My ma is visiting Japan and she’s bringing back presents. My sister, the favored one, is going to get a fancy digital camera, and I’m getting — wait for it — a pen. I bet I’m going to get a $5 “Hello, Kitty” pen. And from what I hear, the camera was hard to find and had to be purchased at full retail. For a Sony camera, that has to be expensive.

Why do I need a pen when I have the ultimate pen already?

So I wonder what people are thinking when they park. If you hit someone’s car, you should — at the very least — move your car away so it doesn’t look like any damage was your fault.

This actually happened on the 31^st. The kids at the grade school have a Hallowe’en parade for the grandparents and, by the make of the car, I’m guessing it was a grandparent. Oh, well. No real harm done.

My car was initially a magnet for trouble. Once I was parked on a slight incline and was hit by a pickup truck. The pickup was parked in neutral, with no emergency brake set. Later, I was hit by someone in front of a rap studio (next door to my ex-girlfriend’s place) and a crease was put in my door.

Knock-on-wood, I hope that’s all over.

I can’t believe I actually filled up my hard drive with all my ripped CDs. At the moment I’m re-ripping them with AAC because my time’s worth less than the cost of a new hard drive in my laptop. I suppose I could always buy the iPod I said I’d buy myself for my graduation present, but as I said before, no job and no rich girlfriend mean no iPod.

Most of the entry level jobs I’m looking at are really entry level and don’t require any degree. For that reason, they figure I’m just throwing in my résumé for no reason and they don’t respond. I got one response today, finally, after about twelve tries. They warned me about the pay, but I’d like to find out what the job is before I pass it by. Unfortunately, it’s another sysadmin job, and it probably entails after-hours work, keeping servers running 24×7, getting yelled at by everyone, etc. I’d much rather have one of the other two jobs I’m looking at: postal carrier and gas meter reader.

Wish me luck.

I have trouble getting to sleep sometimes. After initially falling asleep, I’ll immediately have some odd dreams and wake up. Often the dreams go awry and I’m in some nightmare that isn’t frightening from any rational standpoint, but does wake me up and keep me from falling asleep for a while.

It was worse when I was in high school. I’d have a recurring dream where there was a bright light outside my room, and I’d know it was some sort of UFO. And I couldn’t wake up right away. I’d keep dreaming that I woke up but still be in another level of the dream, with the UFO still outside the window. The worst experience was when I woke up, really woke up, and looked through the window just as LifeFlight was landing a helicopter in the park a block over. As the helicopter passed overhead, I just about jumped through the window.

I guess I’m not the only one with problems with nightmares when I first fall asleep. There are cases where people feel the Night Hag sitting on their chest and sucking out their breath. This is something that I even heard about in a psychology class.

Last night I had a more run-of-the-mill nightmare. A guy was breaking in through my window, and I had to try to convince him to leave, and to leave what he took. He had chiseled away part of the window. I remember thinking the best part was that I need to replace the window anyway. But I couldn’t get the guy to leave, and he was in my bedroom. I woke up with a stomach-ache.

Well, it’s almost time for sleep to see if I have some more interesting dreams. Like maybe a third annoyingly useless one about a particular woman who already has a boyfriend. Oh, well, too sleepy to write more sensibly.

My buddy Il and I went out to a dark area on Sauvies Island, just north of Portland to try and see the Aurora Borealis. What we saw were a lot of stars and some headlights. Not much else. We kind of gave up after discussing our mutual disappointment in viewing the Leonid meteor shower and most comets. Hyakutake kicked ass but, I’m sorry, the rest of them were lame.

Il usually tries to get me to see some naked women on our travels, which is quite easy since Portland is supposed to have more strip clubs per capita than any other city in the US. But tonight he decided he’d rather build up points on his online Star Wars™ game than see nekkid women. I’m actually a big fan of letting my imagination do more of the work and very often I’m frightened by what I see in the strip clubs. In any case, I wanted to get home and install the latest version of Mac OS X (Panther) on my computers.

So, we’re perverts, but we’re much bigger geeks.

So I can go on about the jobs I searched for, and how lucky I am to find ABSOLUTELY NOTHING but I’m in Day 2 of being a dutiful Asian son while my ma is in Japan, and I’m trying to keep my dad from driving me completely nuts. I took him out to lunch and to a bakery. He loves buying pastries, but he usually doesn’t eat them. My mom usually uses me as a human garbage can to get rid of them.

In any case, I was asking him what he wanted for dinner, hoping that I could avoid cooking and also find something I could take out so I could finally see the Marlins beat the Yankees, but he said he’d eat leftovers. He had some turkey from lunch, and I knew there was rice in the freezer for emergencies like when my dad promises to take my mom out to dinner and at the last minute decides he’s feeling too bad to go out.

What happened was I realized why my mom should empty out the refrigerator before she leaves. My dad put a bunch of awful looking things together in a small pot, heated it up and ate it. My mom had left cooked rice sitting out on the counter in a Tupperware container, some stewed Japanese radish from Saturday (stewed in some sickly sweet soy sauce-based broth) that also had konnyaku, which is barely edible Japanese rubbery stuff. He also opened a can of Spam to put into this mess. That was his dinner.

I offered to take him out, I offered to buy him something at the store, I offered what is my own weakness — Popeye’s Fried Chicken but he wanted to eat leftovers.

Since this afternoon he’s been complaining that he has, “A touch of the ‘flu,” but that’s a common complaint from him, as well as, “A cold settled in my back,” and, “Give me a good rubdown.” He also likes asking questions I can’t possibly answer, like, “How much do you think it costs to sponsor a softball team like that?” or “What kind of oil do you get in Yugoslavia?” or “What do you think is wrong with my back?” and gets mad when I can’t give him an answer.

It’s proved one thing to me, though, that my college degrees are useless if I can’t answer those questions.

It’s a good thing that my sister is coming to make sure we don’t drive each other nuts.

We took my mom to the airport this morning, a place I’ve grown to dread. They swabbed the inside of her suitcase, but didn’t require the full-on x-ray scan (or whatever they do when the stick your suitcase in the front-loading washing machine in the lobby.) We left her to manage the security checkpoint on her own after seeing a line that rivalled the one leading to Space Mountain in Disneyland.

This evening my dad has been wandering around lost, but I was ignoring him and trying to watch the Marlins beat the hated Yankees. That wasn’t to be. I ended up driving to Popeye’s Chicken to get him the drumstick he was asking for and the hated Yankees scored four more runs. What I thought would just be a 2-1 score ended up as 6-1.

But the worst news came from two phone calls. One was from a friend I’ve known since kindergarten. His mom just passed away, and he was calling to let me know. A little later on I heard from a family friend that her sister-in-law had passed away. My mom always says these things come in threes (mainly because we like to group things in threes) and I’m not looking forward to hearing about the third.

On an up note, my friend Megan’s chemo seems to be working, and her tumor is shrinking!