COTTON MOUTH

I changed my phone number, but the Maestro still writes to my courier electronique. He is just an old lonely man with a frail heart. But that is not my fault. Why doesn't he talk to his wife? She doesn't understand him. Well I didn't marry her for him.

This is yesterday's message:

I don't believe you've forgotten me. Have you?
Anyway it's been such a long time. I asked about you several times with Iliojuet and called your number without success.
Hope you are doing well.
But I want to hear from you.
You have my cell? 9687565342
I miss you

I don't respond. I hate that I have to think about him at all, I was so relieved to get away. What happens if you put a block on someone's e-mail? Will he get a message back that says "You disgusting old goat, leave her alone?"

What does a man feel when his love is pregnant by another man? Does it make him mad or jealous? Is it solid proof that her life does not belong to him?

When my belly finally starts to show, I will wear tight t-shirts and carry it proudly down the street. I will go into all my old haunts and say "Look at me! Ha! I don't belong to you. Or you or you or you. This is my baby, and we belong to each other."

PIONEER DAYS

In these cold months, the boiler runs out of hot water quickly. After Freddy bathes in the morning, there's no hot water for two or three hours, and then it is used for washing dishes and laundry.

I've never spent much time on grooming, but now, besides brushing my teeth, I do nothing. It's winter. You don't sweat, your hair is always messy under hats, and bathing exacerbates chapped, flaky skin. I have stopped taking daily showers. I am a dirty girl, a dirty knocked up girl in a farmhouse in the dead of winter.

Our water is heated by a propane tank, so after 3 days of feeling sticky, I feel like I can justify taking a long steamy bath with the few cents I have saved on the previous days being filthy. This bath is a long ceremony which requires much planning.

I am a bit insane about the ritual of bathing. First, the bathroom has to be immaculate. It does not have to be clean for pissing, pooping, or showering. But for bathing, the entire bathroom must be splashed with buckets of bleach. The bathtub itself is scrubbed with Ajax. We have a small bathroom, so I've got the routine down to about 16 minutes.

While I am cleaning the bathroom, four 2-gallon pots of water are brought to a boil on the gas stove. Two minutes into filling the tub, the faucet runs freezing cold, so then I carry these pots from the kitchen to fill the tub the rest of the way.

When I can finally step into the tub, with a paper-back and a couple of lit candles and something frothy to drink, I get overheated so quickly that I have to step back out in a minute. I try to relax when I get back in, but then I think "Oh shit, I'm going to have to soap up and wash my hair," which is a chore. So I wash before the water gets cold, and then I'm back out of the tub without reading a page or taking a sip of my drink. And the whole enterprise, which took an hour to plan, results in only a few minutes of pleasure.

GROWTH SPURTS

I am hyper-ventilating. Ten minutes after posting the rant on sloppy writers, I check my in-box to read a message from my mother that opens with "Yo, 'sup?" and ends with "Love from Yo' Mama."

I immediately called her and demanded to know what form of torture her creepy Bostonian fiance has been applying. She said, "My god Zulieka, just chill." Chill?! Before I passed a kidney stone, she relieved me by commenting on how I was o-beessive just like her mother, and added that my obesity could make things difficult for people around me. She meant obsessive. Whew. I can handle her problems with the English language. I can't handle her trying to be hip with slang, especially as it would be indication of a huge personality shift.

We both realized, talking about my obsessive-obsessive grandmother (not compulsive, just obsessive) that today is her birthday. She is 78, strong, still works and makes a lot of money, and hikes Mt. Fuji. For someone who was orphaned by the firebombing of Tokyo and made a successful life for herself through self-education and hard-work, she's an amazing woman and I am proud of her. Today is also my father's birthday. Four years ago I would have spent January 28 in tears, but the fact that I almost forgot its significance means that I am finally recovering from the sadness of his long bout with cancer.

RANTING ON HIPSTERS AND BLOGGERS

Ask the English Teacher has kindly answered some basic but worrisome questions for me. I will be the first to admit--no, Freddy will be the first to admit--that I am a carefree, sloppy kind of girl. I like to throw things around, my shoes meow from all different corners of the house and under the piano and bed, and I have adopted wearing Fred's socks as mittens in this cold weather because my own socks don't match and gloves seem to run away from me.

But with art, I try to be aware and careful. I hope that most readers will be forgiving of the mistakes I make in both grammar and spelling, and will be lenient with bumpy passages while I learn to write better. The point is that I am honestly trying.

When I read someone who is obviously not trying, it makes me angry. Especially in the blog world, where you have to sniff through acres and acres of shit to find a strawberry or truffle. If you don't care about writing or what you're writing about, why do it? Save us readers from hundreds of disappointed clicks.

And that applies to two of the hipster bands I could not protect my ears from last night because I did not have the foresight to bring ear-plugs. I love music. I love all kinds of music, I love music that I don't even like if you get my drift. I bleed too with the romantic bohemians smoking in a very dirty bathtub. I know freedom and spontaneity are important and wrong notes are not. But there's no excuse for being too cool to care.

If you think you love music, and you're in a band, please realize though this is your chance to look choice and sweet and show off your really cute bum while pretending to be coldly disinterested, that without a minimal level of practising with your mates and the most basic knowledge of chord progressions you cannot dare to call yourself a musician. You spit a loogey into an ear I have spent my life training.

ALL BEAT-UP

I woke up around 6 this morning and when I took a pee, it was coloured a deep and bright fuschia. Holy fuck, what's wrong with me this time? I yelled at the blissfully sleeping Freddy-boy, "Come see this, something's not right!"

He stumbled into the bathroom naked except for his sleeping cap. He lifted an eyebrow and commented, "Wow, what an amazing color."

"Do you think it's blood?"

"No, blood doesn't mix with urine." (He just made this up, he doesn't really know whether it's true.)

Two minutes later he peed too, and though it wasn't as intensely saturated as mine, the tint was definitely unusual. We then realized that it was my cooking that was to blame.




Grocery shopping yesterday, I had bought a bunch of beets. I don't even like beets, and neither does Freddy. But I had not eaten anything with beets in it for at least two years, and it was high time to experiment with them in the kitchen. It is a good balance in a meal to pair something you don't like very much with something that you do like a lot, because it makes the foods you do like taste even better.

So we ate beet salad with spinach and gorgonzola, and we didn't finish the beets but that small amount did surely have an effect on our systems.

RHYTHM

The more slowly one is able to hold onto a single note, the more sensual the transpiring of that note becomes. As one waits for the next note to sound, not knowing from which direction it will come--lower, higher, close-by, far-away, at major or minor interval--space for suspense grows. That's my philosophy on music, or maybe it's not a philosophy, it's my personality. And it applies also to sex.

I try to explain this, in frustration, to a man. Is it conditioned into an adolescent boy that as soon as he becomes erect, he must relieve himself as violently and quickly as possible before he gets caught? Is that why, judging by his own preferences, my clitoris is attacked and agitated with so much anxious flicking of the wrist and fingers?

A violinist or a pianist, despite the callouses on the tips of his fingers, has a more sensitive approach than most. I don't know if that is owing to his musicianship or to his practised awareness of the tactile sense. I sometimes tell my students to imagine that there is a tiny brain at the end of each of their finger-tips to make them more conscious of subtle, minute movements. I should tell my lover the same.

Maybe, being a musician, I have more sympatico with other musicians. All women can't want it the way I want it; however, I think the general consensus among hetero women is that their male partners lack sensitivity. I can feel when a man's sex drive over-powers his desire to make me happy, when all he wants is to get his cock in there and squirt. And that can be lots of fun if the occasion calls for it, but it never lasts very long, and neither does the sexual relationship as a whole.

The more slowly that pressure is built, the more explosive the final climax is made. It follows a series of waves, coming in and pulling away. Two fingers resting still on my lips makes them slicken, the spaces of stillness between the movements is what creates desire.

GERBILS

Pregnant women should maintain a regular lifestyle that includes sufficient sleep, proper nutrition, and regular exercise. I have no qualms about the first two, but exercise? C'mmon, I'm too skinny and financially strapped. I don't have the extra energy to waste just moving around for no point.

The way a poor person sees it, if you exercise you'll have to make up for the calories you burn by buying more food.

I have a philosophical argument too. A gym is my idea of hell. The gods had it right when deciding on the most painful torture for Sisyphus as being an eternity of futile exercise. Those machines were designed by uncreative people who understand the mechanics of the body but not of the mind. You sit in one place cycling or spinning or treading or lifting as fast and furiously as you can but you go nowhere?! We are bi-peds because our legs are meant to take us somewhere! We grew legs because we wanted to walk away from where we were!

I cannot exercise unless the movement just happens as a secondary product of some greater purpose than health. For example, if I am trying to kick someone's ass. I will fight it out until the vegans eat the cows that didn't come home, whether at ping pong or scrabble or basket-ball.

Or say the destination of a hike is Transcendental Falls, I will reach it regardless of nightfall, dehydration, bear warnings, lightning, whatever. I have no sympathy for Ellen's altitude sickness or Dean's blistered toe. Ellen and Dean do not talk to me anymore, but I was able to reach our goal goddamnit. They returned home angry with the memory of blisters and aches. I returned with the memory of the water in the moonlight.

Today, as a shy first-step in relinquishing my selfishness, I bought a pilates-for-beginners manual that promises that the routines take only 10 minutes a day. I can endure it, a tiny little bit of routine hell, for Bb's sake. It's not enough, but who wants to play tennis when it's 5 below zero (or -23c for the rest of the world)? The doctor says hockey is out of the question.

A SCIENTIFIC CASE FOR MONOGAMY

There is not a lot of talk about sexually transmitted diseases here, and I figure I should comment on the likelihood that I would have caught something in past considering my sexual history and reckless practices in regard to protection. This Zulieka, who is so stuck on her own brilliance, is a complete moron with her vagina.

In this decade, if you sleep with someone casually, you can make a tentative estimate that you are also sleeping with forty or fifty others and their bacteria and viruses. And if you are like me, and do not discriminate against heroin addicts or bi-sexuals, your chances of contracting an STD without use of a condom are of course increased considerably.

What was I thinking? To tell you the truth, I didn't care. There are many ways a person expresses a death-wish; not all of them include wrist-slicing and pill-swallowing. Sex was, and still is, a way to escape--the boredom of living, personal failures, confrontation with the Self.

That is my explanation--but what is the explanation of the men who slept with me, who knew something of my history and personality and yet plunged right in vulnerable and bare? I have never once been asked "Are you in the clean?" If I had been, my answer would be "I think so but I've never been tested."

The Maestro had herpes, and would often get outbreaks around his mouth. He would say that he had a rash on his face because of eating chocolate or Indian food, but I suspected it was more than oral herpes because of his unusual refusal to let me unzip his pants for two weeks at a time. I still let him kiss me during his outbreaks, and when he left, I would run to the bathroom and soap my mouth and face. I would wash myself on every occasion after seeing him anyway, regardless of whether or not he had scabs on his cheek. It wasn't the sores that repulsed me, I just didn't love him.

So I wasn't surprised three months into our relationship when I woke up with tiny bumps at the corner of my mouth. I automatically assumed it was oral herpes, which I am told most people carry anyway.

Twelve years since my first sexual encounters, it was not until this pregnancy that I was tested for STD's. They checked for syphillis, gonorhea, HIV. Then last week I showed evidence of having thyroid problems, so when they took blood again I requested that I be tested for both herpes I and II. It's just haphazard luck that all the tests came back negative--those bumps around my mouth were a one-time eruption probably due to my tendency to drool on myself in sleep.

So to some who will be disappointed, I am closing the book on rampant sex and confining myself to one man. And several vibrators.

MORNING ENDINGS

Freddy was snoring. I would kick him to make him stop, and then he would kick me back to make me stop kicking. This went on all night and around 4 I gave up and commenced reading Stephen Baxter's Manifold Space which a reader recommended after my last post.

What a piece of shit book, absolutely depressing. But I didn't have to read it all the way through, all 500 pages of plotless, characterless, sequences did I? We reach page 498 at 3275 A.D. and the human civilization is wiped out except for one two-thousand-year-old man who synthesizes with a robot near the center of our galaxy in order to assist the robot in a futile attempt to wrap a neutron star with netting to prevent the cyclical destruction of the entire galaxy. But it's a hopeless cause and all life must start from the beginning again, remembering none of its history or technology.

Freddy wakes up refreshed and humming, not remembering any of the kicking and ignorant of promise of doom and extinction. I am already awake but bleary and nasty, gagging into the toilet. It's all his fault, of course.

NAME-NAMING

We have fifty girl names chosen, and only one boy name--an iffy one at that. How many boys will be named Huygen this year? Well ours is named after the Dutch PAINTER.

Speaking of Huygen, I wonder what would happen if a little wire went fizz-splunk-crackle in that sea of methane. And what else is on Titan? Nitrogen? Where are all the little people?

No, really, where are they? That Fermi paradox is giving me the willies lately. The universe is billions of years old, there are millions of G2 stars, and quadrillions of planets revolving around them. The odds are a bajillion to one in favor of the existence of civilizations much more advanced than ours. I mean WAY more advanced, like instead of calling each other Asian or Black or Muslim or Christian, they are harnessing stars and time.

How come our satellites aren't picking up any signals? Does their technology have no relation to our own understanding of physics and science? Are we so brute and under-developed that our little earth does not deserve any recognition? Are they so developed and magnanimous that they think it best to leave us alone? Maybe they know that we are just going to kill ourselves in the end, so there would be no point. Or maybe all intelligent life ends up destroying itself. Because we really don't seem that intelligent, after all these years, still not having learned how to live in peace and repeating the same mistakes on an ever increasing scale of destruction.

I just want to get the fuck out of this solar system so that my Bb doesn't have to be a Cancer.

SUPERSTITION

While I don't take much stock in astrology, I am guilty of intermittently browsing predictions for Aquarians on the net. Just for fun. I fit the bill of an Aquarian personality to a tee--flighty, removed, rebellious--but that's a coincidence that has nothing to do with my birthday. You will never get me to believe that everyone born on the same day with the same ascendant has the same personality.

I never should have had the extra time to look up Bb's sign yesterday. I should have been tending to pie crust or curtains.

I am now illogically worried about having a Cancer baby. I fear that I will have no understanding of my Cancer baby's personality. Freddy's older sister is a Cancer and we practically hate each other. She is over-the-top emotional and cried all Christmas because she had given her cats to her parents and she misses them. She's forty years old for chrisssakes. Also she is real bossy and puts cream cheese in everything she cooks. She went to Italy and thought the food there was gross.

She will try to talk to me about clothes and shopping, and I will try hard to assimilate, but I just have no idea how I'm supposed to have any input. I don't fucking care about Tommy Hilfigger.

I know, I'm being ridiculous worrying about having a kid like her, but then I think about the other cancers I know. The baby's due date, according to the doctor, is July 18. Usually babies are not born on their due date, nevertheless, July 18 is an ominous sign in my mind because it is the birthday of two profound influences in my life: the Maestro, and the poet Yev-Yev. Turmoil and strife, ill-omens in the wind. If I can just keep things closed up until July 22, Bb will be a Leo and we'll be in the clear.

NAME CALLING

I asked Freddy if he thought it was racist that I am often referred to as being an Asian blogger even though I am American in citizenship. He thought that yes, it was a subtle form of racism. He said no one describes a caucasian female blogger as being, "You know, that one WHITE chick who writes about sex."

I am not offended by being described as being Asian unless there is an overt intention of racism, but I am irritated at times that this is used as a signifying description, when to be Asian--from any one of a hundred different countries far east of the prime meridian--means, really, absolutely nothing. Armenians are considered Asian, Tibetans are considered Asian, Indians are considered Asian, as well as the Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese. The 'Asian' population of the world far exceeds the 'Caucasian' population of the world, so in the world wide web, it's nothing special to be an Asian blogger, and it does not describe an ethnicity or culture.

You group one Asian with another, and a bloody war is likely to ensue. Just try it. Call my grandmother Chinese, and she'll tear your eyes out politely.

A more effective description of me is the label of being a Japanese blogger, which though erroneous, would at least describe some of my heritage.

My friend Lani, who is Barundi, told me that she doesn't understand the term "African-American". She says, "I see the American, but where is the African?" She has a point. She's very proud of her family and culture, and she finds no cultural similarities between her own native Africa and African Americans. Add to that the previous comment--Africa too is a continent of many different customs, languages, countries--and you see why the term African-American is neither political or correct.

For me, being called Asian is an indication of where I am, not what I am. In Japan, during visits as a kid, I tried to hide the fact that my father was not Japanese, and spoke in as urban an accent as I could manage. But despite my careful Tokyo pronunciation, I just didn't look like all my playmates, so I got called "gai-jin" a lot. "You're American aren't you?" "No, no, I'm Japanese." In the States I spent my childhood trying to convince everyone I was American.

One last puzzle--if you are half something in this country, half-Barundi, half-Korean, half-Mexican; and the other half happens to be some mix of German and Irish, why is your minority half considered the dominant indication of race? Why am I "Asian-American" and not "German-Swedish-Jewish-Japanese-American"?

Why do the German-Swedish-English-Americans get to be called plain 'ole American period? I'm plain 'ole American too, I really am.

I'm going to talk to Tony Pierce about all this and see what he has to say. You know, he's that really hot black blogger.

I envision a future world of Amazon women. I have this whole sci-fi novel planned out where all men occupy positions of slavery in the world.

It's a stupid move to attack my readers who are mostly male. But I'm not really attacking, just throwing out ideas. I love men. In a female-dominated world, you'd find me in the kitchen sweating it out with the boys.

I don't blame men entirely for the subjugation of women through the centuries. Women are equally responsible for setting their own place in society. Though we've resorted to sexual manipulation in the past because of our weaker physical strength, now that mental prowess is more powerful than physical prowess, the time has come to unshackle our pussies and let our brains loose.

We are still moving terribly slow toward equality when finally a path has been cleared, and this I blame on a woman's mistrust of other women. The words bitch, slut, tramp, or whore, I have heard mostly out of a woman's mouth (not necessarily directed at me), not a man's.

UNFORGIVING TO MAN

At a ball in Moscow, I write a note to Anna Karenina asking her to meet me in the dining hall. The last line of the note is a pun about osetra (a type of caviar) and ovaries. When I enter the dining hall, I am no longer a male, I'm myself. The Maestro has been waiting for me, and we are seated at a bed. He orders blinis and caviar. The lights are turned down low and he tries to seduce me. Then he's no longer the Maestro, he's my father. I leave.

I'm wearing a white gown, and I'm about to go on stage. Tchaikovsky Concerto of course. But someone else has gone ahead of me, and I am told that I am no longer needed. As I leave, Henry Kissinger greets me in the wings. He says, "Allow me to introduce myself, I am Henry Kissinger. I have been watching you."

He pulls an old program guide out of his pocket, and it has a picture of me in it as a ten year old next to a short article. I am interviewed in the article about my composition. I am quoted as saying, "If you listen to the bass line, you will hear the the many thorns and brambles of the landscape. This is a wild, tough place unforgiving to man."

CENSORSHIP

My best friend in second grade was named Joyce. She had short curly ash hair and wore over-alls. I got the idea, because she wore over-alls almost every day, that her family must be poor, and romanticizing the condition of poverty (no doubt under influence of fairy tales like Cinderella or The Little Match Girl) I went out of my way to become friends with her.

Joyce had a birthday party in April and my mother drove me to her house. I was carrying a meticulously wrapped present, completely unsuitable for a kid. It was a carved ebony elephant with real ivory tusks; my parents had brought over a dozen of these when we moved from India. I went to several grade-school birthday parties in self-conscious embarrasment with this gift. Upon opening the present the birthday girl would frown in disappointment and the parents would try to conceal their puzzlement. My lonely elephant would stand uncomfortably amidst stuffed animals, Hello Kitty pencils, gummy worms, and cheap Barbie knock-offs.

Joyce lived in a small pink stucco bungalow. Her mother seemed really old to me; she was overweight and had grey hair. Joyce thought that my mother was beautiful. My mom was always dressed up in those days, had long black hair and wore sunglasses and bright red lipstick. She wasn't used to mid-western informality yet, and all her clothes were designer label from Tokyo.

The morning after Joyce's party my mom drove me to school. We lived on a big hill and the road coming down was steep and curving. At the stop sign at the bottom, she informed me that she did not like Joyce and suggested that I make friends with some other girls. I was traumatized, I loved Joyce. When I asked her for further explanation, she talked in adult vagaries about Joyce's family being too different from our own, and not of the same class.

I stayed friends with Joyce anyway. I confessed to her, "My Mommy doesn't like you because your house is small but I still like you." Joyce was really sweet and eager to please. Nothing made her unhappy for long.

One afternoon in school, a classmate found an encyclopedia with pictures of renaissance paintings of naked women. The book got passed around the classroom and we ooohed and aaahed over bared breasts and pubes. A boy of whom I was really jealous, who was known for being a good artist, drew a sketch of a nude female. Not to be outdone, I drew my own sketch and made it more detailed. I thought it was way better than his. I took it out to recess with me to show it off.

My sketch was passed through grubby hands on the play-ground; it was further enhanced by a classmate's suggestion that I make the naked woman pee into bucket. A dotted line was drawn from her bush and directed into a pail between her legs.

When we lined up to go back inside, a bully in front of me grabbed the sketch and handed it to the playground supervisor; she was an ugly, ignorant troll of a woman and not even the six-year-olds respected her. She never smiled, and she wore a plastic headband with two red glitter stars bouncing on the end of antenna-like springs. Maybe the stars were supposed to endear her to us, but we thought she looked stupid. She was mean as hell.

Later in the afternoon, the troll woman came to our classroom with the principal. The principal wanted to speak to the child who had authored the pornography, and the troll woman scrutinized our faces to try to remember which one of us was the culprit. She pointed at Joyce. Poor Joyce was summoned, and she walked between the aisles of our wooden desks to the front of the classroom white and trembling. At the last moment, I stood up and claimed my rightful march to the guillotine.

The principal could see I was terrified, and she questioned me gently. I think she was amused by the drawing. After she satisfied herself that the sketch had been made innocently out of curiosity, and was not an indication of sexual perversion or abuse, she let me go back to class.

I came away from the experience with the knowledge that nudity causes great alarm in our society, and that it is a sure way of getting attention.

DAMN IT, I WANT A BLACK BABY

Or rather a half-black baby. I should have thought about this 4 months ago. Being bombarded with baby pictures in pregnancy manuals and child rearing books, I have noticed that all the white babies are ugly and the black ones are beautiful.

Editors are careful these days to include different coloured babies in their books, to have the token black mommy and daddy or asian mommy and daddy represented. The black baby mommies are smiling and the white baby mommies are going "Eeew". The black babies have a bit of curly hair, eyebrows, and dark round eyes, and the white babies look like cone-heads.

And I have always believed in the strength of hybrid vigor (of course, of course, I have to, I am SPECIAL because MY genes are stronger, smarter, faster, as a result of no crossing for the last 5,000 years or more). Less likely-hood of hip-dysplasia, skin diseases, webbed paws, bad temperament, etc. It's an well-known fact among veterinarians and animal breeders, but for some reason our government isn't going all out to promote inter-racial unions. I know the solution to racism: kill all the skin-heads and give a 20,000 dollar scholarship to all babies born to inter-racial couples.

What about tradition, preservation of culture, of heritage? If it doesn't get saved by the family--say, Aunt Minnette's recipe for cabbage rolls from Latvia--it isn't good enough to save.

I dreamt all these cats were in bed with me, big ones and small ones curled at my feet, behind my knees and on top of my head.

Pischna is not allowed in the bedroom because I am allergic to her. Last night she threw herself mercilessly against the bedroom door, jealous of all my sugar-plum kitties.

WRITING VS REALITY

People seldom write like who they really are. Aside from exhibiting their level of education through vocabulary and structure, or revealing their political and religious beliefs, writers, bloggers, internet daters generally do not write honestly about themselves in a way that we, as readers, would be able to know them after sitting and chatting for an hour over a cup of coffee. Most people try to be honest, but social conditioning and the nature of the art of writing limits our ability to present accurate descriptions of ourselves.

I can't describe my person as well as a good friend or lover can, or even a sharp-minded adversary. And I think I'm more honest with myself than most.

When writing auto-biographically, you can't spout all your great qualities, your smarts, your ability to leap over tall buildings, because 1) you would probably not be believed and 2) in order to come across as being valid and honest, you must be able to convince readers that you have the most important quality as an observer of yourself: humility.

On the flip side, you can't drone on about your insecurities and faults because this would be read as an indication of low self-esteem and depression and does not make for interesting reading unless you are REALLY good at it, like Dostoevsky or Kafka--but it's still dreary reading. And sometimes self-flagellation is actually a cover-up for a monstrous ego.

So the beauty of an autobiographical kind of blog is that the reader can ascribe whatever characteristics she wants to the writer. Sex blogs, especially the ones without photos, are successful for exactly that reason. Because, as often quoted from Einstein, to humans "Imagination is [far more appealing and useful in all creative fields including sex and] more important than knowledge.

Mr. V., when we were writing often to each other and before we met in person, came across in the course of several messages as being a sort of sensitive manly-man hopelessly romantic and a connosieur of all things beautiful. He was these things, but not primarily, and I would say that though to him these qualities are important, they are not what his friends admire in him. I would describe him as being a Bacchus/Santa Claus (he's going to kill me if he reads this), full of wine and fun, laughing bad things off easily, omnivorous in his interests, gregarious, and unconditionally loyal and caring to those lucky enough to call him a friend. I've also seen him bull-dog his way through business deals, and know from seeing his work that dark streaks abound. None of these traits were evident in his writing. I like him much better in person.

The opposite happened with Joshua, a guy I met at a Christmas party while visiting a friend in NY. We made out, cooked kugel in his kitchen, and developed a fantastic rapport long-distance over the phone and internet. He was damn smart, read everything from Rousseau to string theory crap, belonged to some music society at Lincoln Center, and before long we were professing our love and planning on having 6 babies. Then we spent a weekend together, and found out that our love was only in writing and definitely not in reality. We could barely stand each other and hung around my apartment reading and trying to keep up some semblance of politeness before his flight home. Just awful. Torture for us both. Really too bad because besides being intellectually compatible, he had the biggest goddamn dick I've ever seen.

Inevitably I come to Freddy who I love a little too obviously for both of our tastes. Freddy is in fact a genius in several ways, but I would never have suspected it if I had known him through his writing only. His attempts at rearranging the English grammatical system (and this is much tempered in his blog) would have thrown me off entirely. I am still trying to teach him why and where to use apostrophes. This is unworthy of a person with his insatiable curiosity and ability to quickly analyze the mechanics and physics of all machinery. I slept with him shortly after he made, out of scrap metal, a piece that had broken in my ancient sewing machine. (This was during the time Iliojuet and I were involved in the ill-fated business of designing purses and hats. I'm hoping we can give it another go with a bit more planning and capital.)

Two years ago, he had never even touched a computer--he's a painter, why would he need to? I bought one at a garage sale just for writing papers, and he took it apart. Then he started building them out of rummaged parts, and then he learned programming. Now in the room that I want to clear out for Bb, there are no fewer than six computers all subject to experimentation and crashing. I tell him to stay away from this one, but occasionally on the days that I don't write, it's because he's been messing with it. Anyway, he's never not been able to fix something, and gets 90% of the credit for making our relationship work. I am good for the 10% that is sex.

BAREFOOT, KNOCKED UP, IN THE KITCHEN AND SNOOTY

Good food is of prime importance to me. The main reason my ribs show and my hip bones jut out is not vanity; it's extreme pickiness with food. Anyone who knows me well knows that I can be possessed of a bottomless stomach granted that the culinary treat is fresh and cooked with a sensitivity to the subtle texture and taste of each ingredient. Food is more important to me than sex.

These last three harrowing months I have experienced the hell of Tantalus, dreaming nightly of lambchops, juicy t-bones, salt-baked fish, double Devon cream, watercress, artichokes, green beans and hollandaise, mangoes, guava, the most amazing tropical fruits found only in the open markets in Barcelona or Hong Kong, the ones that are hairy on the outside and open and drip like pussies and taste like the secret of everlasting youth, they swirl around me with and puff pastries, tortes, French maron cake, raspberry sherbet. Some nights the dishes are ethnically grouped; a sizzling dish of Tandoori chicken with those salty sour relishes and naan bread and an overloaded curry, mmmmm. Or endless plates of sushi, golden bubbles of ikura popping in my mouth, a plate of yellowtail even better than what they serve at Itacho's on W. Beverly Blvd. I wake up with tears in my eyes and drool on my pillow. I take a little sip of water and a spoonful of gruel.



Then this morning, a miracle! I wake up around six thirty, not fully cognisant and composing a gospel-like tune in my head, approximating this: "Oh, Lord, please rain on me. My soul is dry, and I'm mighty thirs-ty." I make a strawberry sauce, whip some cream. After Freddy finishes his ritual morning masturbation (to big ole pussy shots with the blooms held apart by the victory sign. He looks on The Hun or Cream Asia) he joins me and fries bacon and makes pancakes. I ate, for the first time in 13 weeks, real food. Three pancakes with strawberries and cream, two eggs, four slices of bacon. Things are on the up and up 'round here.

Fuckin' laws, fuckin' government. You can't do this, you can't do that, you must fill out this form and mail it in with those stubs enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope and it must be postmarked no later than yesterday. Otherwise you will be charged a late fee equal to either 14 percent of the amount due or the sum total of lines 4 through 7, whichever is greater. We grumble but we do as we are told, attributing all this to some higher power beyond our understanding or control, maybe a ginormous computer 13 feet tall and 10 feet wide with blinking lights spewing forever red tape.

But it isn't. Not a computer, not a higher power. It's other PEOPLE who are doing this to us. Most of them not so intelligent.

Why do people do this? Because most of us want to inflict our own standards/morals/beliefs on others and are intolerant of differences in opinion, even when those differences have no direct effect on our own lives. Why do some of us want everyone to be just like us? I can't understand it, I'm so self-centered that I can't imagine being interested in what other people are thinking or doing, as long as they leave me alone and let me use my time and money the way I want. I would much rather donate to Tsunami victims than pay taxes to kill Muslims.

Some special people can create beautiful things out of feeling crappy. Chopin composed fragile flowers while coughing up blood. But all I can make, feeling crappy, is crap. For this reason, I will be writing seldom until I feel better.

It's like this: during sleep I'm okay and the moment I open my eyes before having full consciousness I'm okay, but as soon as I come back into this body, which is no longer mine, I am not okay. Doesn't Bb want to eat too, hasn't evolution picked up the obvious clue that a fetus has a better chance of surviving if the mother can eat? And where do I find a bra that is 28 D? And why haven't I pooped in a week?

With a heavy spoon I lift the third of an insurmountable number of predicted spoonfuls needed to empty a bowl of vegetable soup, gagging, and force it down because if I don't, I will starve and kill Bb, or worse, be responsible for severe birth defects. I do breathing exercises after eating to try to keep everything down, and then I go to the piano and sight-read orchestral scores because it's mind-numbing and more tolerable than t.v. which I can't watch recently because the shaky camera and flashing visuals increase the nausea. I can still enjoy Bach, which is a great blessing, because life without Bach is simply not worth it.