Jacob and I found a potential problem with MT last night, and here is the amusing story to go along with it:

I was idly obsessively checking my stats when I noticed I was being linked to by a page I’d never heard of which was not spam or a search engine. Naturally, I went to check it out. Imagine my shock to find a girl from high school. She had Googled her own name (we’ve all done it) and found my site, where I impoliticly (but I don’t think rudely) referenced her a couple of years ago. Apparently, this creeped her out.

Not wanting to be a creep, I deleted the entry. Here is where the problem lies: the entry can still be reached by following her link to it, or by Googling for it. I confirmed it with Jacob: I’m not inept, MT just has a weird issue. This means that any entry you have created and deleted might still be out there. Hopefully there will be a fix for this coming from the Lad when he gets home, but in the meantime, be warned.

Anyway, hopefully this will not turn into some war of meta-blogging. I just wanted to 1) warn people about the MT thing and 2) reassure this girl that the entry will be down as soon as I figure out how to do that.

I had a long, serious meeting with my cowboy boss this morning. I was scheduled to meet with my professor boss in the afternoon and tell him the whole horrible truth about his brand new shiny deficit of ($249,000).

“Will he be mad, do you think?” I wondered.

“Oh yeah,” said the cowboy.

“Will he yell?” I asked.

“Hoo boy, yes. He’s gonna hit the roof.”

“What should I do? Should I just sit through it?”

“Yes, just wait him out. He’ll rant and scream for awhile and then calm down eventually.”

Heart in mouth crowding my foot, I crept up the stairs to my professor boss’s office, clutching my backup paperwork like an 8″x11″ rosary. I gingerly laid the debt on his desk in front of him and waited, eyes squeezed shut, to be fired.

“Oh, that’s no problem,” said this calm, kind gentleman who I suddenly remembered had been my boss all along, even as my other boss has always been a little psychotic and prone to fits of hyperbole and drinking in the office. “Here’s how we can fix that,” said my lamb of a professor boss, and fixed it beautifully, and with all the weight that has been lifted from me I think I will become a model.

They wanted to put our new techie, a friendly, ponytailed warhorse, into the cubicle next to me in the office I share with my four other female coworkers. My cowboy boss, resisting this attempt to pasture a foreign bull with his cows, decided instead to give his private office to the techie and move into the cramped space neighboring mine. As Nabokov would say, “Welcome, fellow, to this bordello.” He has already warned me not to sit too close to him, though I’m not sure whether the implication is that I will jump him or he will jump me. But as long as he keeps co-writing my term papers I don’t care.

If all the flights departed on time, the Lad should have landed in Cairo about a half hour ago I think. I am of course intending to be miserable without him. So far I’ve been able to replace him in my life with macaroni’n’cheese and “The Secret of Monkey Island,” but I have my doubts about how long these pleasures can hold me. And while it is true that chocolate bars, when used correctly, can substitute for sex (I favor king-sized Mars Bars), what can I use to replace true love? Maybe Ben & Jerry’s makes a flavor for this.

Kids who bring guns to school are now officially classified as terrorists. I imagine this linguistic crime is committed by those pale-complected men who spend their time in beige rooms, inscrutable, cigar-smoking, with the English language bent stuttering and scared over a table in front of them while they perform on her the unthinkable.

And each day sees a new lexigraphic travesty on the newsstands as ordinary citizens are classed as heroes or terrorists, sheep or goats, and English is locked up so far from the sun she has forgotten all the shades of meaning in the world; now there is only pale or beige, beige or pale, and she loses vocabulary like fluid oozing out of frightened pores.

Who will take back the night for English? And when that happens, when that (let us say) man comes stumbling out of the beige building, English swooning in his massive arms, trailing lost vocabulary like kidnapped children, will we call him a hero and kill English right there in plain sight of the world?

At random I opened Anna Akhmatova’s poems today. Sleeping under a slip of paper which bore your old (760) and three-pronged name were these lines:

For one moment of peace here

I would give up the grave’s peace.

I have always used books as my oracles in this way. If a yarrow stick or a coin can be an oracle, why not the Word? To prove my point I have opened Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to this line: “The past, it seems, returns.” Proof positive: here I am, prodigal, holding your only name.

The question now becomes: which is the prophecy? Two lines of poetry on a securely-glued page? Or the loose-leafed name and number which have stuck to me so improbably for two, or is it three years? I will ask Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Page 46: “All this I would have seen if I was on the roof looking.” My interpretation of this answer, I guess, is to stop assigning blame to these inanimate ideas, turn off the laptop, get up on the roof and water my baby tomato plant.

And someday you will find some bit of me wrapped in a fortune cookie, and then you too can send vague, pompous emails out into the ether.

Update: Pictures of our trip are here.

I decided that after I die, when I am asked by a celestial government worker whether I have a preference in re: my next life, I will request to be a member of the Ahwaneechee tribe in Yosemite about a hundred years before the white people came. Hopefully the Lad will also request this, since I think it would be nice to be together in the next life. No doubt I will then die in childbirth and he will be eaten by a bear, but in the interim years between birth and horrible death we as Ahwaneechees will enjoy some truly phenomenal landscapes together.

On this trip, however, we came to the park as the aforementioned white people. Though we missed out on the more pure, tourist-free experience of the early Ahwaneechees, I was glad to be a card-carrying member of the now when I saw our hotel room, whose private balcony overlooked the grumbly river and whose Jacuzzi tub was big enough for two.

I can’t remember the last time I had so much unbroken time with the Lad. We schlepped around to the various waterfalls and hiking trails on offer, making fun of the people carrying ski poles on their hikes or wearing North Face t-shirts. We mocked the people filming the gift shop and laughed at the people trying to take good pictures of stunning views. We become known as “the two-baskets-of-bread couple” at the Ahwanee. We vengefully undertipped. We saw a fox and a baby deer but never a bear as I had hoped. “It would be great if a bear broke into our car,” I said. “Like being robbed by a celebrity.”

What I want to know now is, why haven’t we been visiting Yosemite all these years like Katie Vigil was always encouraging us to do? It’s only four hours away. It could conceivably even be a day trip. From now on, I intend to spend at least one Saturday a month there. Four hours in the car, three hours on a hike, two hours napping in a meadow, four hours back. Who’s with me?

Due to my professional incompetence, I’ve been spending the last few months at work trying to magically create $200,000 where no $200,000 existed before. Today, butting my horns against a looming deadline, I finally swallowed my terror and consulted my cowboy boss on how to go about this.

I managed to get him into my cubicle and explained the problem. He stared gloomily into his teacup and idly quoted some country lyrics under his breath. “Am I going to be fired?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. I nodded. I deserve to be fired. I am a dreadful, indolent, mistake-making employee.

I explained my plan and he paid close attention when his phone was not ringing and his friend was not telling a long story about union troubles (which, weirdly and coincidentally, were also partly my fault) and the Korean girl he has a crush on was not flirting with him. “Well,” he sighed when I finished. “That seems like the only way to go about it.” He advised me not to tell my professor-boss anything about the matter. He dictated a long email for me to send to my professor-boss explaining the situation. He advised me not to send the email.

“Am I going to be fired?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. I nodded.

“Am I going to be fired?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. I nodded.

“Am I going to be fired?” I said.

“No,” he said. “What would I do without our Coleridge conversations every Monday, Wednesday and Friday?”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I said. “After all, what’s a $200,000 mistake when you look at the state deficit?” I so enjoy our little chats.