that time of the...

It's that time of the year again where sanity takes a nose dive out the window and carpal tunnel comes knocking at the window, like an optimistic vampire at a sorority house. It's less than a week to the kickoff of Nanowrimo, National Novel Writing Month. For those who are newly arrived (and therefore less familiar with the topography of my yearly cycles) this event demands 50,000 words of novel-writing in the month of November. It seems a foregone conclusion that I will, perforce, be somewhat less than productive on the journal front.

This is the fourth year that I have participated in this mad dash towards greatness. I have no logical explanation for why I choose to inflict this barbarism on myself on a yearly basis. My suspicion is that it serves as some alleviation of the chronological ascension vs. aspiration uncertainty, that slightly skewed horror that people my age get when viewing the achievements of younger, more nubile heroes. It is true that in my day I was the one who astonished and appalled my elders, shaming them with my accomplishments and precociousness at an age when steadier heads were learning how to spell "APPLE" -- but that was then, and this is now, and what have I done lately? It is a different matter altogether standing on this side of mortality's fence, watching pre-teens perform on stage at Carnegie Hall, winning awards and writing novels.

The knowledge that said pre-teens suck and that I could've done so much better at their age is, I must say, small comfort. I'm 31 years old and what do I have to show for my life? A car, a job, an apartment, and a husband -- pshaw. Where's my Nobel Prize?

My NaNoWriMo trend over the last four years is a progression of improvement, just enough to be encouraging if not enough to trick me into hubris or self-confidence. It is a small matter to string together 50,000 words, but the quibbler in me insists that they be 50,000 different words, which -- while not being a requirement for the event -- does squash any levity I might inadvertently feel regarding the occasion. There have been occasions when I have chosen a four-letter word and filled entire pages with them, tallying them towards the final word count. Unfortunately, my inner judge inevitably clucks its tongue and chases me back to the delete button, erasing all the gains that I have made.

(I admit I imagine my inner judge to be similar in many physical respects to my mother, armed with a black robe and a gavel. My inner monologue looks remarkably like my imaginary cat Heisenberg, whereas my husband and my sister play no distinctive proxy role in any aspect of my ongoing identity crises. The latter heartens me, as it seems to indicate that, while I am cursed with a strong streak of masochism, I am at least possessed of a fairly healthy sense of self-preservation.)

Those who have cataloged my past attempts at NaNoWriMo know that last year was the first time in which I finally reached 50,000 words. It matters very little that the last 9 words in my novel consisted of: "This is it, this is my 50,000th word! Hurrah!" --which, if taken in context with the rest of my novel, was unquestionably the most exciting passage in it. While there was nothing wrong with the words in my novel, there was plenty wrong with their arrangement. I am hopeful that I will not duplicate that error this time; while I cannot claim to be a ready listener or an attentive student, I can at least learn from my mistakes if given a year to absorb their import.

It is now 4 days until Nanowrimo, and I do not have a plot. This did not occur to me until yesterday.

I am not entirely sure yet if this will be a problem.

My sister is returned from the wilds of Yosemite at long last, having been driven forth by plans to go climbing elsewhere in California. This necessitated her departure from Yosemite to San Francisco, where she hoped to find employment of a type that would result in quick money.

Sako: yud, i was thinking of selling my blood.
Yuhri: Why?
Sako: do you think i'd get much for it?
Yuhri: no.
Sako: well, how much do you think i'd get?
Yuhri: I have no idea.
Sako: hold on
Sako: okay, no go.
Sako: no place wants to buy my blood.
Yuhri: *patpat*
Yuhri: I love you anyway.

Speaking to my sister is a discombobulating experience, in part because it is like rolling back the hands of time in my personal development. It required several years of living apart from my family to learn the basic art of linear thought; a household in which people buried nuts to give squirrels the fun of finding them, is not one that teaches the building blocks of Aristotlean logic.

As I say, my sister is out of Yosemite at last. A few days previously, she called to inform me that her new boyfriend was in the news, a statement which -- I admit it freely -- did not instantly strike me as propitious. My sister's taste in men is almost invariably sound and yet, she seems so classically appropriate to play the role of Bad Girl, one is consistently surprised to find that her men are charming, intelligent, and almost always without criminal records.

The boyfriend, it transpired, was in the team doing body recovery and search & rescue in Yosemite. "Do you still want to be a nurse?" I asked her.

"Sure," she said. "Or maybe a massage therapist."

"Those aren't the same thing."

Sako: i think my boss is dead. literally.
Yuhri: Er...why?
Sako: crack.

Her current fast track to money in San Francisco is cleaning windows for high rises. It is a perfect job for her, in that it involves high places, nigh suicidal risks, and ready cash. I find it a peculiar job, in that she never seems to receive any paychecks, and that her employer apparently has no qualms about one of his cleaners disappearing for weeks at a time into the wilds of Yosemite, only to reappear again without warning to demand work.

Yuhri: Um. What?
Yuhri: Why? Is he not returning your phone calls?
Sako: crack. you know, crack cocaine?
Sako: he's a crack addict.
Sako: a lifer
Yuhri: Your boss washes windows on high rises and he's a crack addict?
Yuhri: These do not seem like compatible hobbies.
Sako: yup

Well, you know. They're really not.

Yuhri: I'm tempted to write about your boss on my journal.
Sako: i don't care. i'm sure he wouldn't either since he's probably DEAD!

I can't figure out what to write for NaNoWriMo. I'm sure it'll come to me eventually. Nonetheless, I'm a trifle concerned.

Last night we went up to Millbrae to meet up with Diva, who had moved to San Francisco. Millbrae was a convenient midway point, and we had dinner at the Hong Kong Flower Lounge before heading to the nearby Starbucks for coffee and dessert.

In the car, the Guy abruptly wailed. "Oh no! My wedding ring's gone!"

He was quite upset.

Sako: i'm bored.
Sako: and hungry.
Sako: bored and hungry
Sako: hungry and bored.
Sako: did you know that racecar was a pallendrome?
Sako: did i use the right word?
Yuhri: Palindrome.

I've always had a problem with plots. Linear thinking, you know? It's just so complicated.

midget maggots

I have been in a state of barely suppressed anxiety over the last few days, in part because I am realizing just how poorly I am controlling my blood sugar of late. This, you realize, is a fairly significant problem, as a lack of resolution will eventually lead to blindness, loss of limbs, irrepairable nerve damage, and -- eventually -- death.

But, you know. Beh. This isn't what's really bothering me. What's really bothering me is that last week, the Guy found a family of wee dead bugs floating in the spaghetti he was boiling for dinner.

Of course his instinctive reaction was to share the excitement of his discovery with his spouse. "Yuhri. Check this out."

We are still at that stage of our relationship where a summons from one spouse will result in the appearance of our other spouse, a condition which I think my actual family skipped over entirely during my adolescence; I do not recall ever responding to a summons from either parent or sister, feeling it unnecessary: if they wanted me enough to call my name, they could certainly put forth the effort to come get me, which would add a personal touch to an otherwise unrewarding experience. The marriage, being fresh, is accompanied by its attendant luxuries, and being able to produce a spouse at will is one of those rare treats that will doubtless fade over time.

As I say, he called, I went, looked, and was revolted. Since it was the reaction that he plainly wanted, I was willing to oblige.

"Ew."

"So what should I do?" he asked.

There are times when I wonder about him.

Side note:

"I wonder about our customers sometimes," he said. "Jane Doe at one of our sites called me to fix this name problem they're having. I fixed it on one of their computers already. She wanted me to fix the other five computers, so I started a connection to their network. Then I had to leave her a message telling her, 'I'd love to fix the computers, but they seem to be turned off so I can't.' And just now she e-mailed me with, 'What should I do?'"

"That's weird," I told the Guy, while he went about dumping out the spaghetti-and-dead-bug soup. "Where did the bugs come from?"

"No spaghetti!" he wailed. "I made the sauce! What are we going to do without noodles?"

It was our unique household management that rescued dinner. We found an unopened box of spaghetti on one of the dining room chairs. This pleased the Guy, who went about the business of making more pasta, sans bug; meanwhile, I went on a hunt through the kitchen in an attempt to find the source of the infestation.

"Where did you find the spaghetti?"

"On the dining room chair," the Guy said with exaggerated patience. Honestly. Sometimes, woman.... "You were right there."

"Not that spaghetti. The buggy spaghetti."

"Oh. In the bottom of the pantry."

"Was it open or closed?"

The Guy considered. "Open."

There were little flecks at the bottom of the pantry, like red pepper flakes. "Something spilled," I said, and groped for the flashlight. The Guy was buzzing happily to himself over the pot of pasta.

The flashlight flicked on. There weren't 'some' red flecks. There were hundreds of red flecks. With little legs. Dead. Hundreds of dead leggy wee flecks. I inhaled sharply. This was a mistake, as the dead leggy wee flecks were, as it turned out, in variable states of dessication and very, very light.

And they weren't just in the pantry.

With the newly enhanced vision of familiarity, I turned the flashlight to our kitchen floor and found it covered with dozens of tiny red flecks, mostly dead. Those that were not dead were in an enthusiastic state of dying. There was a small Jonestown congregation in front of the stove. There was another, smaller Heaven's Gate meeting below the pantry. I found them on the refrigerator, on the stove shield, and on the corners of the stove itself. I found them on the counter edges.

I found them in the glass bin we use for flour, and was moved to mine the depths of a vocabulary enriched by a lifetime's fascination with the dictionary.

Since that night, it has been an ongoing battle between me and the bugs. I have rarely seen any of them alive; the only evidence they willingly give of their passage through my kitchen is the prominent display of their corpses, a sight that is both illuminating and oddly unsatisfying. The bottom half of the pantry was emptied first, and the graveyard meticulously wiped away. The next day, I opened the pantry to find a fresh harvest of teeny-tiny bodies, mocking me. I bought a swiffer and deployed it ruthlessly on all available surfaces. The next day, materialized from who-knows-what inner spiral of space age, transporter-enabled high tech ring of hell, said surfaces were once again showered with the dregs of a massive suicide pact.

Nature is out there, and she is taunting me. In fact, just as I was writing this, a little red bug -- alive this time -- plopped out of nowhere onto my arm and sat there complacently, leering at me.

...there. Mine vengeance is mighty and swift, and will be visited unto the least of your children's children, sayeth the Yuhri.

I realize this story may not give you particularly warm feelings about my housekeeping skills. I will acknowledge the sad truth of this with what shame I have left. It is difficult to maintain a clean apartment when one's husband originally modeled his character after bacon (under the theory that bacon tastes good, so it must be doing something right), and who once thought 'ring around the collar' referred to that stain growing fuzz in his bathtub. (And, let's be honest, I'm no neat freak either.) To tell the truth, I gave up on housekeeping after he first moved in; it was a short-lived battle, against overwhelming odds. Nowadays I simply dread going home and postpone it as long as possible.

On the other hand ... bugs.

Where does one draw the line?

a little nap

Our book club book this month was The Time Traveler's Wife which, I will admit, did not enthuse me. It has the dubious distinction of looking like an Oprah book club book, which in and of itself means little, except betray how poorly I adhere to the "Never judge a book by its cover" philosophy. I have an prejudice against reading anything that has been avidly jettisoned into the mainstream. I acknowledge this is a hypocritical attitude from someone who actually owns the entire Harry Potter series.

(I liked the covers.)

It took several attempts to pick up The Time Traveler's Wife; I would read two pages, put it down, and then feel disinclined to pick it up again. On Sunday night I made a last attempt at 11:30 pm. If it didn't take this time, I was going to put it down and not bother. 10 pages. I would read 10 pages.

I read 10 pages. And then I read another 10. And at 2:30 am, with the Guy sound asleep beside me in bed, I finally finished it.

This was unfortunate for the Guy.

Without going into overmuch detail about the book, I will briefly describe it as a "tragic love story." I normally loathe tragic love stories with the violence other women reserve for cockroaches or small white maggots in the rice (more on that later). Unfortunately: wee hours. Weakened emotional response. Sleeping Guy. I found myself wracked with anxiety (that he might die in his sleep, that he might already be dead, what I would do without him, how our as-yet unborn and unnamed -- and goddammit we were not naming any of them Clever Li -- children would grow up without a father) with love, with a chaos of conflicted emotions....

I started out by staring at him, just to impress on myself how much I loved every pore on his round bobble-head face. This was not satisfying. Adoration is not a fulfilling experience if it is not actively returned. I poked him a few times to see if he would wake up and adore me. He whimpered. I felt a spasm of guilt. It faded. I poked him some more.

When this was not productive of anything more than a few moans and another whimper, I attempted to adjust his body so I could rest my head on his shoulder. This roused him just far enough for him to make a protest. "What's happening?" he asked, plaintively.

"Nothing." I patted his face and adjusted his body some more, a procedure to which he submitted more from bewilderment than compliance. "Just go back to whatever it was you were doing."

He mumbled a little; I planted my head in his shoulder, and he went obediently back to sleep.

And then I changed my mind. I didn't want to have my head on his shoulder. I wanted to have my head on his ribs. I prodded him a few more times and inspired another groggy, "What's happening?"

"You know I love you, right?"

"Mumabuf." He started to flail a little. I dove in at the opportune moment and made myself comfortable. He whined like a stomped puppy and fell asleep again.

I stared up his nostrils for a few minutes, then changed my mind. I didn't want to be sleeping on him. I wanted to be sleeping on his arm, on my side. I started to move his bits and pieces around again.

It was almost 5:00 am when I finally fell asleep, having experimented with more positions (platonic) than were ever dreamed of in the Kama Sutra. I woke refreshed. The Guy, mysteriously amnesiac regarding the previous night's doings, complained of feeling tired. I wondered aloud if he was coming down with the flu and puttered off to work, leaving him drooping over the computer.

They say you always hurt the ones you love.

some cosmetic points

My car looks like it's been attacked by the sugar sprinkle fairy. From a distance, anyway. It's a red car, it has lots of white streaks: they look like sugar sprinkles.

Closer up, it becomes evident that my neighborhood is home to several flocks of disgruntled seagulls. Why being disgruntled should be so closely associated with diarrhea is, in my mind anyway, one of the great medical mysteries of our time. At any rate, there you are. Me and my red, white sugar-sprinkled car. I haven't washed it since a week before my wedding, which is now over three months gone.

Along the same lines of cosmetic delinquency, I am still wearing the last, determined shreds of toenail polish also originally donned for the aforementioned nuptials. Only four toes (distributed across two feet) still retain traces of that bright red lacquer. One big toenail is, I suspect, glued together by the stubbornness of the pedicure. Since I have taken up Aikido again, I have found that bits and pieces of me are prone to breaking (or scraping) off. The exercise of being tumbled across a warehouse floor like the eponymous star of armadillo bowling has a wearing effect on one's appendages; to add to this, a thick coat of nail polish can be deceptive on the subject of nail length, which would explain why I neglected to clip my toenails for far longer than was either healthy or appetizing. If I peer at my big left toe nail, I can see dim fracture lines spiderwebbed across the polish, too deep to be simply surface faults. I'm afraid I have a San Andreas fault cleft in my toenail, and I'm too much the coward to brush off the detritus and peer into the abyss.

Purely cosmetic issues have not been in the forefront of our minds of late. Domestic tranquility is a far more urgent matter. The Guy has thwarted yet another of my strictures with that eel-like slithering that he has mastered so well. Dealing with him is an exercise in exactness, a test of precision I presume all new wives and lawyers must undergo before being accepted into their respective fellowships. That it is karmic retribution on me for some prior injury cannot be doubted. While the memories are dim, I cannot deny that it is quite likely -- almost inevitable, knowing my personality -- that at some point my mother told me strictly not to touch something-or-another, which command I followed to the letter by simple expedient of acquiring a stick to poke said something-or-another with.

The rule at hand was the law laid down in our apartment that further computers were henceforth unnecessary. "No more. Why anybody would want or even need seventeen computers is beyond me, but--"

"Not seventeen," he interrupted, much injured. "I don't think we have more than eleven."

"--BUT," I said in turn, raising my voice to the shriller heights of authority, "you don't need any more computers. No more computers."

My assumption was that I had made it perfectly clear he was to acquire no more computers and yet, what seemed to rational and straightforward to me was not, perplexingly, quite so straightforward to the Guy. Having been given borders over which he was not to cross, he promptly found a stick with which he poked triumphantly at the territory of the forbidden. "It's not for me, it's for you." he assured me, after heaving computer #12 atop my desk. It was certainly disingenuous, and clearly an act of sheer defiance on his part. Nonetheless, the sheer shamelessness, the effrontery with which he called it a gesture of generosity on his part was disarming. To add insult to injury, he stood back and stared at me with sparkling eyes, clearly expecting to be lavished with praise and adoration. "It's a birthday present," he added proudly.

The acquisition of the new computer was vexing, in that it showed my dictatorship over the household has not been solidified. On the other hand, it has allowed me to purchase Sims 2 and exercise my tyrannical rule over sprites. While not quite as satisfying as flesh-and-blood, the surrogates I manufactured in the game did somewhat alleviate my frustration.

That is, until they started behaving ... oddly.

In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to create Sims characters based on the Guy and myself; it is not a mistake that I will make again. It was satisfying at first to find that my little electronic proxy was the subject of much male admiration, which -- considering the brutal honesty with which I initially designed both her face and figure -- says much for the desperation of the little male Sims. The Guy was a less successful experiment, as during the design of the character I became abruptly aware of how unfamiliar I was with his face. This may seem an irresponsible declaration on the part of someone who plainly loved it enough to marry it, and yet, there you go. Given an opportunity to mold a likeness, I was left bereft of any clear image of it save for the dim recollection that the hair was black and the eyes were brown. As the Guy is Asian, this feat of memory is hardly an achievement worth noting. The final result was mysteriously Hispanic and fleshy.

When the Guy came to inspect his electronic representation, he professed himself entirely unimpressed. "You think I look like that?" In actuality, the resemblance was extremely slight. I consoled him by telling him that my version of him was simply a rough draft, and that at some later date I would kill him off in some gruesome fashion and recreate him as an ideal. He wandered away, not much comforted.

My Sim and his Sim started out quite affectionate of each other, which was hardly a surprise. Every thought e-Guy had revolved around e-Me, which was gratifying. By some unfortunate circumstance however, every other thought e-Me had involved money or, if not money, the latest male to walk into the building. e-Me was, to put it baldly, a slut. An expensive slut, at that. It occurred to me that it was perhaps fortunate that the flesh-and-blood Guy had very little interest in the Sims, though he drifted into the bedroom from time to time to gloat in my use of the computer. The e-Guy proved strangely independent of the original as well; while e-Me began to retain water and displayed a perverse fascination for the toilet, e-Guy began to work out fanatically, to the extent that he eventually lost weight and became quite annoyingly buff.

e-Guy admired himself in the mirror and dreamed adoringly of e-Me. e-Me made hamburgers, sat down in front of the television to eat, and admired a friendly male neighbor's ... eggs.

For whatever reason, of all the vagarities displayed by the Sims representations, the one that was most disconcerting to me was the extreme bounty with which the pudgy e-Me had been blessed. It has always been my contention that, but for genetic misfortune, I would fit quite comfortably in an A cup instead of the Almost-an-A that has been my lot since puberty. At the breast of bounty, I am a -- excuse me my atrocious sense of humor -- teatotaller. And yet, e-Me has bumpers that could steer her through Brooklyn traffic without a scratch.

I have no doubt that this bestowal of plenty is the work of the Sims developers who, like all game developers, appear to have a breast fixation that neither the laws of physics nor simple common sense can shake. It is useless to argue with the game engine on this issue; while the rest of the character's behavior and appearance can be modified, this one particular situation is non-negotiable. It seems unreasonable. Here I am, a player, desiring to make the pixel allocation less than it is, reducing the ephemeral workload for the system, and it is a nirvana that is held just out of reach.

In all fairness however, the designers have been consistent: male characters cannot be, shall we say, "adjusted" to a larger mold either, thwarting the ambitions of many an optimist. This is no doubt through the design of the same game engineers. It may only be my imagination that perceives the female situation as an issue of desire, and the male situation as an issue of inadequacy.

It seems worthwhile to note that the spawn of the e-Me and the e-Guy appears to have inherited her mother's love of toilets. She spends an inordinate amount of time playing in them. (e-Me and e-Guy are, not surprisingly, inadequate parents.) I recall that my mother has several embarrassing stories of my own baby self and toilets, so I presume some cross-over between reality and fiction has taken place; still, it is a disturbing speculation on how our offspring might turn out.

The Guy: "Let's name our first kid 'powerful.'"

Me: "No."

The Guy: "C'mon. Powerful Li. Hah!"

Me: "No."

The Guy: "Or Happy. Happy Li. Or Smart! Smart Li!"

All in all, enforced sterility seems the most reasonable course of action.