Fear the Crab

Happy Birthday to Me!Maile took me out to dinner at the Prince Court. We had some Inniskilin, which was only our second sampling of that label. The first time we drank, it had a lychee taste to it. This time it had an apple juice taste. Both were good.

The buffet was pretty good. We both took from the salad bar, and “oysters in luau sauce.” Maile had some “crispy baked chicken with white sauce,” potatoes au gratin, some bbq meat that looked like something you’d find on a grill. I had some prime rib in addition to the bbq meat. It doesn’t seem like much, but past experience with buffets teaches us that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. This way, we had room for dessert, which consisted of bread pudding, chocolate cream pie, and some strawberry cake.

Then we walked it off by cruising the DFS, and saying hi to old friends. Needless to say, nobody recognized me at first. Granted, the weight gain, long hair, and general scruffiness probably led them to think I was a criminal. A well-dressed, but scruffy, criminal. Too bad the Georges and Irene weren’t there. I haven’t spoken to them in ages.

I think tomorrow after work I’m going to wash the car. And if time permits, I’m going to wash Maile’s car, too.

After a decent night’s rest, and a vivid dream that I’ve already forgotten, I feel better about last night. I’m still going to support Maile, I just won’t impose it. And if she needs her “private time” then I will let her have it.

I still wish I could spend more time with her, but it’s a compromise towards a better goal.

I just realized that I haven’t had anything to eat except a sandwich.

I love Maile. I always will.

Yet I think I lost a part of her today, or perhaps I lost a part of myself that I thought I could give to her.

Maile has always been independent, from the elementary school days. She learned to be self-sufficient, to not have to rely on someone and be pigeon-holed into a role she did not want. I came to this realization recently, although I think I’ve always known, just never really thought about it. This also makes me realize that I cannot be the person that supports her, that gives her a shoulder to cry on or an ear that listens, because she will not accept it. She feels that if she has a problem, she will take care of it herself.

That is a commendable spirit, and I hold a lot of respect for her, and her ability to take care of matters. However, it makes me feel.. useless. Like nothing more than a meat-puppet she can parade to her friends. I know she loves me, she’s said as much and done way more to show it. I just wish I could be her complement, that part of her she can rely on that just so happens to be a man who thinks of her as his complement.

Maile does not ask for help in matters that are “important” to her. Homework? Important, yes, but nothing compared to real-life issues. Sometimes she tells me about them, the problems, and sometimes, though rarely, she will ask me what she should do. I offer my advice, my parables, my logic, my wisdom, my experience, to help her assess the situation and make a decision or take a course of action that will turn that problem into a beneficial convenience, or at least a life lesson. Unfortunately, my words are met with I can’t, I won’t, or I don’t want to. All this does is make me feel like my words don’t matter, which brings back images of dangling meat puppets on strings.

Today, I came to the somber realization that she does not want, nor does she need, my help. This realization was after an uncomfortable moment of figuring out why emotions were running high. So we had a talk. And I have to face the fact that I can only offer my support if she truly desires it. This I said to her, and it broke my heart. Perhaps that’s a little strong, but it felt like it. I can’t give her my support if she doesn’t need it, or maybe she doesn’t want it. If she feels that she needs her own private time, her own personal space, then the best thing for me to do is let her have it. Even if it means that I will not see her for five or six weeks.

Given our current work, and upcoming school, schedules, we rarely have time to see each other, much less spend some time together. At the Lab I only see her for about an hour, or half an hour. Then she gets home at around 1700 and exercises. Once that is done, I could visit and see her, but by that time it’s around 1930 and that means I can only spend about two hours with her. Basically and hi-and-bye sort of deal, to me. And since she doesn’t want me around when she exercises, it means that at a certain point in the morning and late afternoon, I shouldn’t be there. So to me, it seems that I will not see her, at all.

The thing is, she’s fine with that. It’s testament to her independence that she can do that. I, on the other hand, am almost opposite, where I need to have that “safety net” behind me that I can use if things get dicey.

I shared this bit of my life experience with her, that while I have lived independently for a time, it was only during college, and it was “sanitized.” By that I mean that I always had some place or someone to fall back on if things got rough. I was living in the dorms or in university-owned houses. If something required repair, the U would take care of it. Rent was part of the tuition. I had a meal plan, and if I cooked it was only for that day, and I would grocery shop only for those ingredients (or to buy alcohol). And during the summer and winter breaks, I came back to Hawai’i where my family was. So I have never been at a point in my life where the only person I could rely on was myself, and I don’t hide that, either. I had family, I had friends, and I had a roof over my head if things got rough.

Given that experience, I want to be a person that other people could rely on. I want to be a person that someone could know was available anytime to turn to for aid. I don’t do it because I want something in return; I do it because I think, I feel, it is the RIGHT thing to do. There’s a sense of security knowing that in a time of need, there is someone you can trust to help.

I want to be that security for Maile. I want to be that person she can rely on, to be that person that she knows would be available at any time. And I want her to know that no matter what she thinks of my advice, whether or not she will accept it, or whether or not she feels it’s important.. No matter what, I want her to know that I will be there.

I tried to tell her this once, but I got the impression that I was making a funny, so I didn’t push the matter. Actually, I think she was busy with something at the time, like cooking dinner, and couldn’t grant me her full attention. I’ll have to work on my timing for my next attempt.

This morning as I was walking to work (the Office), I saw a girl in front of me slip and fall. She landed on her tush, full leg extension parallel to the ground. She was too far away for me to catch her, unfortunately, and even if I were close enough I probably would have burned her with the cigarette in my hand.

The thing that struck me most, however, was the fact that none of the other twenty people around her didn’t stop. They just kept walking, some of them not even giving her a glance. It was rather sad.

When I got to her, I asked if she was all right. To which she replied that she was, thank you. She didn’t appear hurt, more embarrassed than anything. You could tell she was embarrassed because she kept trying to clean her hands.

Of course, she was wearing these stiletto heels whose points were no bigger than the diameter of a pen cap, so I suppose it would have been inevitable that she would fall sooner or later. The sad thing is that regardless of when she would fall, nobody would help her.

You’d think that in a place like Hawai`i, there’d be at least some sentiment to help.

Last night I found a small scorpion in my bathroom. It was just sitting on the floor.. well, perhaps sitting is not the right word, but it was simply there, and not moving much at all. At first I thought it was dead, but it made a little twitch in my direction. I showed my dad, and he mentioned that it’d been years since he saw a live scorpion.

Then he killed it with his slipper.

The smashed corpse was wrapped in a paper towel and stuffed into a glass bottle that was going out in the trash. In the end it was rather anti-climactic.

It reminded me of the other time I saw a scorpion, roughly that same size. It was at George’s house, and we found it in his sister’s closet. It was captured and put in a glass jar, and then someone mentioned that scorpions glow in black light. It just so happened that the sister had a black light lamp, so we pulled that out and turned off the lights and turned on the light. And it’s true, they do glow. It’s kind of weird, in a creepy sort of way.

George then figured that he should use the black light to check for more scorpions, so he pulled it over to the closet while the rest of us sat in the dark. I think we started discussing why there are scorpions here, and how much of an infestation there was in the islands.

That’s when George screamed and dropped the black light lamp. As he bolted up, the rest of us cleared the floor, thinking there was a massive invasion force nested in between the denim and cotton. I don’t think any of us have moved that fast, ever, and we probably mastered the art of levitation if only for a few seconds. What was worse was that when George dropped the lamp, the bulb fell out and so the room was plunged into darkness. Meaning we couldn’t see squat of what was going on.

So amidst the screaming and the jumping and the banging into furniture and other people, someone had the intelligent idea to turn on the lights.

And we see a cockroach scurrying away.

Turns out the roach was in the lamp hood, and when George started moving it around it tried to run, and ran up his arm. That’s what he felt, and that’s why he screamed. At least, that’s what he’s claiming to this day. I know I was freaked trying to avoid stepping on the little stinging bastards that I thought George had unwittingly unleashed upon our pink toes.

In the end we caught the roach, and threw it into the jar with the scorpion to watch them fight. Oddly, they both died.

Last week my friend’s father passed away. I’ve only met him once, at my friend’s wedding. While I didn’t know him very well, it’s still sad to see someone with so much experience move on to the next phase in life. He was 58.

On a lighter note, my cousin also phased life, celebrating his graduation from high school. He plans on staying here, and attending a community college. I believe he intends to attend the U of Hawai`i later, so this is a smart move. Many of the credits can be transfered and apply towards those core requirements. And it’s cheaper by about $600, I think, maybe more.

Maile phased her life into a new direction, with a healthier diet and the abstinence of smoking. It’s a good change, and I’m trying to keep up. Unfortunately, I’m not actually following her footsteps, as I only eat healthy when I’m eating with her, and I’m only “cutting down” on the smoking, rather than quitting. She’s using one of those nicotine patches, bought at a tremendous discount because she went through this stop-smoking program at the hospital. Ordinarily a 1-month supply of patches would cost around $100, but after attending that program, the cost went down to $5. As for my cutbacks, I’ve taken steps to limit the number of cigs I take in a day. I never went more than a pack a day to begin with, but I’ve established rules to go by, such as not bringing cigs to work and not smoking indoors. The denial of cigs at work goes a long way towards cutting back.

I told Maile that I believe the battle to quit smoking involves not only the withdrawal of nicotine, but also the willpower to actively change habits. Nicotine is a powerful addictive stimulant, and I don’t doubt its potency. I’ve noticed, too, that we sometimes want to smoke after we eat, or when we drink, or when we want to take a break at work. That part is mental, where we’ve developed a habit (or more appropriately, an excuse) to smoke. My self-imposed rules of not bringing cigarettes to work and not smoking indoors goes a bit of ways towards that goal of breaking the mental addiction.

Since Marissa has been reading my LiveJournal, it has occured to me that I haven’t been that diligent in maintaining it. I’m sure many of you really don’t care, but it says something about persistence and dedication if I can at least write something once a month.

I’m no longer driving for The Lab, except on Saturdays. They’ve hired two new guys, who both work all week, so instead I’m grinding contacts. Not lenses, but the areas where the crowns touch other teeth. It’s good work, because I get to use the small handheld rotary tools and really screw up my tasks. I get to sit down at a small desk with magnifying goggles around my eyes. But the best part is that I can listen to CDs while working.

Granted, I’ve always listened to CDs while working, even when I was driving, because the lab car has a CD player. Nowadays I’m listening to what other people call dance goth. I have no idea what makes goth dancable, but I don’t really care. I like it. Today I’ve been listening to Switchblade Symphony, a band I recently found out had broken up in 1999. Too bad.

At the Office, I’ve finally starting coding the identity management tool for the University. It’s in PHP with a lot of HTML involved, and it makes me realize just how much I actually know. For those of you who don’t understand, don’t worry, because I don’t, either.

Next semester I will take ICS 321 and 331. Or something like that. I actually wanted to start taking some of my 400 level courses, but there’s a new rule that 400 level courses are first reserved for seniors who are going to graduate. I understand why that rule is in place, because seniors who can’t take their required courses can’t graduate. It still puts me in a bind, though, because those classes fill up so fast that I’m forced to take classes that, while I need them, I don’t want to take them just yet.

Maile and I are going to start an exercise program. We’re also going to try and quit smoking. Starting the healthy life, yo.

Since Marissa has been reading my thoughts, it seems that perhaps I should tone down the content. Yet that sort of defeats the purpose of having a journal. However, it’s online and therefore public and open to scrutiny. A compromise must be found.

Still, Marissa has her own journal-type thing and her handle is dis-be-yo-pimpette, so who am I to judge?

I’d better get back to work.

This morning I found some… thing, on my truck. It was on the hood, and it looked like some kind of raw hamburger, but not quite raw hamburger. It looked like it was chewed-up raw hamburger. It was a very startling sight to see first thing in the morning, but unfortunately I had no time to contemplate its universal significance because I was late for work.

So I simply shot it off my truck with the water hose. It came off easily enough, and broke apart into tiny little pieces, much like how raw hamburger would, I guess. Yet there was something else strange, for in addition to the little pieces that fell to the ground after I sprayed off my truck, was this dark, bumpy thing that looked like a link sausage. Or was it shit? I have no fuckin’ clue, and that made me stand there and stare at it.

I wasn’t about to touch it, no way. If it were a link sausage, it certainly looked strange, like it was a burnt, mutated link sausage. And what was it doing mixed in with the rest of the pink stuff? If it were a sewer log, what the fuck? And what the hell is the pink stuff?

Then I got to thinking, when and where did my truck mysteriously acquire the new hood ornament? I tried to think if it happened while I was at Maile’s house last night, but I don’t quite remember because I can’t recall if I looked at the hood of the truck when I left. The amount of.. matter.. that was on the hood seemed big enough that if I were driving I’d notice it, but I don’t remember that, either. It was dark, though, so perhaps I just couldn’t see it. So if it wasn’t last night, it must have been at my house, while I was sleeping.

How? The question of how it got there eludes me, though I have some hypotheses. One could be that it was a cat. A cat that.. maybe.. took a dump on my truck, then puked. Or puked then dumped. Or maybe the pink stuff was in the dump. Or some cat that was eating raw hamburger and a link sausage on my truck. Another hypothesis is that there’s a weirdo wandering around the neighborhood eating raw hamburger and link sausage on people’s automobiles. I don’t want to consider the hypothesis of a weirdo puking and dumping. If it happened at my house, that’s scary. If it happened at Maile’s house, that’s scary, although it’s Waipahu, so it’s not that strange. Scary, but not strange.

What disturbs me is not the question of when, where or how, but why. What possible reason could there be for some pink crap with some thing that looks like crap be on my truck? If I didn’t have to work today, I’d investigate further. But I won’t get home until later, and by then I think it will be gone. If it was food, at least.

The last couple of weeks have been a fucking hell. Not just any kind of hell, a fucking hell, with no protection. And it was all my fault, so that’s why I’m bitter, because I could have prevented it had I exercised a bit more caution, or more appropriately, anal retentiveness.

First it was discovered at the end of March that I had misplaced all my W-2s for the 2003 work year, plus the Form 1099-INTs that the banks send out with all the interest accumulated. I don’t know how I misplaced it, all I know is that it was all together with the Federal 1040 forms and then it disappeared. It used to be on the dining room table, but then my dad says he told me to take it back and hold onto it until he was ready to process them. Unfortunately, I don’t remember if I did take it back or if I left it on the table. So I turn my room inside out, looking through stacks of loose papers and books and other knick-knacks. I look through my old files, my old folders, the closet, my brother’s room, his closet, all the folders and files and books and binders and shelves and even under the bed. Nada.

So I had to do the next best thing. I had to call up all my employers and ask for copies of W-2s. The Office and The Lab were pretty easy, since it seems I’m not the first to lose a W-2, so they had copies readily available. DFS was a bit more stressful, because I had to call the main office in San Francisco to request a W-2, only to discover that I needed to fax my request in. So I had to wait. I didn’t know how long it would take, so I began preparations to file for an extension.

While this was happening, my laptop died. I mean it died. The hard drive failed, I think for a possible number of reasons. I’d been using the laptop every day for the past 2 years, so perhaps it was its time. Laptops are notorious for placing hard drives next to CPUs, so perhaps the high heat output negatively affected the disks. I was downloading and installing Visual Studio .NET (a legitimate copy from school), and I had forgotten to defragment my hard drive prior to that, so perhaps the disk wrote into some bad sectors, and upon boot it failed to read. So many reasons, or perhaps all of them, contributed to my laptop dying.

Ordinarily it wouldn’t be too bad. Unfortunately, the laptop crash occured at a crucial moment in my school life. I use my laptop to do my assignments, where I download applicable software to run my programming assignments. The crash meant that I no longer had a computer to program, and I wasn’t about to try to dload and possibly corrupt my desktop. So I had to scramble around trying to find someone else who either had the software I was using, or was willing to let me install it temporarily.

Needless to say, it’s been a stressful two weeks.

However, at the end of the two weeks, things worked out. The W-2s came in fast, allowing me to file in time and avoid having to submit an extension. Getting a new hard drive was simple, I just had to go to ByteWare and buy one. My professor offered his computer for me to test my programs on, so that went well.

Repairing my computer was a trial. It was the first time I had ever done something to a computer that involved the hard drive, so I didn’t know what to expect. Taking out the old hard drive was deceptively simple, so simple that at first I was trying to do it the hard way. I tried to remove the disks through the keyboard, when in fact all I had to do was open up a side panel and slide the carriage out. Pop the new disk in, and prepare to partition, format and install the OS.

Partitioning was easy. Formatting was easy, albeit long. But installing the OS was tedious. I heard from a reputable source that I couldn’t use my recovery CD that I got from Dell that came with the laptop. So I pulled a copy of WinXP from one of my friends, used the product key, and installed the OS. Then of course, I had to install all the patches, especially Service Pack 1. But after I downloaded it from the update site, it told me that the product key I had was invalid. Apparently MS put in checks to ensure that only legal copies can update their software, by comparing the product key to a known list of copies or pirated versions. So this meant I had a working copy of XP pro, but I couldn’t install any of the security patches needed to cover up the many holes.

I then discovered that my “reputable source” was an idiot. My recovery CD has a legal copy of WinXP Pro specifically for my laptop, and restores it to factory specs. I didn’t even have to enter the product key. But I had to delete the partition, reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS. I had to do this three times. The first time, I saw the message about the bad key. The second time, I figured maybe I entered the key wrong, so I reinstalled, and that didn’t work. The third time was the final, after my enlightenment by more wizened members of the computer community.

Updates were a cinch, although long, since I had a lot to catch up on. I also didn’t want to install them all at once, because sometimes that has nasty side effects. So I was downloading them one by one, installing each after I got them, and rebooting my computer. Took forever. I spent the whole day getting my laptop back on track.

And then I had to reinstall all the programs and files that I had accumulated over the past 2 years. This was a bit easy, and I cannot stress the importance of regular backups. Had I not saved many of my files to CD, I’d be lost. I suppose if there’s nothing important on the computer, backups aren’t necessary. Like I said, though, I use my laptop for my assignments, and I’ve started to make it a practice to save each one to disk for later retrieval, or as it so happened, in the event of a hard drive head crash. Even on my desktop, I’ve saved photos of friends, stuff that I wrote, even certain legal downloaded applications like ZoneAlarm and virus scanners (only because it’s a bitch to search the web to find them again). I’ve thought about saving stuff like the web pages I created, but if RoadRunner’s servers ever crash, it might be an opportunity to simply remake my web page from scratch. I don’t know. Jury’s still out on that one.

Anyway, I just finished getting my laptop back to “normal” level. It’s not quite the same as when I first got it, but that’s good, because after this reinstall, I only have the programs I want on there, not all the bundled software that usually comes out of the box. In fact, I should have done that for my desktop. It’s not too late to try, although it’d take a couple of days to backup current files and reformat/reinstall the discs. I need to check what reinstallation discs I have, though. Don’t want to start formatting and find out I don’t have that DVD player software anymore.

This morning I dreamt that I had a 10-inch fat centipede in my shoe, while my foot was still in it. I felt something inside, so I took my shoe off and emptied it, and this monster of a centipede fell out. It was dead, according to my dream, so I had no fear of being bit, but it was a disturbing sight and I felt very… uncomfortable. Chills and goosebumps, that sort of thing.