2001-03-14 - 4:50pm

Who's Who Cheat Sheet
Who I Read

On the internal soundtrack: Hee! That Phil Collins song, "Against All Odds/Take a Look at Me Now"

I wrote this on the train last night. First funeral went okay. I was there more for Stacey than anything -- I rarely saw her Nana and mostly just feel annoyed that I didn't get to know her better. She seems to have been a really cool lady.

I spent the day with my mom and her three sisters (we all went) and we had some interesting talks about death, some of which I'm sure will worm its way in here eventually.

But back to last night...

So, I have indigestion and I'm mopey. I'm really not happy about leaving Poindexter for 5 days, least of all for something as depressing as two funerals and clearing out my grandparents' house for its sale.

Argh.

Poor Poindexter is stuck with the dishes, which he never has to do ordinarily. Lucky for him, I grabbed the bills due before I left, so he doesn't have to do those.

I only had about an hour at home before I had to leave for the train station. About 15 minutes of it was spent waiting for the stupid person on the other end of the Amtrak TDD line to realize that she was supposed to be using the TDD, not her voice.

So I am all cranky with the conductor.

I was trying to find the cafe car. I looked at the LED signs above the doors on both ends of my car, saw nothing but "restroom this end" and "restroom other end", so wandered back to a car I had seen labeled as "food service car" on my way onto the train. But when I got to the door, it had a weird handle I didn't understand.

I touched it once, dropped my hand stood there looking at it for a moment, decided there was a reason the handle was weird, and turned around to go back.

Walking toward me is the conductor, who had been yakking on his cell phone as I walked past him not 10 seconds earlier. He was shaking his head at me the tsk-tsk way an adult does three-year-olds testing their limits, and motioning me back in the direction whence I came. "That's First Class," he says.

Well, just HOW am I supposed to KNOW that when nothing is LABELED?! It didn't SAY "keep out" or "don't touch". It's not like I was trying to PRY it open with a CROWBAR.

This irritates the hell out of me. Flight attendants, school teachers, and security guards sometimes do it too. Treat you with condescension, in part by assuming you're up to no good.

ALL he had to DO was say, "Are you looking for the cafe car? It's down the other end. That's the first class cafe car, and [wink wink] degenerates like you aren't allowed in there." I would have laughed, said thanks, and been on my way.

As it was, I smiled anyway, said, "Oh, there's a cafe at the other end? Thanks," and went on my not-so-merry way. You know how I am about not stooping.

What goes on inside my head is, of course, another matter.

Freakin' "authority" figures. Bastards.

We just went over a long narrow bridge over dark water. Reminds me of more of my weird nightmare topics:

- I fall into water and irreparably damage my hearing aids.

- I discover that I put my contacts into fresh water instead of saline and they swell up to the size of dinner plates (yet still I try to get them into my eyes)

- I have to close and lock every single window in a 4-story house with about 15 windows per floor. To keep the burglars out.

- I have to clean up a colossal mess that never seems to dwindle no matter how many things I sort through and put away.

Speaking of irreparably damaging my hearing aids:

I'm not sure why this is such a huge source of anxiety for my subconscious. I've always had dreams where I end up in water -- usually because my car went off a bridge, a boat is sinking, or someone is drowning -- and get them wet and ruin them. I depend on them, of course, but this scenario has no basis in fact. I mean, you can't swim or shower with the things, obviously, but it's simple: I just take them off.

Whatever the reason, I have always dreamt about it a lot. Which makes the following story all the more funny.

The first or second time I went to visit Poindexter after we were dating, I handed him my hearing aids and asked him to put them someplace for me, when I was about to take a shower.

He got the clever idea of putting them on the kitchen windowsill, right above the sink. There WAS a logical reason for this, I'm absolutely certain of it, but I cannot recall what it was.

Seconds later, he comes running back to me in a panic because he dropped one of my hearing aids in a bowl full of water in the sink.

My first reaction was speechless shock, then I started to laugh. How weird is that? All those nightmares, and here's Poindexter dropping one in a bowl of water. I laughed and laughed while he gave a halfhearted attempt at a laugh but continued to look mildly panicked. Kinda embarrassing to do something like that with your brand-new girlfriend.

It turned out that the hearing aid was fairly watertight -- it was barely submerged for a second or two before he pulled it out anyway -- and we just mopped it up real good and aimed a blow dryer at it for a while and it was good as new. I wore it for another full year, until I switched from analog to digital.

One more fun embarrassing story. This one may contain slightly Too Much Information (not graphic).

Our apartment in San Jose had a long hallway off which were all the rooms in the apartment. As you walked in the front door, the living room was the first door on the right, bedroom the second, kitchen the third. Bathroom is facing you at the end of the hall.

Here's the key feature to remember: between the bedroom and the kitchen, the wall juts out about 2 feet on the right (narrowing the hallway) to make room for the closet in the bedroom. If you exit the bedroom, you have to go out the door, walk two more feet past the closet wall, THEN turn right.

So one time when the apartment is still new to me, Poindexter and I are in the bedroom. One thing is leading to another, and I have to interrupt for a trip to the bathroom. So I head out the door, stark naked, sort of running because I'm in a good mood (I tend to hop around a lot when I'm cheerful) and in a hurry. I make a sharp right outside the bedroom door...

you see where this is going...

and smack headlong into the jutting wall.

I whacked my head real good. I didn't realized had happened at first -- all I knew was that I hadn't gone where I expected to go and it hurt a lot.

When I finally figured it out, I went back to Poindexter for some sympathy. Plenty of "poor things" and gentle kisses on the boo-boo.

The entire time, of course, he was trying desperately not to laugh. Such a gentleman, he is. I looked at him, saw the giggles trying to get out, and said, "You can laugh, you know". And he did. Loud and long. Fell back on the bed, clutching his middle. It doesn't take much to make him laugh in the first place, so when something is funny he can laugh for well over a minute.

It is, of course, one of my favorite things about him. Even when the laughter is at my expense.

Well, jeez, I've done a great job of cheering myself up. The indigestion's gone too. Imagine that!

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