has history behind it. It lacked real zing to it, though, because he obviously didn't mean it as one. See, this is part of the special personalized service you lose when you outsource your IRS call center.

Just out of curiosity, I asked, "Will I get my refund with interest?"

Hah. Finally made him laugh.

Six weeks after this phone call, I finally got around to doing and filing my taxes. The tax return was fairly simple, at the end. I used an old copy of Turbo Tax and plugged in numbers, singing -- for whatever reason -- Winnie-the-Pooh to myself. That is to say, I sang the first line of Winnie-the-Pooh, because that's the only one I know. There's just something about Pooh that makes me think of taxes, that whole bit about getting wedged into Rabbit's doorway so that Rabbit has to use his back door. . . .

Taxes or prisons. Anyway, the federal government owes me $2,600. I told them they didn't want me to do my taxes.

8 Short Intermezzos

One of our project managers came around the corner into my cube, holding the receptionist's wireless phone by the antenna. It was a perfect example of the "Ew, ick" hold: the lateral pinch between the very tips of two fingers, used most frequently on wings of dead insects, soiled jock straps, and dog toys.

"Here," she said, and put it on my desk.

I eyed it. "What?"

"I find it in the bathroom," she announced. "I am give it to you."

"Why me? I don't want it. Take it back to Toilet-Receptionist."

"No, I cannot finding her. I am give it to you."

Small pause. "Where exactly in the bathroom did you find it?"

The Project Manager made an odd gobbling noise and fled.

I filched some kleenex from a coworker and used it to herd the phone into my garbage can.

***

Me: "I'm going to make my vegetable stir-fry for dinner tomorrow. I'll need to get groceries after work."

The Guy: "....oh."

Me: "What?"

TG: "It's not really stir-fry when you make it, is it? It's more like . . . soup."

Me: "That's sauce."

TG: "Stir-fry is when you're actually frying."

Me: "There's oil. There's frying."

TG: "Yes, but when you add so much water to it that it actually covers the vegetables, that's not frying. That's boiling."

Me: "Hot oil is scary. It's being subdued. Besides, I'm using a wok."

TG: "Woks can be used for making soup, too. That's what you're doing, making soup."

Me: "No."

TG: "Are too. Proper stir-fry. . . "

Me: ". . . Are you saying you dislike my stir-fry?"

TG: "No, it's good, but it's not stir-fry."

Me: "See, this is where I stop listening to you."

TG: "Stir-fry should not contain more soup than food."

Me: "If I take off my glasses, everything goes fuzzy. It's like drugs, but cheaper."

***

I rolled into work after lunch on Thursday, starving and feeling remarkably self-satisfied. "I lost 2.4 pounds this week."

"Why're you still wearing a nametag?"

"Oh. I joined Weight Watchers. I had a meeting today. 2.4 pounds!"

My coworker looked wistful. "I wish I could lose 2.4 pounds. I wish I was as skinny as you."

I pointed out, "You're eight months pregnant."

"Good point."

"You know, that's the first time anybody's ever wished they were as skinny as I am."

"I'm eight months pregnant."

"It wasn't flattering, no."

***

TG: "Have you been watering this plant?"

Me: "I thought you were watering the plant."

TG: "I thought you were."

Me: "Is it dead?"

TG: "I'm . . . not sure. Your sister wouldn't be happy if we killed her plant."

Me: "She gave it to us. Tough cookies."

TG: "I think I've pinpointed why your plants keep dying."

Me: "Ungrateful bastards."

***

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, sako hirata wrote:
wwwhen yu be home ttuesda or wdseday?
--

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Yuhri Hirata wrote:
Already home. Come pick up your beef jerky.
--

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, sako hirata wrote:
comuter broen. cnt typ
--

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Yuhri Hirata wrote:
Freak.

***

Me: "Do I see a ring on this finger? I don't think so."

TG: "Heh. So you want to get married?"

Me: "Okay."

TG: "Cool."

***

The phone rang at work. I picked it up. "Hello?"

It was my sister on the other end. "I'm going to change my middle name," she announced cheerfully.

Her middle name is Paulina, an outre extension of my father's American nickname, "Paul." Most Americans had problems wrapping their tongues around his real name, Yoshihiko. Say it with me, folks. Yo-She-He-koh. Is that really that hard? But still. Paul. Paulina.

I didn't bother asking why. "Really?"

"It only costs $50, and a friend said he'd help pay for it."

"Really."

"Yeah."

"What're you going to change it to?" Jane, I thought, then rejected it. My sister's not a Jane. She's more of a--

"Sultasanagio."

***

Me: "Are we really going to do this?"

TG: "Yes."

Me: "You were serious?"

TG: "Yes."

Me: "That wasn't a joke?"

TG: "No."

Me: "Oh."

Pause.

Me: "We're really going to get married?"

TG: "Yes."

Me: "Cool."

TG: "Yay."

Me: "Where's my ring?"

white pills

I wrote bits and pieces of this entry over the last four days, Friday through Monday. I was alternately tromping through the mists of anaesthesia, sliding down the slippery slopes of unconsciousness, or drunk driving through Vicodin land.

White pills. itty bitty little pills. They're shaped like sausages. Chop 'em in half. Chop chop. Chop.

Yay, pills! Little pills.

The parts I wrote during my drug-induced hazes are rather painfully obvious. Just in case they're not -- don't tell me, please; I've always suspected taking drugs would be redundant but I don't know if my ego could take the blow -- I've italicized them.

The Vicodin packed a wallop. Knocked me out for a long time, right before I woke up and discovered I had a, you know, Sensitivity.

White white white white half chop chop white. . .

Hi!

'Sensitivity' in my case meant unconsciousness followed by acute dizziness, nausea, and spasms of acute pain. And sweating. Lots of odd, erratic sweating. I flattened myself on the sofa like an overboiled lasagna noodle and thought, "So this is what menopause is like."

In between the Downs I had brief periods of Up, which sent me careening from brunette to blond in under a minute. I was like a comic strip: before color, after color. Look, Little Orphan Annie really didn't have any eyeballs! How freaky. Are Asians supposed to be blondes?

Vico vico vico-din. Chop! Hi! Chop!

Friday was a rocky, adrenaline-fed day. The surgery instructions stated that I wasn't allowed to eat anything as of midnight the night before. Only water. "And a very little amount of apple juice if your blood sugar drops too far," the nurse conceded reluctantly, after I'd grovelled at her feet and played the diabetes card.

What with anxiety over the upcoming surgery, no food, and an abnormal intake of water -- which does not, by the way, replace a good healthy breakfast and a cholesterol-killing six inch roast beef-and-horseradish sub -- I spent most of the morning in the bathroom, making up for the time I spent in front of my computer morbidly investigating "hideous deformity" on google. You'd be surprised at the fetishes people have out there.

Unfortunately, I had a presentation to do at 10:30 to a group of potential customers. Halfway through the demonstration, wracked by nerves and raging starvation, I abruptly lost all grasp of the English language. I finished the demo at 11:45, wielding a dangerous bludgeon of Japlish and assorted psychological disorders. What I should've done is stopped midway, apologized for my disorganized thoughts, explained my situation, and then continued where I left off.

What I did instead was, "And this is . . . um . . . and, you can using it for . . . you know, children. Children. Measuring their girth and . . . um, things."

'Girth and things.' I could remember the word 'girth' but I couldn't dredge up the word 'growth.' 'You can using it for'? What the hell was that?

My surgeon was gorgeous. Beautiful. I think she might have been 18 years old. Gorgeous gorgeous. Why's she a plastic surgeon and got all resentful. I think ugly people should be plastic surgeons. Beautiful people should be married to David Bowie. Hi!

It's possible that the customers thought I was a floor show. After the first thirty minutes of gibbering, they fell ominously silent. I suspect they had the mute set on the phone and had called security to dispose of it.

Can't really blame them.

The Guy came to pick me up at 1:00. My appointment had been moved up to 1:45. Hugging a water bottle the size of my head, suitable for the extermination of any medical professional who came near me with a scalpel, I climbed into his car and we headed for Santa Clara hospital.

She prescribed me Vicodin. Little white pills. Yay! Chopping them in half.

Hello there! Hi! Hi!!

I was admitted still clutching my water bottle, which the admitting clerk appeared to find completely natural. With the Guy seated as chaperone and guard nearby, we reeled through the piles of information that Kaiser appears to think necessary to the admission of a patient for surgery. The clerk showed a remarkable nonchalance towards spelling, which my uninitiated mind had never before perceived as a creative outlet. Corrections she accepted with sanguinimity, obligingly blotting out a letter at random to show that she was, in fact, open to our suggestions. To say that the final result held a passing resemblance to reality would be grossly overstating the case.

A plastic wristband was fastened on one hand, its twin was cuffed around the Guy's wrist, and we were herded upstairs. "They're calling for you," she announced. It was 2:10.

We followed limp green arrows upstairs and around some particularly institutional corridors to the pre-op prep room, where the medico from the initial consult was waiting for me in green scrubs. The bottle that the clerk had accepted without a blink almost caused a coronary in the surgeon. "What," she flared, dramatically pointing, "is that?"

"Water?" I said blankly, and clutched at my bottle.

I had roused the surgeon's wrath, who knows how. "You're not supposed to drink any water for Three Hours before the surgery," she scolded, and pointed at the Guy. "You. Take that away from her."

We were herded to a waiting bed, a portion of the long room that was banked by curtains and nothing else. A nurse closed the drapes to give us a semblance of privacy, and directed me to change out of my clothes into the embarrassingly scanty hospital gowns they always provide for the titillation and entertainment of onlookers. They handed me a shopping bag and directed me to put my clothes in it. "Look, it has my name on it," I told the Guy with a proud feeling of importance.

Stripped down and changed, I lolled on the padded bed in the little room made up entirely of curtains. "There's cold air on my ass," I complained to the Guy, when suddenly the curtains were drawn back and I was surrounded by people in scrubs. A barrage of questions attacked me.

"Have you had cough, fever, runny nose, aching in the last two weeks?"

"Do you drink alcohol regularly? Do you use tobacco? Do you use any illegal drugs?"

"Have you an allergy to any medication, antibiotic, topical cream--"

"When was the date of your last period?"

"Have you been exposed to Hepatitis, tuberculosis, malaria--"

"Do you snore?"

"Yes," answered the Guy for me, with what I thought unnecessary emphasis.

"When was the last time you drank water?"

They all paused expectantly. I lied. "Twelve o'clock?" I said, meekly.

Instant chagrin amongst the scrubs. You would've thought I'd just confessed to having regular unprotected sex with African monkeys being used for HIV drug tests.

"It was good monkey love," I said in a small voice.

After much deliberation, meaningful glances at each other, and muttered conferences outside my curtains, the attendents eventually decided not to cancel the surgery. An IV was inserted at my left wrist, and the anaesthesiologist injected it with happy juice.

The world immediately began to spin. "It'll be like getting drunk without the hangover," she assured me.

"I've never been drunk," I announced, watched while she split into three or four people, and added happily, "but if this is what being drunk is like, I should start doing it."

Boom. Boom. Hi. Guy. Hi Guy!

Of it all, it was the local anaesthetic that hurt the worst. They wheeled me down long depressing corridors into a larger, jollier room, at which point a group of cheerful people in more scrubs swaddled me like an obese baby and poked painful needles in my cheek.

"Ow."

"Sorry. This'll only last--"

"Ow. Ow. Ow."

"--a second. I just--"

"OWOWOWOW."

"--have to finish this one--"

"OW!!!"

"--spot. There. Now that wasn't so bad, was it?"

I had more dignity as a three-year old. Now I know why my Mom was so impressed.

Poke. Pokey things. In the cheek. They hurt. And then, and then, yum.

The rest of the procedure passed by in a haze, a drowsy sensory deprivation without sight -- they dropped a large cloth over my eyes, presumably because my earlier behavior hadn't instilled in them any hope that I'd behave well upon seeing a scalpel, happy juice or no -- or feeling. The chatter of the scrubs around me had little impact on my mood, which was one of sleepy contentment without ever actually falling so deep as actual sleep. They were lucky. The Guy wasn't kidding about the snoring.

After the surgery they wheeled me back into the pre-op ward again, now designated a post-op ward because I was at its other end and Kaiser is cheap. They informed me that they were going to keep me for about an hour for observation, "Although she was already chirping by the time we finished," the anaesthesiologist told the nurse in what she apparently thought was a whisper, "so we could probably release her earlier than that."

Chirping?

The nurse stuck things to me and wandered away, and I watched with interest as the monitor over the bed began recording things. I managed to establish that the meter at the top of the display was my heart rate. The one in the middle I couldn't establish. A number at the side recorded my blood pressure, and the one at the bottom was my respiratory rate.

Being me, and already being bored, I instantly began trying to mess with the readouts. My normal respiratory rate is 15 breaths per minute. I can comfortably go to 7 breaths per minute. The monitor alerts at 9 breaths per minute. And then there was my heartbeat . . . .

The nurse wasn't amused.

By the time the Guy came to pick me up, I was exhaustedly chipper -- yes, chirping -- over a cup of jello and chicken broth brought to me by a maternal nurse. They popped me into a wheelchair for the ride down, over my weeble-wobble protests. And that was that.

The rest of that day, my head nodded on my neck like it was barely hanging on by a thread . . . but I was happy, oh yes, I was happy. On Saturday, I ate most of the kitchen. And on Sunday--

--on Sunday, I learned I had a Sensitivity to Vicodin.

I'm all better now.

Hi! Hi! Hello! Hi! How are you? Hi!

***

Incident...

I went to bed on Saturday night and found a clear sticky round thing planted right between my breasts. It had a metal nipple. I shrieked.

"STICKY THING!"

I started to peel it off while the Guy chuckled. "It's just the pad they use to monitor your heartbeat. They must've forgotten to take it off."

It was painful to remove. I rubbed the skin left behind and it was sticky and plastic with leftover goop. I climbed into bed. "They left it," I said sulkily and more than a bit idiotically. "Sticky thing."

I'd forgotten to put on a pajama top. Something on my ribs itched. I reached to scratch, and my fingers came in contact with--

"ANOTHER STICKY THING!!" I shrieked.

I investigated further on the other side while the Guy dissolved into mirth. "ANOTHER ANOTHER STICKY THING!!"

bathroom courtesies

4 hours to surgery and counting. I'm starving. No food allowed. On the other hand, water's fair game, so I've been entertaining myself by guzzling 32oz bottles at a time and waiting to see how big my bladder can get before I absolutely can't hold it in any longer. I'm betting it'll outgrow my breast if I try hard enough.

My coworkers would be thrilled about this game, I just know. Maybe I should let them in on it.

I was never part of the bathroom packs in high school. You know the ones. Groups of giggling girls with their garbage bag purses, heading towards the girl's restroom in a stampede that flattened all before it. For one thing, I didn't -- and still don't -- wear make-up. Make-up was the sign of the Woman. On the Cover Girl scale of maturity, I was still a toddler. Much of the time the female herd spent in bathrooms was wiled away in front of mirrors, touching up stucco makeup. Then there was the fact that I never really had that much to talk about. I was a freak among teenagers: this lack of subject matter actually bothered me. It didn't necessarily stop me from talking all the time, but it occasionally made me unsociably silent . . . an improvement from the times when I was unsociably vocal.

On top of all the rest however, the real reason I was never part of the bathroom pack was because, to be completely honest, I hated letting people hear me pee.

Who knows what childhood scar inflicted by my Jim Henson mother prompted this particular inhibition. Fifteen years later I still can't even say the word. I don't go "pee." I go to the bathroom. Go To The Bathroom in capital letters, thank you very much, a procedure that has the sanctity of ritual behind it and is therefore cleansed of anything so grossly biological as "pee." Pee is a letter. It is a member of the alphabet. It is not--

--you know. That. Going To The Bathroom.

It took me years to learn how to unlock my bladder when other people were in stalls nearby. My very presence in the bathroom was a secret to be hidden by late arrivals onto the scene. Hearing the door open in an otherwise deserted bank of stalls, I'd hold my breath, clench my . . . you know, and stealthily raise my feet so nobody peering through the bottom of the stalls could tell that anybody else was present.

I know it's irrational. Shut up. And if you think that's weird, you can only imagine how I felt about conversations held in bathrooms. Public humiliation, degradation and bodily noises, all rolled up into a spiffy Nine West purse.

Which brings me to my workplace. Bathrooms are weird in my workplace. While they've stopped short of actually making the bathrooms co-ed -- and the thought of that atrocity actually makes my heart skip a beat -- they've done the next best thing to it, which is by making the outer doors almost impossible to close. Bathroom doors in other places fall automatically closed, dragged shut by some massive spring. Not here in the Island of the Purple Monkeys. At any given time you can wander past the women's bathroom and hear the sharp echoes of tinkle-inkle-inkle-tink bouncing out of the room and into the hall, and from the hall into the first rank of cubicles next to the hall.

My Caucasian coworkers usually attempt to shut the door, only to be thwarted by a doorframe that rejects all attempts at cooperation with the revulsion of the Christian Right meeting Reason.

My Chinese coworkers tend to take a less dictatorial approach towards the door. Their attitude seems to be: if it has to be wide open to let me in, it has to be wide open to let me out. Why waste energy by closing it in between? As a result, I -- a firm Closer -- have had more than one trying episode in the bathroom, emerging from the imperfect privacy of the stall to find that my occasionally enthusiastic functions have been shared with four or five IT guys just a short step away.

I was seated in a stall one day, very quietly going about my business, when the bathroom door slammed open and a heavy-footed woman came storming in. The stall door next to mine banged shut, and there was a rustling sound of obvious origins.

Then a curious ringing.

"Hello?" the unknown woman said.

I froze. Was I supposed to answer? I shifted unhappily and stopped breathing.

"Hello?" tinkle.

Maybe I was supposed to answer. Feeling caught, I opened my mouth--

"Oh. Hello, Mr. ---. How are you? We haven't heard from you in a while." tinkle tinkle tinkle.

People, she had brought a phone into the bathroom stall with her. Not only was it a phone, it was the office phone. The receptionist's phone. It was a Board Member, wanting to talk to one of the Vice Presidents.

That was pretty much it for my bodily functions. Sharing them with an anonymous neighbor in the next stall is one thing. Sharing them with the world over the medium of cellular technology is another. Even if I'd wanted to, I couldn't; the Kegel my terror had prompted could have cracked the top off a Volvo. Unthinking, desperate to make my escape from the bathroom before the receptionist finished and came out, I scrambled myself together and flushed -- an unmistakable noise, even if tinkle-tinkle-tinkle somehow failed to penetrate the Board Member's consciousness -- before making a hasty nod to the gods of sanitation and dashing out the wide-open door.

Behind me, the receptionist was still cheerfully tinkle-inkle-inkling away. "Oh, sure. I can transfer you. Hold on, I have to check the number."

FLUSH.

***

3 hours to surgery. Hold that thought. I think my bladder's reached an A-cup.

I have to go see a man about a dog.

surgery consult

So, my new journal format has a comments field. Really. Right down at the bottom of the entry, you can now entertain yourselves by leaving pithy, crushing little remarks about the latest and greatest entry. Comments. Who would've ever thought it possible? Oh frabjous day, calloo, callay!

Knock yourselves out.

I spent most of the Labor Day weekend struggling to make some sense of this new format and port over the archives of previous years. 2003 is done -- it has been an uninspired year -- but 2002 is three times as much, and 2001 isn't much better. It will likely take the better part of next week to finish with the porting, after which I will be entertaining myself with the joys of editing. Never mind. It's all for you, really. You'll be thankful when I'm done, because then I can start changing the way it looks.

Plastic surgery for the soul, that's what this is. Nose job for the web. If I had the money to afford it, I'd graft some epicanthic folds as well. Can't have everything.

***

I haven't had the surgery yet to remove the face nipple yet, and already the scar -- no, sorry, the SCAR -- is haunting me. It sort of hangs out there a couple of inches from my face, eyeing its new home with an eagerness I can only describe as obscene. The SCAR is Benny Hill.

The Santa Clara hospital is a broad, sprawling complex that consists of an actual multi-storied hospital surrounded by a good dozen satellite buildings that have sprung up like corns around the mother bunion. The bunion was intimidating. I parked as far away as possible, through some obscure disassociative desire to be unobtrusive. Two minutes left to my appointment, discovering I had actually parked on the wrong side of the hospital and that there wasn't actually an entrance on my side, I sprinted for it. I showed up at the reception desk wheezing like a 90-year old asthmatic finishing the last mile of the Boston Marathon. I'm sure that must've been very comforting to the nurses.

Side note: not enough horror films take place in hospitals. There's a wealth of potential terror inherent in any clinic; shiny instruments, antiseptic, and lab results. How can Freddy or Jason compare with the anonymous annihilation locked up in an impersonal lab result? With Freddy and Jason, you end up dead, it's a foregone conclusion. But a lab result? Weeks, months, years of terror, depression and pain, and no guarantee of anything at the end.

Plus, they feed you jello. Screw Elm Street. Hand me a hospital cafeteria tray if you really want my movie money.

A surgery consult is basically an exercise in self-induced terror, all in the convenience of a sterilized, generic exam room. It turns out that ignorance really is bliss, which is irritating because that just means Mom was right all along, damn her black little Fraggle heart. A consult isn't so much a consult as it is an instruction class. We're going to do this, and this, and let's check that, and okay, sign this paper. Have any questions? Is that a nod or a quake? Scared you speechless? Great! See you Friday.

They're not going to hoe it out. They're going to -- I don't think I like this word -- excise it.

"It'll be a long ellipse about three centimeters long," the medico explained, sketching it out on the tissue that covered the exam table. Sometime soon, another patient's going to lay her buttock on a drawing of my face nipple. "We'll excise the tissue and send it to the lab for analysis. If they find something wrong, we'll have to go in again and make a deeper incision to get the remainder of the tissue."

The word "excise" instantly makes me think of taxes, right before it makes me think of scalpels, which instantly makes me think of pain. It's Three for the Price of One. It's a remarkably unbloody word, which is probably why they chose it. The word "excise" suggests sharp, shiny metal instruments, latex-gloved doctors, bloodless surgery. And, okay, that pain again. Lots and lots of pain.

And the SCAR. It hovered greedily over my cheek while I clutched the face nipple with possessive fingers. "Three centimeters?" I echoed, bewildered. Metric system. Damn you, metric system. One centimeter is . . . uh, an inch is . . . . uh. "Is that big? Will it . . ."

"Oh, you'll definitely scar," the medico said cheerfully. "But it'll be beautiful. We'll have you smile right before and mark out the lines. We'll make it look like a smile crease, although," she added with the first hint of doubt, "your skin is so smooth . . . we'll find a way. It'll be lovely."

She was enthusiastic about the scarring. At home later I would stare in the mirror and experiment with a huge grin, only to discover that the cheek nipple added insult to injury by being at the apex of a smooth mound of dislocated cheek fat. Smile crease, my ass.

The SCAR trailed us to the surgery schedulers, large, jovial women who noticed that my pupils were dilating and upped the geniality. "Shall we schedule you for 2:00, then?" they suggested, after we haggled over the time. "No food from midnight the night before, just water. No aspirin for seven days before. No--"

"No food?" I interrupted. I was having a hard time grasping this concept. "None?"

"Just water," the scheduler repeated firmly.

"Yes, but when you say no food, do Doritos count? I mean, they're not technically food, are they?"

"I'll see you Friday!" the medico carolled happily, and trotted off.

"Friday?" I echoed, blankly. "This Friday?"

The SCAR cackled.

They're plastic surgeons. They're not just going to hoe it out and leave it. Really. It'll be beautiful. Really. But.

You know, face nipple. I'm used to the face nipple. I have a history with the face nipple. I don't know how to feel about the SCAR. It's not even born yet, and I'm already feeling self-conscious about it, like a 4'9" pregnant woman in her ninth month with triplets. I find my hand creeping up to my cheek to say good-bye to the nipple, hello to the-- how do I know what it'll be like? What if it's a bad roommate? What if it spills things, or breaks things, or swears? Swears more than I do? If I were lean and grim-looking or Goth, it'd fit in just fine, but in my more honest moments I have to admit the fact that I look like a reject from the Sanrio factory.

How does a Sanrio toy explain a scar? "Hewwo. I'm Hippity Hoppity Peanut Bunny. This? Oh, itty bitty accident wif a pwice tag--"