michele

the other day i argued with jason and jolie about san francisco being a small city. their conjecture was the inter-connectedness of everyone they know. i countered with the theory that to them the clubbing/bar-hopping gay community might be small but that doesn’t make san francisco small. after all, gay is not the whole city (current weekend of pride aside).

today however i realized that the asian boy with the motorcycle helmet who is frequently to be found sitting in my library is the same one who i often see driving past me in the morning on his bike when i am walking to the bus stop up the street.

which is not to say that the richmond district or USF are the whole city. but perhaps i need to give more credence to this small city theory. or at least the group dynamics which make it up.

nichiyoubi alcatraz ni ikimashita.

chisai tori wa imashita. kawa yokatta! taitei [fluffies] to itte imashita. takusan shashin o torimashita.

[prison] no kanji wa mimashita. totemo omoshirokatta.

marina to jolie issho ni sanbo shimashita. nemuku narimashita. tenki wa sukoshi suzushikatta, ga kirei datta. ame ga furu to omo iru tsumori desu, ga furimasen deshita.

alcatraz ni fune de ikimashita. fune ga daisuki desu. kodomo no toki watashi no kazoku yoku fune de norimashita. amari byouki ni narimasen deshita. okaasan wa [watashi no kodomo wa genki datta] to itte imashita. ha ha wa tanoshikatta, mou tanoshite imasu.

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last night as marina groaned and bemoaned the lack of food in my house, i came to a realization of my problem. if something requires more than one thing to make it, then i can’t buy it. like if you have to buy hamburger meat, hamburger buns, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, bacon, avocado, and cheese–that’s just too much for me. invariably they come in large servings, like a whole head of lettuce or multiple slices of cheese; plus buns come 6 to a bag. i couldn’t use all that before it went bad. therefore i can’t buy it because it’s wasteful. thus i limit myself to buying single things. like apples. or steak.

last night at suriya

marina: i should have brought some of my cereal with me.

me: yeah…but that would require me having milk.

silence falls over the table.

i was having some difficulties with question marks in my big book which i am editing at work. my problem consists of the fact that they exist in a reference text telling you the dates of a serial title that a particular repository is carrying in their archives.

you should be exact, i am querulous.

director boss explained to me though about this one serial’s dates listed like this, ‘1914-1941?’ which was published in shanghai.

see, he instructs, shanghai is very close to japan and after the bombings at pearl harbor, this serial might have stopped being produced suddenly with no warning. people were a little more concerned with the japanese invasion and war. but maybe it’s not positive when exactly it ended because 1942 or 43 issues could have gotten blown up in their entirety along with the legs and arms and bits of middle squishiness of the printer’s devil, you see, michele? you see?

i see now, i said, question marks indicate fear.

zao, zao, zao calls the director boss from the hallway. zao, crows back french father.

he turns to me, multiple grins lighting up his face. his happy to be alive face, his happy to be here face, his happy to be talking to me face, his happy to be explaining something face, his happy memory of the past face, his happy happy face.

when i first went to taiwan, he says, to learn chiiinese, the first lesson on the first day was the chinese word ‘zAO’ which means ‘good morning’. the next day i was walking in the street and i met a fellow who said to me, zao! i knew it meant something, i knew i knew what it meant, but i couldn’t remember. and then i did remember, it was the first thing i learned! zao! good morning! so i turned around to say zao to him, and he was already 20 feet down the street, but i yelled zao at him and he laughed and laughed. zao. zAO!

director boss pokes his head in the door drawn by the constant repetition of zao and my giggles and asks, learning your first chinese word?

zao, chortles french father as he turns back to his computer. zAO. he puts emphasis on the ‘ow’ ending. like za-ow, but said really fast.

i recently ordered some new contact lenses having grown tired of the necessity of wearing one green colored contact and one clear. i was all excited because i was going to get these contacts billed as being ‘honey’ colored. brown eyes, i thought to myself, i’ve never tried that! there were those yellow ones (supposedly they were hazel) which made me look vaguely hawk-like, but never have i tried brown.

they arrived in the mail late last week, and i exuberantly tried them on only to discover that the diameter was much too wide (though they are my exact prescription) and the colored part hovered partially over my iris while not covering it completely. the world was kind of a fuzzy blur of honey and normal cross-hatchings. i was quite irritated.

today, i emailed 1-800-contacts.com people and said, “hey, these contacts are fuck! can i please have news ones. or money?” and they wrote back all full of apologies and politeness to say that of course i could exchange them for full refund.

this is a lesson to me, (and to all of you).

1) customer service can be a beautiful thing.

2) 1-800-contacts are stand-up kind of people, (much like those people gene dealt with).

3) i should have been less lazy and timid the last time something like this happened (with purple contacts) and requested exchanging because then i wouldn’t have lost $70.