Blog of Magic Cheese

I had the loveliest time visiting my family-to-be in Prince George. Folks were nice, I was fed until I positively waddled back into the United States, and everybody got me beautiful pressies.

My family hasn't really celebrated the winter holidays much since Jin and I turned ten or so. I really missed things like the tree and presents and the nice festive feeling of having family together. It's just not the same when you're sitting in a quiet house Christmas morning with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and a sullen brother who hates his life because the kids next door are shrieking with joy with a giant tree of gifts and tons of cousins to play with.

Rob's family does things I'd only ever seen in movies until now. Cars come up the snow-lined driveway to deposit relatives, greatcoated and breathing clouds of steam, carrying wrapped bundles. There's holiday cookies and tarts and all kinds of sweets all over the counter from neighbors, friends, and relatives. A live Christmas tree is chopped down from the woods out back and brought into the house. They bake and decorate special Christmas cookies. The table and kitchen area is laden with food, food, and so much food.

There's nothing I regret whatsoever about growing up Japanese American and getting to experience bazaars at the Buddhist church, taiko drumming, and homemade takuan, or about growing up in an area of California that never snows, but it was so neat to be able to also experience the type of Christmas that I'd only ever seen in movies starring white people that were made about the idyllic holidays of the East coast.

Oh, and Rob's family has really good taste in clothing. I got an entire wardrobe for 2007 for Christmas. This is not at all like when I was a kid, and getting clothes was an absolute drag for the holidays. My father's side of the family gave me clothes that would get me beat up at school, like electric blue pants covered in white sheriff stars, or pink and green plaid. One memorable summer whilst visiting my mother in Los Angeles, I donned a pair of shorts I'd received for Christmas because I'd outgrown all of my other clothes, and my mother, upon seeing them, shrieked and told me to take them off that instant, threw them in the trash, and took me out to buy new clothes that afternoon.

More than I like the clothes, I love the fact that I'm marrying into a really great family that I enjoy spending time with, and who have made me feel absolutely welcome. Yay!

The requested pictures have come via very very long zip file transfer from northern dial-up.

Here is the ring, taken as we were riding in the bucket of a tractor to chop down a Christmas tree.

Here we are after dragging Rob's sister out of bed to take our picture.

"Why do you guys need pictures taken now?"
"Because we look good."

Here we are looking like idiots from having tried to take our own pictures using the reflection of the preview window in the bathroom mirror as a guide.

And here we are being utter, utter dorks.

After three years or so, I've finally out-listened Gatecrasher Disco-tech, my favorite trance disc set, and am on the hunt for more music. Unfortunately, the most promising artist I've found so far is Gataka (name similarity total coincidence, I'm sure) who is located in Northern Israel and whose albums I have not found available for purchase in the United States so far. Somebody out there with some mp3s or that knows him needs to hook me up.

I also listened to Death Cab For Cutie's Transatlanticism album over iTunes' music share at work and man is it calming. I'd never been that mellowed out before without plentiful perscription medication, a long exhausting wushu practice, or both.

I'm going to do everything I can to add both artists to my collection at the same time. The ultimate uppers and downers should balance one another out for a harmonious listening experience.

I haven't gone hungry since I started my full time job.

This is a big deal.

For years now, I'm used to running out of money or scrambling to keep from being overdrawn, eating nothing but white rice and grocery store samples for weeks while waiting for money to come in, and feeling myself get short of breath and my muscles go soft as I run out of nourishment.

It's been almost five months now, and I haven't been hungry once. There's oatmeal when I get to the office in the morning, organic fruit and nuts to snack on after lunch, money to buy food, and now I have a credit card to purchase food the one time I was running a little low after paying rent.

It's funny how, once you cross a certain line, food is so easy to get. In the corporate/working world, there's food everywhere. There's food that's left over that no one wants to eat. There's office lunches. There's baked goods brought in from home to share with everyone. There's dinners you're taken out to when your friends come by your place and crash for a night. When I got a full time job, in an office, suddenly I was being fed all the time.

I believe this means I've broken the starvation line, and it strangely doesn't have that much to do with money. Food doesn't actually cost that much; there's food being wasted and thrown away all of the time in grocery stores and restaurants and things. It's a certain lifestyle that, once you've broken into it, food is there aplenty and it's taken as utterly normal that there's always food to eat. I think I've broken that line now that I have a Real Job In A Computer Software Company In San Francisco. It still feels a little disorienting being in this place now. Sometimes I look around the office and wonder if I'm really there, and if it's really my desk and my bowl of food. I occasionally fancy that security will bust in and drag me, a hallucinating crazy person, out of the door while the real person that works in the office stares and wonders what possessed me to come and sit at her desk.

I guess it's so strange because for a long time I worried that the state of my brain, even heavily medicated, might keep me from ever holding down a full time job or being financially independent. I have this to say about the hunger line, though: now that I've crossed it, I'm not ever going back.

I found a jar of lingonberry preserves in my purse. I must have forgotten to take them out after our trip to IKEA.

Curse them. We went for a chair for my flatmate, and they were out of stock, but we did not discover this until after I purchased a pretty blue throw for my squishy velvet futon chair and a new big firm squishy huggly pillow for my bed, as Rob confiscates both my normal pillow and my spare pillow every time he comes to visit, leaving me to try to adjust my head on a stuffed tiger.

I quite like Jonathan Coulton's take on IKEA. I sent it to my aforementioned co-worker, who responded, "now the only expression of the formerly bloodthirsty nature of the Norse is through that black metal that comes from the frozen north. That and the occasional church burning The difference is that they burn their own, not ones belonging to others nations. Pansies."

I love my job.

Also on the eyebrow front, they appear to be growing back in, and the right one no longer resembles the Nike swoosh.

Sadly, my eyebrows seem to be angry with me for allowing that Vietnamese manicurist near them, as some of the hairs are growing in slightly curly and veer away from the rest of the 'brow. Dammit.

Today on the bus I observed a young woman very carefully, very delicately touching up the make-up around her eye with a cotton swab. "Dab" would have been too strong a word. More like the delicate kiss of a kitten's whisker upon her lid.

What made this sight incongruous of course, was that her make-up consisted of thick, unblended horizontal smears of black paint, applied to one-half of the length of her eyes.

If you, I thought to her in my head, an otherwise pretty young woman applies her make-up by scrubbing a charcoal briquette in random areas on her eyelids, then why now this sensual dance with subtlety?

Confusion reigned the rest of the ride to work.

A man trash his home
Cranes smash, mud smeared on walls, then
... windexes peephole

-Confusion haiku

I have a new coverlet. It is soft down, fluffy and warm, and has a cool crisp cotton cover on it.

What makes this somewhat out of the ordinary of course, is that this coverlet is for use in, and sponsored by the office.

I get cold easily. I think this has something to do with the fact that office furniture is made for bigger people and my feet can't reach anything to rest on when I'm sitting in my chair unless I'm perched on the edge and I have my feet propped up on the castors. Consequently, my legs lose circulation and get cold.

My godsend was this big grey blanket that had been used to cushion furniture when we moved it into the office, and I'd been wrapping myself in it while sipping boiling hot mugs of tea.

I think that this niggled at our Chief of Operations incessantly, because he said that I looked like a homeless person in it. Not that he was the only one; I think that one of our engineers and the CEO commented, too. Nevertheless, it was soft, thick, and warm, so it was going to stay in use.

Last Friday, the COO finally snapped and told me that in addition to making me look homeless, the blanket was such a disconnect from my blazer, slacks, and blouse that it made me look like a deranged homeless person, and to get a new blanket, and that he'd buy it for me. While I was laughing, he said,

"I'm not joking. Bring in the receipt, the company will comp you."

So now I have a huge fluffy down quilt to wrap myself in when I get chilly at the office. Score!

I love my job.

Today a group of businessmen came in to chat with our CEO. They walked right past the group of desks that I sit in. The following furious jabber chat ensued betwixt me and co-workers:

Me: There is a bevy of Japanese businesspersons in the fish tank with D.

L: That's no bevy. That's a gaggle.
    Perhaps a pod.

Me: A cluster?

L: A cluster... not bad.

Me: A covey

G: A murder.

Me: A coterie

L: I was waiting for "murder."

Me: An outfit of businessmen.

L: Heh. An outfit of suits.

G: Heh, that's good

J: Are they handing him fat stacks of cash?

Me: A horde of mongoloids.
    *titters.*

J: *baps Aya on the head.*

L: Thank you, J.

Me: What?
    It's a perfectly cromulent term.

L: So. Wrong.

I love my job.

I don't know why the guys at work seem so partial to this gyro place just across the street from our building.

First of all, when I think of gyros, I think of a giant stack of meat turning on one of these dealies. The sizzling cooked meat is then shaved off, and it looks something like this.

At least, that's how the gyros that I saw all over the Saint-Michel district of Paris were prepared, and how I continue to think of them today. An English co-worker informed me that in London, these are known as kebabs, and that you only eat them after stumbling out of a pub following a long night of drinking, as you would not want to consider eating them sober.

No matter. Gyros these are in my mind.

This sandwich that I purchased today for over $6 had compressed chicken material lunchmeat in it for meat. It was so inadequate that I'm actually angry with the sandwich for being so inadequate. I had it and a large glass of pomogranate blueberry juice for lunch, and over the course of the next five hours I devoured a pound of dried apricots, two apples, a can of pringles, and a bag of candy and I came home ravenous. I wolfed down a large turkey sandwich on some real bread and half a bag of vegetable chips before we started off for the gym.

I don't know what the hell was in that sandwich, but I'm starting to suspect it was diet supplements.

Also, Pringle detritus is disturbingly undistinguishable from dandruff. I thought somebody had snowed all over my new desk until I remembered what I'd been reduced to eating because of that horrible sandwich.

Never again.

Crap hair day today. Gave up. Turbanized.

I need to visit Thy again.