poopy mouth

Seattle.

Cold. Wet.

Raining.

Don't know what I was expecting. Color me unsurprised.

Something happens between each visit to my Mom, some inflationary childhood trauma that spies a moment of weakness, slithers into the opening, and promptly starts to expand. Seattle trips are never as bad as I think they will be -- there is inevitably some vexation, maybe, but it is relatively rare; the reality is far more mundane and mellow than I ever imagine possible when cowering in my California home, two states away. My mother really does have more than her fair share of charm. It's easy to forget that when she's being reproachful at me over the phone. In person, she has more delicate ways of manipulating me to do her every bidding, and it's easy to submit to that gentle nudging when she delivers it through the medium of body language, an instrument that is not available to her over the harsher perspective of audio-only.

Anyway, I'm home with Mom, and it's been fine.

In an attempt to try and win a little independence from Mom's one-car schedule, we actually rented a car this time. This may become a new tradition for us, although a not entirely unexpected side-effect has been that Mom's errand list has been split in two, one half for her, one half for us. The end result has been, not increased freedom for us, but a different kind of indentured servitude. At least we get to drive at our interpretation of the speed limit, which is something.

An e-mail from my sister...

hello friends, family, and others i for some reason associate with,

i've been in yosemite for for over three months and only two of you non-san franciscans have come out to visit. lame. i'm here until mid october so i had better see at least a few of you.

out here, where the pace of life is a bit slower, every little event that happens excites and stimulates your personal growth. i think i've built enough character to last me a lifetime.

this one might be up there in terms of grossness with the time i doused myself with my own urine...

some of you may remember when i subjected myself to two root canals and crowns down in the dental capital, el salvador, last november. it just so happens that although el salvadoran dental work is by far fairer on the pocket book, it doesn't seem to withstand the test of time.

last week i was eating a delicous supper with a few friends -obviously not cooked by me- consisting of spaghetti with tomato sauce and wine... mmm...wine... halfway through dinner, i realized that my back molar had gone awol. after i realized what i had done, i rushed to the bathroom to make myself hurl. since tomato sauce and wine tend to be quite acidic, it got into my nasal passages and started to make me tear up. after ten minutes of yakking up stomach acid doused noodles and chunky vege-tomato sauce, i finally quit and faced the fact that i was going to have to wait for the dam thing to pass. bummer.

when i got that shatty feeling the next day, i was super excited to see if my tooth had passed! big wall style, i pooped into a plastic bag and explored the contents of the evening before. after ten minutes of being duped by undigested peanut bits and corn, i concluded that it had not yet made it through my mile of small intestines. i was forced to wait even longer.

more than forty hours had passed before i was able to retrieve my crown! i figure another trip to a central or south american dentist would be justified after what my poor little tooth had to go through. anyone want to go on a trip with me?

still estranged from the others, i figure that this would be an excellent story to tell on a first date if i weren't interested in the other party.

i sprained my ankle too...fortunately, that was not bowel related.

here's a 2 minute poem i just submitted online in order to receive a 50$ gift certificate. i titled it potty mouth.

last week i swallowd my tooth
i tried to yack but couldn't
i waited and waited
twelve, twenty four, thirty six hours...
time was passing but my bowels were not
forty hours and excited
out came my porcelin crown
not as white as once was
but securely resting with its friends

such prose. i've brought myself to tears.

love,
sako

A reply to Sako's e-mail from one of her friends...

Haiku for you;

O my pearly crown,

How good to see you in your

Autumn coat of brown.

On Thursday, the Guy and I went to SeaTac airport to pick up Sako, who had timed her own visit to overlap ours. The Guy circled around the terminal in our rental car -- a PT Cruiser, which proved a nice ride but only averaged 20 miles/gallon -- while I wandered into the baggage claim and collected a much-browned sister, cast, crutches, and all.

The story of her sprained ankle requires some explanation. My sister, as you all might recall, works as a volunteer ranger in Yosemite. She gets paid for Search and Rescue, and for four days was on two different searches. At the end of the fourth day, she stepped on a rock and twisted her ankle. She subsequently hiked seven miles out of the wilderness to find help, where she had an X-Ray, was diagnosed with a severe sprain, and put on crutches.

This was not, however, how she told us about her sprained ankle when she first called me. Her version of events started with: "Oh my God, Yuhri. I just met the hottest male nurse."

I admit that I don't really understand my sister's priorities.

Later that day, we were standing outside Costco waiting for the Guy to bring the car around, and she suddenly remarked, "I had to think about that for a second."

"What?"

"That we were in a city. I had to go to the bathroom."

"I think there's one inside..."

"No, I mean, I had to go to the bathroom, so I was thinking, 'I'll just step around these bushes there,' except I had to remember that this was a city so I couldn't just do that."

"Ew."

So there you go. Forest living changes a woman. And I have now successfully written an entire entry in which my sister's sole contribution was an obsession with, well, poop.

You're welcome.

mother computer

Of course it would be too much to hope that I would actually write with enough regularity to suggest a trend. August seems to be one of those months where a lot gets done, if not necessarily in any area that would be of any use. I'm getting a lot of work done at Work, in other words, where it will do absolutely no good to anybody that I really care about. In the grand scheme of things, it's likely that one or two e-mails will not make a significant contribution to the well-being of the world. Of course, neither would the act of cleaning a toilet, but it would certainly improve the well-being of yours truly. I'd much rather get the latter done than the former, but even my mother would admit that the former is the path of least resistance. Or maybe not. You never know with my mother.

I'm hoping to get my COO to come by and do the cleaning for me, but that seems unlikely to say the least. Still, hope springs eternal.

We're rapidly approaching our week-long sojourn in Seattle, a trip that is intended to provide celebration and relaxation to all except my husband and me: me because we will be staying with my mother, who despite her quixotic charms still holds the dubious privilege of knowing exactly which of my buttons to press, in what order, and how often. No doubt by the time I leave I'll be breathing heavily through my ears, my nostrils and mouth being fully occupied by the rabid froth of barely restrained rage. It won't be fun and games for the Guy, either, who -- like all able-bodied male visitors to my her house -- will somehow find himself climbing up in the attic to clean out generations of clutter, or cleaning out the gutters, or painting the house, or any of the millions of household chores she seems to accumulate and hoard just for occasions like this.

I might have done him a disservice early on, when he was still trying desperately to ingratiate myself with my mother. Sako pointed out with perfect fairness that I had sabotaged their relationship from the outset, by painting a picture of Mom that so terrified the Guy, he was barely functional when it finally came to making a first impression. In the attempt to make up my sins and help him along in my her eyes, I assured her heartily that he liked helping around the house, that that was just the sort of sweet, compassionate, ready-to-lead-an-old-lady-across-the-street boy scout he was.

It would be unfair to call my mother an opportunist, since I think she honestly believes that storing up all these chores to give the Guy will, in fact, make him happy. He pounded the final nail in his own coffin when he reappeared from tidying her massive back yard, beaming and full of advice on how to manage a large garden.

"I did it this way, because it's smarter," he said, and: "If there's anything that needs to be done, just tell me. I'm here to help." And, fatally: "Oh no, it was no problem. I enjoyed it."

She regarded him thoughtfully. I think I actually heard the house let out its belt buckle, sag a little, sigh with relief, and pop open a beer. Guest privileges were over.

It might be due to this prediliction on her part for keeping him occupied that the Guy has decided to teach her how to use a computer. I will confess freely that it is not a notion that has tickled me pink. My mother and I have had three encounters with computers together, in a teacher/student capacity; none of them ended well, either for me or Mom, while each computer in question seemed to power down with a newly acquired air of disillusionment that bordered on the suicidal.

Honestly would compel me to admit that out of the three of us, it was Mom who walked away the victor. For all her protestations that she is, in fact, willing and eager to plunge into the mysteries of the 21st century, she is maddeningly prone to distractions, pointing out reasonably that it would be far faster to write her letters to Japan with paper, pen, and fax machine. In fact, she was perfectly right. While my training in piano has helped me reach an average typing speed of 140 words per minute, her instrument of choice is the violin, which is training that only assists the most obscure of office talents: disembowling executives, for instance. Her typing style was of the blink, blink, blink, peer, blink, peer, poke, Oops, blink, contemplate-one-hand-clapping school.

It was like being nibbled to death by feral ladybugs.

When she began picking up her mouse to peer into its underbelly, mistaking it for some bulky laser pointer (a concept she is also unfamiliar with) or a poorly constructed face towel, it seemed time to call it quits. It took two hours to explain the concept of the "ON" switch, information that she perversely refused to retain, while developing an inconvenient talent for mimicry and retention when it came to the phrase (my fault) "For FUCK's sake."

To this day I'm baffled why the power switch was such anathema to both her long-term and short-term memory. I am puzzled as to what she thinks she actually does when she flicks the light switch in the kitchen. I suspect that in her mind there is some Rube Goldbergian contraption inside the wall that knocks over a domino, triggers a marble, startles a canary, tips a scale, pulls a string, knocks over a jar, and lets lightning bugs loose into the glass coffin of the light bulb.

It is the Guy's opinion that he will be better suited to introduce Mom to the wonders of the Internet Age. This is not due to his skills as a teacher, which I have repeatedly assured him are minimal; rather, he seems to think that his primary advantage over me lies in the fact that he is not her daughter. I have to concede the justice of this, as I have often remarked myself on the disadvantages to being Mom's offspring. She is a wonderful woman -- everybody tells me so, and what objectivity I possess verifies this -- and I am certain I would adore her absolutely without question, were it not for the fact that she is the four-breasted werewolf who guards the fifth portal of hell.

Maybe I exaggerate. I don't know. At any rate, the Guy is optimistic. He has spent the last few weeks reconstituting an old HP computer given to him by a friend's mother. "I shall install Linux on it," he declared, "and it shall be Good."

Personally, I am a fan of Linux. Nonetheless, my private opinion is that in the handicap race between the Guy and me, Linux pretty much equals being the woman's daughter. It may have been foolhardy of me to try training her in computers, but at least I never made the mistake of trying to explain to her what bash was.

how's it dangling?

A short, choppy entry, made up of three utterly disparate thoughts. Indulge me.

In the end, eleven out of the twelve people in my riding class passed. Six out of the original six women. Five out of the original six men.

Me.

I've heard it said that women are better students than men, and while I can't say that this particular incident proves it, I can suggest that there's something about the shape of a motorcycle seat that can negatively impact the judgement decisions made by certain males. I suspect it is the act of straddling, and the pressure of one's weight placed directly on one's balls. There is something unique about a motorcycle's seat that appears to dislodge testicles from their customary place and spurt them straight up the spine into the skull, where they displace any prior tenants.

This is, however, just speculation on my part. Not having balls of my own, I have to rely on observation and hypothesis. If there's any man out there who can verify or invalidate my theory, please feel free to drop me a line. Inquiring women want to know.

In other news, I've decided to stop using the phrase "Christian Right," which, as far as I can tell, is insulting to the actual Christians I know -- who tend, in the main, to be reasonable people who love God in their own way but will kindly tolerate your own distinct brand of worship, which consists of a persistent delusion that God has moved into your bathroom and manifested Himself as an invisible Bengal cat with a fingernail polish fetish.

As far as I can tell, the so-called "Christian Right" has little to do with Christianity (save for the fact that the Thump-Book of choice is titled "The Bible," as opposed to "A Bible," which I think would be more contextually accurate) and still less with being Right, save in the fundamentalist extremist definition of the word. My new phrase therefore, in deference to the Christians out there who are people I would be willing to introduce my children to -- who are, in fact, people I would want my children to emulate, whatever their final religious choice -- is the "Fundamentalist Right."

This may seem a redundant combination of words to the astute, and this would be because it is. However, you may detect in my choice of the latter word a bit of tongue-in-cheek, and as for the first word, an assumption that fundamentalists of any religion want pretty much the same thing (power) and have chosen the optimal regional Religious Pedestal to climb on. When it comes to thumping of any kind, there isn't all that much difference between the Koran, the Hindu holy texts, or the Bible. Different language, same speech.

Moving on to more important news, I've taken up practice writing in preparation for the big November nanowrimo marathon. Last year I managed to finish 50,000 words of absolute garbage, none of which was really salvageable. On the other hand, the 50,000 words were extremely educational for me, if not necessarily for the readers, of which I insured there would be none. And if my past pattern of increased success holds, this coming nanowrimo will see me exceed my 50k limits with some improvement in quality.

My primary faults in writing appear so far to be that 1) my writing is unnecessarily florid; and 2) I write books I wouldn't want to read. The first problem is a technical issue, and one that I hope a good edit and some practice will eventually overcome. The second issue is more severe, I admit. It may be that there's an audience out there for, say, gloomy speculations on the nature of racial identity and the integration of "ethnic outside, white inside" cultural norms into suburbia. This is not, however, a group that I fit into. It seems rather contrary that I should write for an audience so alien that I would rather gouge out an eye than participate in it, but there you go. I can't seem to stop myself.

In later years, some anthropologist will come across the sadly neglected, poorly edited proofs of my first and final draft, and note wisely in his report: "The Invisible Cat made her do it."