conspiracy and paranoia

It's an odds and end sort of day.

Bri: Your new web design is like you.
Me: How so?
Bri: It's yellow and Asian. Just like you.

Well, there's no denying that, anyway.

The new design is, I believe, complete. There are no more dangly bits and unruly pages that have yet to be converted; if there are, I am unaware of them, at any rate. Some kinks with the notify page have been worked out at last, so those who have been waiting for a working notify page can now trot on over there and register. If y'all find any weirdnesses in any pages, just holler in the Comments.

That said, there's a salami haunting our kitchen.

How's that for segues?

It (the salami) has been there for weeks now -- months, in fact, though I only bothered to mention it a few days ago. I pass the kitchen and get the smell of salami smack in the face, an abusive blow that has no concern for personal space or human dignity. I have no objection to salami as a meat, though the concept of it leaves me cold; there is something very -- I'm groping for words here -- earthy? Bestial? about the smell of salami, (musty?) that makes me think of cavemen flopping about in their fetid condos, surrounded by week-old carcasses of dinners past.

The Guy swears that there is no salami in the kitchen, and yet I wonder. I do not put it past him to silently sneak one into the apartment and squirrel it away behind the refrigerator, though his motives for doing so escape me. I have never forbidden it in our house. Our small family believes less in 'you may not' than it does in 'I will.'

Anyway, there you go. A rogue salami is lurking in our kitchen. The Guy promises, face straight, to ferret it out. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that he mocks me on this matter.

Conspiracies run amock in the background of my life, as does paranoia. The salami is simply the tip of the sausage, if you will excuse the phallic and inappropriate metaphor. My car, whom I have always considered to be a cheery and willing participant in my life's endeavors when I thought of him at all, has abruptly started displaying an uglier, hitherto unsuspected side of his personality. It seems that he has long been brooding over wrongs unfathomed. News to me. I have always attempted to treat him with the same respect and consideration I extend to all my colleagues: oiling, feeding, washing. What abuses he is imagining has been his lot is beyond me; he does not communicate with me, obviously.

His likely counsellors in this would be the motorcycles, the Guy's and mine, parked in the same covered parking lot -- you see how I even protect him from rain? -- and I can see how it would be in their best interest to drive a wedge between us. A disloyal car is an untrustworthy car, and in a time of trial and travail, where else would a betrayed rider go but to her faithful motorcycle?

My first indication of the car's newfound sense of grievance was when he decided, case unfounded, that I was a car thief who had somehow managed to steal him from his rightful owner.

It is difficult to maintain a sense of dignity in the face of such pure irrationality. Attempts to gain access to my car are now almost always accompanied by the agitated honkings and wailings of the his alarm system; he has only the barest glimmer of respect for the unlocking remote, viewing it more as a cue to squeal for help than a courteous request from his legal owner to let her in, goddammit.

You simply cannot trust the inanimate. Just because they can't hold a knife doesn't mean they can't stab you in the back with one.

He's always at his worst right after Aikido.

I park him in the parking lot just in front of the dojo. From there, he can see directly into the dojo itself, a front-row seat to the stage of the mats. Who knows what's going through his maladjusted mind? "Oh, look. Yuhri got smacked down by a teenager. I'm a car. If he can take her, I can take her."

Whatever the reason, after class I stand in the rain, pushing futilely on the security fob while he attempts to trick me into opening the unlocked -- alarm-active -- door.

I have learned his tricks. I am wary, like a cat. I have learned much from my Aikido masters.

Click.

Bee-woop! Woop! Woop! Woop!

The locks pop up on the door -- I can see them through the window -- but it is an ambush. The first few times, I was caught by this pretence of compliance. "What is this 'woop woop!' crap?" I thought idly to myself, and opened the door, only to be driven away by an instant shriek of triumphant accusation.

BWAAAAH! BWAAAAAH! BWAAAAAH! HAAAAAHHHHHHNNNNNK! HAAAAAHHHHHHNNNNNK! "Help me! I'm being stolen! Oh, God, someone, help! Help!"

A true unlocking, an unlocking in which the alarm will not activate if I open the door, is heralded by a "bee-woop! Woop!"

Click.

Be-woop! Woop! Woop! Woop!

Inside the dojo, people talk in the aftermath of class. I can hear them from outside; my ongoing struggles with my car inevitably end up woven into the warp and weft of their conversations.

Click.

Be-woop! Woop!

He has learned new levels of sophistication, my car. I hop inside, relieved, only to hear a disturbing afterthought of "Woop! Woop!" still coming from the car security system. It is not, however, an alarm.

I put on my seatbelt. I put the key in the ignition. I turn it.

The car loses it. Caught red-handed! The police will have to arrest her now.

BWAAAAH! BWAAAAAH! BWAAAAAH! it screams. HAAAAAHHHHHHNNNNNK! HAAAAAHHHHHHNNNNNK! "Help me! Help me! I'm being stolen! Oh, for the love of God, she's going to sell me to slavers! They'll take out my kidneys and give them to rich, dying BMWs! Heeeeeeeeeeeeeelp!!"

Even when I have managed to win my way past his initial wails and complaints, even when I am actually seated in the driver's seat, he continues to wage war. Starting the engine starts in more screams and farts; it is unthinkable that any self-respecting human being would drive this cacophony of hysteria out of the parking lot and onto the freeway. There are California highway patrolmen to be considered, always on the alert for shrieking SUVs tripping gaily down 101.

There is much cursing while I fumble out the keys, search for the security fob, and smash its buttons. The wailing stops, only to be replaced by ominous, teary hiccups. (Woop. Woop.) I tumble out of the car, convinced any moment now the airbag will release and attempt to smash my face in. My features are already alarmingly two-dimensional; they require no assistance from a '97 Honda CRV.

Inside the dojo, the black belts and brown belts are nodding sagely. Were I at a supermarket or a dry cleaner's, people would be peering out the windows or staring out the door to see what was going on. Not the people at my dojo. They have grown accustomed.

I believe it entertains them. There is no understanding the blackness in people's hearts.

The car tricks me three more times before I am able to finally -- finally! -- negotiate him into surrender. We pass no bored policemen on the way home, and I drive precisely at the speed limit to prevent any unwanted attention. As outrageous as his behavior is when no authority figures are about, I can't imagine how he'd act if I were to be pulled over. He'd probably try to hump the police cruiser and take its battery hostage in exchange for a sub-woofers and a fast flight out of town.

He is still sulking when I pull into my parking lot at the apartment; I can tell from the steam rising from the hood.

I leave him to his buddies the motorcycles, and head hastily upstairs to change and shower. "Meet me at the restaurant?" I told the Guy on the way home, and I'm later than I expected.

I walk into the apartment. On the way to the bathroom, I am smacked in the face by salami BO.

What the hell is going on with my life?

running naked

"Mom never calls me back," Sako complains. "I call her twice a week and pffft, nothing."

"She calls me."

"Do you call her?"

"Um." I begin thinking of a way to say 'No' without actually saying the word. "Well--"

"Twice a week," she says, saving me the trouble. "I told my friends this and they were, like, what? That's backwards from the way things usually are with mothers."

"Ironic," I say vaguely. I am never quite confident in my use of that word, and yet I like to produce it at random intervals.

"She's getting revenge, is what this is," Sako decides. "This is her way of getting back at me for not calling her while I was in Guatemala. Or Malaysia. Or Europe. Or--"

Sako is back in Yosemite for the rest of the summer, her impending graduation once more relegated to the back of the cupboard, that increasingly dusty stack of 'taxes to be paid' and 'life decisions to be made.' This time she has an actual paying job in Yosemite, one which will provide her with enough money for meals, if not for lodgings. "In my car," she says when asked, in answer to a question to which this should never be the correct answer. "I shower at my friend's place."

Well, thank God for that, anyway. Knowing her, bathing is never a certainty.

"Heard you were coming to San Francisco," I say.

"What? No."

"That's what I heard. Mom said you were coming up."

"When did she--?"

"I guess you told her at some point. She told me to take care of you."

"Heh." Me taking care of Sako is a concept that would boggle any mind but my mother's.

"You're not coming up?"

"Oh. Well, I'll be there, but--"

"You'll be in San Francisco without coming up? Will I see you?"

Encounters with my sister are increasingly rare, treasured things, like glimpses of exotic and endangered wildlife passing unexpectedly through Better Homes and Gardens tours. "And behind the begonias, you can see -- my. Look at that. It's a Monkey-Eating Eagle, one of only three hundred that still exist in the wild."

"I'm going up for Bay-to-Breakers next weekend," Sako explains.

"You're running it this year? Cool."

"Naked," she says, brightly. "A bunch of us. You can run too if you want."

Normally, I'm slow on the uptake. I am having a good day. "Naked?"

"Well, not completely," she temporizes.

"Well, good."

"We'll be wearing shoes."

"Of course."

"And we'll be painted."

There does not seem to be a great deal to say in response to that. "...oh."

"I have to decide what color to be."

"Wait. Why are you painting yourselves?" To me, this seems somehow more bizarre than deciding to run a race through the streets of San Francisco in the nude.

"It traps in body heat," she says. "It's cold in San Francisco."

She has a point. "Try yellow," I suggest.

"Maybe blue." There is a pause on the phone while she gives this serious consideration. "Anyway, I have to make up my mind before this weekend."

"That's nice," I say, lacking inspiration for anything better. Polka dots? Stripes? Plaid? "Can I take pictures?"

"You have to come up and be naked with us," Sako announces.

"...oh." Well, then. Never mind. "Take pictures for me, then."

When I finally hang up the phone, the Guy is seated on the sofa playing a video game. "Sako's going to run the Bay-to-Breakers naked," I announce tragically.

He cocks his head, eyes still fixated on the TV, and after a moment asks with interest, "Is she going to shave first?"

mama's on the internet, pilgrim

Hi!! Yuhri and Yan,
Sorry I did not contacting you so long,
How are you ?
I am going to go to Leavenworth WA 4/27-29.
will be back on fryday night.
I hope I can walk around a lot !!!! and finish tax.
Talk to you after I come back.
Please take care both of you !!
bye mamma!

It's the first email I've ever received from my mother. There is certainly no intimation that it will be the last. There is a kind of -- if not apocolyptic, certainly mythic -- quality to the event, a feeling of historical portent that has hitherto been absent from any other email I have ever received.

Except, okay, for the first penis enlarger email I ever got. I have to admit that one gave me a little thrill. ("Little." Heh.)

It cannot have been easy for my mother to write the email she sent, no matter how flippant its text may seem to the idle eye; I, who have personally witnessed the hunt-and-peck mechanism of my mother's typing, can attest that those 8 little lines above likely constituted several hours of labor on her part. I am not a patient person, and the strain of watching her attempt to type even a small word like 'the' will drive me out of the room and out of earshot.

For the rest of us, email is a convenience. For her, the keyboard is an exercise in the type of torture she was never able to legally inflict on her children during the 70s and 80s.

It's a huge step for her to step across the dividing line into our territory, and I applaud her for it. Our own forays across that same border in the other direction have never failed to give her amusement. She still fondly recalls the postcard my sister sent her from somewhere, on which Sako had attempted to write 'Mama' in Japanese. Unfortunately, through some vagarity of memory or lack of practice, Sako had ended up rotating the characters and wrote 'Mumu' instead. It took years for Mom to stop sharing that story with Japanese-speaking friends and acquaintances.

Anyway. Mom's now driving on the Internet.

Look out, world.

I was watching TV post-work one day, when the Guy came tromping back into the apartment bearing hats. Great big black ones, all stacked together like ice cream cones.

He was more interesting than the television, so I muted it to watch him instead. "Is there dinner?" he asked, placing his hats carefully on the table.

He disappeared into the kitchen to get food. Sensing a lack of ongoing interest, I went back to watching TV.

It took him a while to finish eating, sitting in front of his computer -- "recreational computing," which is a bizarre concept for a software engineer who spends all day in front of the computer. Considering all he does in his free time is look at stuff about computers on his computers, it's rather like a bulimic who goes to Sears to look at larger refrigerators and toilets.

I watched TV.

After dinner, he retrieved his big hats, claimed a roll of tin foil from the kitchen, unearthed a pair of nail clippers, and began cutting out little aluminum squares.

I watched TV.

He'd purchased some sort of spray glue, somewhere, and used it to glue his little silver squares onto his black felt hats, one by one. "How does it look?" he demanded, holding one up for inspection.

"Just fine," I said.

"I have a $40 rubber chicken in the car," he announced.

There's a strangeness to watching a 33 year old man doing a kindergarten arts and crafts project on your living room floor.

"What are you doing?" I asked at last.

"Making pilgrims."

"Why?"

"Work," he said, briefly.

Of course, work. Why else would a software engineer be making little pilgrim hats out of tin foil? "I'm just making them," he added, "I won't have to wear them."

"Ah." Well, of course that makes sense.

"This is going to be a peace pipe," he confided, waving something in a plastic bag at me.

"That's nice," I said, and went back to watching TV, where grown-up people were doing strange and dubiously legal things with a microphone.

the ongoing quest

I calculated the following today.

I moved out to go to college when I was 17. I am now 31.

There are 365 days in the year.

Out of each of those days, I was conscious for approximately 16 hours each day.

Calculated out, over the course of the last 14 years, I have spent 81,760 conscious hours looking for quarters with which to do my laundry.

That's a lot of hours.

Back in the days when I traveled for work, I would hoard strange and silly stories like quarters and bring them back to my coworkers as gifts. The nature of my business travel didn't tend to support actual, physical presents; it's hard to go out and find souvenirs when your work hours are from 7AM to 11PM, with 5 minutes for lunch if you're lucky.

Now that I don't travel, it's my coworkers who bring me back stories. K, the owner of the cat-ravished Elvis car, traveled to Tennessee several months ago on a business trip. Several days into the trip, she was met by her husband, who flew out to spend some vacation days with her.

At one point, she and her husband booked tickets to see a show at a large arena. Accompanied by one of our clients, she arrived at the arena and found people streaming out of what was obviously a previous showing. She and her husband waited.

On the other hand, the client who accompanied her was plainly uncomfortable and embarrassed. "We must seem a little backwards to you," he said.

K and her husband were puzzled. The arena was obviously made with up-to-date concepts. Concrete. Electricity. Even plumbing. There were no horses or pigs or mules in the parking lot.

The client waved a hand at the crowd streaming out of the arena. "The earlier showing's for the ethnics," he said, apologetically.

...and K and her husband, both charming, intelligent, educated white people from California, realized for the first time that all the people coming out of the arena were, indeed, not Caucasians.

"Ethnics," she said to me later, blankly. "I couldn't believe he said that, for one thing. I wouldn't even have noticed if he hadn't pointed it out. And anyway, 'ethnics'? There was maybe one or two asians, and everybody else was black. How do you get 'ethnics' from that? I mean ... ethnics?"

Ethnic ol' me laughed herself sick.

Nowadays she and her husband, still bemused by the entire experience, recall the strangeness of the South and its ways with tongue-in-cheek mockery. They reserve tickets for showings and concerts, and caution each other over the phone, "You sure you didn't get the showing for the 'ethnics'?"

It's sad that there are places in this supposedly progressive and leader-of-the-free-world country that still feel it's necessary to segregate people based on color. That it's so entrenched that people feel more comfortable that way -- at least until they see it through someone else's eyes -- is even sadder. Then again, this is the same country that still thinks Creationism should be taught in schools, and tries to force at-risk children to bear more children.

On the other hand, this is the same country where a nice young couple from California looked at a segregated crowd and didn't even realize it, because it literally did not occur to them to register skin color.

We might be slow, but we're getting there.