the kitten was fine.

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dateline: oZolitary

13 august 1996 9:31 p.m.

I'm as surprised as anyone about where I'm spending my birthday. Still, I'm content. Although, this Asahi (so I like the Japanese stuff) is a little warm. I just finished a round on the webring; lots of birthdays out there in the last few weeks. We Leo's gotta share the karma. I've sung to myself a handful of times (Derek just called, and I sang to him too). Made up a good number of verses. "Today Kat's twenty two, eating hamburger stew, her finger's still throbbing, and she's getting buzzed too." The beer is Jen's fault. Her day off was yesterday so we celebrated last night. But I better not get ahead of myself... there's so much to tell. The not-very-short summary is as follows: The Real Birthday Fun(tm) has been re-scheduled for Sunday, due to various acquaintences having stupid things like jobs and some strange affliction known as "responsibility." I saw "Trainspotting." I didn't see the Great Meteor Shower of 1996, because of all things it actually rained on the Windward side (said with sarcasm). My left index (?) finger is currently wrapped up like a mummy, due to a on-the-job, characteristically stupid injury (making my typing funny as hell, though I'm going to run this through a spell-check to prevent any further embarrasment). I'm kinda not a student, because I forgot I had to pay tuition by last Friday. But I'll still sign up again and shell out twelve hundred bucks. Maybe. One of my aunt's good friends was shot and killed on Sunday. Take a deep breath... I knew "Trainspotting" was going to be good. And I was right... it kinda reminded me of "Shallow Grave" (especially the ending). Some parts were sincerely disturbing, other parts making me squeal and laugh out loud. The heroin addiction theme was skillfully handled, the "crash" sequence particularly well done. I came out of the theatre wishing I could do a decent Scottish accent, and the soundtrack was so good I bought it that same night. I've determined that I'd find Jonny Lee Miller (a.k.a. Sick Boy) attractive, if only he didn't do such silly things to his hair. He's got a kinda angelic, Michaelangelo's David-esque face. His role in "Trainspotting" was very subdued, but quirky. His only other film was "Hackers," which only seven people on the planet (including me) liked, and he was the best actor in that flick. Kelly MacDonald was also cool, and I wish she had a bigger part. I don't think she's done anything else. The weird thing is that the only thing I could think of when MacDonald was on screen was how much she reminded me of Jay (or "J," short for something), a really cool girl I met through Nate a few times, who now lives in Chicago. The resemblance was uncanny, especially in MacDonald's first few lines. Jay went to a private Catholic school here, too (St. Andrews), and as expected rebelled to quite the other extreme (at least during the one semester she was at UH). I had a lot of really weird dreams last night, and she was in one of them. I'm not in the mood to tackle that right now. After the movie (and the stop at Tower, which made Jen cringe), we were figuring on getting a bite to eat when a deejay on Radio Free said there was some big meteor shower coming. It was supposed to peak at midnight, and it was already close to that, so we plotted how far we should get from the city lights. We settled on a lookout I knew of on the yet-unlit and unfinished H-3 freeway in Kaneohe. Did you know "Kaneohe" translates to "no men"? Fitting that the area is best known for the main Marine Corps base. It started raining when we headed up Likelike Highway, but we figured it might be clear on the other side. We were so very wrong, but I discovered I can still hold my breath through the tunnel. I was pooped anyway, so after driving back over and getting briefly tangled in some road construction, we stopped for a "snack" at Times and I took her home. (She gave me the tape of country music she promised, and it's going on after this very good "Transpotting" 'track is finished). All in all a good Birthday Eve, considering what I'd done to myself during the day at work. I slammed my hand in a "torpedo." It actually was a perfectly decent day, with a couple of early birthday wishes from the guys, except my klutz ions were really charged and I was struck by a bolt of bad luck. At the hospital, they have this really groovy vacuum-tube system running all over the place (think "The Jetsons"). Everything from prescriptions to patient records to bags of chips (anything except assundry body fluids) can be sent almost anywhere, from the towers to the morgue, whooshing at ridiculous speeds behind the walls. The vessels we use are angular, torus-shaped (why do I know that word?) plastic canisters lined with foam. I call 'em "torpedos," because they remind me of the thing they locked Spock's body in at the end of Star Trek II. Anyway, I love playing with it. When something comes to our station, I jump to empty it and send the torpedo back to "000," some place I've never seen where they collect the empty ones. I was a little too eager yesterday. I tried to slam one of the suckers shut with one hand before the other one figured out what was going on. Of course, after yelping in pain, I also tried to yank my hand free before thinking to carefully open the thing up again. Thus, I smashed all the fingers on my left hand except my thumb, and also scraped a good portion of the skin off two of my knuckles. I actually worried that I wouldn't be able to use a keyboard for a while, but of course I've always been the melodramatic type. My hand hurts a little, and my knuckles look pretty awful, but here I am tooling along at something around 30 w.p.m. (I can hit 100 on a good day) with a goof about every paragraph. Of course, I was just recently reading in another journal about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Repetative Motion Injuries, and since I'm also the hypochondriac type, I'm cringing and stretching with every ache. The UH system is totally fucked up. This year, the same semester tuition goes up 75 percent, they also decide to move the tuition payment deadline (twice!) up a good month to before classes even start. I've always been used to paying a week or so into classes. I never know what I'm going to keep or if I'll want to shell out a fortune for this or that class' books. So, all my pre-registered courses are cancelled. I now get to fight for the dregs along with the freshmen, who are always the last to get to pick their classes, sometime later this month (I better get that date down). I didn't even know the deadline passed until yesterday when Jen said she was depressed because she wasn't going to school this semester because she can't afford it. Not like I can. At least without a little boost from mom. Wherever all those people were that lectured me over the summer about how I shouldn't take a break from college, I sure need them now. I hear William Sonoma (very upscale kitchen gadget store at Ala Moana) is still hiring... They're saying on TV tonight that it was a parked car that pissed off this guy, this accountant who lived in Mililani, pushing him over the edge. He killed his two neighbors (parents of two, who weren't home), and a woman named Terry Nakasone, who was just there visiting. My mom's sister knew Terry, and the scary thing is even I probably met her once. A pretty, totally sweet local Japanese woman. She, like the married couple (one a well-known surfer), was shot several times in the head. Her husband escaped, but he's totally broken up. I cried thinking of him. The TV stations here have no soul. They've been playing the recording of a 911 call made by the dead mother. During the call, she actually pleads with the guy for her life. "My children! My children!" Then you hear a crack, a pop. And then the line goes dead. The guy killed himself after killing her. You know the words they're using: "quiet," "kept to himself," "a loner." Everyone's asking, "How could this happen in Mililani?" You have to understand, this is the definitive suburban wonderland. Green lawns, tree-lined "parkways," parks every two blocks, engineered placement of streets and malls and schools... peaceful, hopelessly upper-middle class. My aunt moved there first, and my mom followed, and they love it. But it always bothered me a little about how perfect it was. Like some Norman Rockwell nightmare. The murders have freaked everyone out, but the terrible, darkly cynical side of me thinks it was only a matter of time. (If you check in within a few hours of my putting this up, you can probably get to the story at the Star-Bulletin web page. Otherwise you'll have to go into back issues.) Well, it's been a well-spent birthday evening. Three, maybe four diary entries in one, out of two hours of off-and-on rambling. I even wandered the web a bit so that I could plop in the pictures above (from Jeff Main's "Trainspotting" page). Just might take a couple of days off. Then again, I'm worried about how often I'll get to write when classes start on the 26th, so maybe I should push for daily while I can. I have to concede being a little cranky tonight, in part (through no fault of anyone) that I'm home by myself on my birthday, in part because it was hectic and hot at work today, and in part because I've gotten a couple of pretty uncool e-mails in the last couple of days. I'm about ready to swear off Eudora for the week ...but the birthday messages are too wonderful to pass up. Mahalo, all. (To any online buds, if you didn't get a terse e-mail back from me, it wasn't you. Calm down.) On the bright side, Jen, Nate and Jaimee them are plotting something for me for Sunday, which will probably involve a club, or a picnic, or a few videos and more beer. Whichever way, it'll be great.