heisenberg lives

Sako is back in town, after a prolonged stay in Seattle to complete another morsel of her degree. She moved back in with mom for two short months. During her stay she acquired a cell phone and a desperate yearning for the company of people who hadn't actually given birth to her.

This is not, I think, really a surprise to anybody.

It was a little unfortunate that the phone and the loneliness were coincidental developments. The combination of the two meant that she was calling me obsessively. The record was three times in under an hour. Her calls were short, meaningless, and unfailingly random; in Seattle she was strapped to the vagarities of the public transportation system, and so would call me whenever she found herself waiting for a bus, sometimes just for the sake of saying hello to someone who wasn't homeless. I spoke more to her when she was in Washington than I ever did when she lived thirty minutes north of me.

She didn't start her conversations with 'hello,' either. Like another member of the family not too distant from me, she has a tendency to start phone conversations in the middle and forge her way out from there, leaving her conversational partner to grope after her with the odd handful of clues.

Witness.

Brrrring. Click.

"She's driving me crazy! CRAZY!"

"Wha--?"

"That's all. Bye." click.

You see what I mean? Or, for instance:

Brrrring. Click.

"Hello?"

"I'm waiting for the bus."

"Okay?"

"That's all."

"Okay."

Click.

This is not the sort of conversation that made Dorothy Parker famous.

School ended for Sako -- inasmuch as school ever 'ends' for her -- last week, and in her creative way, she managed to get a job that would actually pay her to drive one-way down to California. She left without any real warning, the same day (coincidence?) my grandmother and aunt flew in from Japan. Japanese relay, with my mother as the baton.

Let's pause and think about this for a moment. My sister got paid to do something she was going to do anyway: drive down to California. What I would like is for someone to pay me to do things that I do anyway. Like, you know. Sleep. Eat. Go to the bathroom.

She called me several times on the road, leaving messages on my cell phone; I'd turned it off for a doctor's visit and neglected to turn it back on. "I'm driving to California. I left this morning," the first message said cheerfully. "Pick up."

The second message was much the same, albeit a little less enthusiastic. "Still driving. Where are you? Call me back."

And the third, decidedly sour: "Driving. Call me. Pick up. Pick up. Pick up pick up pick up pick up...."

Travelling by car from Seattle to Mountain View is about 13 hours, so it was certainly understandable that her mood would gradually become depressed during the course of the drive. However, the notable thing about each of these calls was the background noise.

If I'd been a strict adherent to narrative truth, I should have transcribed her first call as follows:

meow. Meow. MEOW. mew. -- "Hey. I'm" -- meow. Meooooooooow!! mew. mrrrrrp. -- "to Califor--". MEOW. Meow? Meow. Meow meow meow meow. -- "--this morning. Pick up." MEOOOW.

The second:

MEEEEOOOOOOW. -- "--ll drivi--" meow. Meow. Meow meow mewmewmewmewmew mrrrp? "--you? Call me b--" MEOW. meow. (meow.)

The third ... but you get the picture.

I finally got the messages while waiting for the Guy outside a noodle shop that evening. I called her back and was answered by a strained, "Hi." In the background I could hear the backup feline singer carolling a happy answer to
one of the more buoyant Bee-Gees recordings.

"You hear that?" Sako wailed at me. Her voice cracked. "It's been doing that since ALL DAY."

The job, it turned out, was a single payment of $100 to courier a cat from Washington to California. A man in Washington had bought a pedigree cat, only to discover that he was allergic to it. He wanted it shipped to his mother down in Mountain View, fifteen minutes south of where I live. "It's a beautiful cat," Sako admitted grudgingly. Meow, meow, meeeeeeeeooooow! sang the cat in the background, self-congratulatory. "It just won't shut up."

My sister is not, alas, a cat person. By the time I talked to her, she was emphatically a dead-cat person.

She called me again from just south of the Redwood City exit on 101. There was a note of intense frustration in her voice.

There was aggressive meowing taking place in the background.

"Hey." MEOW. "How far "...MEOW MEOW!... "from Redwood City is" ...MEEEEOW! MEOW! MRRP MEOW!... "Mountain View? God DAMN i--" MEOW! MEOW! MEOW! MEOW!

I was, I regret to say, reduced to hilarity. Who knew I could be so heartless? I held up the phone so the Guy could hear the noise; he pressed his ear to the receiver and listened in awed silence for a moment before offering his opinion. "I think it hates you."

My personal opinion was that the cat really liked Sako.

"Bitch!" squeaked the Guy. "Cow! Let me out! Get me out of this car! You're so fucking annoying!"

I started to laugh.

When Sako had dropped the cat off, she drove back up and crashed at my apartment, exhausted and smelling distinctly of feline musk. "The lady I left it at was really polite," she said wearily. "Really, really polite. I don't think she wanted the cat; I think she's just taking it because it's her son and she's an Asian mom. It was still meowing when I gave it to her. She looked at it and said, really politely, 'My, what a ... talkative cat.' I told her she had no idea."

Heisenberg, curled up behind the door, yawned pointedly and drifted out. He has no interest in members of his own species.

Unless they're female. And stuffed.

bless yo ha-aht!

"There's a lot of people in the world don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern."

-George W. Bush

***

I've been unmotivated to update the journal lately, partly because I've just had so many other things going on in my life that sparing time for writing seems, well, self-indulgent. As a result, events in my life have piled up to such an extent that I'm now so far behind, catching up seems an impossibility.

So I won't try.

***

I spent three days last week in Tennessee: two days travelling, one-and-a-half days working. For those of you who can do math, this will add up to three-and-a-half days instead of the three days I laid claim to. The three days I laid claim to are the days I'll get paid for. The 'half' is the day I have to make up in sleep somewhere.

Tennessee is, without a doubt, full of some of the nicest people I have ever met. Nice, charming people, Tennesseeans -- what are they called, anyway? Tennessites? Tennessans? -- albeit with a drawl that I had to fight off with all the powers at my disposal, lest it creep through the ears and take up residence on my tongue. Indifferent though I am to the feelings of others in my normal state of mind, in Tennessee I became morbidly sensitive to my own Yankee-Asian accent, free of twang and replete with nasality. It was beyond tempting to hop into a Tennessee accent and take it for a spin: so mellow! so exotic! so foreign! In the middle of a conference call with our Tennessee customers the Friday before, I was appalled to discover that I came away with a sort of "Tennessee-Light" whine to my conversation.

Convinced they would think I was mocking them if I succumbed to the temptation of twang, I bunkered down behind the determined shortened vowels of my Northwestern blandness and waved a defiant "R" at the enemy.

There's not much to say about my trip; it was business, the town was tiny, and the combination of the two meant my free time was spent either in the pool or sprawled half-conscious on my bed. Not a bad state of being, I have to admit. Still, hardly meat for the narrative buffet.

The most notable thing about Tennessee has to be, I think, the colloquialisms. At some point, I started keeping a list, tallying each unexpected, hitherto unheard phrase, and the number of times I heard it.

1. "Bless yo heart!" or its variation, "Bless her heart!" - 23 times.
   
2. "Y'all." - 19 times.
   
3. "Sugarbutt." - 3 times.
   
4. "Laws!" - 2 times.
   

There was also something obscure that took place in a restaurant called the Cracker Barrel; sadly, I missed it in an appalled exploration of my plate. It turns out that there are restaurants that actually aspire to be as good as Denny's. Who knew?

***

I have instituted a new rule, stolen shamelessly from John Scalzi: no entry shall, in the future, take more than half an hour to write. Like all my rules, I'll probably break it in under a week; still, given a deadline, it's possible I'll make more of an effort to write entries. It's not the lack of subject matter that's daunting, usually, so much as it is the knowledge that sitting down to write an entry will consume a considerable amount of my free time.

Given an egg timer, surely the new rule will be an improvement on my nonexistent old one?

in utero

It has been a hectic and uncomfortable week, and the stress has been dribbling down in torrents from the ceiling -- I'm my very own rain god, replete with acid moistness -- in a nearly unmanageable deluge. I hear that's going around. Deadlines at work, deadlines at home, assorted chaos, frenzy, and now a trip to Tennessee. I leave on Monday to visit one of our newest customers for three days....

...and at 12:32 am this morning, I read the following passage in Eats, Shoots & Leaves by the hilarious Lynne Truss, and thought: Life's really not bad.

"I write quite differently in emails," people say, with a look of inspired and happy puzzlement -- a look formerly associated only with starry-eyed returnees from alien abduction. "Yes, I write quite differently in emails, especially in the punctuation. I feel it's OK to use dashes all the time, and exclamation marks. And those dot, dot, dot things!"

"Ellipses," I interject.

"I can't seem to help it!" they continue. "It's as if I've never heard of semicolons! Dot, dot, dot! And everyone's doing the same!"

Well, really.

(Dot, dot, dot.)

Life really isn't that bad, for which I can thank my firm Japanese genes. I strongly suspect that had I weaker genes from, say, Ireland, I would have shedded large clumps of hair and taken on the air of a dilapidated Cabbage Patch Kid by now. Fortunately, the silken locks of my ancestors evince no interest in abandoning ship -- not today, anyway -- and so I'm left with my looks and my health, though whether my looks in any way reflect my health is something for other people to lie about when the time comes.

I didn't mention it here, but last week the Island of the Purple Monkeys shrank a little, losing a few feet in coastline to the tumult of the tides. Damn those jetskis. As a result, three purple monkeys were tossed into the waters, to sink or drown as they saw fit. It's ruthless on the Island of the Purple Monkeys; it's a reality TV show without FCC oversight. At any rate, one of my favorite purple monkey is no longer playing the Purple Monkey game. His loss has left the office a little quieter than I'm used to, outside of my more energetic ranting and raving. This week was made memorable by the announcement that one of my other favorite monkeys would also be leaving soon.

Let there be no misunderstanding here: harrowing as it is to live on a small island populated entirely by small purple monkeys, it is possible to grow attached -- even, I daresay, fond -- of some of my fellow denizens. I imagine it is somewhat like the close bonds formed by survivors of hostage situations; members of military combat units; stage crews of American Idol.

This particular purple monkey, beyond being well above average in looks, intelligence, charm, and general sanitation, was also notable in that he fed me very, very, very good chocolate from time to time. In fact, it was his habit to pause work in the middle of a stressful afternoon, whip out several expensive bars imported from assorted countries, and conduct mini chocolate tastings. He would attempt to educate me with informative snippets about each block, ("This one is has a slighty bark undertone to it, with good texture. It's from a particularly good harvest out of Venezuela,") while I would lean back in my chair, coat my taste buds with quality chocolate, and think hazy thoughts about nirvana.

Lesson for diabetics: a small piece of truly good dark chocolate contains less sugar than your average dinner roll.

We need not go into the reasons why I will miss this purple monkey, though if you don't think the chocolate tastings alone are reason enough, it is possible that you will -- if you haven't already -- discover that you have grown testicles sometime soon. I have been assured that there are women out there who don't care much about chocolate. I number myself among them. However, there is a principle involved, and we women can't stick together to perpetuate a stereotype about our own gender, what's the point?

Somehow I seem to have wandered off the topic.

(What was the topic?)

Dot dot dot. That's right. There was no topic. Sorry 'bout that. It's been a long week. Let's try this again when I get back from Nashville.

poomba

Mass e-mail from Sako...

Having had the mis/fortune of possessing a bit of a flighty personality, I have always been curious about the lifestyle of a 9-5er. As I’ve seen, the stability of having a ‘career’ job certainly has some perks to it. For one, I would be able to eat meals without the aid of Safeway’s club card Top Ramen special. Maybe I could even move into an apartment with a shower and only use the Beauville as a means of transport. Think of all the benefits.

Yuhri: she's not kidding about that Beauville. Remember that van that she and her boyfriend bought? The child-snatcher? It's the size of a Berkeley commune, and she drives in it, sleeps in it, even bathes in it when she can get away with it. You could flood that thing and have a swimming pool large enough for a Jerry Springer guest. Also, I'd like to point out that she's come over for dinner some nights and I've offered to cook her real food, only to have her opt for the cellophane packaged squares of kim chee ramen she finds in my cupboard. She doesn't eat Top Ramen because she lacks a career. She lacks a career because she eats those Top Ramens. She's pathological.

On the flip side though, having a career job seems to destroy more souls than even Japanese pop music.

My older sister does the ‘career’ thing and she absolutely detests it. She’s been forced into that little area in each of our psyches that use fantasy and hallucinations as a means of dealing with traumatic events. She’s still in that room in her brain and it has become apparent over time that she’s dead bolted herself in.

Yuhri: I deny this categorically. Deny, I say. Deny. I can get out anytime I want. Me and my invisible cat. And this guy who's living with me.

I am revolted by the idea of having to have to trade in my fundamental nature in order to avoid eating another package of instant top ramen. Therefore, I have decided that a career is not for me and that I’d much keep the MSG shakes than become a barbequed purple monkey.

Yuhri: I get no respect.

Anyways, there’s a reason to my rabid rambling…

I’ve just recently taken a job as a seasonal ranger out at Lk ******* in Yosemite NP. I get paid...nothing. It may not be the best of jobs, but I’ll be able to go on Tuolumne search and rescue training and get my wildland firefighting redcard thingy! Although its an hour and a half from the valley and Tuolumne, I’ll have three days off a week....

-sako

Yuhri: If you don't get paid, does it count as a, well, job?