Suzy Says

Of the many, many things I have done many times but am still bad at (for example: waiting in line, anywhere – watch Suzy go from 0 to homicidal in 60 seconds or less!; grocery shopping – immediately forget what I went there to buy and wander the aisles mindlessly, only to end up with a bizarre assortment of things and then the homicidal waiting in line capped by the cashier eyeing my selections and me suspiciously; being a grown-up; any form of domestic chore whatsoever), the worst has to be flying. Flying includes many of the things I hate the most:

– The afore-mentioned waiting in line (to check in; to go through customs and/or security; to get on the plane)

– The boredom

– The complete lack of space and privacy, even in first class

– The claustrophobia

– The terrifying turbulence which can make your life flash before your eyes (and if it’s my life, that little montage is scarier than a Stephen King novel)

– Being subject to the general public, including screaming babies (let’s face it: flying is really public transit, with all its accompanying horrors)

– Public bathrooms (2-4 per 200+ people – need I say more?)

I fly thousands of miles a year, but still hate it. In fact, I am writing this little missive on board a plane, which just goes to show that I must have a certain optimism, since presumably I believe that I will be able to post this when I get where I’m going.

I will never be a blas&eacute(e) flyer, however. Turbulence always scares the crap out of me, and the turbulence I experienced on my earlier flight today (I’m on Flight Number Two now) was the worst in my entire flying lifetime. Landing in Chicago, the plane was rocked back and forth violently, as if by a giant, unseen and malevolent hand, and just to make the ride more fun, the rocking motion was interspersed with being tossed around like a toy ship on the high seas. I have never been so glad to get anywhere. I almost bagged the rest of trip to stay on safe ground and hang out with Colin, but I figured the worst had to be over.

However, I was wrong about that. I have discovered something even worse than being bounced around in the clear blue sky, fearing for your life (such as it is) and making deals with the nearest available deity that are about as likely to be kept as most New Year’s resolutions. The guy sitting next to me fell asleep before takeoff (how do people do that? I envy them and their bliss of unconsciousness) and started snoring with a volume and vigor that had most of my fellow passengers looking around for the source of the noise, probably fearing engine trouble. He appeared set to stay that way for the whole flight, which suddenly seemed just so much longer. I was homicidal in record time and overwhelmed with the unfairness of experiencing both horrors in one day – within an hour, actually. However, I was rescued by a kindly steward, who winked at me and smiled before dropping a candy bar on the guy to wake him up. He apologized and moved on. His work here was done.

PS The snoring guy appeared to have clear nail polish on (not to mention lots of heavy gold jewelry), which somehow just made it worse. Men should not primp and/or be more vain than girls, especially if they take up valuable bathroom time which the girl of the house could be using to primp. They should not wear jewelry, except a wedding ring (if applicable) and a watch (but not something hideous, like a Rolex). I mean, leave us something, guys! You already run the world, don’t have babies or periods, and mostly get paid more than we girls do. And you only have to wear nylons if you WANT to.

Man. No sooner are the interminable Olympics over than the Republican convention starts. It’s like a tag team of tediousness!

Coming to you from New York City – the state of my birth, though not the city (that distinction belongs to the unlovely town of Syracuse, and that’s the only distinction it has). New York City has plenty of distinction, but also lots of myths and legends which are not entirely accurate.

Myth: It’s sooo easy to get a cab in New York.

Truth: It’s completely impossible. Especially on a hot, humid, and rainy Friday night after a concert in Central Park. Literally the minute the show was over, it started to pour in an epic and Biblical manner (I can’t get used to it raining in the summer – it only rains in the winter in California). It was like walking through a waterfall.

Within minutes I was soaked to the skin, and the streets became mini rivers. I made my way to Madison Avenue and tried desperately to hail a cab. You know it’s bad when a girl in a soaking wet and form-fitting shirt, transformed into a transparent shirt thanks to Mother Nature and her sick sense of humor, can’t get a cab. I walked ten blocks or so before I finally got one, and if I hadn’t been so wet and cranky, I would have been flattered by the alacrity with which the cab driver swerved through traffic to pick me up. Instead, my only thought was, “I have never been so glad to see a cab in my life.”

I ended up taking all my clothes to the hotel laundry to get them dried, including my dripping Keds. It was hard to get them to understand that I didn’t want them laundered or dry cleaned – they had been thoroughly laundered and wet cleaned by Ma Nature – I just wanted dry clothes. More than anything.

I finally got my point across, but they sure looked at me funny. Good practice for the Hamptons.

How unfair is it that my sensible sis Beth was invited to the Buckingham Palace garden party and I wasn’t?

I would have shopped with enthusiasm for a hat to wear, and it would have been a totally over the top, My Fair Lady number. Of course, I’d have to get new shoes to go with the fabulous new hat, and nothing in my wardrobe would be up to the challenge, so I might actually buy the first suit of my life. Or maybe a flowy summery dress. Something good enough for the hat, anyway. And no-one could complain about the shopping, since it was really out of respect for Her Majesty.

I’ve been pretty much incommunicada the past few days. My email suddenly got corrupted, as if it fell in with the wrong crowd at school, and is presently at a corruption level equalling that of the N’Awlins police department. Juvenile delinquent that it is, it completely refuses to work at all. So I have to reinstall it at peril of losing saved messages (including some from Dad) and at peril of my technological stupidity, which is at a level equalling that of any member of the Bush family.

Which means I haven’t yet attempted it, and probably won’t until this weekend, so if you have written to me in the last week or so, for once the old line is true and it’s not you, it’s me. Hopefully all will go well and you will find my words of wisdom in your inbox sometime next week.

Apart from tech issues, you also know that we are experiencing Mo’ Mom. In addition to that, my father’s closest friend Colin W (aren’t I lucky to have two amazing Colins in my life?) has been visiting San Francisco for the first time ever, so I have been trying to be the best Tour Guide Suzy ever since Sunday. Being tour guide is quite exhausting, though at least the weather has cooperated and been sunny and bright. Since Colin lives in England, he doesn’t find 50&deg cold, so he’s pretty happy.

He’s also an excellent cook, so I have been on my mettle producing show-off food all week. Colin and I cook together as naturally and happily as Dad and I did (and Colin and Dad did, for that matter), which was a poignant surprise.

Tomorrow my sis & bro arrive here for Thanksgiving – Colin’s first ever! I know it will be an emotional one, and I hope it will be a happy one, too. I have a great deal for which to be thankful, and having all these people I love together in my home is at the top of the list.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, even if you live where it’s not a holiday. To all of you who read my trivialities, offer your support, advice, and friendship: I am thankful for you, too.

I might need a therapist to recover from my therapists. If so, it’s going to be a woman, and a straight one.

Before you start yelling homophobe at me, I would remind you that I live in what may well be the gayest city in the world, and ask you to read my (mis)adventures in therapy first. If you still think I’m gay-averse after that, let me have it. I promise not to say, “some of my best friends are gay.” Deal?

Therapist One chose the week before I was slated to go to London for the first time after Dad’s death (not counting the trip immediately after his death), when he knew I was scheduled to clear out Dad’s things and visit his friends and generally be immersed in the horror of being Dadless in Dad’s house, to break up with me on the phone because he had a crush on me. Shouldn’t he have told me in person, at least, and not on the phone? And couldn’t he have held it in for just one more week and told me after I got back? Unbelievable. I was so shocked that I didn’t say much while he was on the phone, and then it seemed stupid to call him back and rant about it, so that was it. PS: Guy is married and has kids.

After a couple of months, I overcame my native slothfulness enough to find another therapist. Last week, I informed Therapist Two that my benefits run out at the end of the month. He took the opportunity to hug me and tell me that I should fire him as my therapist (well, he’s right about that, anyway) and he’d take me out to drink champagne and we could be “friends”. In the course of the hug, his fingers touched my back (the actual skin! Ick). I was horrified and fled. PS: Guy is married and, yeah, has kids.

A couple of days later, he called me on my cell phone and said, “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t too freaked out by what happened last time I saw you.” We still have our standing appointment this week, and I am planning to confront him at it, so I said, “We’ll talk about it when I see you. I have to go now.” There was no way I was letting him off the hook or excusing him or anything like that. And it just shows he knows what he did was wrong.

The thing that kills me is that my first reaction was, “Is there something about me that makes this kind of thing happen?” I can’t believe that I was blaming myself for the actions of these two guys, who are: medical professionals and know most of my horrible secrets, thoughts, and feelings. My trainer thinks these guys must have skipped all the ethics classes in their 10+ years at school, and the whole fiasco is an exercise in ego and power. I think she’ll be my therapist from now on.

The following are things I wish I never had to hear again. I realize that if the wish were actually fulfilled, it would be in a horrible Monkey’s Paw/Twilight Zone manner, so that the protagonists involved would be dead or I would never have met them or something. However, it doesn’t stop me from daydreaming of the absence of the following, in the same way a girl daydreams of winning the lottery (knowing it will never happen, but what if it did?!):

1. Snoring: Really, is there anything more annoying than being yanked out of the depths of hard-won sleep by snoring? Especially if you’re having a really good dream for a change; say, one featuring Johnny Depp or living in Italy or unaccountable and defiantly un-worked for wealth. To add insult to injury, the cause of your sudden sleeplessness is sleeping! And probably having a completely excEt dream. The final garnish on this cocktail of inconvenience is the utter inability to persuade the snorer to turn over, either by physical or verbal means. Note to self: Must work harder on upper body strength.
   
2. The Troll Downstairs: Has earned this unloving soubriquet by means of unrelenting obnoxiousness and habit of leaping out of his front door whenever he hears (see Superpowers below) someone coming or going; hoping, undoubtedly, to somehow glean the remnants of an actual life from theirs.

   The Troll noises that I never, ever, want to hear again:

   – Snoring: (And it’s not just Me. The guy who looked after our cats while we were in Canada remarked on it with the amazement usually reserved for phenomena of nature, such as waterfalls or the Grand Canyon).

   – His Radio and TV: He plays the classical music radio station every weekend, commercials and all, at a sound level usually experienced at heavy metal concerts instead of one’s Pacific Heights living room. He has done this for years, which begs the question: why doesn’t he just buy some CD’s and be done with it? CD’s rarely, if ever, have commercials for cars, laxatives, or anything else, for that matter, though what with the lack of a life and all, he may be unaware of this fact. The radio is replaced by TV after dinner, and I could tell you everything he watches, unfortunately.

   The garnish on this cocktail of horror: The Troll has a form of deafness previously unknown to medical science. While he can apparently only hear his radio and TV if they are played at a sound level approximating a jet taking off, he has preternaturally sensitive powers of hearing us. He complains bitterly at every condo meeting about us walking around (shoeless, too), the cats walking around (equally shoeless, and with sound-muffling paw fuzz, too), and once actually complained about the fan in our bedroom by saying, “I thought my refrigerator had turned on.” Bonus: He claims not to hear loud parties in the neighborhood that are shaking the windows and causing small objects to fall off shelves in manner of earthquake until the police are called. Sometimes he flees his cave until the cops have done their duty.

   – Bodily functions: The worst is the unnatural sigh of pleasure while peeing. Hearing both the sigh and the peeing is so beyond disgusting that I won’t even attempt to describe it, fearing the inevitable loss of both my sanity and recent meal. I’m sure just the fact is more than enough for you and me both. I will just say that it’s undoubtedly the most enjoyment he ever gets.

   This is followed closely by the loud and phlegmy coughing that is a feature of every day life in the Troll household, and just another of the hideous side effects of his inveterate smoking of deeply stinky cigars.

   But it’s not just the unloved and unlovable who are the targets of my ire. Ain’t no-one exempt:
   

3. The Cats: I really, really hate the way they demand to be fed. At the top of their voices. Non-stop. Milling around in a manner calculated to get in my way and possibly cause bodily injury if I fall over one or more of them. And even when I am clearly in the feeding process – opening the containers, scooping out the food – they are still milling around and shouting at the top of their voices. Garnish: Cleo keeps giving me shit while I am actually putting the food in her bowl. And she won’t get her head out of the way so I can get the food into the bowl per her incessant demands, so some goes on the floor. Every day. Every single goddamn day.

   Bonus: We have Mom’s neurotic and unrewarding cat staying with us indefinitely. She has been vacationing at our little resort by the Bay for more than 6 weeks now, yet the hissing and fighting have yet to subside. This morning, the kitchen was flooded by an impromptu chase through the kitchen, knocking over the water bowl and accompanied by hissing and yelling. Topper: Cats tried to claim they hadn’t been fed, when I knew for a fact that they had been fed a couple of hours earlier. Not that they shut up or anything.

So it’s been about a million degrees here the past couple of days, which equals an even crankier than usual Me. It’s like living on the sun. By the time I got to the gym after work on Wednesday (it was a mere 88&degF/31&degC that day and I walked there up hill, arriving light-headed: what was I thinking?!), my hands were swollen little sausages and working out, despite the air-conditioning in the gym, didn’t help matters.

It was so hot yesterday that I took the cable car home, because walking up the hill, even on the shady side, was out of the question at 97 fun-filled degrees F (or 36C, which is fun-filled as a bra size but not as weather). Just leaving the overly air-conditioned office building, where I had been shivering all day in my appropriate for the baking heat of the outdoors but inappropriate for the mini-Alaska of the indoors outfit was enough. The heat hit with the force of a blast furnace, and you know what? The sun’s rays really do beat down. Like you can feel them hitting your skin and making it sizzle in spite of SPF 45 sunscreen.

This makes me wonder how people in Arizona and Florida and other places that are legendarily hot on a routine basis survive. They must go from air-conditioned car to equally A/C’d offices and then back to A/C’d apartments or houses, but the unnatural cold of the A/C is almost as unpleasant as the natural heat of the sun. Does one’s body eventually become accustomed to it and better able to cope?

Fortunately for us, the heat wave is supposed to be over by Sunday, and we should be back to our usual daytime highs of around 70 F/21 C. Sweating will once more be relegated to the gym, where it belongs, and I will no longer fear setting foot outside. I can’t wait to hear the fog horns again, signalling the arrival of the blessed fog and its natural air-conditioning.

Yesterday’s incident affected me more than I thought. In a matter of seconds, a total stranger destroyed my peace of mind in the selfish desire to fulfill a passing whim. It seems deeply unfair that his caprice had this effect; also, that just because I’m a girl, I have to worry about my physical safety in the simple act of walking to work.

I used to really enjoy the walk to work. It was not only what Buddhists call “walking meditation”, but a pleasure. I enjoyed the beauty of the city, its remarkable buildings, secret parks and gardens, the different vistas of the Bay and its bridges, for our city planners knew enough not to obstruct the waterfront with high-rises. I enjoyed the exertion of walking up and down the hills, aware of my body and breathing, present in the moment.

But this morning, I took a different route, however irrational. Perfectly innocent joggers passing me prompted a pang of fear, as did a gentleman in a suit who stepped from the shadows of a building to hail a passing cab. I looked nervously down dark alleys as I walked by them, and over my shoulder every block or so. Never before had I realized how inadequate the street lights are to their task. Many streets only have them on one side, and there are deep pools of darkness in front of many buildings. I felt like a child dared to walk through a graveyard at night. And though it has been many years since I was actually a child, I have always retained that childish fear of the dark, along with other childish qualities, so the walk this morning seemed even more fraught with hazard than it was in reality.

But I can’t live in fear. The truth is that nothing really happened, though it did make it clear that something easily could have. Even had I been armed with any of John’s suggestions, the guy would have been too far away for me to use any of them by the time I got them out of my backpack or pocket, other than the gun. Though I don’t think even Texas considers groping to be a capital offense. I hope that the passage of time will lessen the fear, though I doubt if it will ever completely eradicate the awareness it caused.

I also hope that the flu I came down with yesterday is passing, since I still have way too much work to do and not enough time to do it in. Isn’t it ironic that when you feel really horrible it keeps you from sleeping, and that’s when you need the sleep the most? Here’s hoping that I am both psychologically and physically better real soon.

Today started out with an extreme compliment. Very. Or a minor assault. You decide.

Given that the swampage at work is of Okefenokee-like proportions these days, I’ve been getting in as early as I can to start the day’s Sisyphean activities. As Winston Churchill said to the Temperance woman who held her hand halfway up the wall and said all the alcohol he had drunk would reach that point: “So little done, so much to do.”

So I left the apartment around 5:00 this morning, which, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, looks approximately the same as midnight. Despite my route to work taking me through money-laden Pacific Heights and Nob Hill to the equally money-laden Financial District, a girl walking alone in the dark needs to keep her wits about her. So I was aware that there was someone walking behind me up the California Street hill, but I wasn’t overly concerned.

I easily outpaced the person walking up hill – I’m so used to it now that it doesn’t even slow me down – but I could tell that he caught up with me when the street flattened out around the Cee-ment Church and the grand hotels. Yet he didn’t pass me, and that made me feel a little weird, so I crossed the street. He followed, and as I approached the Huntington Hotel, he suddenly lunged forward, grabbed my ass, and then ran away like an Olympic sprinter.

It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to feel scared. I just yelled after his rapidly-vanishing figure, “What the hell was that?”, which brought the Huntington’s doorman on the run. He asked me what had happened and I told him. By now I was laughing with relief and absurdity, but the doorman found it no laughing matter. He offered to call the police, but I refused – I couldn’t describe the guy other than what he was wearing – and he was long gone, anyway. He then offered to put me in a cab, but I told him I was OK. He said, “If you need me, you just call”, and gave me his card. What a sweetheart.

I must be having what Fran on Mad About You called “a good ass day”.

Well, I’m back. More or less, and for what it’s worth.

Really, there’s been nothing to report in the past two weeks, since my life was pretty much reduced to a treadmill which was even – if you can imagine this – less fun than the one at the gym or the one gathering dust in your basement. This particular one consisted of the following, repeated seemingly ad infinitum and definitely ad nauseam:

1. Work for 9-11 hours with ever-changing deadlines and ever-new crises caused solely by those who never look at anything you give them until the very last minute, which in turn gives you that minute and that minute only to fix it. You can give these things to them two weeks ahead and it won’t make a whit of difference. Digression: when’s the last time you used “whit” in a sentence? And really meant it?

2. Walk to the gym uphill and try to work off the tension accumulated during the day. Can’t be done, at least by me.

3. Run errands on the way home such as shopping, picking up or dropping off cleaning. Get cleaned up from gym exertions, feed cats, make dinner*.

4. Watch less than an hour of TV after dinner. Fall asleep. Be prodded to bed. Sleep exhausted for about four hours, then wake up for another three. Variation: have anxiety attack wake you up. Fall asleep just as the alarm goes off and curse the evil necessity of hauling your ass to work every day.

5. Repeat Step One.
   

And then spend Saturdays with your histrionic and thankless mother, who still gives you a hard time no matter what. There you have it.

*Now, for those of you about to scream sexism, let me just say that I am a very good cook and John isn’t one. Also he does the dishes. And cooking is the only creative thing I do.

I’m still sick. It’s still raining. I’m not convinced that the two are necessarily connected, but I’m also not convinced that they aren’t, either. I am, however, convinced that daily dog walking in daily rain is not conducive to evicting a cold.

Worst of all, I actually had to vacuum my own house today. For the first time in years. It’s against all the laws of nature, you know. I figured the cleaning lady couldn’t cope with the sudden, if temporary, appearance of a pit bull at my house (and I feel exactly the same way), also my Spanish, though adequate for menus and getting drinks and even suppressing drive-by flirting, is not up to explaining rental dogs, so I told her not to come back until after Mom has.

So it’s been almost three weeks since her last visit, and with my dust allergy and untidiness intolerance, I had to give in and vacuum today. I really, really hated it and am further convinced that everyone should have a cleaning lady, even the cleaning ladies. Housework, like all forms of work, is to be avoided at all costs, and if avoidance is impossible, you gotta be paid for doing it.

Dentist: No cavities for me, but John got my helping as well as his own and has at least four and possibly more. Looks like there’s some pain in his future.

Other than that, mild flossing lecture and complete removal of what little make-up remained after a day’s work and walking to the dentist’s through torrential rain.

Dinner: Mom and Alice seemed to cancel each other out, proving that there really is some truth to algebra after all and two negatives really do make a positive. And I thought I’d never use algebra in my every day life. Who knew? Though it did take 30+ years to come in useful.

Food was as cafeteria-like as ever, and the pouring rain and darkness didn’t enhance the usually stunning view from the dining room, which looks over Aquatic Park, the historic ships at Hyde Street Pier, and Alcatraz, which was too bad, since it was Mom’s first time there. It will also be her last, since the Officers’ Club is closing at the end of the month.

Mom: Treated us to a visit to a whole new room in the funhouse of her mind. She informed Alice and John over dinner that when I was a kid in Upstate New York, we used to cut down trees (we did have 5 acres of land, including a pine forest, and we really did cut our own tree each year) for every class in our elementary school, treat them with flame retardant, and then bring them to the school, where we also supplied the happy little students with hot chocolate complete with marshmallows. I changed the subject immediately. John and Alice looked bemused, but were too polite to comment.

She was driving me so crazy that when I went to the gym on Saturday, my trainer asked me if I was stressed, because I had the tell-tale flush over my throat and chest that I get when I’m upset. It was gone by the time I left the gym, but reappeared fairly rapidly after getting back home.

Took Mom to the airport in the worst of the storm on Saturday afternoon. Carried her stuff, got her checked in, where she was supplied with a wheelchair and an airline person to push her in it. I had to leave her at security, and as I hugged her good-bye, we both started crying. I am such a perverse little freak. She annoyed the crap out of me during the scant 24 hours she was with me, showing that I am:

1. A really horrible person, since I get annoyed at my terminally ill mother; and 2. A really horrible daughter, same reason.

Weather: Hell. We have been relentlessly pounded by storms and high winds since Friday, and it looks like we are in for at least another week of it. Jonathan was wise not to come down here. They got almost 17 inches of rain up there between Friday morning and Saturday night. Their power’s been out since Saturday, though Jonathan bought a generator a few years ago, so Megan can come and visit the electricity at his house when she’s tired of the silent, lamp-lit dark of her house. It’s funny how close they live to the 19th century there.

Jonathan got 12 calls on Saturday alone, and at one point, he and Jed were trapped in the fire truck on Albion Ridge Road (the road that leads to their “town” and the sea), by downed power lines on one side and fallen trees on the other. He just turned his pager off until help arrived. A tree fell and missed his house by less than a foot.

Guest Pets: I’m already sick of walking the dog in the pouring rain and scraping poop off the soaking wet sidewalks, and we’ve only had her for three days. She is a very sweet dog, but not very smart. For example, she pees on a hill with her butt facing the top of the hill. We also can’t let her in the bedroom, because our cats need their own place to be sans the guest beasts, who get the whole rest of the apartment. So you can imagine how fun it is feeding 5 cats and a dog in separate rooms.

At least Mom’s cat and dog curl up together on the couch, which we have covered with a sheet.

It’s going to be a loooong month.

You know you had a bad day at work when:

– You don’t even have time to complain about it until the following day, your every waking minute and atom of energy on the day in question being completely sucked up by work.

– By 8 a.m., you have had the following sartorial embarrassment: you move the water glass which you are holding and which you have recently used from your hand and hold it against your chest to answer the phone*, resulting in a smear of lipstick on your left breast, close to your heart, which, like the Grinch’s, is three sizes too small. You repair to the ladies’ room and scrub it off your pale apple green linen top, but are left with a damp spot for the next half hour, looking suspiciously like the aftermath of a physically impossible lactaction accident. *shudder*

– You work almost 12 hours, yet your to do list is as long, if not longer, than it was at the beginning of the day. The truth about being a grown-up, or a convincing facsimile thereof, appears with blinding and sudden clarity: it’s an endless procession of obligations, personal and professional, and you’ll never get caught up. You do not realize this when you are, say, 18, and all you want is to grow up, thinking it to be a paradise of doing whatever you want instead of what your parents and teachers want you to, but in fact teachers are merely replaced by bosses, and you and your parents switch roles with you as you get older, and it’s a lot less fun than you would think.

– You have dozens of unanswered e-mails, not having time for such things. When my niece takes a few days to get back to me, it’s because she’s having so much fun. For me, it’s the opposite.

– You don’t get paid overtime, since you supposedly already make enough money, even though you can’t afford to rent a parking space for your car, and the monthly mortgage payment on your one bedroom apartment with neighbors above and below you and without benefit of parking space would shock and horrify anyone other than a fellow San Franciscan or a New Yorker.

Added to which it was a record-breaking 90 degrees when I finally escaped from the treadmill. I hate the heat, and if I wanted real weather, I wouldn’t live here.

I can’t believe that I’ll have to do it all over again on Monday. Why can’t we win the lottery, which is almost $50 million? Then I could finally achieve my life-long ambition of being idle rich. At last, something I’d actually be good at!

* How I long to be like the heroine in Salinger’s “A Good Day for Bananafish”, of whom the great J.D. writes, “She was girl, who for a ringing phone, dropped exactly nothing.”

Like Colin, I used Red Envelope for our Mother’s Day present (I am the appointed gift and card buyer for the three of us kids who live in California). I got lilies of the valley, planted in a ceramic pot, which will bloom in the next few weeks. I think blooming plants are less depressing than cut flowers, which have to be thrown out when they’re dead and brown. Blooming plants die a natural death, and some of them even have Jesus-like resurrection abilities.

Lilies of the valley are nostalgic for my mother, as lilacs are for me, and for the same basic reason: they are both associated with my mother’s mother. Nana grew both flowers in her garden, and always wore Muguet des Bois perfume. So Mom was really happy with the present.

But…the card that came with the present was for someone else. Mary Dolson of San Francisco, to be precise. I wonder if Mary Dolson got Mom’s card? If so, she’s probably wondering who the hell all those people are. Somehow, it seems entirely appropriate given the rollercoaster, Fun House quality of my relationship with my mother that my Mother’s Day gift to her got screwed up.

I didn’t get picked for jury duty! Yay! But the system is as mysterious to me as ever. On Friday, there we all were in the waiting pen, and there was an announcement that there was one case scheduled for that day. So they’d let us know as soon as the judge and lawyers were ready for us. Then they warned us that if jury selection could not be completed today, we’d have to come back on Monday to finish it. Two hours later, there was another announcement saying that they wouldn’t be ready to see us that day, so thank you and you’re done for a year.

My question is: what were they doing for those two hours and why weren’t they ready for us? It seems to me that whatever they had to talk about or arrange should have done before coralling us in the pen. Maybe Becky can enlighten us?

At least I’m done for a year or more.

But our iMac is still swooning, so instead of being incommunicado (incommunicada?) during the working day, I’m incommunicado/a after work, when real life begins, which is even more annoying.

And to cap off the annoyance, we haven’t been able to get the repair guys to pick it up and start repairing it. John dropped by their store on Friday with the receipts showing that they had repaired it two months ago to the day, and telling them that it now had the very same problem (black screen, but everything else working fine). They said they’d call about having someone pick it up on Saturday.

John called them three times on Saturday, and nothing. Then we got a call on Sunday afternoon, the purpose of which seemed to be to confirm that there was something wrong with the computer, but not to set up a time to pick it up or anything. So John’s going to call again today.

You would think they’d be kissing our asses and apologizing for doing such a lame job in the first place, but nothing. Unbelievable.

You know how I had the great mail day a couple of weeks ago? Yesterday, I had the hell mail day, brought to me by our friendly government, local and federal: a summons to jury duty for the Superior Court of California, made extra scary by including a form to be filled out and brought with me (suggests to me a case that will go on for months); and an extremely invasive and personal census form which I’m supposed to fill out and return to Big Brother.

I had jury duty 4 or 5 years ago for the first time, and I’m still recovering from the horror of it. In the City and County of San Francisco, you have to serve five days, whether or not you actually sit on a jury. I have heard of people who have been called for JD and only had to call in, but my own experience was quite the opposite.

Report to the waiting room (which I call the pit of despair, because that’s where you sit for hours before possibly being called into a courtroom — or not) at 8:00 and sit around, waiting, waiting, waiting, like the beginning of Casablanca. A couple of times I did get called into courtrooms, where you can’t read or do anything other than participate in a scientific experiment to see whether it is actually possible for a human being to die of boredom. I am extremely boredom-intolerant, and on the third day, after going home in the pouring rain after 8 hours of this, I sat on the floor of my living room and cried from the horror of having to do it again the next day, and the day after that.

I never did get on a jury. Also, that spell of JD coincided with our busy time at work, and so does this one, slated for April 22. I don’t know if I can stand it.

As for the census thing: I can’t believe we have to tell the government what our mortgage payment is, how much our monthly bills are, etc. They probably ask for bra size and frequency of sexual intercourse somewhere in the questionnaire, which is approximately the length of War and Peace, though I didn’t finish reading it. I’m under no illusion that the government doesn’t already know frightening amounts of information about every one of us, personal and otherwise, probably including bra size, but I just can’t make myself complete that document and send it back to make their invasion of what little privacy, or illusion of privacy, I have any easier.