Monday, April 10, 2006

Our Chinese Lady

I don't know why this is but for some reason when life is getting to that super crazy point fate has to give you that one little thing that is so utterly disturbing and absurd that you can only just stand there and think "Why me".

Our life has reached one of those points.

A few weeks ago my husband, spending sometime at home while he was recuperating from such and such thing and currently between jobs came downstairs in his boxers to get himself a soda.

Instead of finding a beverage he found a small chinese woman sitting on our couch eating cookies.

The call I got at work went something like "There is someone in our house." "Like one of "Roomates" friends?" "No." "Well did you call the police." "No." "Who is it?" "She doesn't speak."

In fact she did speak, she spoke three words of english and a lot of chinese. But yeah, she didn't actually say anything, no matter how nicely my husband and my roommate entreated her.

Then she picked up some shopping bags she had brought with her and left.

The cops, typically, showed up two minutes later.

It was a tense and rather absurd day that broke up the rest of our tense and not-so-absurd life. And we puzzled over it a little while till life popped back up and started to bury us again. My looming unemployment, my husbands new job, taxes, bills, health. All the things that you end up doing while life is happening elsewhere. Like laundry.

Till today, tired and grouchy from a long day at work I drive into my garage and see someone standing in my front door.

It doesn't look like anyone I know. And it's not.

It's a small chinese woman walking out of my house with a bunch of groceries.

I had a brief moment of ridiculousness as I jogged alongside her down our driveway trying to get an answer from her.

"Hey, hey, wait, do you need help? Want me to call someone? Need a ride somewhere? Hello? Can you hear me?" I'm panting and realizing that she hasn't even looked at me. It's as if I wasn't even there. I'm not sure I could simply ignore a woman running in heels and yelling at me like that. Especially if it was a woman who happened to live in the house that I had just invaded.

Regardless we got the end of the driveway and she walked past me. I could really justify chasing her down the street.

When I returned to the house I asked my roommate who the woman was.

"What woman?"

I was going to answer him, but really can I be certain there was a woman? I doubt she could be certain there was a Katy.

Instead I just showed my roommate how to lock the door...again.

Sheesh - Why me?

Monday, April 03, 2006

Vague

When I was ten years old my friend Ellie who was very tall and had very long, very red hair showed me a strip in a comic book.

It was a big, coffeetable sized anthology of some Japanese graphic novel partially translated to english and there was a boy antagonist who was doing strange Japanese type heroic stuff that antagonists do in Japanese graphic novels.

Anyway he and his cohorts of unknown species found an egg. A big egg. And it hatched and this dragon-y thing came out and said "Zilla!"

So they asked it a bunch of questions like what is your name and how many fingers am I holding up and it kept answering "Zilla!". So the boy hero, who now that I think about it had blue hair, asked the monster:

"Are you a god, Zilla?"

And then there was something about directing the monster to a big Tokyo-like city to get some food.

I don't know why I thought of that...

(As a side note when I spellchecked this post the checker suggested I enter "Silly" instead of "Zilla". Not really sure what that means either.)