Suzy Says

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.

Why doesn’t snoring wake up the person who’s doing the snoring? I mean, it’s right by their ears and you’d think it would be louder there at the epicenter than just in the neighborhood. But it never does as far as I can tell.

And why can I always sleep when the alarm goes off, even if I have been awake for hours at other times during the night? Maybe if I set my alarm for 1 a.m. or something I’ll be able to go back to sleep. I can get to sleep OK, I just can’t stay there.

When Buddy was still alive, he used to sleep on my pillow every night. When I was ready to go to bed, I’d say, “It’s sleep time”, and Buddy would pad majestically into the bedroom and jump up on my pillow. So I’d fall asleep listening to his deep, rumbling purr. If I woke up in the night, I’d just cuddle up to his soft fur and listen to him purring and I’d go right back to sleep.

But Buddy is gone and so is my father. The world has gone crazy, and it’s no wonder I can’t sleep. My world is a mess because of Dad’s sudden death. I hadn’t even begun to cope with that when last Tuesday’s disaster hit, so the entire country and in fact the entire civilized world is now a strange and frightening place. In addition, two of our consultants have quit in the past month and one is on maternity leave, so things are weird and chaotic at work too. No peace to be found anywhere. The really amazing thing is that only last month, in the beginning of August, we were fully staffed at work, the World Trade Center Towers were still standing, and my Dad was going to cricket matches and gardening. All that was swept away forever in the space of a few short weeks.

Here’s my goal for 2002: a completely uneventful year. In particular, I’d like the Reaper to leave me the hell alone for at least one year. He’s been an annoyingly faithful visitor over the past three years, and I think it’s about time he picked on someone else for a change.