mushrooms

I promised the people on my notify list that I would tell the story about the mushrooms, and so here I am, fulfilling my promise. It's not so much funny as it is--I don't know. Typical?

So. Mushrooms. First, let me say this.

I grew up with hobbits.

In my youth, it occurred to me once or twice that my family was something out of a particularly turgid fantasy. Back in those days (those days being the days of yore when all genetic markers pointed to my mature height being well under 4'5") we were a little more quirky, a little more erratic. Back in those days, we lived imaginary lives in an imaginary world. Back in those days, we grew hair in only one of the many places hair was customary, and were creepily hairless everywhere else. Back in those days, there was more than one suggestion that we were not entirely unrelated to small, round, hole-dwelling, food-loving, barefoot midgets featured in epic works of fantasy.

In most respects we really did resemble hobbits, albeit distant cousins from back east. Waaay back east. We were certainly small. Those of us who took after Dad's side of the family--namely, me and Dad--were decidedly geometric in shape, and that not a shape liberally endowed with angles, if you get my drift. We lived in a hole of a house that was both downhill and below sea level, well-chosen characteristics for a home based in Seattle. We loved our food, though poverty reduced us to basics. We never ever wore shoes.

Now that I really think about it, the hobbits really are the white trash of Middle Earth.

And then there was the thing with the mushrooms. Mushrooms of all types, all sizes, all shapes, all flavors. Fresh mushrooms, wild mushrooms: a luxury we could ill afford, back in those days when only gourmands knew about the glory of the fungus, and everybody else eyed them suspiciously as things only vegetarians would touch--and it was a clearly established fact that there was something seriously wrong with those vegetarians.

Specifically, it was the matsutake that inspired unapologetic greed, that delicacy worth a hundred times its weight in gold. The matsutake mushroom is something it seems only Japanese really understand, a bell to our collective Pavlovian psyche.

Once every fall, Dad would wake us up at an ungodly time of the morning, wrap us in bright red hunting flannels--just in case--before bundling us into the car. We'd drive for a couple of hours, my sister and I alternately quarreling and napping in the back, until we reached some unidentifiable stretch of wood near some unidentifiable road. And then we'd get out and hunt mushrooms.

That is, Dad would go and hunt mushrooms. My sister and I would pick up deer pellets. We would make little piles of them near trees to fool insecure deer into thinking all the other deer had hip, deer toilet hangouts to which they were uninvited. Mom would pretend to hunt mushrooms, while in reality she would be doing her best to make us stop picking up deer pellets with our bare fingers and shoving them up our noses. The fingers, that is. Not the deer pellets.

Of the two of them, Dad had the more fun. He'd disappear into the deep woods, taking huge strides with his rubber boots and flannels. Two hours later he would rematerialize with his canvas sacks bulging, like a Japanese Santa Claus. We would squeal, Mom's eyes would sparkle with the love light, and we'd inhale our lunches while admiring the outspread glory of his finds: row after row of beautiful, perfumed matsutake. Who knows if this was legal. Who knows if it would've stopped us if it wasn't.

Back home we would clean them and bestow some on our friends, whose eyes would also shine with the love light. The Hirata family was the Simpsons of our times, beloved by all. We were the only poor Japanese family in all of Washington, and yet we were rich enough to give away mushrooms worth more than the value of our house.

The best part for me was the eating. You could slice them into long strips and pan-fry them in a little butter with lemon juice sprinkled over the top. Then there was matsutake gohan, the recipe for which I've listed below. We would come home from school in the afternoons, smell that smell, and hover like enraged hummingbirds over the rice cooker until Mom emerged from teaching to unchain the lid.

We were limited in our focus, but we had dedication. There were matsutake in the forest. We would get them. We would eat them. End of story.

It was later, when I started creeping up towards puberty, that things started to change. It was harder to find them in the deep forest, for one thing; the ravages of dozens of predatorial Japanese gourmands was starting to have its impact. Dad would be gone longer and longer in order to come back with less and less. And then there were the little old women in the Dojo, who chattered happily about other mushrooms that could be found in the woods, good ones, delicious ones, not quite matsutake perhaps, but good all the same.

"You should try them," they suggested.

Mom and Dad decided that they should.

Except they didn't know what these other mushrooms looked like, or smelled like, or where to find them. They knew that there were other mushrooms because they'd seen them, while roaming around in the forests. On the other hand, it had never occurred to them to try them out, so they hadn't realized they were edible.

On the whole, they weren't. A normal person would have considered going to a bookstore and looking at--perhaps even purchasing--a field guide to mushrooms.

My parents? decided they would experiment.

We made a special excursion for the occasion, both Mom and Dad taking canvas sacks to make a sweep of the selected territory. They returned with heavy bags to the car, where we'd rimmed the wheels with rock-hard deer pellet pebbles, and spread their assorted finds out on a tarp for inspection. Funny looking things. Orange mushrooms. Frondy mushrooms. Curling mushrooms. Black things. Red things. Spotted things.

"I think I remember that one from when I was a child," Mom said hesitantly, pointing at one.

"Hm," said Dad.

Back in the safety of the home, they laid out their assorted discoveries again. They agreed they would need to determine which were poisonous and which weren't. After all, they were good parents; they couldn't very well be feeding their two little daughters lethal doses of toadstool. There were plenty of other ways to determine which mushrooms could be consumed in safety.

My parents, while lovely, wonderful, mostly intelligent people, have rarely been accused of being "sensible." In order to make sure there were no accidents, they decided they would divide the mushrooms up into two piles, one for each parent. Each would take turns eating one of the mushrooms. If a parent got sick, the other parent would take the sick parent to the hospital.

It was a remarkably silly plan.

My sister and I watched with round-eyed interest as first one, then the other, experimented with a new fungus. The first one, grilled with butter and lemon, was deemed not poisonous, but also unworthy of future consumption. The second, treated the same way, was judged unremarkable. The third one was determined to be acceptable. The fourth one--

--Mom suddenly announced that she wasn't feeling very well. Dad was halfway through the fourth mushroom. "Was it the first one or the third one?" he wanted to know. Priorities.

"Will 911 send an ambulance for stupid people?" I asked. (I was at that age.)

Mom made a hasty exit for the restroom, chased by my Dad, and the two of them eventually retired to the bedroom where Mom huddled in bed with damp towels across her forehead. She wasn't sure that she felt unwell enough to go to the hospital. I doubt it ever even occurred to Dad that eating a poisonous mushroom could kill Mom; she was beyond indestructible, a latex-sealed bottle of antibodies off which most infections and bacterium bounced with Batman-like percussions: BANG! CRASH! tinkle.

In any case, things turned out just fine. Mom didn't die. Dad didn't even get sick.

They did, however, stop eating the mushrooms. Masako and I took one out into the backyard and dribbled bits of it down a mole hole. Who the hell knows why.

MATSUTAKE GOHAN (rice)

Ingredients:
* 2 small matsutake
* 1 c. regular white rice
* 1 c. sweet (mochi) rice
* sake (Japanese rice wine)
* hon-dashi (fish stock, usually powder form)
* soy sauce
* salt
* water

Wash and clean the matsutake. Cut the top cap off of the
stem and remove the very bottom, rough root of the
mushroom stem if it is still attached. Slice thinly.

Mix regular and sweet rice together and wash it thoroughly.
Make sure the rice kernals are thoroughly mixed. Drain.

Measure enough water to cook 1.5 cups of rice in the rice
cooker. Add a quarter cup of sake. Add two dashes of
hon-dashi. Add a couple pinches of salt. Mix thoroughly.

Put rice and water mixture into rice cooker. Add enough soy
sauce so that you can just see the rice through the
water. Mix well so soy sauce is evenly distributed.
(At this point, the liquid in the rice cooker should be at about
the right level in the cooker.)

Lay the strips of matsutake over the top of the rice, making sure
to cover the entire top surface of the right. Close rice cooker and
cook. When done, mix rice thoroughly and enjoy.

enter the banana

Mom left to go to Japan this morning, after leaving sporadic, disconnected ramblings on my answering machine over the course of the week. She was originally meant to leave on Saturday. Having reached the point of imminent departure in San Francisco, she was turned around and sent back home.

Her green card had expired. "I did not knowing green card, it expire," she announced cheerfully over the phone. "It supposing to be pink."

I had nothing to say to that. Immigration baffles me.

The story that Mom eventually narrated was of one of the great cock-ups of travel history. Usually things go well for Mom when she travels; the gods like her, and spoil her shamelessly. Not for her the experiences of Pepe, the husband of a fellow guest at Tara's dinner on Sunday. By the mutual agreement of all present, he was the most consistently unfortunate traveller ever born. Luggage that ended up in Sarajevo. Hostile airports. Injuries. Misdirected planes. Even an incident in Japan when he fell inexplicably ill after travelling in a subway.

This sort of thing never happens to Mom, partly because she prefers to view everything that goes wrong as a sign that our deity of choice is watching over us. Delayed plane? Divine intervention. If it had left on time, her plane could have sucked in a passing bird that would otherwise have crossed its path. Lost luggage? Erasing bad karma! In a past life she probably set fire to someone's belongings. Illness? Cleansing her body of toxins so they don't build up and cause cancer. Her life is exciting, even if it's only in the reflections of what disasters Might Have Been, were it not for the minor inconveniences that Actually Were.

She relishes going over the mishaps of her day, picking through them hungrily like a miser with his bag of diamonds. Disaster, as I said before, delights her, and never quite so much as when it happens to her. In her cosmic scales, things are slowly being balanced. As far as I can tell, her guardian angel is embodied by a stressed day trader, haggling for commodities with fictional money.

It started with Saturday morning, with her first flight. My cell phone recorded an apologetic message from her on Saturday afternoon, from the airport in Oregon. "Harro? Yuhri? This is Mama. I am in Portland. You are not there. Oh, too bad. I am in Portland. Okay. There is engine trouble on ther ai-ro-plane, and I will having to spend ther night in San Francisco. But I do not knowing how to find you, oh well. I will be in ther Doubletree. Okay. Bye-bye."

All through college Mom would leave me diddly little messages that started with a cheerful, "Harro? Yuhri? This is Mama," as though there could ever be more than one English-slaughtering, chirping Japanese mother in my life. I used to come back from practicing to find the light blinking on my machine, and as was my inveterate practice, switch it to speakerphone. My college dormmates would come dashing around the corner and chant along with her voice the moment they heard the first "Harro?" floating out my door.

"--YUHRI? THIS IS MAMA!"

I got the message late evening on Saturday, and promptly called all the Doubletree Inns I could find in the area. None of them had a Mihoko Hirata. "I have a Misako Hirame," one nice receptionist told me.

I've seen my mother's name spelled in more creative ways. "Oh, that's her," I said confidently . . . and subsequently woke up a bewidered, completely innocent traveller with an accusatory, "You're not my mother. Why aren't you my mother?"

She caught up with me at last on Monday, sounding remarkably cheerful. I assumed she was calling from Japan. "Harro? Yuhri? This is Mama. Guess where I am calling from!"

After being stranded for several hours in Portland because of engine trouble, then being stranded over twelve hours at the San Francisco airport because of more plane difficulties, the immigration officials suddenly informed her that she would be allowed to leave the United States, but she might not be allowed to come back. "You need to renew your green card," they informed her. "Go home."

"Except there were no flights back to Seattle for a long, long time," she explained, "so I wait and wait, and I walk around the airport again and again and again and again--"

I would have gone insane. I would probably have gone postal.

"I didn't want to make a scene, because I feel, there is no point in becoming angry and upset. Why get upset? It does no good. It just makes everybody unhappy. So I walk around the airport again and again and again and again--"

The airline, apologizing for the delay in Portland and the subsequent cock-up that resulted in her overnight in San Francisco, were -- according to her -- very nice. They gave her coupons for food.

Three of them.

$5 each.

"It is so nice of them," she announced, delighted.

That wouldn't have been the word I'd have used.

It's useless to puncture Mom's bubble however, and unkind to boot; she admitted that she was so disappointed about not making it to Japan in time that she was near tears in Portland, but that it was a passing thing. She had had a vacation planned with her younger sister and her mother, a trip to some hot springs or bed and breakfast that had to be cancelled. "But it is oh-kay," she said. "Maybe something would have happened on the vacation, so we did not go, so we do not have anything bad happen."

Monday night she called back, wanting help with the INS application for a new card. On Tuesday she got approved. In one of those sudden reversals that the travel gods are notorious for, she managed to find new tickets to Japan that cost less than her original tickets had, even on three days' notice.

So anyway, she's in Japan now. "Bring me back stories," I told her before she left. "Lots and lots of stories."

"INS is so nice people," she enthused.

I've updated my journal links, now that my daily early-morning website checking has finally settled into a consistent handful. Every so often I go through a phase when I add willy-nilly to my browser's bookmarks, only to discover that as time wears on, some of the links simply don't get clicked on as often or, in the case of some, ever. Yesterday I went through and deleted my unused bookmarks, then pasted the survivors wholesale into my journal. You can now be assured that my list of links accurately reflect my pre-work procrastination.

Looking down my list of links, I notice that there's very little here that's really shocking, provocative, or particularly enraging. In general my tastes are mainstream: I like writers who make me laugh, writers who occasionally make me think, and writers who write well. Like many intellectually lazy people, I avoid writers who actively infuriate me, or go yin to my yang; while there's a certain There-But-for-the-Grace-of fascination to reading Ann Coulter, for instance, I avoid reading her articles for the same reason I avoid watching Jerry Springer. There are only so many hours in the day. The minutes I waste reading the surreal rantings of a self-aggrandizing, halo-polishing red-bottomed monkey could be better spent watching rabid dung beetle sex on Tivo.

What is worth noting is that few of my regularly visited links could be considered Asian, so to speak. I appear to be culturally bereft, or at the very least, out of touch with the Asian-American experience. Blatherings and Medea Sin are exceptions to this, to be sure. However, much as I'd like to point to the talented Debbie Ohi as my window to Asian-American Power, the fact is I read Blatherings because I like it, not because she writes feverish, Malcolm X-ish demands for racial recognition. As for the fascinating Dr. Scott, the fact is that his experiences of being hapa aren't going to be my experiences of being banana, and it would be hubris on my part to think that they could be.

Where we do overlap is in being the odd man--or woman--out in a society that dedicates its appeal to two-and-a-half racial demographics. That's a pretty crowded pool of leftover people, and I'm not sure that the three of us share even that. After all, you're only left out if you feel left out, and I can be as oblivious as the next minority woman who occasionally forgets she's not white.

So, anyway. The whole point of this is so I can segue into this link for Rice Bowl Journals, a community of Asian journalers. It's interesting skimming through some of them. You know. Asians. Writing.

Ever watch TV and scream "ASIAN! ASIAN!" at the top of your lungs whenever you see an Asian actor? It's awfully quiet at our house during primetime.

You'll probably also have noticed that the icon for Nanowrimo--the increasingly inaccurately named National Novel Writing Month--is also featured on my list of links. In a burst of optimism not supported by any of my accomplishments over the last two nanowrimos, I've gone and signed up again.

We'll see whether this goes somewhere, or if it simply shrivels up and dies a piteous, dessicated little death. The first year I managed to write 15,000 words before tumbling into a deep pit of I-Don't-Care-And-You-Can't-Make-Me-ism, if I recall correctly. The second year, I reached the 30,000 word marker before surrendering the keyboard to my better urges. The dreck that was bled from my nasal cavities onto the page deserved little better than the eventual deletion I mercifully bestowed on it. If this is an ongoing trend, this year I should be able to get to 60,000 of utter garbage.

Meanwhile, in the three days leading up to Nanowrimo, I've been trying to figure out what to do with a nearly full vial of vicodin currently sitting in my medicine chest. I can't use it. I took maybe a total of four pills during my recovery. Surely there's some charity I can donate it to, for redistribution as needed? I've tried calling my HMO's pharmacy, and can't get a human being on the line. The office of one of my doctors said they didn't think it could be done. Anybody else know? Have any ideas?

I suppose I could keep it, for the days after nanowrimo when I actually get around to reading my great masterpiece. Nausea and vomiting wouldn't be half so bad if I also didn't have any feeling in my extremities.

happy birthday, Guy!

Short entry. It's the Guy's birthday today. He'll be 33.

Happy Birthday, love.

(Damn, he's old.)

I brought up the Guy's birthday at book club last night, and was asked how I remember when his birthday is when I can't remember the birthday of my best-friend-since-middle-school. "His is two days before Halloween," I pointed out. "It's easy."

The rest of the club looked blank. After a moment, my old roommate sighed. "Here we go again."

"Halloween's in two days?" another asked suspiciously. "That doesn't sound right. What's two days from now?"

"The twenty-fifth," supplied my old roommate. "She thinks everything's on the 25th."

"It's easier," I announced.

"For who?" the others demanded, ungrammatically.

Tara interjected, "What I don't understand is, if you can remember his birthday is two days before Halloween, why can't you remember that my birthday is two weeks before Christmas?"

I blinked. "It is?"

"Two weeks," she said firmly. "Two days, two weeks . . . it should be easy."

"I can do two weeks before the Christmas," I decided.

Added my old roommate, "And Christmas is actually on the 25th, too."

"It is?"

"Really. It's pretty much the only holiday that is."

"Wow." I considered for a minute. Said thoughtfully, "I don't think I've ever had that happen before."

So now I'll be able to remember Tara's birthday. Everybody else, unless you have a '2' in your birthday description relative to the number 25, you're still out of luck, and will just have to live with receiving sporadic Happy Unbirthday gifts when I feel like it.

Just in case: happy unbirthday, all.

I've been getting the occasional email from my sister, who from time to time finds herself in an internet cafe down in ....I don't know. Wherever the hell she is. She has a problem with the keyboards. "I can}t find the } key," she informed me over Yahoo Messenger.

I'm pretty sure she meant she couldn't find the apostrophe, but it's hard to tell with her.

She also doesn't seem to be able to find the SHIFT key, but we won't hold that against her.

buenos dias! (sadly, that{s about the extent of my spanish)

sitting in a car for hours on end, i have taken to counting the bites on my body and multiplying them by the estimated volume of blood sucked out by each insect. i think i may need a blood transfusion soon.

after many mind-numbing {and ass numbing} days of driving, we have found ourselves in the very flamboyant and artsy town of oaxaca, mexico. a pleasant, but energetic, town with a population at roughly 400,000 (!), oaxaca is definately the hub of mexico{s highly imaginative community. though it{s a bit touristy (actually quite alot), it definately has an air about it that successfully masks the 2:10 gringos. the greatest part of oaxaca though is that they have not once mistaken me for a chino!

apart from a run-in with some ´federalis´, who thought they were about to uncover a mass murder scene, the encounters have been relatively mild.

we{ll hit puerto escondido {apparently popular with surfers} before taking off to guatemala. anyone interested in meeting up down there? or in the bay islands, honduras? bocas del toro, panama? just make sure to drop me a line a few weeks before hand.

i have recently heard that ´the terminator´ was elected as california´s new governor...god have mercy on you all. now, would he be considered the lesser of two evils or the evil of two lessers?

take care.

love,
sako

days on the road: 18-ish
accidents: 2.3
encounters with ´civil servants´: 4
bribes payed: $180.00 USD
missing limbs: 0
number of fights: °?*&$%!!!
please send: peet´s dark roast coffee, SBC´s dark roast coffee, Tully´s dark roast coffee...anything but instant Nescafe!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I just chatted with her on Yahoo Messenger again.

Me: "I posted your email in my journal."

Sako: "John smells bad. I took him to the hospital this morning."

Me: "Why?"

Sako: "If people make fun, it's your fault."

Me: "Heh."

Sako: "he's smelly."

Me: "You took him to the hospital because he's smelly? You're a little crazy."

location: mount saint helens
date: may 18, 1980
event: an explosion of cataclysmic proportions, no wait, an explosion 400 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that leveled hiroshima! according to seismologists, there was a 200 mile an hour blast that flattened trees up to 20 miles away!

that was me two days ago.

location: panajachel, guatemala
date: oct 22, 2003
event: an explosion of similar magnitude to that of st helens.

two of us have parted ways from the rest of the party. prior to this, the air had been THICK with tension.
THICK.
we have agreed to meet back up in four weeks and see how things go from there.

the guatemalan presidential elections are coming up on the 9th of november. it has been interesting speaking with locals about who and why they are choosing particular candidates. the most controversial candidate without question is rios montt from the frente republicano guatemalteco party. locals have told me that his long list of accomplishments have included (just to name a few):

1. overthrowing the president of ´82
2. the assembly of military killing squads
3. the massacre of entire villages, mostly of indigenous guatemalans, totalling up to 100,000 people.

although there was an article in the constitution that prevented him from running for president during the two previous elections, his party´s gaining popularity had won an FRG candidate, Portillo, the presidency back in 1999. surprisingly (or not), rios montt became the head of guatemala´s congress soon after this.

after many of the human rights organizations began to protest a constitutional courts decision to allow his entry into the 2003 presidential race, montt apparently said, ´that with the increase in anger amongst the villagers, the FRG would not be held responsible for its aggressive means to keep peace.´

the next few weeks should be interesting.

love,
sako

days on the road: 24-ish
accidents: 2.3
encounters with ´civil servants´: 4
bribes payed: 1 @ $180.00 USD
missing limbs: 0
number of fights: °?*&$%!!!...if you only knew.
please send: nothing. the guatemalans KNOW about good coffee.

Like I said. Crazy.

trimming the turkey

I've been working on another entry about mushrooms, which hasn't been going well -- I've lacked inspiration, and nostalgia is one of those things that requires more than its fair share of concentration -- so I thought I'd put it aside for now and post something else while that story percolates.

We've been looking for a pair of round trip tickets back to Seattle for Thanksgiving, part of what is now a habit for me and a new tradition for the Guy. This is the first holiday opportunity for him to look across the table at his future mother-in-law, as opposed to that queer Japanese antique stick figure related to his girlfriend. Despite two years' acquaintance, she still manages to reduce him to a shivering wreck, though growing accustomed to her has done much to alleviate this bizarre ataxia of his. A few weeks ago, he even managed to bear up under the strain of wishing her a happy birthday over the phone, in Japanese no less.

While I have to admit she laughed for quite a long time after he got off the phone--he hasn't quite mastered the Japanese accent--I think it was a step in the right direction. A year ago, he would have scuttled towards the bedroom and hidden under the desk if I'd even suggested he talk to her. As it happens, tickets to Seattle will cost us somewhere around $600, so it's probable that we won't be able to get up there this time around. I've apologized to Mom, who claims she doesn't care.

"Oh, I have plenty to do. I will be fine," she said cheerily, in Japanese. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure this means, "I'll be alone and lonely on the holiday, and will clean the kitchen from top to bottom in a vain effort to assuage the deep depression inspired by an absent and uncaring family," in English.

I swear, sometimes it's impossible to talk to her.

Over the last few weeks, the Guy and I have started having some issues that probably need to be worked out before the wedding. This isn't a surprise to anybody who's married. There's something about the advent of a wedding that inspires a certain amount of nitpicky-ness in the most mellow of future spouses. Knowing there's a date--or that there will be someday be a day (we're a little behind in our wedding planning)--when one will be linked ad nauseum to another human being makes one take a good hard look at said other to see what can be improved before one signs on the dotted line.

Once the vows are spoken, all motivation to change on the part of the second party is effectively erased. He has gotten his cake, and has eaten it, too. The girl is his; the race is won. In his mind, it makes no sense to change. He had what it took to get to the finish line with his prize. Why bother changing perfection?

As it happens, in this case, Perfection has hair down past his hips. Damaged hair, with a serious wealth of split ends. Hair that hasn't been cut since the early '80s.

I used to have split ends once upon a time, part of a legacy of cheap shampoos and a budget that didn't include room for conditioner. It was inexpensive entertainment for a musician on a budget, having split ends; I could spend hours curled up in a chair, painstakingly pulling my hair apart until I had two long strands of hair where once I had one. There was a masochistic satisfaction to it, and never mind that this constant harassment of my hair resulted in a fragile and decidedly lopsided afro effect.

I still check it from time to time, hopeful of finding at least one split end I can mutilate. Nowadays, I take good care of my personal grooming; the rare sighting happens once in a blue moon. On the other hand, the Guy....

...the Guy is just asking for it, is what I say.

He looked up from the computer one night to find me silently huddled behind his chair, brooding over a handful of his tangles.

"What're you doing?" he demanded.

"Nothing." Well, of course I said that. I'm a girl. I'm not a moron. A boy would have told the truth and got in trouble.

He twisted around to investigate, and caught me red-handed in the act of peeling a hair into four distinct pieces. Yes, it's just that damaged. "Are you splitting my ends?"

"It was already split. I'm helping it along. It would've fallen out anyway, eventually."

Not the best thing to say to a man. All men have a deep-seated fear that premature balding is hovering just outside his door, like the front team for Death getting the site ready for the big visit. He instantly reclaimed his head, rolled his chair a few feet away, and regarded me with the air of a man discovering his wife was once a suspect for proactive precipitation of widowhood. "Stay away from my hair," he ordered.

The situation disintegrated rather quickly after that. There was, as I say, a hypnotic fascination to his damaged hair, and whenever I spied him engrossed in something else--vulnerable, in other words--I would drift unobtrusively behind him to peel another hair before the Guy felt my presence and scampered to safety. At one point I decided to do him a favor, and started bringing scissors with me. If anything, the metallic hiss of the scissors clipping his split ends off made him even more nervous.

He grew increasingly wild-eyed under this treatment, and began adopting a furtive, hunched posture whenever I was in the same room. From time to time in the car, my gaze would drift to settle thoughtfully on his long braid. He would sense my stare and whip it to safety while his shoulders slowly rose to engulf his ears.

One night, discovering me crouched behind him with the scissors in my swiss army knife, he lost his equilibrium altogether. "Stop it!" he shrieked. He leaped from his chair to the far end of the room in a single bound, and turned on me like a cornered rabbit. "Those are scissors, aren't they? You were using scissors, weren't you? You were cutting my hair, weren't you?"

"I was helping you," I said soothingly, tucking the scissors into hiding behind my back. "It was all splitty and flaky and dead and gross. They need help, Yan. Lots and lots of help."

"Leave my hair alone!" he hollered, and danced in place, agitated. "Why can't you leave my hair alone?!"

"If you'd just cut it--" I began, in my most reasonable tone of voice.

The Guy wailed. "You want to cut my hair!"

"It's so long, you have so much of it. I just wanted to see . . ."

"You want to castrate me!!"

"You're being completely unreasonable about this."

"STOP LOOKING AT MY HAIR!"

"It's so messy. You don't take care of it, it's all damaged. I just want to see what you'd look like with, you know, a normal head."

The Guy burst into tears.

Well, okay, no. That last bit was creative license. But the rest of the conversation is pretty much word for word. In the main, he's mostly torn between worry and hilarity when I make these aborted assaults on his hair. I think he's grown to expect it as one of those charming little quirks of our relationship, although this hasn't kept him from being in a rather nervous mood, lately.

"If you get to cut my hair, I get to cut yours."

"Fine. I don't mind. You can even do mine first. Here--"

"Not fair! Yours will grow back!"

Personally, I think he's overreacting. A haircut's not really that big a deal. I don't even mind that his hair is long, although it does sort of make my fingers itch after those scissors. Besides, I can always get to it while he's asleep. He really does have a lot of split ends.

Now that I think about it, he hasn't been sleeping very well lately.

Interesting side note. A reader has asked to use my last entry in a class she's teaching, up in the wilds of the Arctic circle. A class, let it be noted, which is teaching English. This is cool in so many ways that I can't even cover them all. There's the fact an entry of mine will be read aloud to complete strangers by someone not related to me, for one thing. For another thing, those complete strangers will be there by choice, not accidentally caught in a surreal nightmare by the chance concatenation of a sudden downpour, no umbrella, and a Twilight Zone-ish Bates Motel convention center advertising Time Shares for poetry.

It's possible that she'll be using the entry to teach her students what not to do when constructing a proper sentence, and I'm fine with that. I've been extremely generous with representational samples, and if my high school Writing 101 class did anything, it was to imbue me with a fanatical desire to see good grammar eliminated world-wide, once and for all.

On the other hand, it could be that she'll be using it as a role model, a good one, and in that case, hurrah! This is something of a triumph considering that I didn't even speak or hear English until the age of three, when my parents enrolled me in Acorn Academy Preschool. They never spoke it at home, and all their friends were Japanese as well; for all my exposure to America, I might as well have been born and raised in Kyoto.

I asked Mom later why she never even tried to speak in English in the house.

"I didn't wanting you to learn the bad Engrish," she explained. "We were thinking, if you learning from us, it will be, tsk, so bad, so bad Engrish."

And, you know, she was probably right. She usually is. On the other hand, how cool would it be to be able to launch full-throttle into a sentence like, "I was reading ther book, ther book my student, she is giving to me, and I am so boring--"

--and make perfect sense?

tempest? meet teapot.

There's a woman in one of the stalls in the bathroom at work, and she's reading a newspaper. I can tell because I can hear the rustling of newspaper as she turns the pages. This is, okay, weird, but I also have to add in the interests of full disclosure that she isn't doing anything but reading the newspaper. What I mean to say is, she isn't going about any "personal business," wink wink, cough cough.

At least, not audibly. Not, that is, for the space of the ten minutes I was there. (I was washing my hands. Shut up.)

So anyway, there you go. Woman in bathroom, reading newspaper.

At least, I think it's a woman. Honestly. I work with monkeys.

I voted yesterday before heading in to work, a good two hours after the polls had opened. I was voter number 43, which tells you that: 1) people in my district are apathetic voters; or 2) sane people vote after work. I probably should have done the 2nd, since voting early made me late for work. However, I'd made up my mind about my votes several days ago, and didn't like to be miserly with their distribution. There was the additional fact that my mood after work tends to be pessimistic to the extreme, which could very easily have swayed me to vote the opposite of what I'd intended. My post-work philosophy tends towards the George Carlin-ish: "If you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem."

As it turned out, at the end of the day, my district ended up voting the same way I did, which was comforting since my entire life consists of a ceaseless striving after the elusive Norm. On the other hand, the rest of the state didn't. I can look at the results map's breakdown and recall driving through some of those dissenting districts. Since I've seen some of the inhabitants of those tepid pools of genetic abnormalities, I'm comforted by the thought that, while I didn't go with the majority, the majority probably shouldn't be allowed to breed, either.

(Political commentary isn't really satisfying unless you get to throw some gratuitous pig feces. For the record though, I wasn't kidding about the people in these other counties. The ones I saw end up on stage in Jerry Springer shows.)

In all honesty, I'm not particularly upset by the results of the recall election; I predicted that this would happen back at the beginning. Governor Davis was not a popular man, and the general election notwithstanding, as many people were voting against Bill Simon--labelled tactfully as a "social conservative," which was the PC way of saying "bigot" for some people--as for Davis.

Governor Ar-- okay, so I'm having trouble getting that out without laughing. The new governor might do a good job. Who can say? He's got good advisors. He's middle-of-the-road. He's not entirely opposed to everything I believe in: education, choice, gun control, civil rights.

Anyway, there's nothing to be done now. The primal ooze has spoken. We'll see if he manages to do a good job. I didn't vote for him, but I'll root for him. Something has to start going right for California. Might as well be now as later.

Besides, this means he won't be able to make a new movie for years. Who says there's no upside?

Here's one of the things I enjoy about Kaiser Permanente, my HMO. Every so often I'll get a phone call or a notification reminding me of a doctor's appointment I never made. Kaiser takes its management of your health very seriously. If it feels that you need a doctor's appointment, it will give you a doctor's appointment; your input on when, where, or with whom is irrelevent to the process. They're like Basil Fawlty: everything in this best of all possible worlds would be just spiffy . . . if it weren't for the #%&@*! customers.

I personally find this attitude liberating. Of course, we've established before that I have a somewhat alternative perspective on service in general. There's something comforting to the feeling of being a cog in a large machine. The Japanese were born to be cogs. This is why they're so beloved by the Swiss.

The doctor's appointment I had on Monday was an exception to this rule in that I scheduled it my very own self. My plastic surgeon had informed that she'd referred me to ENT surgery, and warned me to expect their call. "It's just in case," she said cheerfully. "I'm hoping we'll get your lab work in on time."

. . . Which, as far as I knew on Monday, they hadn't. Except for a two-second call during the Cow Trip--"Just wanted to tell you that we haven't forgotten you. We haven't gotten your lab results back yet, but we'll call you when we do."--I hadn't heard a word from anybody. Usually when dealing with the medical world, this is a good thing. Doctors don't call to tell you that your tests are normal. What they do is call to tell you when your tests are abnormal, since this means you are due for more of their time. Doctors get paid $15 a minute. Telling you that something's wrong is in the nature of a long-term investment. If you can maintain the delusion that an efficient, meticulous medical operation is giving you the service of its best and brightest, this means that no news is good news.

At least, that's how it is in the US. In Britain, silence means that someone accidentally diagnosed you as dead, and nobody has noticed yet.

My appointment was with a hasty, harried otorhinolaryngologist--ENT guy for Latin speakers--who buzzed in, mispronounced my name, and shook my hand with the air of a man who knew all about germ transmission and didn't like any of it. It amused me. Having accomplished personal connection, he bounced back to the safety of his desk and instantly started nattering about subjects I knew nothing about.

He'd interrupted me in my Agatha Christie--I get some of my best reading done waiting for doctors--so I wasn't what you would call "attentive" when he started vomiting clinical professionalism. In point of fact, I was trying to identify the odd stain on the back of the book. That's one of the bonuses to buying secondhand books; inhuman diseases and irregular contaminants are part of the package. As a result, a lot of what he said was white noise, interspersed with actual words during my occasional flashes of lucidity.

". . . lymph nodes . . . buzz buzz buzz buzz . . . normal . . . buzz buzz buzz buzz . . . melanoma."

I jerked back into the real world. "What?"

"Normally we do some lymph node removal for melanoma," he repeated in a rapid monotone, "but for now I'm just going to check how your scar is healing and do a quick physical exam."

"Back up," I said. "Rewind. What melanoma?"

He flipped through my thin chart, forehead wrinkling. "The melanoma you have," he explained patiently. I knew that voice. I've used it many times on my coworkers. It was the You are a mental microbe but I am prohibited by law from shoving this stapler up your right nostril voice. "This is why Dr. X referred you to me."

"Who?" I blinked at him. It's possible he was even able to tell; my eyes had gotten somewhat wider during the exchange. Who the hell was Dr. X?

He paused. "Dr. X didn't call you?"

"Who's Dr. X? I have melanoma?"

"Hm." This was obviously not in the script. "Dr. X was supposed to call you," he said, fretfully.

I pitied him. It can't be easy walking in and accidentally giving someone news like this. He looked cross. I couldn't blame him. Shame on Dr. X, whoever he was. And, bizarrely, my arms and legs were getting numb. I pondered on this curious development while the ENT doctor continued gibbering away. I think he was trying to tell me something about the diagnosis.

I didn't hear him. There was this strange buzzing. And my ears were going numb, too. Odd. I twiddled them experimentally.

". . . a deeper excision," he finished, and began poking my lips with a tongue depresser. I opened my mouth obligingly. He started foraging for my tonsils.

"U-ah?"

"Mm."

"Unh."

"Wider," he ordered.

Same conversation I always have with my dentist.

He started chatting again with a scope in my ear, squinting through it suspiciously before shoving it up my nostrils, one at a time. He began mining for my brain. "Looks good," he mumbled.

"Narf," I said.

Then it was the latex gloved finger plowing into my mouth. "Don't bite," he said hastily, and I started to laugh, he sounded so belatedly horrified--

--and somewhere in the back of my mind a little woman yawned, and stretched, and said, "Mela . . . what? What's that, then?"

Once he'd established to his satisfaction that my cheek was still there and that my biting reflexes were mostly under control, he vaulted me out of my chair and hurried me out the door. "Buzz buzz buzz buzz," he said, not unkindly, and disappeared. And I drove home.

Except that halfway to the freeway, my inner child had managed to look up the word "melanoma."

These are the things that happen when you're confronted with the reality of cancer for the first time.

1. Your tongue starts tasting of ashes. And not clean, papery ashes, either. The heavy, greasy, acidic ashes you find in the little china vase and accidentally taste while visiting the mortuary.
   
2. Your heart starts beating very quickly. Hummingbirds everywhere are jealous. So, in a different way, is Courtney Love.
   
3. You start feeling nausea, and remember all the reasons why having lunch at that sleazy grill was a bad idea.
   
4. You feel lightheaded. The world gets that poorly maintained look of public schools and Honeypot urinals.
   
5. It occurs to you that you probably shouldn't be driving.
   
6. It occurs to everybody else on the road that you definitely shouldn't be driving.
   
7. You think of all the trivial things you should have gotten done before you knew you had cancer, and regret not having done them back when life wasn't so weird.
   
8. Except that thing with the toilet paper mushroom. You don't regret not having done the toilet paper mushroom thing.
   
9. You try and figure out who should know, who shouldn't be told yet, who can handle the news, who can't, whether to bother the fiance at work when it'll just ruin his day--
   
10. You fall madly in love with the man you thought you already loved.
    

It was the last one that was unexpected, that ended up bowling me over the edge. Abject terror, yeah, sure, I was expecting that . . . but it hurt, driving home with this massive flood of love sitting like a septic tank in my chest. I pounded on my chest with my fist, like a flatliner giving himself CPR, and sobbed my way past his workplace. I panicked about the wedding--would we have it? Was it fair to let him marry someone on the verge of IMMINENT DEATH? I wallowed in an image of me on my coffin at a peculiarly deserted funeral: my corpse was fat. I wailed, heartbroken at my deceased self's weight problem. My memory recalled that people who die of cancer tend to lose a lot of weight before the end. My imagination reduced my body to skeletal proportions. I wailed some more. I looked even worse, skinny. No wonder nobody wanted to come to my funeral.

It took the radio to distract me from my morbid crisis of shallowness. I switched on the radio after barely avoiding a collision with the entire right-hand lane, desperate for distraction, and was insensibly soothed by a news show about Israel's bombing of Syria. The announcer's voice hypnotized me into calmness; there was something vaguely consoling about world events. Same old, same old. She talked me the rest of the way to the apartment, where I unpacked myself, organized my cell phone and Kaiser card on the dining room table, and made a plan. To wit:

1. Find out what the hell was going on.
   

It was not a complicated plan.

On the other hand, I'd never tried to get information out of an HMO before. Remember what I said about being a cog in a machine? I take it back. Us bananas? We hate it.

I reached nobody helpful that night, not unreasonably. It was already 6. The Guy drove home in haste when I called him; I sounded like an asthmatic turkey on the phone, all gobblings and wheezings. He wrapped himself around me like a warm blanket. He's taller than I am, and his hugs have a way of blotting out the rest of the world, drowning my face in chest and arms and the smell of fresh laundry. I listened to his heartbeat for hours that night, and found it more comforting than the BBC. On a whim, I decided I wanted to watch a movie or two. He came with me to the small independent movie rental on the corner. From 9:00 pm to 12 midnight, I watched episodes of The Tick with Patrick Warburton--"A two-headed cobra of goodness slithering down the path of righteousness, leaving its venom deep in the hindquarters of evil!"--and forgot.

At 12:30 I turned off the light, and remembered. It was 3 AM before the Guy finally coaxed me to sleep, still aching with craven terror.

I drifted through the next morning feeling vaguely sick to my stomach, the taste of bile an enchanting footnote in the back of my mouth. I began calling the various departments--Dermatology, Plastic Surgery--at 10, and left messages for several people. Two hours later, the nurse for Dr. X called back to announce that the doctor was out of town, and couldn't get back to me before Friday. So sorry. Before I could summon up the intelligence to ask who the hell Dr. X was, the call was over . . . and I had no idea how to call Dr. X's office back. I still didn't even know what department he was in.

Besides, Friday? Four days of feeling like this? Fuck that.

My arms were numb. It was hard to breathe. At 12:30, hopeless, I called and left a message with my primary care physician. She had had nothing to do with the entire fiasco, but maybe she could at least tell me what the diagnosis had been. I could do something with a diagnosis. I had resources. I knew doctors. Doctors who were communicative. Doctors who knew how to use a telephone.

That was the worst part: not knowing. Not knowing anything. Not having anything except that one word--melanoma--with nothing, no adjective, no descriptor, no code to link to it.

At 4:45 I discovered that my cell phone's battery had fallen out. I cursed creatively at the top of my lungs and pushed it back in. It beeped an SOS: message waiting. My PCP's nurse had called at 2:30 to get more details on my message. I called her back and gave her details, a step-by-step account of how I had ended up here, starting from the initial referral to the dermatologist.

"I'll talk to the doctor," she promised. "She'll order your chart and try to get back to you tonight or tomorrow."

5:00 pm. I resigned myself to another sleepless night.

Ten minutes later my doctor called.

"It's called a desmoplastic melanoma," she announced, dispensing of the courtesies with a machine-gun "YuhriHiThisIsYourDoctor." "In fact, the lab isn't quite sure that you have it at all. Your tissue samples"--the face nipple--"showed signs of being a mole, but also showed signs of being a melanoma. They're going to err on the side of caution. It doesn't look serious. This kind of thing is usually local, and rarely metastasizes. They want to do a more thorough excision in order to remove any tissue they might have missed. That should take care of it. Hopefully you won't have a huge scar."

I might have yelped at her. I think I babbled. I'm hoping I said thank you. I have the impression I might have hung up in the middle of a sentence; I was feeling a little drunk.

I wish I could say that I had some epiphany during my brief brush with mortality. I would love to be able to say that I came out the other side with a deeper appreciation for life, an enthusiasm for living, more gratitude for what I already have, more compassion for the people for whom it's real. I don't know. It's early days yet. Too soon to tell.

For the record, though, I would've made a gorgeous corpse.

lost carrot

I've been sick for the last week which, following the trip to The Cow, was one of those inevitabilities one spies heading down the road and tries to avoid anyway, like Mondays after long weekends. I'm always sick after The Cow. I can't recollect any specific examples of this besides this past week, since I seem to have difficulty remembering more than two weeks at a time, but it's obviously enough of a pattern that people at work have remarked on it.

"I keep telling you people, I'm allergic. You shouldn't send me there anymore. Really."

"We don't care that you get sick after the Cow. We were just noticing that it happens."

Feel the love.

At any rate, I lost two days of work, felt better, came in for three, infected everybody I touched as a zealous proxy for karmic retribution--I smite with the left hand of God, yea verily!--and then was flat on my back again for the entire weekend.

It was 3 AM Monday morning, restless in bed, that I realized I'd somehow managed to lose a bag of baby carrots.

I know, I know, segues. I have to work on my segues. But honestly, folks; these realizations come to me when they come to me, and if I hadn't gone to The Cow, I wouldn't have gotten sick, and if I hadn't gotten sick, I wouldn't have been awake at 3 AM, and if I hadn't been awake at 3 AM, I wouldn't have remembered the carrots. Which I'd lost. Somewhere.

I joined Weight Watchers about a month ago, one of the steps I've taken to prevent my heart from imploding. While I've only lost three pounds so far, this failure is due more to my general inability to remember I'm on Weight Watchers than any lack in the program itself. I tend to remember these sorts of things right after I've started eating the four pound roast beef sandwich, or right before I throw away the empty Carl's, Jr. wrapper.

I can just hear my cardiologist now. "Goldfish, Yuhri! Goldfish! Do you want to be a comma in the run-on sentence of life?"

Hence the carrots, a little sack of baby ones that I bought on a whim at the grocery. I've mentioned before that food-wise, I tend to operate on color rather than substance. Orange, a color I abhor in any other medium, has a way of pushing my epicurean buttons, who can say why. Thus the otherwise inexplicable passion for cheetohs which, if you really taste them, are rather like styrofoam packing beans coated with salt.

Speaking of which...

A couple of years ago after the Seattle earthquake, news and media were trumpeting the imminence of a massive quake that would annihilate most of the west coast. According to them, it was only a matter of time before we all slid into the ocean and the tuna-net ravaged dolphins got their payback playing bocce ball with our plump, dead buttocks.

None of this was news to my mother, who alternates "Be Happy!" campaigning with "The End is Coming!" predictions. In between teaching violin to her little three-year old students, gardening, visiting the poor and the sick and mentoring young teachers, she prepares quite contentedly for the forthcoming annihilation of all life on earth. God has a hard time keeping up with her expectations, seeing as how they require the job holder to be equal parts Disney production and homicidal psychopath.

She was delighted by the Seattle earthquake, in a shiny, smug sort of way. "I was ready," she told me with great satisfaction, and instantly contradicted herself with a triumphant, "Nobody was ready. It was big surprise to everybody, but I knew."

I visited her a few months later to help her empty out the garage, half of which is still packed to the roof with Dad's carpentry tools, machines, and lumber. On the so-called "clean" side of the garage, I discovered four refrigerator-sized boxes full of styrofoam beans.

She must have been collecting them for years.

"What is this?" I demanded, manhandling one towards the curb. Mom, who was busily gardening in the front yard, instantly straightened and started to chirp.

"No, no! No throwing this one out. I am keeping this ones."

I released the box with some relief. It thumped to the ground; a little cloud of styrofoam beans poofed out of the half-open lid, causing Mom some distress.

"You send that many packages?"

"Sometimes I sending, to Japan. But these are good for emergency."

Emergency . . . what? Emergency packages to Japan? I contemplated my little mother, who was busily weeding the driveway clean of little styrofoam beans for return to the big box. "What kind of emergency?"

"Earthquake," Mom announced, and tenderly replaced the beans in the box before folding it carefully shut. "If there is big emergency, I will using them to eat." She popped one in her mouth and munched, thoughtfully.

Eat. I eyed her. "Using them as chopsticks?" I suggested hopefully.

Mom swallowed. She was greatly amused. "No, no, eating them. They are making out of corn. They are biodegradable. If there is being big emergency and no food anywhere, I will eating them. They may saving my life!"

Mom knew the word biodegradable. I meditated on that while I took the box back to the garage.

So anyway, the carrots. The end of the story is that I crunched through a few--they taste nothing like cheetos--stored them in the fridge for a couple of days, then took them to work. I remember putting them in my bag. I vaguely recall eating one at work. And then, nothing. I can't find them anywhere. Not in my bag, not in my desk, not in the fridge, not in the work fridge.

Don't you love an anticlimax?

odds & ends

Mom's birthday was this past Friday. A week or so beforehand, feeling vaguely pressured into getting her some sort of present, I signed her up for a wine club membership online. What with her going through labor, painful surgery -- "My hips are too small," she told her daughters complacently in one memorable, horrific night of sharing. "They cutting from here to here, all the way across. Almost they are making me into two Mamas!" -- and wasting thirty years of her life in raising a pair of aerosol cans without environmental warning labels, I felt some sort of token was required.

I might have mentioned this before, but Mom likes wine. A glass of red every night; it actually lowers her blood sugar, which is a good thing, though I'm pretty sure there aren't a lot of doctors out there who'd recommend it as a primary response to elevated glucose levels. One glass (or maybe two) a night, and that's usually enough to get her completely buzzed. You don't know hilarious until you've seen my little Tweety Bird mother tipsy. Her eyes get all round and shiny. Her poofy head wobbles. She kicks her feet and notices the obvious with all the excitement of a first discovery. "Yuhri, you are so short next to your sister." Basically, she becomes the intellectual equivalent of a hedgehog.

She also starts tasting things. Stains. Pools of unidentified liquid. She'll discover something shrivelled and cryptic sitting on the counter, wrinkle her brow over it, wonder, "What is this?" and before anybody can stop her, nibble. Not that this is relevant. I just thought I'd, you know. Fill in some details.

By some fluke, the cool people at K&L Wines managed to deliver her new booty exactly on time, despite the fact that I hadn't bothered to mention in the order when her birthday was. She called me up, chirpy as a Tamagochi, to announce that we were "Soooo funny." She chortled and chuckled to herself on the phone, an appreciative audience at her own one-woman comedy show. "Your present, I am laughing and laughing . . ."

"Why?"

"It is so hi-la-rious," she pronounced. The woman can't remember the word for 'table,' but she can use 'hilarious' correctly? "I laughing and I laughing and Paula says, it is very creative gift, she has never seeing before, and she laughing too."

I paused to consider this. Maybe she hadn't quite got it? "It's not a gag gift, Mom. You can actually drink it, you know. It's real wine."

"Yes. Funny. Ha ha ha ha!"

This was obviously some sort of generational or cultural disconnect. There isn't much you can say when a person receives a gift of wine with a: "Funny, ha ha! I am laughing and laughing!" My personal suspicion was that she tried on her gift before she called me, just to see if her head fit through the hole.

My sister headed out for Panama today, pickled in a van she bought with her boyfriend for $2,000 from a random stranger who threatened them with violence when they counter-offered. Four of them -- Sako, her boyfriend, their friend and his girlfriend -- will be spending the next two months driving an erratic and potentially inconclusive route down to Panama, after which they'll return to the Bay Area for Christmas.

I'm sorry. Did I say Sako and her boyfriend? Did I mention she broke up with him a week before the trip? "We're postponing the actual breakup until after the trip is over," she explained cheerfully over a lunch at the Neiman Marcus Rotunda in San Francisco. "It's for the best. He wants things like marriage and kids, and I want to join the Peace Corps."

"You have to have a college degree to join the Peace Corps."

"I'll graduate from college. . ."

"You're ten years into a four year bachelor's degree program. You haven't taken a class since 2002."

". . . someday."

Right. Dear Abby. My sister. . .

The original trip was intended to take them down to Chile, for a span of six months. "But everyone wants to go back home for Christmas," she told me deprecatingly, "so we're coming back in between. We've already got our first job," she added.

"Job?"

"Picking coffee beans in El Salvador." Her eyes lit up. "25 cents per hundred pounds."

Even by her standards, this was not commensurate renumeration. "Is that technically a paying job?"

"That's what they pay coffee pickers down in El Salvador," she informed, and hastened on when I started getting visibly disgruntled on behalf of El Salvadorean coffee pickers. "You can get by on 25 cents in El Salvador. It's cheap down there."

"I dare you to get by on 25 cents. I dare you."

"It's really cheap."

"I suppose, if you're living in your van."

"Well, we have a place to live, too," she admitted. "John's aunt owns the coffee plantation, and we can stay there, except she won't let us stay without a bodyguard so she's hired one--"

I regurgitated half my glass of water. "Sorry. What? Bodyguard? What? What? Did you say bodyguard?"

"His aunt's a little paranoid."

Golly. Imagine that. And now so am I.