never seen a tiara worn there

At some point during my interminable imprisonment in New Jersey, I sat down at my computer and bought myself a crown.

You'd be surprised at the kind of thoughts that drifted through my head, all alone in that hotel room. Too much solitude isn't a healthy thing for a woman who runs an open-door shelter for intellectual vagrants in her skull. Trapped by the weather in the misery of a three-star hotel suite that provides free cable, pay-for-porn, an indoor swimming pool, and a dial-up connection? Horror. The only shows playing in the back of my eyeballs were: What's for dinner? and, I need a tiara.

It didn't occur to me that there was anything abnormal about this abrupt and entirely uncharacteristic need. Not until later, that is. The upcoming wedding barely even registered as an excuse. No, I was a woman trapped in a hotel in New Jersey. I'd clocked over 90 hours in 8 consecutive work days, and it's possible I was starting to lose my grip. I needed a crown. I was a princess. I needed a tiara to be a princess. Everybody else got to be the princess. There were whole battalions of men in San Francisco who got to be the princess. It was my turn, dammit. Mine mine mine!

Yes, well. This is one of those things that only make sense if you were actually wandering through my mind at the time. Anyway, it became an obsession. Tiara. Now.

And, oh. Look. Ebay.

The need for the tiara died down as abruptly as it rose, though too late to save my credit card. It wasn't an expensive purchase, at least. I'd retained that much control over my senses. By the next morning, I had already forgotten all about it.

On my first day back in the office, it was brought back to my memory when the tiara arrived in a little white box just big enough for my chin. Let me tell you, when purple monkeys discover that a tiara is in the house, this is cause for excitement. Lots of excitement. Piles of little purple monkeys, dancing on each other purple monkey heads. After all, crown = royalty. Could it be there was a new purple monkey prince in town?

Emboldened by my self-made elevation, I organized a coup and reorganized my department. Then I took it home.

Here's a sad fact: no man is a prophet to his family. No woman is a god to her fiance. The Guy, noteworthy though he may be in other not-insignificant merits, is like many other members of his great, international brotherhood.

He doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut.

I was waiting for him when he came home, all becrowned and bejeweled. "So what do you think?" I demanded, presenting the full glory of my sparkling, regal beauty to the Guy.

He stared. His mouth twitched convulsively. I twirled for him and felt glamorous, like a short, pear-shaped, ethnic Barbie.

"It's ... nice." He sounded like he was being strangled.

"You're laughing," I accused suspiciously.

"I'm not laughing." His mouth was now twitching uncontrollably. His eyes were shiny and bulging. "You have a tiara. That's nice."

He was starting to hiccup, too.

"You don't like it."

"No, it's very ... nice. It's a tiara." And now he was being encouraging, in a high-pitched falsetto that suggested a three-puffs-a-day helium habit.

"Fine," I said flatly, and flounced -- yes, flounced; the tiara demanded flouncing -- off. Behind me, the Guy burst into carols of hilarity that probably had the neighbors upstairs thinking dark thoughts about illegal dingo pets. This being rampant provocation, I promptly turned back and bludgeoned him to death with my shiny disco-ball sceptre.

So the wedding's going to be missing a groom, but at least I'll look outstanding in my sparkly tiara.

***

Adjustment to California has been a little odder than I thought it would be. Two weeks wouldn't have been enough time, you'd think, for my entire life to get out of whack, and yet -- there it goes. After some struggle, I've given up on trying to shift from east coast sleeping patterns to west coast; waking up at 3 AM may not do much for me, but tossing and turning to wake up at 7 AM does allow me to go to the gym and work out for an hour before work. Too, going to sleep at 10 PM might seem like the height of old fogeyism, but there's nothing good on TV after 11 anyway, so no big loss.

Eventually I might revert back -- I loathe being a morning person now -- but until then, my health will reap the benefits while my psyche sulks. In the meantime, my apologies to New Jersey drivers. I hadn't realized you'd take offense to my earlier harping on your failures, and send your people to California after me.

Heard on NPR, Wednesday night.

Newscaster 1: "Traffic backed up for quite a long stretch behind Golden Gate Bridge, due to ... what?"

(pause.)

N1: "Due to ... apparently, earlier this evening someone attempted to do a U-Turn on the Golden Gate Bridge."

Newscaster 2: "A what?"

N1: "A ... that's what it says. A U-Turn on the Golden Gate Bridge."

(silence. Then muffled hilarity.)

N2: "A U-Turn. On the Golden Gate Bridge. Wow. That's something."

N1: "Traffic is slowly returning to normal, and...."

***

The Guy, who inexplicably survived the first pounding and, Man-like, had failed to learn his lesson, came upon me experimenting with the tiara in front of the mirror last night.

"Hee," he said. "Hee. Hee hee hee."

I hit him over the head with my new crown. This failed to persuade him to adopt a proper mien of respectful reverence.

"Hee. You have a tiara. You're a Princess."

"Damn straight."

"You're a Japanese American Princess," he crooned, gleefully. "Japanese American Princess. J, A, Princess. J, A, P--"

Anyone feeling the urge to sit shiva? I've got a perfect corpse, all lined up.

news from the home front

I'm home.

(That was delicious. Let me try that again.)

I'm home.

The weather is 57 degrees. I stepped off the plane wearing a sheepfur-lined jacket, a scarf, a hat, and gloves. Just in case.

57 degrees. I called the New Jersey customer and was informed that they were expecting 12 to 15 inches of snow in a couple of days. Weather.com says it's 19 degrees Farenheit over there, but feels like 9. Oh, it's warming up. That's nice. "What's it like over there?"

"It's overcast," I temporized. I didn't want to gloat.

(I lie. I did want to gloat. I'm just bigger than that, is all.)

I'm home. Today I'm wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Just a T-shirt. I mean, yes, a bra underneath because otherwise the little purple monkeys would be sightseeing some Golden Gate Bridges, if you get my drift, but still ... just a T-shirt. No scarf, no gloves, no hat, no jacket, no second jacket, no sweater beneath the second jacket and over the T-shirt. Just a T-shirt.

There is a God, and he's got invisible pigeons shit-bombing New Jersey.

Me? I'm home. Hi.

***

The Guy came to meet me at the airport. He looked strange. This is what happens when you've been parted from people for too long; their faces start to transform in your mind until they reach some randomly generated, amorphous ideal. Except it turns out that my ideal is fatter than the real Guy. The real Guy, it transpired, has been exercising regularly and has lost five pounds.

"You always lose weight when I'm away."

"It's because there's nothing else to do."

"It's healthier for you when I go away?"

"That, too."

"I hate you."

He kissed me. We grinned like idiots. Everything was back to normal.

Like many a self-respecting single male, he'd survived on little packets of ramen for the most part, lacking either the motivation or the creativity to actually cook. I shudder to think what single men would be living on if it hadn't been for my people and mass production. Microwave popcorn? Cheetos? We'd have to redefine the male standard of beauty. A few days before I left, he'd bought a giant box of instant kimchee ramen. What was it, a 54 pack? I peeked into the box when I got back. Two left. I can't imagine what's going down in his bowels.

In order to catch the 7 am flight out of Newark, I'd woken up at 4 am, after falling asleep on a tidal wave of work-related nerves at 1 am. I got lost on the way to the airport, and managed to return my rental car a solid 45 minutes before the plane took off. No problem. Plane was half empty. I don't get that. Who the hell wants to stay in New Jersey?

Technically, the time meant that it was after lunch for me. Breakfast had consisted of airline largess; the stewardesses had fed me a cold, squishy omelette for lunch that I hadn't been able to choke down. By the California clock, I'd last eaten at 4 AM. I was a trifle starved. We headed to the Sky Kitchen cafe at San Mateo airport, a popular breakfast place for us, followed the entire way by the delicately tuned complaints of my internal organs.

Cafe was full. I read a newspaper while we waited.

I don't normally keep track of the US news -- what I call "the Entertainment News" because it's not really news so much as it is entertainment, though the rest of the world calls it CNN. In the main, I prefer to gain my current events education from the BBC Online service, which at least has the benefit of realizing there's an entire world out there, full of people who aren't Americans. There was no BBC Online service at the cafe. There was, however, a little local paper that came out weekly and managed to revel in the depths of editorial incompetences. On our trips to the Sky Kitchen, I invariably pick up the latest copy, the better to entertain myself with the more egregious offences against the English language.

One would think that with this spirit of noble nitpicking, there would be little room left for actual digestion of news, and yet, there was one article that I glanced over that actually managed to lodge a little hook in my brain. It niggled. It nudged. It tugged. The Scott Peterson -- Scott Peterson trial? -- had been moved.

Scott Peterson. Was this an important trial? I was assured that it was. Why was it important? People were outraged by the murder of a pregnant woman. Pregnant women are killed all the time, I pointed out. Murder is one of the leading causes of death for pregnant women. Ah, but I hadn't been paying attention. America was outraged because it was an attractive, affluent, white pregnant woman.

Well, there you go. And it had been moved.

Guess where.

Go on.

Guess.

When you're done with that, guess which courthouse is only three blocks away from yours truly.

And now, guess who has jury duty next week.

C'mon.

Guess.

Coincidences aside, it's unlikely in the extreme that I'd ever end up a juror for the Peterson trial. For one thing, any lawyer stupid enough to select me as a potential juror is too stupid to be practicing law, much less working on such a high-profile case. I can already picture the initial interview.

"What is your opinion on murder?"

"Is the victim purple?"

"I . . . beg your pardon?"

"Because if the victim is purple and has a prehensile tail, I don't mind."

"A what?"

"Especially if it's wearing a little crown. I could go in for some good purple, prehensile-tail, crown-wearing murder right now."

"I . . . see."

"Could he be strangled? Strangling's good. Slow. It's slow. And tactile."

"Next!"

***

An email from my sister, for your entertainment....

aah montana...where the men are men and the sheep are scared.

i'm in bozeman, montana. home of hyalite canyon, bridger bowl, and yes, scared sheep. central america to montana is not exactly the most graceful of transitions, but the scenery is spectacular and the people are beyond sincere. although the temperature has been a bit sporadic, jumping from -32 F to +40 F, we've been able to go skiing, snowmobiling, and bring shame to the gracefulness of ice climbing.

so many of you know by now that the fantastic road trip i was intending on taking down to tierra del fuego was put on hold. after reaching the end of central america, we realized that the funds needed to fuel our beast of a car would cost us almost double of what we had originally expected. also, since the number in our group went from four down to two, the driving responsibilities escalated to many more mind-numbingly cruel hours. thefore, the second leg of the trip has been put on hold until a later date when i can find a few others whom i can tolerate (or rather, who can tolerate me) for a few months.

my strange and wonderfully rude, scottish-y friend just had an asian looking baby at her current residence of barcelona, spain. the reasons why this little bambino was blessed with above average features is beyond me. perhaps my superior, asian, genes were somehow transmitted overseas via osmosis. nonetheless, it gives me hope for the little poop dispenser.

with that said, i will be leaving for spain sometime in march to torment the little tax write-off and his mother.

i will be needing a climbing partner. i can't guarantee weather patterns during the months of march/april or april/may, but if anyone would like to come out for a couple of weeks to go climb, i'd be super thrilled! spain has a lot to offer!

love,
sako

current location: bozeman, montana
next location/s: missoula, montana >>> seattle, washington >>> san francisco, california >>> las vegas, nevada >>> ?

pens

"Where are the -- I can't find a pen."

"Here's one. No, wait. It doesn't work."

"Do you have one?"

"Hm? I'm using the last one. --Hey, you have a pen for Yuhri?"

"I have some pencils...."

"This is amazing. You don't have any pens. Your drug reps aren't doing their jobs. This is the first clinic I've been to where there are no drug advertisement pens falling out of people's ears."

"It's kind of unusual. Usually we have lots of them."

"I can't find any."

"It's because it's just after the holidays. Usually we have more pens than brains around here."

"Heh. Heh heh. Yuhri. Tell them about the thing you had with the server and trying to reboot it--"

"Shut up. Give me your pen."

phone calls II

"I can't turn on this damned machine."

"Did you check the power cords?"

"Yes."

"Did you flick the switch?"

"Yes."

"What did you do to it?"

"I'm telling you, nothing. I came in, it had the blue screen, I couldn't do squat, so I turned it off. I was desperate. And now the fucking thing won't turn back on."

"So you flicked the switch."

"Yes."

"Both of them?"

"Yes."

"And you flicked them back?"

"What am I, a fucking moron? Yes!"

"And then you pushed the button in front?"

(silence.)

"Button in front?"

"The power button."

"The one in front."

"The power button in front. It had a power sign on it."

"There isn't a power button in front."

"Yes there is."

"No, there isn't. I'm telling you, I'm looking right at it, and there's no power button."

"You see how the front opens up?"

"What?"

"You see the top half of the machine, how there's a flap there?"

"A flap?"

"Like a little door. A panel. It swings open, just like a door."

"It's locked."

"Have you tried it?"

"There's a lock on the side. It looks like it needs a key. Goddammit, I need a key to turn on this machine?"

"Try opening the little door."

"I'm telling you, it's . . . oh."

"Now. Do you see the power button?"

(silence.)

"Hello?"

"You tell anyone about this, I'll kill you."

"You're a sad, sad person. You know that, don't you?"

"Don't screw with me. I'm a California girl in New Jersey, and there's white shit coming down from the sky. Entire goddamn state is covered with flying, frozen, pooping pigeons."

"That's snow, Yuhri."

"Pigeons, I'm telling you."

"It melts when it lands?"

"They have liquid diets."

"Booted up yet?"

"Bite me."

phone calls

"Hello."

"Hello?"

"Hello. This is Yuhri."

"Hi."

(silence)

"So ... what can I do for you?"

"Um, you called me."

"I did?"

"Yes."

"Who's this?"

"AM."

"Hm. Why did I call you?"

"I don't know. You tell me."

"Do you suppose it was something work-related?"

"It probably is. We work together."

"That's true."

"Does it maybe have something to do with the errors on the server?"

"We have errors on the server?"

"Well, you sent an email out about that this morning."

"We shouldn't have errors on the server."

"No, not really."

"It's absolutely unacceptable."

"I agree."

"Could you get the engineers to look at that?"

"Sure."

"Christ. I can't believe this. A week and a half and we still haven't fixed the fucking server."

"I know."

"It's ridiculous. How do they expect us to succeed out here if they don't read their goddamn email and fix stuff that's broken?"

"Yeah."

"I mean, for fuck's sake. Don't they have any professional pride? What are they, lemmings? They have the attention spans of french fried canaries."

"Of what?"

"It's unbelievable."

"Yes."

"They have absolutely no follow-through. I swear they're out to screw me over."

"Are you warm enough over there?"

"What?"

"Are you wrapping up when you go outside? A hat, maybe? A thick hat for your head?"

"Why?"

"Nothing. Just wondered. Bet it's cold."

"I hate you all."

"Okay. I'm sorry. I'll get the engineers on it."

"Okay."

"Anything else?"

"No."

"Okay. I'll stay on them until they fix it."

"Thanks. You're the best."

"No problem. Stay warm."

"I hate you."

"Heh."

(click.)

(boop boop beep beep boop.)

(click.)

"Yes?"

"Hi. It's me again."

"Hey, Yuhri. What's up?"

"I remembered why I called you."

"Sure. What's up?"

"How do I check my office voicemail?"

things you overhear

Nurse on the phone.

"You're feeling dizzy? And nauseous? Like you might pass out? No, he can't come to the phone right now. He's seeing patients. You feel sick? Where are you again? Honey-- no, I know he is, but dear, he's seeing patients. What do you want him to do? I don't think he can do that. He's seeing patients. Have you talked to-- no, I know that. Of course he does. But he's in the middle of seeing patients. He'll be finished in a couple of hours. He's already a few hours behind. I can't disturb him when he's seeing .... listen to me. Yes, I know you're not feeling well, but you're at a hospital. There are doctors there. Go downstairs, walk into the ER, and ask them to look at you. No, don't wait for him. Go downstairs and tell someone you're not feeling well. Honey, he can't come to the phone. There are doctors where you are. They can help you. Yes, there are. Yes, they're different doctors -- YOU'RE IN A HOSPITAL."

70th birthday

Dr. H's Daughter: "Your balloons are running out of air. Look."

Me: "Oh, hey. Happy 70th."

Dr. H: "What?!"

Me: "You look good for a 70 year old man."

Dr. H: "I'm not 70!"

DHD: "Say thank you."

DH: "For what?"

DHD: "She complimented you."

DH: "She did? How did she compliment me?"

DHD: "She said you looked good for a 70 year old man."

DH: "But I'm NOT 70!"

DHD: "That's not the point. Say thank you."

DH: "I'm not saying thank you! The balloons say 50!"

DHD: "Be polite."

DH: "I'm not 70 years old!"

ME: "But you look good for not being 70."

DH: "....!"

50 is apparently a difficult year for men.

peeing dog

Dr. H: "You know how to get back to New Jersey?"

Me: "Um...that-a-way?"

DH: "That way's Florida."

Me: "So the other direction?"

DH: "Here. We wrote down the directions for you."

ME: "Hey, thanks!"

Dr. H's Daughter: "We gave you a couple of ways."

DH: "You go that way down 3rd. Here, let me show you."

ME: "Now he's going to draw me a picture."

DH: "And it does this and this and goes up a little bit like this...."

ME: "My Mom draws me pictures. One time she drew a little dog on a map."

DH: "She like dogs?"

ME: "No. She just remembered she once saw a really beautiful dog on that corner, so she drew it there to show me where it was."

DH: "Was it there when you got there?"

ME: "No."

DH: "Huh. So you turn here, it sort of goes up like this, and don't go this way because that way goes somewhere else you don't want to go. And there might be a little dog here, but he'll probably be peeing because it's so freaking cold."

ME: "He drew a dog peeing."

DHD: "That's pee?"

alligator finger

I have this alligator finger. Basically, it's a finger that looks like it might have once belonged to an alligator. It's scaly. Not dry skin scaly, exactly. It's more like black plague pus-laden sore, dead skin, dying nail, little bubbles, raw flesh scaly.

It's possible if I touched a newborn baby with this finger, the baby would explode.

Like any intelligent, well-educated young woman with an abnormal growth (or decay) taking place on a major digit, I took it to the doctor and showed it to her during my regular checkup. "Anything else you'd like to talk to me about?"

That was my cue, see. "Look," I said, and held up my finger. "I have this thing happening."

"Hm," she said, and looked at it. Without touching, mind you. Then she added brightly, "Anything else?"

Which, okay, isn't what I would consider medical care, but at least it had been looked at. I took me and my gross finger back home, where the two of us stewed for a little while.

Fast forward to yesterday, where I'm wandering around the halls of the Brooklyn clinic, waiting for everyone to finish for the day and generally making a nuisance of myself. Dr. H came zipping by, and paused just long enough to talk to me about one of his computers. "----!" he said, and dashed out the door.

I followed him with my finger. "Dr. H! Hey, can I ask you about this thing?"

He grabbed my finger. It oozed at him. Suddenly, it was a Thing.

He hauled two nurses out and ordered them to look for some sort of ointment. "If we don't have samples, you can go to the pharmacy. I'll write you a prescription. Here. It'll be, like, two dollars, you put it on--"

"I'll just put some skin lotion on it," I demured. Too much trouble. Going to the pharmacy would require going outside. Outside was cold. No pharmacy.

Be that way. Abandoning all patients, Dr. H dove after another doctor unfortunate enough to be emerging from an exam room, and sent him off on a hunt for ointment samples. He himself dove into the medicine cabinet, and started rummaging around. "Ask Dr. P if she has any!" he yelled after one of the nurses, who had resurfaced to report failure. She disappeared into an exam room, and reemerged a moment later, trailing Dr. P.

Dr. P inspected my finger. Her verdict: "Gross. --Let me go find some ointment."

In under thirty seconds, I ground the entire clinic to a standstill. And I hadn't even touched a computer yet.

Why can't I get that kind of medical treatment from people I pay for medical treatment, instead of from people who pay me for computer work?

tulips

...and then I woke up this morning, feeling like road kill that had been fermenting a few days. I know, I know: fermenting implies I was involved in some sort of binge. No such luck. It has been an unbelievably exhausting week, and my blood sugar has been ... well, let's just say that if I keep this up, I'll be blind and legless before I reach 35. I have shadows under my eyes you could lose the US foreign policy in, and a ragged, run-down feeling, like I'd been chewed on all night by small, angry rodents.

I'm typing this in Brooklyn right now, in a doctor's office I'll be doing some work on shortly. My brain is fried; I can't remember previous entries, though I think I might've mentioned something about the rodents before. For some reason I'm fixated on this thought. I'm not sleeping so well, and I'm so tired I'm pretty sure I've gone towards the light and am already dead.

The afterlife sucks, man. God keeps gerbils. Avoid it if possible.

I've been compensating for this inability to sleep by pretending to sleep, under the theory that if I look like I'm sleeping, eventually I'll fool someone and "wake up," refreshed. Obviously I have relationship issues with my body that I need to work out. This morning I was disturbed in my pretending by a phone call from the hotel's front desk. I had a package.

I assumed this was a delivery from work, a long-awaited laptop and install disk for this installation I'm supposed to do today in this Brooklyn clinic, two and a half hours from now. The thought of tht install had given me nightmares all week. I didn't, shall we say, leap out of bed and run downstairs to find out what it was.

I got ready for work. (Yes, I know it's a Saturday. This is my life.) I cleaned up my hotel room. I put on my coat, my gloves, my scarf, got my keys, my computer, my bags, my purse, and marched downstairs.

The girl at the front desk was the one who'd checked me in initially, a week ago. I doubted she'd remember me. I began well. "Excuse me. I got a phone call that I have a package---"

I was about to give her my name, but she dove back behind the counter and emerged with a long, fat box.

Wasn't a laptop. Wasn't a CD. Obviously this wasn't meant for my install. I carried it back upstairs, deposited my stuff on the bed, and pried the box open.

The Guy had sent me tulips. A dozen beautiful pink tulips.

I cried like a baby.

I make fun of the Guy in my journal, a little bit, because he does and says such strange and funny things. People do that. Especially people you love. Just in case I've ever led you to believe that he's an accidental selection out of the bottom of the sales bin at K-Mart, let me just say this for the record:

I am marrying the most wonderful man in the world. My heart is so full, it hurts. Everything that ever went wrong, every mistake I ever made, every decision I shouldn't have made, led up to the day when I met him and fell in love. I have no regrets.

I love you, Yan.

Thank you.

she did what?

"She didn't."

"She did."

"You've got to be joking. How did she figure that one out?"

"I don't know. Even if she didn't get told by her doctor, it's not like it's not written on the bottle--"

"Wait. Wait. Tell Yuhri this. She's got to hear this."

"Hear what?"

"I have this friend who's a nurse at another clinic, she tells me this story. There's this woman, right? She gets prescribed a nasal spray. The doctor tells her, two puffs, one in each nostril, once during the day, once during the night."

"Okay."

"So she comes back and complains that it's not working right. So the doctor says, well, try it for a little while longer and see what happens."

"Okay."

"So she comes back later and says it still isn't working right. The doctor's surprised, because it should be, and says, well, maybe you're not getting a tight enough seal when you're spraying it. And she says, I'm not a whore."

"What?"

"Turns out, she's been spraying this in her vagina, twice a day."

"What?!"

"Yeah. That's what I said."

"But it was a nasal spray. For her nose."

"Guess she failed high school anatomy."

Jersey Girl

You have to imagine what the people in New Jersey think of me when they see me show up at their clinic, pasty white and shivering.

"It cold enough for you?"

Why do people say this? No, it's not. I like it really brisk. I like it to be razor sharp. I like the wind to be able to flay the skin off road kill, and ice particles in the air to draw blood from exposed skin.

It snowed night before last, the 2-4 inches that they were threatening me with at the beginning of the day, rather than the more malicious 4-6 they'd graduated to by the end. The clinic's office manager gave me a ride. Today it's record lows. Last time it was this cold, Grover Cleveland was President. -15 last night. -14 tonight.

The east coasters watched me walk into the office with the Office Manager, and instantly started giving the California Girl grief. "What, you moving in with [office manager] now?"

California Girl: "There's this stuff on the ground. White stuff. And it's cold and poof!"

Jersey Girls: "That's snow, honey. It comes down from the sky."

CG: (with deep suspicion) "Things don't come down out of the sky."

JGs: "Like rain, except frozen."

CG: "Pigeons sometimes drop stuff out of the sky. Out of the sky is bad. I've seen movies."

JGs: "Didn't feel comfortable driving?"

CG: "There was stuff! On the ground! From the sky!"

the optional white line

I know that it's cliche to complain about this, but it seems only fair to mention that New Jersey drivers are unlike anything I have ever experienced before.

Ever. Even in New York.

I kid you not.

Did you know the dotted white lines dividing the lanes in freeways are there for suggestion only? That the yellow lines that theoretically divide This Way lanes from That Way lanes are optional? And so are lights? That intersections are experiments in particle physics? And that if you don't take a corner at 40 miles an hour, you aren't living?

Bizarrely, these people do not use the horn. Ever. I've heard more angry drivers outside Kindergartens. Little ghost suicidals, zipping along the cocaine tracks of New Jersey roads ... I think they survive by accident, like doped up fruit flies.

Doped up little fruit flies, mainlining pomellos. Bizarrely, I think being such bad drivers makes them good drivers; their own faults are so bad, they grow to expect them in other people, and compensate accordingly. On Sunday I had to swerve across five lanes of freeway in under ten feet in order to get to my hotel. Not a single horn. Not a single screech of brakes. Not a single accident.

Man, New Jersey drivers. It boggles the mind.

my ass broke off.

I'm going to descend into blogdoom for the rest of my trip here, folks. I apologize in advance. (Blogdoom? Did I mean that? I think I might have.)

***

New Jersey.

Hell has frozen over, my friends. At least I now understand why I'm getting married.

The trip was remarkably without incident, though there was an alarming moment in the San Francisco security line when they wanted to swab my laptop down. They do this periodically when I'm passing through; it's like a courtesy nod to drug dealers. See? We're not profiling drug dealers. We're testing this token, harmless, fat little Asian chick too. Except the fat Asian chick remembered that we'd made mochi a couple of weeks ago, and that there was rice flour everywhere and does rice flour show up as a toxic substance on a cursory scan? After all, “risin” sounds an awful lot like “rice.”

You might be surprised to hear that I actually did quite well in high school chemistry. This homonym-based toxin classification system is something that I developed in my mostly sciences-free college years. Music school, you know. The most toxic stuff we did was ground up plastic piano keys.

Anyway, I made up my mind to ask the security agent if risin would show up on the little swab she was doing, but by the time I had the question all organized in my brain so I wouldn't sound like a complete jackass, she'd already finished and was waving me through. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have been a good idea. I mean, you could be the most unsuspicious security guard in the world and still be a little perturbed if someone asked you about your detection ability for a specific toxic substance.

(Added at 10:54 pm, January 13, 2004 -- Except it turns out I meant "sarin," not "risin," which doesn't even exist. So all that would've happened is I would've looked like more of an idiot than I would've been even asking to begin with. Kind of glad I kept my mouth shut. For once.)

***

The night before...

Me: “Will you miss me?”

The Guy: “I won't be missing the abuse I get while you're here.”

Silence.

Me: “What?”

TG: “Nothing.”

Me: “See, you say these things and then they're out there, and there's no putting them back.”

TG: “Like testicles. They're just hanging out there, but nobody ever wants to talk about them.”

Which you have to admit, as a diversionary tactic, wasn't that bad.

***

It's possible I wasn't reading between the lines when the New Yorkers advised me to bring a sweater. “It's a little cold,” they said. Bastards. Every other time of they year they can tell me exactly what they think. “Your software sucks.” “You suck.” “This entire situation sucks.” But for my trip to New Jersey, it was, “You'll want to bring a sweater. It's a little cold.”

It's not a little cold. It's a lot cold. It's colder than the IRS on tax day. It's colder than Ann Coulter at a welfare mothers' rally. It's colder than the Bush Administration towards civil rights. I scratched my ass on the way to the car yesterday morning, and -- I kid you not -- it broke off. Clattered right to the cold, icy ground, where it shattered into a million tiny pieces of frozen ass. Bits of my rear end now seed New Jersey turf.

Fortunately, the destruction of half my ass still leaves me with a full-grown shut-in's allotment of cheek meat, so I'm still sexy. However, it's New Jersey sexy, so all I'm currently attracting is a few garbage disposal trucks and a truculent carjacker.

Damn. I just took off my jacket and I think my left nipple snapped off.

mattress topper

The Guy is currently enthusiastic about the purchase of a new mattress topper made of some kind of foam that will increase the comfort level of our current chiropractic nightmare.

"It'll help us sleep better. We'll get good rest and you won't wake up tired like you do right now. Then maybe the midnight beatings will stop."

Midnight beatings? What midnight beatings?

"You know, the arms whacking me, the kicking, the way you take over the bed and punish me because sleeping on the futon makes you restless."

What?

"Anyway, maybe with the mattress topper you'll sleep better and we won't have to get a new mattress."

Which is a worthy goal from his point of view. Me, I'm more entertained by the name of the thing. Mattress topper. Bwah! (Because I'm 12 years old.) Besides which -- and I didn't have the heart to tell him this -- having a new, more comfortable bed won't make much of a difference. I'm just a sprawler.

The Guy persists on thinking the Cthulhu sleeping style is related to some sort of unconscious unhappiness with the environment. My mattress situation hasn't been a good one since I moved to California, a little over five years ago. There was the extended period of time when I didn't actually have a bed at all, and sort of lolled about on an foam camping mattress my Mom packed in my car in a fit of inspiration. That lasted for almost a year. Then Tara and Remington had to get rid of a futon-and-frame that Remington had owned since his days in MIT, back in the 1860s.

"Hear you need a bed," quoth they.

"Gimme," quoth I, because sleeping practically on the floor in an uninsulated, cockroach-infested tenement in the heart of San Francisco is not my idea of luxury.

This served me just fine for the next year in San Francisco, followed by a year or two in Redwood City. The futon was just far enough off the floor that the cockroaches, who can be tenacious in their search for a human orifice to breed or crap in -- warm! dank! dark! private! -- were mostly thwarted. When the Guy moved in a little less than a year ago, he brought his own futon with him. His was in marginally better repair, and slightly larger to boot. It's about 15 years old. We went with it instead.

My back hurts. My neck hurts. My head hurts. However, I probably would have thrashed anyway. I've tried to explain this to him.

"It's coming on Friday! I'm excited! We're going to have a mattress topper!"

"Yeah. But see, what I'm trying to tell you is--"

"Aren't you excited? I'm excited. I'm getting excited. I'm excited!"

"Yeah."

"Mattress topper! Isometric foam mattress topper! Want to see the web page?"

Some of you are probably out there thinking, "30 years old and sleeping on a futon?" To those people, I say, bite me. The futon was and is a traditional sleeping mattress in Japan, where there are no cockroaches and where generations of little Japanese men and women have slept in perfect, highly educated, well employed comfort. It's only in the US where the futon has become the refuge of the unemployed college student and first apartment 20 year old.

Besides, this is only my second apartment, and it's not like what happens on the Island of the Purple Monkeys could be considered work in any way, shape, or form. More like torture. Didn't we sign some sort of thing in Geneva--?

Hm. Maybe I'm an enemy combatant. That could explain so much.

***

I'm headed for New Jersey for two weeks starting tomorrow.

New Jersey.

Two weeks.

(My life is crap.)

I've heard from some people -- New Yorkers, mostly -- that New Jersey isn't all that bad. That is to say, they yelp, "New Jersey?" and then start mumbling incoherencies under their breath. Since usually New Yorkers are unambiguous about their feelings, I choose to assume this means that they are unused to the requirement of saying something good about someone.

"Well, it doesn't suck."

You know, that sort of thing.

In the meantime, I'm packing sweaters, workout clothes, and an Aikido uniform. It turns out that there's a conveniently situated Aikido dojo only a few miles away from the hotel. I've called ahead, and they'll tolerate my clumsy presence for the space of a couple of weeks. If I travel much more, I'll be able to claim I've been beat up by every state in the union.

Wonder if there's an Aikido dojo in Alaska?

madness of mom

The Guy, who has an undeveloped -- and therefore dangerous -- sense of humor, directed my mother towards my journal on the first day of her visit. I was busy in my recliner, working through email. The first I knew of it was my Mom's piping question to the Guy.

"Why the mushrooms?"

"I don't know," quoth he. "You should ask her."

"I like mushrooms," I said absent-mindedly, then refocused and looked up to discover my Mom and my fiance colluding together over a laptop. Not, shall we say, a picture to delight the eyes. "What're you talking about?"

"Yuhri keeps a web journal," the treacherous Guy told Mom, blithely indifferent to the whirlwind of potential consequences. "She writes these articles and posts them online so everybody can read them. She has some great stories about you."

Fortunately, One-Track-Mind Mom was still fixated on the fungus. "They're poisonous mushrooms," she told me.

"I don't care."

Said Mom to the Guy, wide-eyed, "She wanting maybe to kill everybody."

She did not follow through and actually read the journal. The Guy has been allowed to keep his testicles.

***

A week at Mom's house in Seattle, and two days back in California with Mom as a visitor.

Stories? I have stories. Gather 'round, y'all.

***

Mom and my sister came to pick us up in the Toyota Previa, a goliath of a van that has been in our family now for 13 years. It was Dad's purchase, back when; I've spoken before about his fascination for road trips. The Previa was the culmination of those years of dreaming, the ultimate incarnation of the family road trip vehicle. Whatever its purpose, it never had a chance to fulfill it. A few years later he died of lung cancer, without ever having had a chance of driving it cross country.

As the vehicle for a single woman, it is eminently impractical. Mom holds onto it anyway, motivated as much by sentiment as by a reluctance to buy another car. I've mentioned this before, but in her college days she studied under Dr. Suzuki with a young man named Koji Toyoda, nicknamed “Ko-chan.” The real Ko-chan is now in his sixties at least, and president of the Talent Education Research Institute, an eminent figure in the circles of musical pedagogy.

Out in Bellevue, he's an ancient, puttering corpse of a car. It isn't too far a leap from “Toyoda” to “Toyota.”

I checked the odometer while Mom puttered happily down the highway at a consistent 60 miles an hour. Tiny old women who could barely see over their steering wheels zipped past us with ruthless impatience. “How many miles are on this car now?”

Mom peered at the mileage. The van slowly drifted off the road. “179,680.”

“Wow. Isn't it time you got a new car?”

Mom made severe shushing sounds at me, finger pressed to lips and all. “No no, don't worry. She was just joking.” She patted the steering wheel tenderly.

“Who are you talking to?”

“It was just a joke. She didn't mean it,” she cooed at the car. “Yuhri, you hurt Ko-chan's feelings.”

“170,000 miles, Mom. It's about time.”

“You work so hard for me. There there. Ko-chan is my favorite.”

The car was doing an ominous stuttering thing the entire way home, occasionally catching on the brake in a burst of hiccups before scooting on again for a few more feet. To be completely honest, I can't be positive it wasn't my Mom's driving.

***

The trip was ostensibly (at least in Mom's eyes) a vacation for us. How it is that vacations automatically translate to "chores, errands, and work" is still a mystery to me.

We had one day of peace and quiet, after which Mom decided that we had rested enough. The Guy fixed the stove and redid the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom. Me? A hundred little errands and tasks she'd been saving up for the last six months, just for me.

"What else happened at Mom's place that was funny?"

"I don't remember," mumbled the Guy. "I've blocked it out of my memory."

It was educational for the Guy, if nothing else. He is now thoroughly intimate with the inner mysteries of a toilet, and has hands-on experience in how to replace a sink. And Mom loves him.

"She make a old woman, oh, so happy," she enthused.

Mom has a tenuous grasp on pronouns. "He, Mom. He."

She was unrepentant. "Make me so happy, so nice."

There was much loud banging, and the sound of the Guy swearing with some enthusiasm came floating down the stairs. Mom beamed.

***

That first evening, after a day's rest and relaxation, I went with the Guy to pick my sister up from work. Mom's car, we discovered, was not Seattle-friendly. It had also heard what I'd said to Mom about finding a new car. Should have remembered about the Japanese, that they know how to hold a grudge.

We met Sako at Uwajimaya, a massive Japanese grocery near the new Safeco arena. We invited her to drive us home. "Yeah, Yuhri's not comfortable driving it."

Except neither, it turned out, was Sako. She spun us onto the freeway with no difficulty, only to suffer some sort of mental spasm a few miles later when we approached a ramp separated from the main road by a concrete divider.

I watched the concrete divider approach us at 65 miles an hour while my sister chewed happily on one of the pastries we'd bought at the store. Fifteen feet away, she looked up and made a split-second decision. We weren't going to take the ramp. We were going to go that-a-way.

With a hard yank on the steering wheel she sent us leaping like a startled fish into the main road. In the rear passenger seat, the Guy screamed like a girl. Me? I squeaked “HOLY SHIT!!!” and wrenched great chunkfuls of flesh out of my thigh with both hands.

Sako made a sheepish little clucking sound. “Oops.” I hate that. I hate 'oops.' I especially hate 'oops' when someone else is driving. The Guy was gibbering and clutching desperately at his bag of shrimp chips. The Previa was purring to itself, like a satisfied cat. My sister added thoughtfully, “I suppose now would be a good time to mention I don't have a license.”

No, not really.

***

Mom has been making grape vodka in the backyard.

No, really. Grape vodka.

Many years ago, on some sort of whim, my green thumbed mother planted four vines in the backyard. "Japanese grapes," she calls them. They're called Japanese grapes because they're a breed that happens to grow in Japan. Here in the US, they call them Concord grapes.

"Oh, that's nice," says Mom. "They have Japanese grapes in Concord. Where is Concord?"

Like pretty much any plant that has met my mother, the grape vines began growing like they had something to prove. Now they sprawl over any stable structure near enough to attract their attention; each year they grow fat, juicy, sweet-sour bunches the size of a grown man's head. "I cannot eat them all," Mom pointed out. "And birds, they eat so much, they become very fat. And also the squirrels, they eat, but still so much, and so waste."

So she makes grape vodka. Actually, what she does is take the extra grapes, drop them in a gallon of vodka, and then forget about them for a year. The end result isn't so much grape vodka, I guess, as it is ... vodka grapes.

Are they potent?

"I think I blacked out a minute after eating one," quoth my sister, the lush.

"What did you do with the rest of them?" I asked Mom.

She looked puzzled. "Rest of what?"

***

After dinner one night, Mom announced that she had something to show us. "Stay here," she ordered. Obedient, the Guy and Sako and I remained perched at the kitchen table while she trotted off.

She padded back with a giant greenish-yellow citrus of some sort, which she placed in the middle of the table. She sat down.

We inspected the fruit. "What is it?"

"It's a po....plum....."

"It's not a plum."

But Mom was still trying. "Plumato. Plorella."

"Pomelo?"

"Pumelo." Mom was agreeable. She added, "I got from Anna."

There was a long moment of silence while we stared at it. There was a distinct feeling that we were expected to comment on it somehow. After all, Mom had said it was something she wanted to "show" us. The word "eat" hadn't entered into the conversation at all.

"It's big," Sako suggested by way of an opener.

The Guy and I agreed sycophantically. "Really big."

"And green," the Guy offered, his inspiration for the moment.

We all agreed that it was green.

"And yellowy."

Yes, it was yellowy. A pensive hush fell over the room.

Sako added, "It's sort of like a pumpkin."

"A Christmas pumpkin?"

"It's a fruit."

"A fruity Christmas pumpkin."

"That isn't a pumpkin."

"A fruity Christmas fake pumpkin."

"We could make a Jack-o-Lantern out of it."

"A fruity Christmas fake Jack-o-Lantern?"

"I don't think it's a Jack-o-Lantern if it's not Halloween."

"Sant-o-Lantern."

"Sant-o-urn."

"Santorum!"

I giggled. Mom wanted to know why. "Never mind."

Meanwhile, my sister had produced a permanent ink marker from somewhere and was drawing a face on the pomelo. She turned the fruit to display it to us. We admired it in silence. Mom confiscated the marker and added some details. In very short order, the entire Hirata family was busily engaged in the decoration of the pomelo. The Guy, finding this bizarre, retrieved his camera and took a picture.

"Do you want to eat it?" Mom asked after the decorating was done. Poor timing on her part. The Hirata children can anthropomorphize anything.

"It has a face."

"Four faces."

"And glasses."

"You can't eat a fruit with glasses," Sako said self-righteously. "It's not fair."

***

To be continued . . .