sniff sniff

"Aren't you glad now that I took that picture?"

"Sort of."

"Because if I hadn't taken those pictures, you wouldn't have any recollections of it except what was in your mind, and we both know what that's like."

"Shut up."

So the miracle of it isn't so much that I actually got on the motorcycle, but that I managed to stay on the bike, which I assure you was as much an astonishment for me as it was for the bike. The chief instructor, a man of deep convictions and a robust mustache, regarded the material he had to work with that first hour with deep chagrin, and even though he made a token effort to hide his dismay, I think even he was somewhat astonished to find that he'd reached the end of the class five hours later and had lost neither motorcycles nor students.

"Lost" being a relative word, that is. One can be present in spirit and still absent in mind. Despite the heat -- which there was in abundance -- I somehow managed to muster the keen, sharp-toothed attention span normally requisitioned for use by members of the bomb squad. This did not earn me any particular accolade from the two instructors, who were rather spectacularly miserly with their compliments. On the other hand, it did mean that I didn't drop the bike or, more embarrassingly, get dropped by the bike.

The picture is deceiving. In the spectrum of documentary value, I'd say it was worth maybe 200 words, or at the most, 213. If it was a picture that had any journalistic pride, it would have shown the wavy lines of heat that were making the helmet absolutely unbearable. It would have shown the rest of the parking lot, where eleven other students were skidding around in a mixture of terror and hysterical glee. It would have shown the fact that I was telling the photographer, "Fuck OFF, you bastard--!" after having told him repeatedly, with emphasis, that he was not invited to come and ogle my very first bout with a motorcycle.

Notwithstanding any alleged affection I might have for the Guy, it is difficult to concentrate on emergency braking on a wobbly, motorized deathtrap when one's spouse is crouched behind the instructor and wielding a camera.

"Your boyfriend?" asked a fellow student during the too-short break, when I squeaked my sweat-soaked head out of the helmet and started stalking towards the offender.

"My husband," I said. "Fuckwit."

"Better watch out. She's mad at you," she called to the Guy, who was already well aware of his sins and was experimenting with a sort of backwards skipping step that would have served him well in the foxholes of Luxembourg, but produced little in the way of actual advantage in a flat asphalt parking lot.

The Guy greeted me with a palliative. "You know I love you, right?"

This did not noticeably appease my foul mood.

The shirt is the Guy's, a massive cotton tent that, besides being formidably ugly, also suffocated all of my fragile feminine pores. The instructors insisted on full-body coverage; lacking any long-sleeved shirts of my own that didn't involve lace or body-hugging in some fashion, I was forced to rely on the Guy's wardrobe. That failure will be corrected before the next and final class this Sunday. It seems worth mentioning that out of the twelve riders in my class, six were women, and the only one who approached being kicked out of the class for sheer asshole-ness was a male.

Of course, it's no good trumpeting the equality of the sexes until we see how many of each gender manage to pass the final riding exam.

This past weekend was the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, a small town due south of us which has somehow built itself up from a middle-of-nowhere outlet central to the vampire hunter's nirvana. You have to admire that kind of marketing. I myself am an occasionally rabid fan of garlic, so this sort of thing doesn't particularly disturb me; still, in terms of sheer gall, it would be right up there with Wisconsin billing itself the birthplace of methane emissions, and managing -- by some feat of marketing genius as yet unimaginable -- to coax hundreds of thousands of visitors to visit, thereby.

I have no pictures. You will have to simply imagine the entire scene in your head. And in your nasal passages, though I regret to admit that after the initial recognition of the garlic odor, I was unable to smell it AT ALL, either because I'd grown accustomed to the smell, or because my nasal passages had preempted an anticipated overload by shutting down and closing up shop. This was a disappointment of no small order. Much of the experience of garlic is the smell, which is an entity all its own complete with ecosystem and legs. In the race of life, garlic is a sprinter; it speeds across hills and rivers and freeways, where it finds the first available garlic-hater and, cat-like, snuggles up to leave garlic hairs over his new khaki pants.

"Sometimes it's the tomatoes," said Sweet Pipes, who was our hostess for the day. She returned from Italy in time for the garlic festival, which I imagine is rather like being treated to sushi on your first day back from Japan. "People link tomatoes with garlic in their heads because of spaghetti, so sometimes they smell tomatoes being processed and think they smell the garlic."

...which tickled me, because it was a connection I had never consciously made before, and was therefore a new thought path I could wander down. I spent the rest of the weekend sniffing tomatoes like they were marijuana plants, a connoisseur -- or, if you will, "junkie" -- hunting potential.

There is no real story here. We went to the garlic festival, then went to Sweet Pipes's house for an entertaining party. The next day, I rode a motorcycle. In the macrocosm of the Yuhri, it was a good weekend. I have a sunburn on the top of my head, right where the hair parts. It makes me squeak when I brush it.

Hm. Think that's it. Scroll up and look at the picture. That should hold you for a few more minutes.

why'd we pick the fuckwit bird to represent peace?

So there's this ladder on our balcony.

The Guy, for whatever reason, bought it one day. This was before we met, so naturally I had no say in the matter; he's used it maybe once in the three years that we've been together, and he clings to it possessively as though it is the final repository of all his masculine dreams. "You're not going to get rid of it," he said when I asked him where it came from. "It's mine. It's staying with me."

"I don't want to throw it away. I was just asking--"

"MINE."

It's useless to tell him I have no interest in it. The Guy is convinced that I am intent on slowly pecking away any remnants of manly independence left in him. In the Guy's world, his hair was just the first step, and never mind that it was his idea. Why does he think he's waging a losing battle against domestication? Jeff Foxworthy told him. On TV. Comedy Central. The Blue Collar Comedy Tour. He hasn't slept well since.

It came with him from the old apartment where he spent the last of his true bachelor days, jammed into a U-Haul truck that rode so low, speed bumps nearly ripped out the cab floor. In the new apartment -- mine -- it spent a few inglorious days roaming about the place before the Guy finally found a place for it.

This is our balcony.

You'll notice how our view of the great outdoors is a fenced-off affair with a large wooden of lattice framing its boundaries. My old roommate and I once spoke to the building manager about having it taken down.

Turns out his reason for putting it was the very reason we wanted it removed. "You're looking at it the wrong way around," he said. "It's not that you can't see out, but that other people can't see in." It only took a few days of consideration to bring home the practicality of this perspective. I have mentioned before that we live in a ghetto, and one of the side-effects of that is that there are always people hanging out on balconies or staircases nearby, gaping eagerly through other people's balcony windows to see if they can see something interesting.

There's plenty of interesting stuff happening in our apartment, some of which would get us arrested under decency laws. The lattice stayed. So did the ever-optimistic audience.

It took some side for the ever-present, long-limbed, obstructive presence of the ladder to finally get on his nerves. One day he tripped on it. The following day, the Guy hammered up a board and some hooks onto the lattice and hung the ladder up. This was over a year ago. If you look on the far right of the balcony photo, you can actually see it: red top, silver legs, silver rungs. You may not be able to tell, but the ladder is actually pretty well settled against the lattice, so the top flat shelf of the ladder, which is not straight but is actually at a rather steep angle, is angled down towards the balcony floor. If you put something on it, it would slide off and go boom.

Get the picture? Good. Now let me introduce our local mourning doves to you: Twiddletwit 1 and Twiddletwit 2.

A few months ago we were lolling about in the bedroom, when we were suddenly roused by the most incredible flailing and banging out in the balcony. It sounded as though someone had picked up a koala and had decided, much to its dismay, to dribble it against our plate glass doors. The koala was registering its protest with strangled cooing. Too apathetic to do anything about it, we lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling, hoping against hope that the koala-hurler would grow bored of the sport and let the koala go. Eventually, he did. We went back to sleep.

A few days later, the Guy, doing some grilling on the balcony (see the grill? That's from Sweet Pipes) called me out to look at a pile of twigs that had materialized just under the ladder. "You know what? I think it was one of those stupid doves, after all. I think some birds tried to build a nest out here," he said. "Look."

I looked. It was not a large pile of twigs. "Eh," I said. "I think it's just the plants." I have mentioned before that the balcony is the last hospice for dead and dying experiments in gardening. Tomato plants from the summer before still drop pathetically in the corner of the balcony, periodically dropping long, dessicated bones onto the floor as a reminder of my past inadequacies. I let them. It seems to make them happy.

A few mornings ago, I was suddenly jerked awake by the Guy, who charged into the bedroom and shouted at me. "YUHRI! Wake up! Look!" He scampered out, only to come dashing in again when I moved too slowly for his liking. "LOOK!"

I dragged myself out to the living room, where he was flattened up against the plate glass door, ogling the ladder. "See?" He was triumphant. "I told you. I told you they were building a nest out there."

"Enh." I lacked my glasses, so squinted blindly in the general direction of the ladder. Fuzzy, motionless, dark blob. "You're right." Easier than arguing. I attempted to head back to bed.

The Guy was having none of it. He grabbed me by the shoulders and steered me back to the glass. "Can't you see them? Look! LOOK! Where are your glasses?" He hustled off to find them.

There were, indeed, two mourning doves attempting to build a nest on top of our ladder. Our slanted ladder shelf, no less. One of the birds, Twiddletwit 1, was firmly nestled on the metal, immensely pleased with herself. Somehow during the night, they had managed to create a bizarre, straggly fringe of twigs around her ribs, rather like a combover that had encountered too much wind. Twiddletwit 2, meanwhile, was off harvesting more twigs, which he passed on to Twiddletwit 1 for more rib-stuffing.

"Idiots," I decided, and stationed myself on the sofa for Twiddletwit-watching.

The Guy kissed me on the forehead and went off on a motorcycle ride.

It was around 10:00 a.m. that the inevitable happened; Twiddletwit 1, with her weak grasp of physics, decided to try standing up. Gravity, who had just been waiting for her chance, pounced. With a great crash and splatter, the entire nest slid down around Twiddletwit 1's ankles and smashed to the balcony floor.

The Twiddletwit couple was baffled. Husband joined wife on the ladder shelf and loitered, dithering.

Twiddletwit 2: "What the hell happened?"

Twiddletwit 1: "Someone stole our nest!"

Twiddletwit 2: "Where did you put it?"

Twiddletwit 1: "It was right here! It was right here! Just a second ago. I could swear it was here, and then I stood up, and it was gone. Is it on the other side?"

Twiddletwit 2: (peering at the other side of the ladder shelf) "It's not here. What did it look like?"

Twiddletwit 1: "What did what look like?"

Twiddletwit 2: "The nest."

Twiddletwit 1: "A nest? We had a nest?"

Twiddletwit 2: "We did?"

Twiddletwit 1: "Did what?"

Twiddletwit 2: "Who are you? Maybe we should build a nest."

Twiddletwit 1: "Oh, good idea! And then we could lay eggs!"

Twiddletwit 2: "Eggs? Hey! We could lay eggs! Whichever one of us is the female could have eggs!"

Twiddletwit 1: "Yay!"

Twiddletwit 2: "What do we need in order to lay some eggs?"

Twiddletwit 1: "A nest!"

Twiddletwit 2: "Hey! Look! Look! This looks like a good place to put a nest!"

Twiddletwit 1: "Yay! Nest! Eggs!"

...and Twiddletwit 2 and Twiddletwit 1 wobbled off, only to return half a second later with brand new twigs, which they placed lovingly on the exact same spot their old nest had been.

Heisenberg was entertained. I was infuriated. Some long-suppressed passion for common sense exploded out of the restraints placed on it when I started working on the Island. It may be unreasonable to expect mourning doves -- whose skulls are the size of quarters, and therefore could hardly encompass brains larger than, say, dimes -- to think logically. It's possible I was anthropomorphizing and irrationally punishing them for failing to live up to my image of the Aristotelean uber-pigeon. I threw open the sliding glass door and marched outside.

Startled by my presence, the doves clutched their twigs in their beaks and flew clumsily away. I was left behind on the balcony, cursing at the mess of twigs and smashed eggs now soiling my slippers.

It couldn't be allowed to go on. Thinking I had dissuaded them from the notion of rebuilding, I went back inside, only to charge out again a few minutes later when the mourning doves returned, encouraged by my seeming defeat. It was obvious by that point that they would not be stymied by the feeble obstacles of gravity and concrete. No. They would carry on, in the noblest traditions of other really stupid prey animals with rapidly diminishing (gee-I-wonder-why) populations.

I rummaged about in the Guy's office and found a shallow, square box that would offer some support for an actual nest, enough to prevent the contents and building material from plummeting to their doom. Out on the balcony, the doves were once more attempting to rebuild, painstakingly planting twig after twig on the ladder, only to be puzzled when they returned with the next twig and found the first twig missing. I stormed out again. They flew off to a safe distance while I tied the box to one side of the ladder with a piece of ribbon. You can see it in the photograph, perched on top of the ladder. I tested its stability. I swore at the mess.

I went back inside, took up my post, and waited.

A minute later, the doves were back. They discovered the box. Their little dovey faces registered surprise. What ho! There's a new thing here. Where're our twigs? Heeeeeeeere, twigs!

Twiddletwit 1 jumped into the box. Twiddletwit 2 jumped on top of Twiddletwit 1. They wiggled. Twiddletwit 2 jumped out. Twiddletwit 1 jumped out. Twiddletwit 1 jumped in. Twiddletwit 1 jumped out. Twiddletwit 1 jumped in. Twiddletwit 2 flew away.

Twiddletwit 1 jumped out. Twiddletwit 1 flew away. Twiddletwit 2 flew back with a twig. Which he placed, very carefully, on the OTHER SIDE OF THE LADDER.

And then he jumped into the box, wiggled a little, and flew away. Just in time for his twig to slide slowly off the ladder, and for Twiddletwit 1 to fly back with her own little twig, which she also planted lovingly on the other side of the ladder, right where the last twig had been.

Enough was enough. I left for Tara's house.

When I saw them last, Twiddletwit 1 and Twiddletwit 2 were still taking turns playing very bad jenga with their twigs, all freshly imported, and jumping in and out of the box. "Fine," I told them. "Whatever. Do whatever. See if I care."

Twiddletwit 1 and Twiddletwit 2 were perfectly content.

Twiddletwit 1: "Look, I'm in. Look, I'm out! Look, I'm in again. Where's my twig?"

Twiddletwit 2: "I'm out. I'm in. Out! Wish it were on the other side of the tree so we could build our nest here. Look, I'm in!"

10 years and change

Yesterday was July 12th, something that hadn't registered with me until my Mom called my cell phone while I was driving to work. "Are you driving?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Oh, sorry! Sorry!" she said, and kept talking.

Japanese is like that. There is a whole repertoire of polite Japanese phrases meant to show the conversant's inferiority, humility, or remorse for inconveniencing the other person that, taken literally, make you wonder if the Japanese aren't so much humble as they are just really really rude. One of my mother's favorites is waruikedo which, translated by context, means, "It's really, really awful/inconsiderate/rude of me to ask this of you, but I'm going to ask you anyway." It took me years to register the prevalence of this phrase in common conversation, and when I did, it began to bother me to the extent that one day I finally called my mother on it.

"If it's really so bad, why do you ask?"

My mother, who always gave the appearance of listening even if she was ignoring you, cocked her head to one side and admitted it was a good question. Then she made me clean my room anyway, which just went to prove that even if she actually did feel bad about asking me, she wasn't going to make a little quibble like remorse stop her.

At any rate, as I say, Mom called me on the way to work to remind me that it was July 12. "Papa died 10 years ago, so you should put out a picture of him and think good thoughts of him today."

So here I am. Good thoughts.

Happy anniversary, Dad.

I spent the entire entry last year at this time going through Dad stories. Today, you get only one. Not because there aren't more, but because it's the day after, and it doesn't do to get all maudlin on a Tuesday. Mondays are different. Mondays are meant for tears and drama and the tugging of heartstrings. Tuesdays are meant for junk food and forcing IT to get you a replacement for the bulimic geriatric work computer you currently have by pouring diet coke in its fan vents.

One of Dad's favorite stories was about his time serving in the U.S. Military in Korea, where he trained unarmed combat and "built bowling alleys." He even had a medal for the bowling alleys, something which in retrospect I'm dubious about, but as a child seemed logical. I can certainly understand him not wanting to tell his children he'd received a medal for killing people -- whatever our family's military history, he had strong prejudices against it in practice, if not in theory -- and it would have seemed perfectly logical to him to tell us it was for something utterly innocuous. I suppose we should be grateful he didn't claim it was for bowling, since he'd proven to us on at least one occasion that he was the least likely person to be awarded by the U.S. Armed Services for that particular skill.

Whether it was true or not, I have no means of verifying; the medal is long disappeared into the junk drawers of our family house, mingled with the bits and pieces of Mom's jewelry that didn't survive her daughters' enthusiastic make-believe sessions. Idiotic though it seems, the claim still holds the ring of verity to me. Given the option of sending Dad out to combat and having him build bowling alleys, I'm pretty sure that his commanding officer made the right choice.

He had two stories that he enjoyed retelling, over and over again. The first one was the tale of the jello, which I recapped last year. The other was the legend of the hot dog. "They sent us to Japan for leave," the story began. "I was there with some friends, they were American, they had never been in Japan. Oh, it was so funny!"

Like ALF, Dad always cracked himself up more than anybody else. No matter how many times he told the story, it never grew old to him. "They wanted hot dogs," he chortled, "so I took them to a hot dog stand, and one of them, he saw the wasabi and he asked me what it was, so I told him it was mustard. And he asked me, 'is it hot?' And I said, 'No no, not so hot at all. Very mild. Delicious. You should try it. Put a lot on.' So he put so much on, you couldn't see the sausage anymore, and he bit into it, and he froze, and he turned red, and then he turned white, and he started to cry. I laughed so hard-- and then I ran away as fast as I could. Not so fast, though," he added, for the sake of verity in storytelling. "I was laughing too hard."

Japanese humor. A subtle, delicate thing. Like the soft, fragile petals of a cherry blossom floating in a keg of Budweiser.

vroom

Joanna has just left a plaintive note in my comments wondering if I will be back, which naturally triggers the creative juices. There's nothing quite as inspiring as feeling loved. While it's true that I've been trying to finish this entry anyway and probably would have posted it today with or without enticements, nonetheless there's a feeling of gratuitous pleasure in thinking I'm performing a customer service. A happy customer makes a happy consumer.

Also, fewer phone calls to one's boss.

Of course, I promised myself that I would stop talking about my wedding by the end of the month, and here it is, and I haven't gotten half the stories out the door.

Oh well. My own fault. I suppose what that means is that I'll continue to spring them on you at unexpected moments, whenever the whim hits me. Well, what're you going to do? That's the problem with cyber real estate. There are no zoning rules. That, however, has nothing to do with anything.

Anyway: hi, Joanna! And here's one just for you.

Perhaps as a counterbalance to the utterly satisfying indolence of the weekend, the work week began with the proverbial lion. I've been percolating with rage since Monday, and it has started to take on the awesome stature of an overambitious French pastry. It lives independent of me, in other words, like rising dough. Or, to take my metaphors into a completely different direction, one of those ghosts who sporadically possess blond little 9-year olds and spew obscenities at passersby. You know what I mean. Like Dick Cheney.

My mother is "in town" this week, if you can imagine a town that runs the full stretch of Northern California. She flew down on July 4th to stay with us for a day, before heading up to Santa Rosa for a Suzuki Institute. The Guy, who in the interval between betrothal and marriage managed to come to a detente with his mixed feelings regarding my mother, bore up tolerably well under the stress of seeing her again so soon. His life has been fairly calm since the middle of June, when our respective families returned to their respective homes. It served as a sort of parole during which he could regain his equanimity. He came with me to the airport to pick her up, and passed over with remarkable aplomb the awkward moment when hugs were (or maybe not) dispensed between son-in-law and mother-in-law.

She was fairly cheerful during her one-night stay, and acted with great restraint, managing to neither clean my apartment from top to bottom, nor lapse too frequently into the sort of Japanese commentary that the Guy, I think, finds disconcerting. When one's wife and mother-in-law begin to chatter in a foreign language, one has to have a monumental self-assurance not to suspect they are in fact talking about one in front of one's face. My mother -- who is still not entirely positive whether his name is "Yen" or "Yan" -- has a habit of repeating his name over and over at random intervals in the conversation until she thinks she has gotten it right. Besides this one trait however, she behaved herself quite well. To the Guy, over whom she holds the rights of the High, the Middle, and the Low Justice, this must have been something of a relief.

The real reason that the Guy is so calm is the therapy of the road, and the acquisition of a motorcycle. A few weeks before the wedding, he became the smug owner of a new sport bike. This is to replace his last motorcycle, currently in the hands of a mechanic friend who has developed towards it some of the abusive-possessive tendencies of a jealous husband. It seems unlikely that the Guy will ever see it again -- and in any case, he no longer cares. His new toy is better. The 2004 Yamaha FZ6. 600cc, liquid-cooled, DOHC, inline 4-cylinder, 16 valves, Group Fuel Injection, 36mm throttle bodies, 65.5 x 44.5mm, compression ratio of 12.1:1...

...I understood none of that.

While I admit that the motorcycle is cool in a way that I could never hope to achieve without props, it has had a debilitating effect on the Guy's character. More than once I've caught him attempting to sneak out of the apartment, creeping quietly about the closet while my attention is diverted elsewhere. He is a safe rider, thorough in his attention to detail, but this simply serves to encumber him when he would most like to be spry and quick. His full-body riding suit from Aerostitch combines the armor of a paranoid turtle with the vivid visibility of a large construction vehicle, being a garish yellow interspersed with reflective silver strips. To watch him attempt to steal out undetected is rather like watching the mutant offspring of Big Bird and Snuffleupagus trying to blend in with a group of touring midgets.

He actually obtained permission for the purchase through a strategic feat reminiscent of my sister's best. I was sent to the far wilds of Tennessee by the purple monkeys for several days, and on my return after 10 hours of travel, he met me at the Oakland airport. 1:00 in the morning. I was tired. I was exhausted. I was -- and this is critical -- inattentive.

"I missed you," he said, and took my carry-on bags from me.

"Okay," I said, and submitted blearily to a hug.

"Do you want some water?" he wondered while we waited for my luggage, and went to buy me some.

"Okay," I said, and nodded drowsily at the carousel.

"Can I buy a motorcycle?" he asked in the car, as I was dropping off.

"Okay," I yawned, and fell asleep. I think I heard him say "Yay!" as I was doing it.

When I woke up, he'd bought it.

I narrated the story to a customer in New York, who revealed himself to be a motorcycle fanatic after some chance comment I made about the weather. "Motorcycling weather," I called it, thinking about the ride the Guy had given me to work that morning. The customer pounced on the phrase and began to dig, coming up very shortly against the shallow limits of my knowledge about the subject. "Two-wheeled" is pretty much the extent of my understanding in that regards, while my interest in it is mainly in the fact that it's fast, and not just in that whorish, look-at-me! way.

"I don't mind that he bought a motorcycle. It's just funny," I assured my customer, after having lowered myself in his esteem by knowing nothing about its make, its model, or any of a million other exotic mysteries. ("I don't know. It's ... silver?")

The customer lapsed into an awed silence, then said with some emotion, "I need to take lessons from your husband."

To be fair, the motorcycle is not an unwelcome addition to our little family, which now consists of one Honda CR-V, one Honda Civic, one Honda Superhawk, one Honda *POS* Nighthawk, and one Yamaha. It took me some time to warm up to it, true, and even now I suspect my level of enthusiasm is not to on par with what the Guy would like me to show. On the other hand, riding behind the Guy when he takes it out for a spin....

...priceless.

As a wedding present from him to me (or, depending on how you look at it, from me to him) I'm scheduled to take motorcycle classes at the end of July. This is something in the nature of a passport to Coolness, at least as it was encapsulated in my years entombed in public schools. There is very little about me that is compatible with the established notions of popularity in the high school suburbs of Washington, and though it never failed to baffle me, my prediliction for classical music seemed somehow to ensure my miserable residence in the hospice for the terminally nerdy.

That was then. This is now. I will be able to ride a motorcycle. That mere fact will elevate me out of government-sponsored asylum to the halls of private health care. Already I have boots and a leather jacket, both an imposing black. In my imagination I'm a Cool Rider, with the figure of Audrey Hepburn, the hard edge of Lauren Bacall, and the sultry seduction of Ella Fitzgerald.

And if it weren't for all these damned reflective windows everywhere, I'd be set.