Transplanted Life

Part of my New Year's Resolution

2010-01-20T00:06:00.000-05:00

I told everybody at Jen's party a three weeks ago that I wouldn't be a shut-in any more, and I meant it. I know it's not good for me, and to be honest, I don't like it. I used to be the most annoying person about telling people that even Blu-ray isn't an acceptable substitute for seeing things in the theater, even comedies and independent dramas; now I haven't even seen Avatar yet because I don't want to go out; I'm honestly saying I'll wait for Netflix. I liked showing my assets off, now I sit home alone in bulky sweats more or less 24/7. Last year was the first season I can remember where I didn't see a game at Fenway Park, although I've got an excuse for most of the season.

You'd think that my not wanting to leave the house would have led to a lot more blogging, but that's just another way to communicate with the outside world, and for the better part of the last year, my thoughts have been along the lines of how the outside world is dangerous. I was quite honestly ready to take this whole blog down, unable to believe how stupid the whole thing was from the moment I woke up as Michelle, even if it was the only thing that kept me sane at first. Just how much had Korpin learned about me just from reading it? About Amy? And we know he's not the end of it.

Like my shrink says, being kidnapped will straight-up fuck your head up.

Anyone reading this will hopefully forgive me for not giving a whole lot of details about that event, or the months following it. I haven't told Kate, Jen, Telly, Amy, or Carlos, except in the vaguest terms. Forget Mom, although I know my silence probably hurts her. I don't even talk about it with Shelly, and who would understand the situation more? I will, eventually, but here's not the place to do it. And I'm definitely not ready.

It was hard for me just to get to Jen's party. I wanted to go, but I wouldn't take the T or even a cab. I've been using Zipcars when I wanted to get someplace and I couldn't have things delivered, but by the time I stopped dithering and said yes, I would go, they were all booked. Kate eventually had to take the T to Jen's and Carlos's place, borrow her car, and come back to pick me up. Pathetic, but at least pathetic enough to serve as a wake-up call.

So that's when I made the resolution to stop being afraid of the world. Not that I've acted upon it much yet, but I'm going to the movies this weekend and writing this. So that's a start.

-Martina

Of course

2009-03-05T09:37:00.000-05:00

I haven't been keeping particular track of anniversaries, which I suppose makes me an atypical girlfriend or a bad boyfriend-type person, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the thing with Kate has lasted longer than any relationship I remember having. It's certainly my longest as a woman, and is probably right up there with Maggie from my previous life. We've been cohabiting for over a year, our families like each other, and we've even gotten to the point where being together was assumed to the point where we were making purchases together.

So, naturally, it was time for us to fuck it up.

Kate's got a lot of theories as to why it fell apart. Most of the women our age are getting married and starting families, and while we're fortunate to live in a state where we can do the former, science hasn't progressed to the point where we can do the latter (at least, so far as I know; given what the last six years of my life have been like, I can't exactly take that for granted). We're close enough in personality that the small disagreements seem bigger, and then when we disagree on something big, watch out! Other things I can't even begin to understand.

I was talking about this the other night, in a bar with Telly and Amy. Amy nodded sympathetically, but after about ten minutes, Telly snorted, and banged his glass on the bar a little harder than necessary. "You girls are making it way too complicated. It comes down to one thing: The two of you aren't gay."

Amy and I started in, saying that sexual identity and orientation were more complicated than a simple gay/straight description, especially for people like us, and he cut us off.

"I get that, ladies, I really do, but honestly, it's impressive that you managed to stay together as long as you have. It shows just how much the two of you really like each other; I don't doubt that either of you would rather spend time with the other than the average guy. But, geez, Tina, you've got my sister's hormones and brain. She was into a lot of things, but other girls wasn't one of them. How long did you think you were going to fight that?"

He's right, of course, and not just about me; I think both of us were starting to realize that being with each other was, to a certain extent, hiding from what we really wanted, even if we were afraid of it for our own reasons: Kate has tended toward really terrible breakups, and even after five plus years in this body, I still second-guess the hell out of the whole boy-girl thing, especially now that I'm starting to get some awareness of my biological clock. The good times of a few months ago, when we would go out and be a little flirty only to frustrate guys when we pulled back toward each other, well, weren't quite such good times any more. I can't speak for Kate, but I know I had the occasional thought of breaking from the script, except that I couldn't do that to Kate.

That we're feeling that is probably healthy, but it still festers, and makes us snippy. I'm pretty sure that we'll still be friends when all this is over, but even though I've moved into the spare bedroom, it's not a fun month right now.

-Tina

Christmas '08

2008-12-30T22:06:00.000-05:00

Man, I missed a whole holiday there. Thanksgiving wasn't terribly exciting, though.

The big present under the tree this year wasn't really a surprise - Kate and I split a Blu-ray player and a bunch of movies. She took a little convincing, of course - as much as she likes movies, she's not nearly as big on the technical stuff as me, and she didn't really think that there was that much difference between it and DVD. She's not alone, and no amount of me throwing numbers and specs at her was going to convince her.

So, I kind of tricked her. I bought a cheap HD DVD player and movies off eBay, and once we sat down to watch some of those, she was noticing the difference. For a while, picking up really cheap movies as various places cleared out their inventory was enough - truth be told, it's kind of ridiculous what you can get. The 1920x1080 resolution of HD isn't that far off from the digital projection in a movie people that some folks inexplicably prefer to film, and it doesn't take a lot of searching to find HD DVDs that sell for less than a ticket to see the movie in theaters would have cost. Anyway, that was fun for a while, but when Criterion started releasing Blu-rays, that was game over; she had to have Chungking Express.

Oddly enough, she still doesn't think the improved picture is quite as amazing as I do, but she really likes the improved sound. I tend to think that the whole lossless audio thing is 50% placebo effect - you tell someone the quality is improved, and they'll convince themselves that they hear it - although if that was true, you'd think people would be snapping them up for the video, too. My pet theory on that is that audio lets people convince themselves that they're special - anyone can see an improvement when when the picture's got six times as many pixels, but noticing a difference that is well past most benchmarks for human hearing? Only the selected few can do that.

Still, Kate's reaction to certain movies on HD just re-establishes how cool she is: She does dig that HD is good enough that you can actually see the grain structure of the film. I've talked to a bunch of people who see HD and want it all to be smoothed out and look like the Discovery Channel, as opposed to, you know, what film looks like.

So, pretty normal Christmas, as such things go. For me, at least. For others, it was a bit odd.

Telly and Amy, for instance, flew out to California so that the Sanadas could meet their biological daughter's boyfriend. It's not that Amy and they are particularly close - she really does tend to stay away - but they still wanted to meet. As Telly explained it, when you're one defective condom away from having grandchildren, it's good to have a handle on everyone involved.

I get that. As much as my mother tells me that the nine months she spent carrying Carter's body doesn't compare to the years she spent raising me (a tremendous simplification, but I certainly like to hear it), she does keep tabs on him, Nat, and her grandson.

Telly found the whole thing sort of surreal, even beyond what anyone connected to Amy's and my lives sees on a regular basis. Of course, part of it is that Telly has never flown before, and he found that pretty crazy, both being up in the air and the entire airport experience. I told him he should try international travel, and he didn't even want to think of it.

The visit itself was uncomfortable; Mrs. Sanada doesn't speak much English, and though Amy has been taking some language courses, it was hard to communicate without her father working as an intermediary. The whole thing was kind of awkward, not like any "meet the parents" he's ever done, more like two sets of strangers, one trying to force themselves to worry about the other's feelings and the other trying to do the opposite.

On the other hand, they got lost often enough to confirm that Amy didn't have any residual knowledge of the city from before. One down, she says, and the rest of America to do.

-Tina

Halloween '08

2008-11-01T10:30:00.000-04:00

Jen always used to throw the best parties, and I guess she still does; it's just that the type of party is a little different nowadays. After all, Eloise is two years and four months old now, so it's not just adults getting together any more - it's the little guys, who are awesome and adorable, although to say they don't cramp our styles a little would be a lie.

It's kind of silly, in some ways - what's a kid Eloise's age care if mommy's friends wear sexy costumes? It's not like "sexy" registers with them at two! Regardless of that, though, the invitation to the party specifically mentioned family-friendly costumes, since some of Eloise's friends from day care would be there too, along with their brothers and sisters. None were older than seven, but some of the parents still looked askance at my Batgirl costume. Okay, sure, it's a little tight, but still - no high heels, cleavage, butt-cheek, or even bare leg - I was hardly Emma Frost out there.

Heh. As I was telling Kate and Jen later, perhaps the biggest disappointment wasn't newly-minted prudes (who probably wore far more prostitute-y costumes than me back in the day) tsk-tsking with disapproval, but just how many times this conversation happened:

"Nice costume."

"Thanks. It's kind of out of date, but Jen's place isn't really handicapped accessible."

Blank stare.

"You really should read The Killing Joke and Birds of Prey. Some fans don't like Barbara Gordon being Oracle instead of Batgirl, but that she can still be a hero after the Joker paralyzed her is really inspiring, I think. Not like a real person, of course, but it's a nice idea to have out there--"

... and they walk away, no matter how interested they'd been in my tight spandex and red-dyed hair. I swear, I used to hang out with a nerdier crowd, one that would have laughed.

Not that I care about men wanting to be around me - after all, I get to go home with Princess Leia and they don't, so I'm ahead of them. I guess it's just another sign of how I'm starting to catch up to where I was. Five years ago, Martin-me was getting some of the same sort of pressure to leave things like comics and Halloween behind, and now it's happening again.

The funny thing is, all those parents who are so much more mature than me were talking about how much fun it was to dress up with their kids and share their excitement, or how Billy liked Transformers and they'd forgotten how much they'd liked them as kids. I don't deny that that is fantastic, but it seems kind of silly to deny yourself things you like between the time you deem yourself too old for it and when your kids are old enough. Not that adults trying to remain kids is a good thing, but a person can be a responsible adult and enjoy a healthy fantasy life.

-"Tina" (Eloise has trouble with my whole name, but her saying the short version is cute.)

Discontinuities

2008-10-29T23:12:00.001-04:00

At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Like the other folks who are left reading this thing, I looked at that last post and thought, man, is she full of herself. I'm not saying I don't stand behind what I say in it, but I think the feeling is something that maybe doesn't translate to someone who hasn't lived this sort of life. It's not that most people don't notice changes to their body and aging, but it's a continuous process, whereas I have a discontinuity in my life in July 2003. Most people don't have a first impression of their own body, so when they look in the mirror in the morning, they are mostly comparing themselves to how they looked the day before, and changes are minor. It's all relative to them. I'm always comparing myself to how I looked when this body was twenty-five; there's the long-dismissed (but still rooted) idea in my head of returning Michelle's body to her as I found it.

Anyway, I don't expect anyone else to particularly sympathize or understand, but that's what was going on in my head that day.

So, I've been holding back a bit - whenever I've been planning on writing something, I'd sit back and think, is this (a) special and (b) not whining? As it turns out, my life has been in that sort of rut for the last few months - good enough that any complaints are not really worth mentioning, though not to the extent of being good news

Saturday was fun, though - one of Telly's bands actually booked itself a good gig. Not a great one, but in the Harvard Square area, which is better than some of the places he's played. The worst, I gather, was a weekday gig at a place out in Cambridgeside that is tough to find not because it's off the beaten path, but because a cajun bar & grill sharing a building with a health club (which has the much larger sign and the front door) is going to get overlooked. Very clean, he said, but not many customers, which kind of sucks when most of your pay is expected to be a percentage of the bar.

Not a problem here: It was Saturday night, there were plenty of college kids looking to get a bit lit, and the place actually had some decent beer on tap, so Kate, Amy, and I were willing to help the cause.

I was kind of surprised by some of what they were playing. Most of it was your standard bar rock - Stevie Ray Vaughn and other rhythm and blues types, probably from before most of the people involved were born. A few originals, too, but also some oddball picks. I didn't know you could do a rock & roll arrangement of "The Highwayman", or that these guys would play it. Telly later claimed it as his idea - "country" doesn't just mean the south, but is big in places like rural New England, too - he'd heard a bunch of it growing up in Vermont. Besides, he said, if you can't respect music by the combination of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings, you're a pretty ridiculous little snot; that's some talent right there.

It was fun to get up and dance a little, and probably good for me, too. Even when you're with someone, it's nice to be looked at, and this body's impending thirtieth birthday didn't seem to be what people were thinking of when we got out on the floor. (Yay boobs! Yay dancing with another girl!)

- Martina

Skipping Birthdays

2008-08-31T23:24:00.000-04:00

At what age do most people with normal lives stop making a big deal out of their birthdays?

I ask this, of course, because among the many, many days where I didn't write anything here this summer was July 18th, which marked five years of Martina, even if I didn't realize who I was or use that name at first. It didn't go completely unobserved - even if Kate and I were in Montreal at the time, there was a party when we got back home, which was fun and all.

It sent me into a bit of a funk, though. It's lasted much of the summer, too nebulous to put into words for the most part, and what I've finally started to credit it too seems both obvious and overly simplistic.

I'm getting older.

We all are, of course, but it's still kind of a shock for me. When the contents of my mind was placed in Michelle's body, it felt like getting five years younger in a lot of ways, and there's something exciting about that. And for a long time, I would think of myself as a twenty-nine year-old man in a twenty-four year-old body, even as time started passing. Now that I've caught up, it's time to assess things somewhat, and I'm not sure about where I stand.

Professionally, I've spent the last five years getting back to where Martin was before the switch. Everyone I know looks at it as an accomplishment, since they see it as someone who was a receptionist five years ago in a professional job with vacation and benefits and a good salary, but for me that's having been forcibly knocked down the ladder, and kind of a disappointment. We all have fantasies that if we could start afresh knowing what we knew now... Most of them involve being able to leapfrog something, which didn't happen for me.

In a way, I almost envy Amy with her clean slate. Bits of skills reappear, along with some random facts or unexpected instincts, but the disappointment isn't there. I know she's got her own demons, and I wouldn't want any part of those, but knowing is its own issue.

Another thing that reminds me that I'm not still the person who I became five years ago is, well, my physical flesh. This body will turn thirty this November 18th, and I'm hardly the first person to recognize that approaching thirty as a man and approaching it as a woman are two different things. I don't really mind the lines on my face, in part because I've come to accept that face a lot more; I'll even admit to being sort of pretty, if you like brunettes without much in the way of cheekbones. The laugh lines help. But I've been finding fewer opportunities to put on my bikini this summer. My butt's softer than it used to be, and my breasts are starting to sag in opposite directions, giving me that inverted-V cleavage should I wear a dress that I can't wear a bra with. I'm swimming twice a week rather than just on Wednesdays, and it's wearing me out a bit more.

Five years also makes me feel like I've failed Michelle somehow, not having answers for Telly about what happened to her mind. No-one really expects me to, and it's mostly Agent Jones and company that have the resources to look, but it's more personal for me, and I've failed.

Kate says I shouldn't worry about it, but this is her first time facing down the big three-oh, and she's pretty satisfied with her life. Me, I feel like everything in my life but her is running behind. (And don't get me started on the "subtle" hints my mother's been dropping about that!)

-Marti

She Knew Us

2008-06-27T21:23:00.001-04:00

Ah, to be young. Kate and I have been working like mad over the last couple weeks, trying to get as far ahead in work as possible before spending a couple weeks in Montreal for the end of the Jazz Festival and the start of Fantasia. Telly and Amy, on the other hand, have had time on their hands. Amy's taking a couple of summer classes and working a part time job, while Telly works something approximating full time and is in a couple of bands, but is still somehow able to thrive on four or five hours of sleep on average. Of course, like everybody, they tend to assume that everybody shares their schedule, which means that they don't think twice calling at 2:30am with news.

They woke Kate up first, though not by design. Since I spend most of my free time in movies, and can be a little scatterbrained, I almost never take my phone off vibrate, which mean the thing didn't have a chance in hell of waking me up from the bedside table. Kate, naturally, is peculiarly sensitive to the growl created by a vibrating phone on a hard object, and woke up almost instantly. It must have taken her all of a second to realize it wasn't hers, because the thing was still going when she twisted my nipple to wake me up.

I shot her a look and picked it up, seeing that it was Telly calling. I said something along the line of if he was in jail, he was staying there at least until morning.

"Why would I be in jail and why would you think that? Anyway, it's not that - Amy remembered something!"

That cleared all the cobwebs out. "What? Does she know who she is?"

"Nothing that big, just - we got home late, and we thought it might be fun to make milkshakes--"

"Why?"

"I dunno, we've just been making milkshakes lately. You gave us that movie on DVD because the Blu-ray came out a month later, then she bought a blender and once she'd bought it she figured we should get use out of it and the syrups and--"

"Forget I asked and get to the important part!"

"Right, right - anyway, we were making milkshakes, but hadn't done the dishes for a few days, so we decided to use the steins. She made a comment about how she didn't figure my grandmother intended me to use them for milkshakes, and I laughed, but as we were drinking them I couldn't for the life of me remember telling her that Nana had given them to me, and neither could she."

"There's a million explanations; we've told that story a lot."

"Yeah, when it happened. Right after that weird Christmas, but I'm pretty sure I haven't told anybody the story in like a year and a half. Have you?"

I couldn't remember telling it, and Telly said he'd checked, and it wasn't in the blog. So she must have heard it from us, but if neither of us told "Amy Sanada"...

"That's thin."

"It's only one thing, the big thing. She's said other things that I just assumed we'd told her, but now--"

At this point Amy grabbed the phone. "And I'm doing better in school. I dropped all my music courses, and I've started taking stuff that seemed 'familiar', for lack of a better word; it just seems like I'm being reminded of things a lot of the time. I think my memory is putting itself back together."

"That's great!"

"Don't you get it? Korpin is the person most likely to know all this! I don't want to be him!"

"You probably aren't. And even if you are, even if you remember everything, that doesn't mean you'll suddenly become a monster - you'll still be a product of the last two years, your own person, okay?"

"I suppose."

I asked if she wanted me to come over, but she said she thought she could handle it. I suggested she might want to make an appointment with her therapist, and she thought that sounded pretty good.

We finally hung up. I told Kate what it was all about, and she said she almost felt bad leaving them to go on vacation. I rubbed my still sore nipple, asking if she felt bad about that. "A little. I just figured, since you still sometimes get surprised by your body when you wake up suddenly, that would be the quickest way to wake you up. That can take some doing, you know." She pulled my t-shirt up and kissed it. "Better?"

Much, I said. We looked in each other's eyes... then saw they were closing, laughed, and fell back asleep.

-Marti

Not officially summer, but...

2008-06-03T16:41:00.000-04:00

It is, finally, starting to be nice in and around Boston on a regular basis. There were a few fake-out weekends in April and early May - the sort where you wake up, put on shorts, a t-shirt, a skirt, or something otherwise not all-covering, and that's nice until you come out of the afternoon movie realizing that it's really not enough.

And by "you" I mean "me". When I was male and single I would do it all the time because I would choose my outfit based on what I thought it ought to be like weather-wise (and because a weekend day when you could wear shorts meant you could push doing laundry back an extra twenty-four hours), with maybe a cursory glance out the window to make sure I wasn't doing something egregiously stupid. Kate, being far more responsible, will see me and ask if I've even checked the weather channel.

Another sure sign of summer is mini-moving day. The start of June isn't quite like the main event September First, especially since it's spread out a bit by the dorms of what seem like hundreds of colleges kicking kids out in waves during the month of May, but that also means that the ones who are going to stay on for the summer are looking for sublets or June-to-May arrangements, and there are people moving stuff out to the Cape or some other summer home.

This year, despite only having known each other a couple months, that means Amy and Telly sharing an apartment. I don't know exactly how long-term an arrangement it is - they have only known each other for a while and Telly's place is way at the end of the 1 bus from Harvard Square - but it works for them now. Telly gets rid of the deadbeat roommates, Amy at least has a place to stay between now and the start of her senior year, and curious blood relatives and friends get to watch and see if this relationship is going to work on an accelerated timetable.

-Marti

I really don't want my blog to become one of those blogs, even though this post is one of those posts from those blogs

2008-05-17T23:33:00.000-04:00

What are "those blogs"? There's a bunch of different types, but the one I'm thinking of is blogs which go a long time between posts, and then spend the post that finally does appear talking about why it's been such a long time between posts, but then soon the author isn't posting very often, and the whole vicious cycle starts again. I don't know whether that makes the result a blog about blogging or a blog about not blogging, but it's weak, no matter what.

This is probably the tenth time or so I've written something about what this sporadic posting means, that my life has settled into something normal, accepted, or routine with the chances of figuring out the cause of the circumstances shrinking as the trial gets colder and colder. Still true, though. I think this is the first time that I mention that I'm looking at the sidebar and how the blog updates weekly because I was posting that often five years ago. I feel vaguely guilty about not being even close to that schedule nowadays, even though the rational part of my mind says that it's not like I'm obligated to produce this for anyone...

(Also: Holy crap, five years! That's like a double-digit percentage of my life!)

So what have I been up to? Red Sox games - I've already been to four or five, thanks to the way my buying tickets back in January clustered and picking up a game from someone at work who has season tickets. It felt pretty good to have them win the first three games I went to, prompting the inevitable comments about how I should go every day. Probably healthy that they eventually lost, or else I might have thought there was something to it. It's not a good idea to start thinking you have control over things you don't.

I did get to see Masterson's first major league game, though, and he was pretty darn good. Last year I saw Buchholz's first game and he pitched a no-hitter the next time he was called up, so it's worth watching next time, eh?

Kate and I also volunteered at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, which was cool, although I chickened out of meeting Famke Janssen. I would likely have blurted something out about having had a crush on her since her appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that might have been weird.

I think next year Kate and I will show our support of the festival by buying passes. It felt good to volunteer, no question about it, but most of the time when I go to a film festival, I'm looking to see a bunch of movies, and working the festival prevents that. It's kind of selfish, since there'd be no festival if everyone who loved movies in the area took that attitude.

And there's been a few other things where, well, to write about them properly would have meant writing about other people's personal lives, and I find myself more reluctant to do that nowadays. It seems like it was easier to do it a few years ago, when I was unsure of who I was and every relationship or observation seemed like it was vital unexplored territory. Now, not so much.

So, there's my last month and a half. Hopefully I'll never make another post like this again.

-Marti

Soap opera stuff

2008-03-31T22:00:00.000-04:00

Telly and I have been hanging aorund more the past couple of months, since my mom visited at Christmas. Not a whole lot, but every once in a while, especially when I feel like doing some guy stuff that Kate figures a woman with a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend has no need to put up with. Kate had no need to go see Doomsday, for instance, so I went with Telly and lapped up the over-the-top post-apocalyptic violence.

That's not the sort of thing he and Michelle would do together, I gather, but it's getting less awkward for us. He'll never look at me and not see her, of course, but I kind of like that. I'll have been this person for five years this summer, and I've gotten so used to it that before I started hanging out with Telly on a regular basis again, I could go weeks without thinking about Michelle. I identify as Martina now, and I'm pretty sure that I'd put up a fight over giving Michelle her body back were she to resurface, but even if I've only met "her" once or twice, she's too important a part of my life story to not stay in my thoughts.

Telly benefits from this arrangement, too, by having at least a surrogate for his sister in his life, and in more material ways. Last week, for instance, he called me to mention that his roommates had screwed up with the cable bill, and Comcast wasn't going to do anything to fix it for another week, and he'd reeeeeeeeeally like to watch the red Sox opening series in Japan... In high definition if possible. And, as far as I knew, he is really good at making pancakes.

So, fine, I say; he can show up early in the morning on Tuesday and Wednesday to watch the games with me, especially if he made breakfast. I was sure Kate would appreciate it, too, even if she wasn't going to stay around to watch the entire game like we were. At about the same time, Amy called Kate asking hte same thing - only for her, it was not wanting to wake her roommates up, figuring she should express an interest because it was in Japan and she should start trying to learn something about her body's ancestral home. Kate said, sure, she knew I was was going to be watching the game, so why not? And, sure, she could stay over the night before rather than wake her roommate with a 4:30am alarm.

I didn't see it coming when Kate mentioned it, or when Amy showed up the night before, but I probably should have at least predicted the possibility. Anyway, Telly arrived Tuesday morning, saw Amy on the couch wearing her Matsuzaka babydoll t-shirt and pajama bottoms, with extra-cute bedhead (hair covered her right eye but stuck up on the left side) and bare feet, and was pretty much incapable of speech until at least the fourth inning. I think he finally got up the nerve to ask for her number after the second game, when I shooed them out right after the last pitch so I could lock up and still catch the 9am bus, because it was the next afternoon that Amy started frantically IMing me saying that she hadn't expected him to call, and was it weird for him to be attracted to her knowing what he knows, and was it okay if she called him back and said she would like to go to dinner and a movie Saturday night...?

I told her the truth - that we share DNA doesn't mean I can put him off-limits, even if I want to. Besides, we're just talking about one dinner and movie right now, and it's not like you're going to find a lot of guys who are more comfortable with your unique situation, even if Telly's still just getting used to it.

I think she'd been trying to get me to give her an easy out, but it wasn't my place. Besides, the part of me that's a little disappointed in just how normal, relatively speaking, my life has become is kind of curious to see how that works out.

I'm also curious to know what Kate told Telly when he called her for advice about dating an exchangee, but I've been told to mind my own business.

-Marti

Weird dreams

2008-03-15T06:49:00.000-04:00

This happens every once in a while. Things will be moving along completely normally, and then I'll start having weird dreams and won't be able to shake them. I used to think they were symptoms, that maybe something was wrong with my brain or that its contents were somehow getting corrupted, but now I just treat them as the inevitable result of a life that is inherently weird, even when it seems to have stabilized. After all, dreams are just your subconscious mind processing and filing the events of your life, fitting them into some sort of holograph, and I've got some unusual associations to make.

The one that's currently driving me up the wall seems normal enough, but at some point I have this realization - that everybody in the world is a single aspect of some sort of universal consciousness, and once I realize that they start disappearing, sucked into me and gone except for a tiny voice that soon fades from my mind. Soon I'm alone in the world, waking up when the loneliness starts to hurt.

Sometimes, as this happens, I'll acquire the physical traits of the people I absorb, and I'll be a man again. In the dream I'll find Kate and make passionate love to her, and I'll wake as she disappears. I'll wake to see her in the bed and hold her, and a couple of times it progressed, but then... Well, there's a part of me that's thinking that we had just been having sex "properly", and I'll feel disappointed that I wasn't able to do that for her.

Which is why I'm in the living room, typing it up rather than waking her. I had to find an aspirin anyway, as this time the end of the dream came with a headache, but it's not something she needs dumped on her early Saturday morning. Let her sleep in.

Maybe I should see a shrink like Amy. Hopefully this will pass before it comes to that.

-Marti

Big and Little Science

2008-02-12T22:46:00.001-05:00

Kate and I went to the Coolidge Corner Theater's "Science on Screen" series last night, in part because I wanted to get some use out of my membership there - I don't use my discount nearly as much as I do my Brattle one and had never seen Body Heat, but also because there was a lecture about the chemical and biological basis of sexual attraction paired with it. I like nifty science, and the subject is pretty personal to me. I think this is going to be the first Valentine's Day where I'm honestly and truly content with my romantic situation since my previous life, and it makes me a little nervous; after all, my first one was the result of some sophisticated targeted pheromones, and it's made me more than a little nervous about every relationship since.

One the lecture reminded me of is just what a black box all the weird stuff I've been subjected to actually is. When I was a kid, there was an anthology of John W. Campbell's early space operas in the town library, and I read it several times. I forget who wrote the introduction - I want to say it was Isaac Asimov, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't - but he rightly made the point that Campbell made a much better editor than writer, and his view of how science and engineering worked was absolutely absurd to anybody who had actually worked in the field. Things went from a peculiar phenomenon being observed in the lab to scientific breakthrough to prototype to an assembly line in what seemed like a couple weeks. The earthbound engineers at the start of the first book were moving planets at the end of the third.

These were great fun for me to read as a young boy, make no mistake. As a kid, I think you need to be fed this kind of grand literature, where utterly amazing things are possible and they can be done by a small group of people in a relatively short amount of time. It's what motivates kids to get into science and engineering; the realities of actual incremental progress and bureaucracy and the millions of false starts per breakthrough can come later, after they are too far along the road to just become accountants. Kate says it works much the same way for girls, only they get books about first love at first sight that don't mention unwanted advances, dates that just don't work out, divorce... I must say, I'm kind of glad that I never had to deal with whatever the female equivalent of the Heinlein juvenile was.

Anyway, to get back to what I was talking about, I have pesonally been the target of some chemicals that showed a pretty sophisticated understanding of how attraction among human beings worked, almost four years ago. But last night, the guy was lecturing about what experimental studies of ferrets tell us, and how much uncertainty there is about it, and how they hope to learn more. I got a chance to talk with him before the film, and he knew my name - as you might imagine, my case is known within his field, just like it is among neurologists and nanotech researchers. He had to admit that he regarded it (at least the "love potion" parts) with a bit of suspicion, though - it was fascinating if true, but nobody had been able to reverse-engineer the stuff I gave Maggie, to the point where they could even suss out the general principles it worked under. And absent working theories, it's just a very interesting hypothesis. So apparently I'm cold fusion.

It does lead me to wonder about a few things. Both the love potion and the nanotech are advanced, functional (even robust!) bits of technology. How did they come about? If the nanotech worked well enough to switch me four and a half years ago, how long were they in development before that? How many people had their brains fried in failed trials? And how did it stay under the radar, and then stay that way even after people started using it, at least so far as anybody I've talked to knows.

Disturbing. But, then again, as Kate and I were taking the bus home, we saw a sign in the window of a library branch about "what Harvard's 50-year plan means for us". It just boggles my mind that Harvard, or any organization, can sit down an make plans on that scale. I suppose if a university can plot what they're going to do with their real estate that far in advance, I suppose something like my situation and the near-total lack of an evidence trail leading to it makes a little more sense, if there's an organization with a grand enough vision behind it.

I hope it's not the U.S. Government. Or Harvard.

-Marti

When Mothers Collide

2008-01-17T18:32:00.000-05:00

It's funny, but I didn't realize how much I'd enjoyed having Telly around until we fell out of contact. I can't blame him for shutting me out, and it's hardly something that was entirely his doing. I tended to avoid him for the same reasons he avoided me - the revelation that Mikhail Korpin wasn't Michelle in his body but was the real thing had the effect of shattering any familial relations that might have grown between us then. I know it made me uneasy about trying to bond with them; the memory of someone preying on that desire and trust was still too fresh.

The woman who raised me had different ideas, though. I couldn't live this life without having some relationship with my genetic relatives, and she wasn't willing to. As she puts it, she knows most of me, but there's a part which comes from them: Anything I've got a genetic tendency toward, or maybe there were experiences that made a deep enough impression on Michelle's brain that even emptying it out and pouring me in didn't get rid of them entirely. There was an involved metaphor about and demonstration of a pencil making an impression that's still there even after erasing it and writing something new, but never mind.

I resisted. I tried to point out that I didn't much like Michelle's mother, and that Telly and I weren't talking much, but she didn't care. I don't think I'll ever be able to refuse her anything again, honestly, since even if she doesn't say as much, I owe her. I can't ever repay her fully for allowing her to think that someone else was her Martin, then laying the burden of that knowledge on her (I know! Totally unfair!). So I called Telly, and though he was reluctant, he agreed to set something up for the weekend of the 22nd & 23rd (gads, almost a whole month ago!).

He met us at the bus stop again and was very gentlemanly in escorting my mother into the car. He was a little surprised at her age, but Mom pointed out that Martin was five years older than Michelle and that she and my father had unexpectedly become parents in their late thirties. Ah, he said, that makes sense. Then he chuckled and said he'd missed that sort of thing. Nothing in his life requires explanation or defied belief.

The visit itself wasn't really something I got a lot out of. I'd met Mrs. Garber before, and I can't say the past couple of years have really improved her any. My mother has twenty years on her and it shows in her silver hair and skinny limbs, but she still has a vitality to her that Mrs. G doesn't. Now, though Mrs. G has the added pleasantness of feeling like she's owed something out of the whole situation with me and Michelle and everybody. It was kind of awesome to see Mom call her on it toward the end of the visit, pointing out that Mrs. G didn't talk about how worried she was about Michelle or asking if we'd heard anything about her from the FBI - it was all "how can they do something to/for me".

I was basically glad to get out of there, and figured that would be the end of it, but Telly called a few days into the new year, asking what Kate and I were up to. I said Kete wasn't around, but we could hang out.

We've been doing that a lot more lately. He wonders if this is what it's like to find out you've got a long-lost brother or sister and meet them later in life (say you were adopted, or your father got around) - they look kind of familiar, but they don't share certain things with you. It's weird, but kind of fun to discover.

I have to say I agree, and I am enjoying getting to know him again.

-Martina

I love you ma, but...

2007-12-31T22:54:00.001-05:00

Seventeen days is a long time to have a houseguest. Yes, we were counting by the end.

Understand, I love my mother. She has put up with more over the past four and a half years than anyone should have to. And when she first broached the idea of coming up for the holidays, Kate and I were both enthusiastic. We've got the spare bedroom, it would be a shame not to use it, and it would be very nice to get back in touch with that part of my original family.

And it was. There was just so much to do, though - she wanted to meet the Garbers, for instance, which meant a weekend in Vermont. She had to meet Kate's folks. She also had old friends from Maine coming down to see her while I was at work during the day, and on top of that she was disappointed that Nat and Marty couldn't come out.

In some ways, it was like crunch time at work, when you've got this one big project that needs finishing, and there's no time for anything else. For the better part of three weeks, everything aside from work was about making things work for mom, and it was exhausting.

But rewarding. I really feel like Mom has completely accepted me for who I am now, and when we had unscheduled time to shop or otherwise, it was good. Simultaneously familiar and novel.

Still, it both nice to have her in town and nice to bring her to the airport this afternoon.

-Marti

Thanksgiving with family

2007-11-28T18:43:00.000-05:00

Kate had wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner at our place, but I was fortunately able to dissuade her. Even if we do have a dining room table that extends far enough for six people, we don't have six chairs to put at it. Besides, I said, nothing really says "home" like every room having at least one big box of stuff that hasn't been unpacked. Heck, the plastic tub in the living room is being used as an ottoman. It doesn't mean anything, other than "we're really lazy and busy and we'll get to it later", but somebody could take it to mean that we're just marking time or something silly like that.

I didn't think of that second bit at the time, of course - it was after spending a couple days at Kate's folk's place that it occurred to me that someone might interpret our partially unpacked state as having greater meaning. Kate kind of laughed when I told her that, saying it's a sign that even after four-plus years, I'm still not all girl in my head, but she knew that Friday if she hadn't known already.

But I'm getting ahead or behind or whatever. So, anyway, we drove out to the Cape, and had the big Thanksgiving meal: Turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potato, and pie. I'm not a really big girl, but I can put away a good holiday meal with the best of them. Mrs. Jensen was kind of amused by that, asking if my appetite was the result of my still thinking like a man on some things. No, I said, I'm pretty aware of what this body can handle by this point. Maybe remembering my first life means I accept that I'll tend to put on a few extra pounds over the winter easier, I guess; I didn't have the same kind of peer pressure to look skinny growing up, even if I did have some other weight issues. But those helped me learn that to recognize when I'm carrying too much and need to buckle down. Besides, I said, the first few pounds I gain tend to settle in the boobs and butt, and people seem to like that. Kate blushed a little at that.

Of course, once I wake up from my tryptophan-induced nap, I can groan about how it hurts with the best of them, too. Lisette got a good chuckle out of that when they brought out the leftover pie during a game of Scrabble.

Mr. Jensen was more than a bit surprised to see me when he came out for breakfast the next morning and saw me flipping through channels on the TV. "I thought you'd be out shopping with the rest of the girls."

Nah, I said. I'd been invited, but I didn't want to potentially make their family activity weird, and, besides, rushed shopping is no fun. I've got a floating holiday left to use this year, so I'll make something up in early December and get stuff done then.

"Sounds sensible." Then he laughed, and said he half-thought I was going to give him the "used-to-be-a-guy, don't-like-shopping" thing. I laughed back, and said I used to be a guy and thus know better. Enjoying shopping is all about enjoying what you're shopping for, I figure. I'll spend hours in an electronics shop, or a bookstore, comparing features or browsing first chapters because I like the stuff. A lot of girls like clothes and shoes, so they enjoy looking at those and trying them on. Heck, I enjoy that a lot more now, because I've always liked looking at snazzy looking girls.

At that point, I probably would have liked it more if he'd asked why men don't like shopping with their wives and girlfriends, and then I could have said it's because they're not doing anything and all too often, requests for their opinion are traps and traps are no fun, and we'd laugh some more, but that's not what happened.

I think it almost was, but then the synapse between the brain cell that processed me saying how I liked looking at pretty girls and the one brain cell with an image of his daughter fired, and he got serious. "You and Kate have been seeing each other for a while. Longer than about she was with half of her boyfriends, at least."

"Yeah, I guess so."

He sighed again. "We all thought it was just a rebound thing."

I didn't know quite how to respond to that. I tried saying I was sorry, but it sounded inappropriate, to say the least.

He said it was okay, and that he kind of wished Kate had met the old me. We'd probably be married and he'd be a grandfather by now.

I told him I would have liked that, and he said this was probably as close as we were going to get, which was a shame. We played a lot of pool that afternoon, which was fun, but made him a little more melancholy - I think it's something he would have liked doing with Kate's hypothetical boyfriend Martin.

Well, at least at first. I think he got pretty cool with Kate's actual girlfriend Martina by the time the ladies returned from their retail assault. Deep down, he's a guy who just really wants his daughter to be happy.

The same's true with my mother. We had a good long talk on the phone the other night. Of course, now that we've got a house, she's making noises about coming up for Christmas.

Which, I think, would be pretty cool. Although if she and Kate's family are ever around at the same time, it will be very interesting to see what they each think of our relationship.

-Marti

Domesticity, of a sort

2007-11-14T17:08:00.001-05:00

I'm almost tempted to just close up shop on this blog, leaving it abandoned like many others. It's been a while since anything has happened to me that most reasonable people would call science fiction. That's probably a good thing for me and the world at large - who wants to think about having one's mind ripped from her body and put somewhere else more than absolutely necessary? - but who wants to write about the minutia of apartment hunting when you've done things that are almost impossible to believe?

The funny thing is, even those little ordinary things do wind up tying into the weird stuff every once in a while. Take the finding a new place to live - Kate and I actually wound up finding a single-family house in Cambridge. Apparently the real estate market is still a little soft, and the value of this place went down when its river view wound up blocked by a construction site. Regardless, Kate fell for the place almost immediately - where some might see uneven floors and a distinct paucity of electrical outlets as major inconveniences, Kate thought they added character. Since we knew the next person to see it would probably grab the place (as they probably should have; the rent is only a couple hundred more than what a two-bedroom apartment will run you), Kate was writing out a deposit check right on the kitchen counter while I was counting how many extension cords and surge protectors we'd need.

Anyway, once we'd committed to that, there was a lot of moving to do. Boxing up our stuff, and then unboxing it. Once Kate's parents heard "house", they saw a great opportunity to move things from their basement to ours. Even Nat is making noises about shipping some of my old stuff from Seattle, since little Marty gets into everything and, besides, she's looking at moving in with her new boyfriend and having this other guy's stuff around is kind of awkward.

Then there's other stuff. Like the post office. Most of my mail comes addressed to Martina Hart , but there's still some stuff that, even three years after I stopped using that name, still gets addressed to "Michelle Garber". What can I say - I'm a little more comfortable having the Victoria's Secret or Avon catalogs be coming to "someone else". Oh, no, I'd never sign up for that!

They're probably not going to follow me this time, though, since I'm not filling out change of address cards using Michelle's name. I'm not saying I'll particularly miss them, but I feel kind of weird chipping that much more of "Michelle" out of my life. It's this body's birthday on Sunday, and I don't plan on celebrating it - "my" birthday is February 2nd, and my swap-day is July 19th. Doesn't seem quite right - like I'm erasing every trace that Michelle ever existed.

-Marti

Living Arrangements

2007-10-11T19:55:00.000-04:00

It looks like I'm going to have to move or find a roommate soon, but for the best of reasons: After serving overseas for as long as I've had reason to be interested, Gertie's boyfriend has finally gotten a transfer stateside. It may not be for long - Gertie says he's going to be working with some people at MIT on a project that they can't really discuss, and once his part is over they might transfer him back to the Gulf - but in the meantime, they want to spend as much time together as possible.

And, of course, lay the ground for much more than that. Gertie didn't show up back at our apartment for at least seventy-two hours after going to meet his plane, and I'm pretty sure that was entirely because she was starting to need a shower and change of clothes badly. Somewhere around hour sixty-one, she says, was when Mark popped the question, a totally spontaneous thing once he realized that the long time apart hadn't changed how they felt about each other at all. Gertie said yes immediately, and later confided to me that this was the best way for it to happen - it means she gets to choose her ring.

As you might imagine, they're trying to pull a wedding together as quickly as possible (and, yeah, I'm going to get to be a bridesmaid), but in the meantime, they're also moving into an apartment closer to the MIT campus. It's also more convenient for Gertie; she's managed to land a job on the Somerville police force with the promise of being fast-tracked for detective (she finished the last course she needed for the Master's in criminology this summer).

Which would leave me with a two-bedroom apartment that I can sort of afford - as in, I can cover the rent all right, but it would leave me with seven hundred dollars less per month in spending money, and I'm not exactly thrilled with the prospect of curtailing my movie, DVD, comic book, and other habits by that amount (setting aside how much more underwear, shoes, and the like cost than what the first thirty years of my life tells me they should...). I was going to have to find a new roommate, a smaller place, or do the logical thing and find an apartment closer to where I work in Waltham - the suburbs aren't quite so expensive as Cambridge. I really didn't want to do that. Once you get out of the city center, you either need a car - which tends to reclaim the money you save from not living in Boston/Cambridge right away - or you need to really think about "how will I get home" if you come into the city for a concert, movie, or anything else. Not the situation I wanted to be in.

Or Kate, it turned out. As soon as she stopped squealing about Gertie getting married, she decided that she could use a new roommate as well, and the lease on her place was coming up at the end of October. So, three guesses on what she and I have spent the last few weeks doing? Looking at apartments.

Which, in case it's been long enough since the last time you did it, sucks. Half the ones you look at still have people living there and it's not always clear which problems are intrinsic to the place and which go with the slobby tenants (or, even with good tenants, how much needed repair work they're covering up). Some you could only see before work, others after, others during the weekend. The most hilarious thing was when we had two lined up in one night, and one was actually Kate's apartment... and the other was in my building. We passed on those.

Ah, well, we've got a couple more weeks. Kate may just wind up moving in with me for a while, although I think she sort of likes sleeping over more than she'd like staying there for any length of time.

-Marti

Someone's going to pay for this

2007-09-05T11:45:00.000-04:00

Samantha Haskins turned out all right. When I first met her, she was a teenager who'd run away from home and was living on the street, hooking up with the wrong guy. She had her body stolen, her mind trapped inside a comatose man for almost a year, but give her credit - where finding out that some three other people had been using her body during that time would have broken some people, Sam took it as a wake-up call, both in terms of how there's bigger things going on than one's own personal problems and not to waste your life being miserable, because someone else can waste it for you.

I like her. We don't always see eye to eye, but I admire the heck out of her. She's making something of her life and the assholes who are behind all the mind-switching stuff should leave her the hell alone, especially when she's done nothing worse than become friends with Amy.

They'd become friendly enough that they decided to stick together as roommates past the summer. Sam and her friends had found a place in Allston, on the B Line, and it turned out that they had room for one more, which worked out fairly well; Amy could take the 66 bus to Harvard on the days when walking wasn't an option. It's kind of close to where Michelle lived when I woke up with her body, although I haven't actually seen the place yet; Sam's friends had rented a van for Moving Day, so Kate and I were free to visit her folks on the Cape rather than help move.

Anyway, the group of them went out for dinner last night when Sam's parents called, saying there was a hitch with one of the financial aid documents, and rather than put it off, Sam went back to the apartment to find what they needed.

Only when she got there, she wasn't alone; some guy was going through their still-packed boxes. She said it was like he had a degree in it - there was a pile of boxes that had presumably already been searched, and right next to it he was going through another quickly. He must not have heard Sam come in, but he did hear when she pulled out her phone to dial 911. He ran out quickly, but Sam was blocking her way, and he shoved her aside hard enough for her to break her arm on the radiator.

It's just a hairline fracture, but as you might imagine, Sam and Amy are livid. Amy called me from the hospital, and Gertie and I were just barely able to talk her out of buying a gun. Gertie pointed out the statistics on how they're more likely to injure their owners than do any good, but Amy said that wouldn't be a problem - she knew how to handle one. She wasn't sure how, but she'd found herself snickering at how someone on the cop show on the waiting-room TV was handling theirs.

Whoever did this, she said, was making a big mistake. She might not be remembering more than bits and pieces, but she was pretty sure that those bits were adding up to someone you did not want to fuck with.

-Marti

Playing hooky

2007-08-18T17:38:00.000-04:00

I'd had tickets to a Sox game back in April, but it got rained out. Rescheduling a ballgame scheduled for a rainy April day to a Friday afternoon in August is trading up, so to speak.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Kate couldn't get off work, so I wound up going with Amy. She's had a bit of a rough last couple of weeks; she thinks that as much as Sam says otherwise, the idea that Amy might have been one of the people who held her body hostage seems to be making her very nervous.

(Boy, my life is bizarre. I have no idea how to describe that.)

It was a fun game, and we had pretty good seats. Well, not seats, per se; we were in the standing room section of the right field picnic area. It's a great view, although some of the neighbors left a bit to be desired - it seemed to take a while for the kids apparently there for a birthday party to take an interest in the actual game, as opposed to throwing peanuts at one another.

There were also the usual folks who seemed kind of lubricated for a one o'clock start, and disappeared when the beer got cut off in the seventh. Amy stirred the ice in her soda as they walked off, wondering if she had been a drinker in her previous life. She didn't have any particular desire to do so right now, but how much of that was Amy's body and how much was some attitude left over from her previous life? And of course, the past year or so couldn't be forgotten - the Sanadas don't drink much, and getting pretty sick at some party had turned her off to it some as well.

So, I said, not having any more flashes of memory?

Not really. She saw her therapist earlier in the week, and told her about blurting Carter's name out, and that got her rewarded with a bunch of memory exercises that didn't seem to be doing much good. She seemed encouraged, though - ever since we'd found out that her amnesia was due to a physical trauma, they'd been worried that the memory was simply impossible to recover, like paper files that had been burned rather than misfiled. Amy's still worried that that might be the case - after all, there's no reason why it has to be all or nothing; some might be gone and some might just be missing.

Anyway, the Sox won, and we went our separate ways after.

I'll write more tomorrow - I've got tickets for tonight's game, as well, and this time Kate can make it.

-Marti

What we know

2007-08-06T11:58:00.000-04:00

In short, not much.

I'm sort of starting to wonder what I ever saw in Carter; it took him a couple of days to get back to me after I called him Wednesday to tell him about Amy calling Sam by his name. Now, the delay probably isn't totally unreasonable; he was under a deadline crunch and I don't suppose everybody has to really prioritize finding out the whos, hows, and whys of us being made into who and what we are now. It's important to remember that Carter 3.0 is a different person than the guy I met four years ago, just as I'm not the same person Martin 1.0 was.

Still, this is big news. Even if he feels that that part of his life is a closed book, it would have been cool of him to pitch in a little faster, if he could.

He didn't have a lot to say. He was a prisoner during his first few months as Sam, and then once he escaped, he was fanatical about not letting anybody know. Even Maureen was kept in the dark until he bolted to switch into my old body.

We were sitting at one of the tables outside Grafton Street in Harvard Square when he told us this on Sunday - me, Carter, Amy and Sam. Amy had to be more than a little disappointed to hear this, but she barely blinked at it. She pulled a notebook and a pen out of her bag, and then snorted a little. "Did you know anybody who tended to make lists?"

Carter laughed at that. "No, not really."

"Worth a shot. I'm going to make a list anyway, though; it helps me."

"Well, I suppose you could start with the people who read Marti's blog."

"It's not like I ever posted pictures!"

"No, but Carter's right." Sam chewed on her lip a little. "Someone could have known about your blog but not told you, and thus known that the person in my body wasn't me, even if they didn't let on."

Amy made an "ugh" sound. The only other people Carter had told were the FBI, but the people working on our case get tested on a fairly regular basis - if someone's body had been compromised in the past year, we'd have found out.

"So who's left?"

We all knew the answer to Sam's question, but none of us wanted to say it. Amy did.

"How many people were in on kidnapping you?" she asked Carter. "It can't have just been the two that are dead. They had some contact with Korpin, and maybe people in their organization had seen pictures."

Sam's eyes got wide. "You can't think--"

"I can't eliminate it. Right now, the most likely answer is that I was one of the bad guys."

"But--"

I interrupted. "She's right. That makes the most sense. BUT, even if it's true... We're new people, Amy more than most. If she was part of Korpin's organization, she hasn't been for a year. And even if she starts remembering things, that doesn't meant he way she acts will change."

"Right." I don't know if Amy really believes that, but she kind of has to.

-Marti

But what does it mean?

2007-08-01T08:55:00.000-04:00

Some people would ascribe my jumpiness at work yesterday to knowing something big was going to happen, but that's bull. Omens are connections we make after the fact in most cases; in others its the willful ignorance that you've been antsy before and nothing important happened. The reality is that I had had a new job shoved to the top of my to-do queue with the actual doing being slowed down by the person who requested it calling every fifteen minutes to see how I was doing. He'd probably be annoyed if he knew that I already wasn't fully concentrating because I was refreshing RedSox.com in another window to see if they had made a trade.

It did get done, in the end, but it took all day and then some, so I had to catch the 6:00 bus out of Waltham instead of the 5:30, and though it seems like an hour should be enough time to get from there to Coolidge Corner, it's not, so I had a cranky Kate waiting for me at the theater when I showed up fifteen minutes late for the seven o'clock show of Rescue Dawn.

"Sorry, Kate, I had--"

"Werner Herzog in the jungle."

"The guy needed it for a presentation--"

"WERNER HERZOG IN THE JUNGLE!"

"Tomorrow night, I promise. I'll skip the comic shop."

That mollified her a bit. After all, it's not actually important that I get the new comics the day they come out; it's just a habit thing. I'm only half-kidding when I say that everyone should cultivate a few habits like that, since they make great bargaining chips, at least in minor situations like this.

Anyway, she was satisfied, so we went across the street to J.P. Lick's to have some ice cream, where we bumped into Sam and Amy... Who had just seen Rescue Dawn and were raving about it. Amy asked if the Sox had done anything cool, and I mentioned Eric Gagne. That led to a long conversation about whether or not they should have given up Gabbard, whether the minor league outfielder they sent along was more valuable than Wily Mo Pena (whom they hadn't been able to trade), and so on. Not your typical girl talk, I guess, although this is Boston - the Red Sox are are everybody's talk.

The exact details of the conversation aren't that important - Sam said she was sick of seeing "Whiffy Mo" strike out, if you're curious. It was the way Amy answered: "C'mon, Carter, at least strikeouts aren't double plays."

The whole table fell silent, and Amy looked at us like we were nuts. "Well, they aren't. Back me up on this, Marti."

At that moment, I had completely forgotten what the point he'd made seconds before was. Amy looked at me like I'd lost my mind when I said nothing.

Sam was the first one able to talk. "Yeah, right, double plays, whatever. Who cares? You just called me Carter!"

It took a second for this to register with Amy, but then the enormity of it hit her. Sure, she knew that my ex-boyfriend had been switched with Sam at one point, but that was just knowledge. For her to actually use Carter's name... That had to come from experience.

I immediately whipped out my cell phone to try and talk to him (what can I say; I never purge my contact list of potentially useful names), but he wasn't answering him. I promised Amy that I'd pick his brain at the office today - even if we don't work at the same location, the phone systems are connected.

We're all a little excited - there's little more frustrating than having a mystery on your hands and not being able to find any clues whatsoever. Of course, I'd be lying if I said we weren't also a little scared, Amy in particular. She doesn't talk about it much, but ever since she learned that she really had been someone else, she's always been a little nervous about the person she'd been before - what if that someone wasn't a good person?

As much as she hates not having a past, she's not quite sure she likes bits of one breaking through to who she is now.

-Marti

The sort of vacation you have to rest up from

2007-07-21T23:10:00.000-04:00

I didn't intend to go nearly a month without writing here; it just sort of happened. I'm not going to apologize for it; everyone needs a vacation, especially after the inevitable crunch of work that has to be done before heading out. Plus there was Eloise's birthday party, then the fourth of July cookout up at Kate's folks before heading back to Boston for fireworks, then catching a flight north...

The festivals were great, although we ran ourselves ragged the first few days darting between Concordia University, where the Fantasia screenings are, and Place des Arts, where most of the Jazz Festival events took place. We thought of doing some things at the Just for Laughs Festival, but a lot of it was in French, and I would have lagged far behind her.

Then back here, and my birthday. We went bowling, and I did not acquit myself well. Now, I'm not saying I was really good in my previous life, but I didn't stink. Still, four years like this, and I still occasionally find myself trying to do things the way I remember doing them. By the end of the night, I stopped trying to lift the heavier balls, and eventually realized that they were going to drift a bit since I couldn't throw them quite as hard, but if I'm going to do this again, I'll have to relearn how.

My life in a nutshell.

-Marti

Vacation planning

2007-06-26T14:01:00.001-04:00

Another year, another trip to Montreal with a new lover.

Obviously, it's going to be a little different this year. For starters, Kate wants to catch a fair amount of the Montreal Jazz Festival as well as the Fantasia Festival. I'm okay with that - I usually get kind of sick of horror movies by the end of my week and a half there. Not that that's all that plays, but it's a big plurality if not a majority, and there's only so many zombies and serial killers you can watch before you're numb to it.

We're looking to have a lot of fun over the next few weeks. Friday is the first birthday of Jen's daughter Eloise, so we've all been invited out to their place for a little party on Saturday. Ellie's adorable, so we had a good time shopping for presents. She obviously won't understand what the big deal is, especially since she's the center of attention no matter what; a party's no different.

We were looking through cards when Kate smirked and held up a card with a big number four on it. "Someone else is having a birthday soon, too."

"It's no big deal; I have one every four months."

"Yeah, I know, but that's the one where you became you. That's important to me."

I told her that was sweet, and almost kissed her, but there was this older woman close by, which puts a bit of a damper on public displays of affection. I'm starting to fear - just a bit - that she's planning something.

She is good at planning things, though - better than I am. She handled booking flights, hotel rooms, tickets to the things at the Jazz Festival that require tickets. It is absolutely driving her nuts that as of right now, Fantasia's website isn't even showing a list of films, much less a schedule, despite the fact that the festival opens in a mere nine days. How is she supposed to plan things around that?

I tell her that it's okay to run a vacation by the seat of one's pants, but she says that whenever she's tried to do that, it's been a disaster - trying to go places that will be closed for the next year and a half, sitting around waiting for openings when she could have booked in advance and done more, finding out after she got home that there was something really cool she would have liked to do. I said it's worked out okay for me, so maybe between us it will be all right. Besides, I pointed out, some of that stuff's going to be weather-dependent anyway, and it's not like she can control that.

Though I get the idea that she's thinking she should be able to.

- Marti

One for her, one for me.

2007-06-17T20:33:00.000-04:00

For someone who always thinks in terms of winning and losing, enjoying both the movie you picked and the one your girlfriend picked to see on a Saturday afternoon can seem better that both enjoying both. I like to think I'm not that girl and wasn't that guy. Hopefully the worst I can be accused of is not feeling bad enough when that happens in my favor and grumbling a little when it doesn't.

It was pretty much almost guaranteed to work out that way yesterday afternoon, given the movie choices. Kate's been wanting to see Paris, je t'aime for a while, and I've pretty much been on board, just trying to find the time. That was first choice going into the weekend, and, heck, might have gone down as my choice - although I had an irrational interest in seeing the new Fantastic Four movie despite the aggressive mediocrity of the previous one - until the Weinstein Company decided to do stupid booking tricks with DOA: Dead or Alive.

I know, I should probably turn in my membership card for the local independent film club for having the slightest interest in that - it's not like I ever even played the game. But, damn it, I figured that something with Corey Yuen directing and doing the fight scenes has to be worth something, and TWC handled it in a way that got my contrarian streak going. Most people, when they see a film delayed for almost a year and then only released in a few theaters just outside the city, get the message that it sucks and should be ignored; I get pissed off that it's being kept from me.

That's what happened here; the closest that the movie was playing was Revere, which requires taking two MBTA buses end to end. So, yeah, not a film I can easily see after work during the week, which means either ditching Kate during the weekend or dragging her along. She agreed to the latter.

It helped that Paris, je t'aime put her in a good mood. We wound up liking different segments; I got a real kick out of the Vincenzo Natali bit with the vampires and Christopher Doyle's nigh-incomprehensible (but pretty) short; she liked Wes Craven's visit to Oscar Wilde's grave and Gerard Depardieu's piece with Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara (so, basically, she liked the talky ones and I liked the eye candy). We were both really glad the film ended with Alexander Payne's piece, narrated in halting, American-accented French which she says does the best job of conveying the effect Paris has on a visitor. I told her I had to take her word for it, as I'd never been, and she said I absolutely had to... Although we (her pronoun) might be better off waiting until the dollar isn't in such bad shape relative to the Euro and politics change so that France falls back in love with America again.

(The love-hate thing between our two nations is pretty fascinating; Kate spent the entire bus ride between Central Square, Cambridge and Linden Square, Revere going off on how astonishing it was that we managed to get them to hate us post-9/11)

Kate put up with DOA like a trouper. Part of it was the theater; as much as any of us Lovers Of Film will tell you that the great theaters are the old-school single screen places whose lobbies display photographs of the marquee from when Casablanca played there, it's also nice to go to a place with 19 screens, all with digital sound and stadium seating. (A mixed blessing - it means you're never looking at the back of someone's head, but ask Kate about how the audience is supposed to look up at the screen rather than see it head-on sometime.) Oh, and where the concession stand also has satellites dedicated to Ben & Jerry's, Nathan's Hamburgers, Sbarro pizza, pretzels... I was kind of surprised not to find a Dunkin Donuts, but then I always am; I believe that donuts and donut holes are the ideal movie food - minimum noisy packaging, no crunching noise, generally filling - and can't understand why theater owners haven't twigged to that yet.

Anyway, theater nice, movie dumb. Dumb fun, if you ask me, though Kate will say just dumb. She doesn't love the martial arts genre as I do - even down to the people who are amusingly miscast in it (Eric Roberts? What the hell?). I apologized to her a lot. I have a feeling I may be dragged to Once to atone.

We went out to dinner afterward, and she was rather amused by my putting my hands on my ears whenever someone nearby was talking about the ballgame. I was recording it, after all, because it looked to be a good one.

We watched it at my place later that evening, after breaking out the Scrabble set. She grumbled a bit about that, just because she wanted to make sure that the trouncing I war receiving was the result of me not having her vocabulary and ability to spot good positions, as opposed to me being distracted by Matsuzaka's gem. Still, she said it was cute - that when I loved something, I wanted all of it - the tension, the little details, the stuff that doesn't really look exciting to an outsider. After all, I could just check the score on the web, but that's just going through the motions, and sublimating passion to convenience, and who wants that?

She may not have been talking about baseball, there.

-Marti

Moving Day

2007-06-05T23:29:00.000-04:00

September First is Moving Day in Greater Boston; it seems like almost every lease runs September to August. Since there's so many people in this city whose lives are tied up in academics, either as students, professors, staff, it makes sense for most people to plan their moves around the start of the academic year.

The same thing applies to the end of the academic year, too, as people clear out of dorms and often try to find some place for summer, either because they're going to be back on campus in the fall, or their lease doesn't start until then. Then there's all the people who go home for the summer and are looking to sublet.

Amy's still trying to line a place up for fall, but since she's going to be sticking around here this summer - taking some classes, auditing one that she's already down as passing, working - a sublet is better than nothing. I was actually able to help her find it - Samantha Haskins found a place near B.U. with a June-to-May lease, but her roommate wouldn't be able to join her until September, so she called me and asked if I knew anybody. Yeah, I said, I do, and gave Amy a call.

Sam was actually pretty excited about this development - she's always been a little awkward around me, both because I sort of see the other people who were in her body when I look at her and because I wasn't necessarily sure it was right for Carter to switch people in and out of bodies against their wills, even if doing so restored her. I'm not unhappy that that has happened, but I don't know if I can do it. The other thing is that while both of us have been through some pretty strange stuff, she doesn't know what it's like to remember being someone else - her time out-of-body was spent in a coma. She is, in her own way, just as driven to know what happened as any of us - she sees it as someone stealing a year of her life - but since her experience is so different from mine and Carter's, she doesn't really feel much kinship with us. She sees it as having a year of missing time followed by a bunch of awkward questions about her sexuality.

She and Amy are in a much more similar position - about the same age, both aware that some part of their life was taken from them, but not able to access it. Hopefully things will work out for them.

We did the actual moving on Saturday, which was no fun, what with the rain. Amy was pretty easy; she didn't have much stuff, and most of it was stuffed in boxes in a corner of mine & Gertie's apartment. Sam, on the other hand, had done a good job of scrounging furniture off craigslist and from various folks she knew moving out of their places, so Kate & I wound up taking Jen's truck all around town because this person had a bed, this one a sofa, this one a coffee table...

After a couple hours Kate and I were starting to seriously question the not having boyfriends thing. As much as I remember hating to lug stuff around, I certainly hate it more now. We grunted at Amy about not at least stringing Akira along for a while, but she said she didn't see this coming.

Sam had no excuse.

We got them moved in, though, which is the important thing. Hopefully they'll be good for each other (and Gertie and I can have a little more free space).

-Marti

Interesting weekend

2007-05-31T08:58:00.000-04:00

I've never really been able to get a handle on how well-off Kate and her family are. She doesn't dress or live ostentatiously, but she also doesn't bargain-hunt or seem to pause to consider how things fit in her budget when we're out doing something. She's mentioned going to boarding school, and her parents live out on the Cape, at least during the summer. Her sister Lisette has a roommate in her apartment, which none of the rich kids did when I was in college.

I mention this not because it's important in and of itself, but because it illustrates just how little I knew about Kate's life outside of how it has intersected mine despite the fact that even before we were lovers, she's been my best friend almost since the day I was "born". It's not that she's particularly mysterious or was hiding anything; it's just that this sort of thing never really came up. What that means, though, is that I really had no idea what I was getting into.

And I had plenty of time to fret over it; when I got home from work on Friday, I threw a few changes of clothes into a suitcase while Amy made things awkward by second-guessing everything I was choosing. I asked her if she would be doing this if she was just a "regular" amnesiac. Well, she says, if she were then she probably wouldn't be here. I concede that that was probably true and slam the case shut just as I hear Kate knock on the door. We left Amy by herself and got on the road.

We'd left at about quarter of seven, and it took us almost two hours to get to her folks' place in Dennis, during which time she admitted that she'd only told her folks about me in the most general terms, but that it wouldn't be a big deal, since they were pretty liberal, open-minded people. Uh-huh, I say. You're the most outspoken, tell-it-like-it-is person that I know, and yet somehow you clam up about me to them and lead me to believe you haven't...

She blushes, and says she wants to change the subject, then doesn't say anything for twenty minutes, and then starts up again like she hadn't been interrupted: "It's just that one of Mom's friends' kids just had a kid, so now she's on a grandchild kick. This... well, we put a crimp in that."

That doesn't help.

We arrive at eight-thirty or so, and it's dark when we drive in. My first impression is that it's a pretty nice house on the beach, and Kate says it's been in the family for a while, and jokes that they probably wouldn't be able to buy it now. There's still a light on in the window, and by the time we're out of the car we see Kate's mother framed in the door.

She's a nice-enough looking woman, in her mid fifties. She's a bit taller than Kate, but that might just be the shoes. I get a very polite "so you must be Martina", and answer in the affirmative. Any questions about just how much she knows (or at least approves of) are answered when she says she'll show me to the spare room. I stop there just long enough to drop my things off and then walk back downstairs, where Kate's hugging her father. He's an affable looking sort, with a prosperous waistline, a fringe of hair around his head, and laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. He correctly ascertains that we must be starving and offers to throw something on the grill. I say I don't want to make trouble but Lisette says it's no trouble at all - he just got a new one.

We follow him out to the back porch, where he flips a switch on a massive hunk of steel. "So that's where Manny Ramirez's grill went!"

"Ha! No, that got too rich for my blood. This is the next model after that. It's pretty nice, though. Any particular sauce you'd like?" He opened a cabinet next to the unit to display a whole bunch of bottles.

"Dad collects barbecue sauces," Kate explained. "Everywhere he goes, he finds restaurants that sell their sauce, or other local varieties. Then he's got to have the proper equipment to cook with them. He's got charcoal and gas grills, a fire pit, a smoker..."

Kate's dad shrugged. "A man's got to have a hobby."

"Hey, I know the feeling. I'm like that with movies, and I whimper a little every time I'm in Best Buy, because I want to start buying stuff in HD, but that would mean picking up a new TV, maybe two new DVD players because of the competing formats, a stereo, speakers..."

Mr. Jensen and I happily talked about electronics while he cooked, while Kate and Lisette spent some time getting caught up. We ate our (delicious!) burgers in the living room while watching the game (and making me want to upgrade my TV even more. NESN looks awful nice in HD), and then crashed afterward.

Kate broke the news about me-slash-us on Saturday. They took Kate having a girlfriend with apparent equanimity, although they displayed the usual and understandable skepticism when they heard my story. How, they asked, does this not make the news, especially after almost four years? I shrugged at that. "It's unbelievable, and it hasn't happened to anybody really high-profile, or at least not that we know about. When it does, I'm sure it will be all over the news and my life will become no fun at all."

They figured it maybe wouldn't, but still didn't really believe it. Kate and Lisette pointed them to some academic sites talking about the research that has gone on, although even that's a little difficult to come by.

Awkwardness aside, it was a beautiful weekend to be on the beach. I felt a little weird sitting in a lounge chair next to Kate in my bikini at first, just because we were at her folks' place, and it's always weird to be overtly sexual that way in front of a lover's parents, but it was cool - suspiciously cool. They treated me like an old friend, at least until Sunday night, when Kate was in the shower and I was working on the Globe's Sunday crossword. That's when Mrs. Jensen decided to talk.

"So, what are you to my daughter?"

"I... She's my best friend, and has been for years; it's only recently that we've started to become... more. I know it's probably strange for you to hear--"

"It's not. Not really. You're hardly the first."

Excuse me?

"It doesn't happen every time Kate ends a relationship, but often enough - she'll show up here with some girl, not wanting to talk about men... Granted, you're the first she specifically describes as a lover, and maybe that's because of your unusual past, but things get back to normal soon enough."

"So what are you saying?"

"Don't expect too much out of this. And don't try to use our daughter to get back something you feel you've lost."

"It's not like that."

"Maybe not. We'll see."

Then Kate came out of the shower and Mrs. Jensen put on a big smile. Neither she nor her husband would speak of this again, that night or the next day, which was taken up by a cookout filled with more of Kate's relatives than I could count.

We didn't talk about it until after the game (which was exciting). I asked her about it in the car as she gave me a lift back home; she grimaced and admitted, yeah, she did tend to get tight with her girlfriends after a breakup, but that I was the first girlfriend-girlfriend, and that was different, wasn't it?

I thought it was, and I certainly hoped it was.

Good, she said. Because this was the happiest she'd been in a wihle.

Me too.

-Marti

Sleeping arrangements

2007-05-25T08:31:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've had to meet a girl's parents. Heck, it's been a while since I've had to meet a boy's parents; I suppose that says something about how my relationships have shaken out since waking up like this. I suppose there was the whole deal where I met my own biological parents, which was kind of meeting the parents of someone I started seeing... except I wasn't...

So, I can at least take solace in the fact meeting Kate's parents can't be quite that bad. I just wish it wasn't going to be so immersive - rather than just having them come into town for dinner one night, we're going to be spending the whole weekend at their place on the Cape before coming back to Boston en masse for Monday night's game. Hopefully that means we'll at least have some common topic of conversation.

I don't think Kate has told them the full story about me yet. Yeah, she talks like she has, but I'm not so sure. She was talking to them on the phone the other night, and I don't think she used a single pronoun. There's also a slight difference between the way people say "Marty" and the way they say "Marti" - the pause between syllables is a little longer in the latter, and it comes in a slightly different place. I think it's because "Mart-y" is short for "Mart-in" and "Mar-ti" is short for "Mar-ti-na". It's a ridiculously minor thing, but it's something I'm either more sensitive to or oversensitive to. One or the other.

I'd rather not be ambushing them, but when you get right down to it, is "Marty's a girl" a bigger ambush than "Marti has the mind of a man because some mad scientist type switched the contents of their brains?" Probably not, although the two together are a heck probably going to be a heck of a whammy.

On the plus side, it will at least alleviate the overcrowding at my place for a few days. Amy's been crashing on our couch since the end of finals because her sublet doesn't start until June 1st. As much as she and her biological parents are cordial, spending the entire summer together, knowing what they now know, would have been uncomfortable to say the least. Besides, she says, her lives are here - the one where she's got friends and favorite places to hang out and the one she's trying to learn about.

It's a crowded house for now, but it's just for a week.

-Marti

Surprisingly good seats

2007-05-16T15:51:00.000-04:00

I got to go to Fenway Park twice in the past three days, which is always a blast. Heck, going once a month is a blast; twice in one week almost feels downright gluttonous. Yesterday's was a bit of a disappointment; Wakefield has been so good so far this year that I was really psyched for a great battle between the wily old knuckleballer and Detroit's young fireballer. Verlander was as impressive as advertised, so much so that the three-run home run in the middle innings seemed like too much to overcome.

It was a very nice night at the ballpark, though - just the right temperature, the clouds made for a beautiful sky, and when they started releasing some rain in the eighth and ninth, it wasn't close to enough to make us retreat a few rows back to get under cover - or, like some of the folks around us, leave. Leaving was not an option, after all - we'd been to Sunday afternoon's game.

Now, that had been an exciting one. Beckett looked pretty darn great until he came out with a cut on his finger, and the Baltimore rookie was dealing. It could have been a bummer before the improbably comeback, but the environment was too cool. Jen had gotten four Monster standing room tickets at work, so Kate and I joined her, Carlos, and Eloise up there on a beautiful afternoon.

Eloise is crawling now, which means she squirms a lot as someone her. She's a cool little kid, with big eyes and little blonde curls. I don't think she really understands the game at all, but she got that people were clapping in the bottom of the ninth, and clapping is fun. All the excitement wore her out, though, and she actually conked out in her highchair whne we ordered dinner afterward.

Jen said she liked me, but I said she just thought I'd make a good meal. Jen laughed at that, but said that wasn't it. Also, I probably shouldn't think my breasts are such a big deal after having them almost four years.

Well, I said, maybe that's why Eloise likes me so much - maybe she can sense that I'm kind of like her in that I remember what it's like to be for the whole world to seem strange and new. I may not be trying to put my whole hand in my mouth, but the rest is still pretty neat.

Carlos says he hadn't thought of it that way, but that I'd make a great mom with that attitude. I laughed at that - I'm not exactly on the mommy track right now. Then I got things off that subject by talking about how it was the second-greatest comeback I'd ever seen in person. They had a hard time believing the "second-greatest" part, but I told them I'd been at Opening Day '98, where Mo Vaughn capped off a seven-runn ninth with a walkoff grand slam off Heathcliff Slocumb. Or, at least, I remembered being there.

So we wound up talking sports for the rest of the meal, although the heavier stuff wasn't completely forgotten. Before the game last night, Kate brought it up, asking if I thought about having children.

Sure, I say. I may look young, but I'm in my mid-thities, experience-wise. One of my best friends has an adorable little girl, there's an equally cool little boy out there that's, at the very least, part of my extended family. Admittedly, most of my thoughts about having kids are in terms of there being kids around, not having one grow in my womb and then being pushed out my uterus, but the idea is there.

Kate puts her mildly sarcastic smile on. "So you're saying that part would be up to me."

I laugh. No, just that my brain doesn't quite work that way yet. Why, have you been thinking about it?

My mom has, she says. She can't help but notice that we don't have a complete set of baby-making equipment between us, and worries about not having grandkids. I tell her it's way too early to think about that, but apparently her parents feel that left to herself, Kate wouldn't think of that until too late.

I guess I've got to actually meet them sometime, so they can at least get to know me as a person rather than some lesbian hussy trying to lead their daughter away from the right path.

And if they start asking about kids, blow their minds with the idea that Kate's ex-boyfriend Carter would be the most logical sperm donor.

-Marti

Good news, bad news

2007-05-07T19:47:00.001-04:00

The good news is that I've finally got a little more time to actually write in this with the film festival over (and for the most part pretty good); the bad news is that it means I also have time to go online, bag myself a domain name, and redirect everything to TransplantedLife.com. I've been doing this for almost four years now, and I'm not intending to stop soon, so why not drop ten bucks on a domain name which will eventually let me do stuff other than blogging. Like selling books when I actually get around to putting that together. As it is, it looks like BackBlog is defunct or otherwise not archiving the old comments any more, so I'll have to do with out those.

In the meantime, though, you all probably won't be able to read this until the domain registration has settled down a little. Sorry about that. It seems a little bizarre that I've got to tell Blogger to point to the domain registrar and the domain guys to point to Blogger/Google - like Google could make some money and simplify everything by getting into the DNS business.

I had a weird dinner Thursday night. Amy wanted to start talking to the FBI, but didn't want to do it alone and didn't want to do it in the official offices. So she and I called Agents Jones and Lowen to meet us in a crowded restaurant - Amy is paranoid about listening devices, with good reason, and figured that a place with a lot of ambient noise would help discourage it. As you might imagine, Amy not wanting a lot of details about her life getting out means I'm going to be a little sketchy on the details, but she didn't say much that the FBI or anyone reading this won't know.

She's having dreams. Not every night, and she remembers so little that she sometimes thinks it's worse than not remembering them at all. She writes maybe one bit of information a week, if that, although she thinks there's something to be learned from what she's seen more than once, and what she hasn't seen. She doesn't remember ever being cold in a dream, even in the middle of winter, but isn't sure whether that means New England winters aren't something she was familiar with in her first life or whether it's just because she isn't in the sort of situation now that dreams of cold can symbolize. There's one that pops up about not being able to get "her" tie even. There's others, but that's about as much as Amy wants out there.

There's more, but I really can't say. It's not my place.

-Marti

Spring is non-stop awesome

2007-04-27T09:25:00.000-04:00

Well, maybe not quite "awesome". "Awesome" would have been if the Red Sox had not just swept the Yankees, but thoroughly kicked their asses while doing it and kept it going through the Blue Jays series. They were incredible games, nail-biters to the end with lots of coming from behind and dramatic moments, but I admit, I was really looking for Schilling, Beckett, and Matsuzaka to really manhandle the Yankees' hitters. Although maybe it's better that they didn't, since that would have sent a clear message to the Yankees to upgrade big-time, beyond calling up Phil Hughes and having people come off the disabled list.

Not that we could get tickets to those games - you had to be selected in a drawing for the opportunity to purchase them, then wait for your number to be called in the "virtual waiting room", then accept whatever crappy obstructed view standing room tickets you were able to buy, paying an eight-dollar fee to print them out at home. I didn't get past step one.

But we were able to watch them on TV, and that's what we did Friday night. The rally when Rivera was on the mound was quite satisfying.

I woke up before Kate on Sunday morning and made pancakes, smiling a bit when I saw the weather report. I made a big show of opening the bottom drawer of my dresser as she stirred, pulling out shorts and a scoop-necked top. She laughed when she saw them. "You've been waiting all winter to do that, haven't you?"

"Damn right. It's going to be seventy degrees today, even though we had a nor'easter less that a week ago. Might as well celebrate."

"Ah. Nothing to do with showing off?"

"Just letting people see what they can't have. Besides, we'll probably wind up walking all over town today, and you know this body sweats. Exposed surface area lets it evaporate."

She suspected the science was dodgy, but let me have my fun. There were, admittedly, times when something like the dress she wore would have provided a little protection from the odd breeze, but I haven't been swimming two or three times a week all winter to cover my legs up.

We did have tickets to Tuesday's game - really good ones, too: Section 1, row A1 (A1 meaning "even in front of row A", the very front row). They actually have leg room, an outright rarity in Fenway Park. Heck, move a couple seats down in the same row, and there's no room to stretch your legs because of the curve of the outfield wall.

Quality view of the Toronto pitcher's butt as he warmed in the bullpen, too. Kate asked if it was okay that she was sort of mesmerized by that when was getting some tosses in. Nah, I said - it's not like I expect her whole sense of aesthetics to change just because we're dating now. Besides, I said as I kissed her, it's not like you're going to act on that appreciation in any way.

She said that if she did, I'd get all the benefit, and kissed me back. Then she looked around a bit. Realizing where we were. "And now my parents know I'm going out with a girl."

I was confused for a second before seeing a NESN sign. "Don't worry about it, this is still New England. Even though we could hypothetically get married here, it's not like NESN is going to show a couple girls kissing on TV. That may fly in Cambridge, but not in New Hampshire."

She was relieved. "That's good. It's not that I don't want my folks to know, and we're long overdue for you to meet them, but this isn't the way..."

"Don't worry, there's no way that went out on the air. The guys in the truck and studio are saving it for themselves, looping it over and over and over. In HD."

I was informed that I suck. Because, as she said, if any cameras did catch us, they'll totally be doing that, because we're hot.

Anyway, we won't have a chance for me to meet her parents for another week or so - Kate and I are busy at the Independent Film Festival of Boston through at least Tuesday. Hopefully they'll be happy that she's found someone who shares her interests.

-Marti

Upgrades

2007-04-19T23:01:00.003-04:00

The very definition of trading up: Kate and I had tickets for the Sox game on Sunday that got rained out. Sadly, rather than seeing the game on a rainy Sunday in April, we're going to have to skip work on a Friday in August.

It still would have been pretty cool to see Beckett continue what looks like a really good start, though. After the disappointing finish to last year's campaign, it's great to be looking forward to a potentially great game every day. I don't know how fans of other sports handle the whole "off day" thing.

Those tickets weren't the only thing that got a little better in the past couple of weeks; I'm getting paid more money at work. More than a little, to be honest, but naming figures is tacky. I didn't get promoted, as such, but someone with more seniority left the company for a better job. This happens on occasion, but it's made me among the most senior people in my department, and management always gets a little worried - maybe Jack doesn't believe telling people how much money he makes in a year is tacky like Marti does, and what if the staff suddenly gets the idea that they could be making more money? So some modest raises are given, also reflecting that you're going to be higher on the totem pole.

And, of course, that the same amount of work is being divided among fewer people until someone new is hired. I must admit, a little extra money has made it harder to think "screw this, I'm putting my résumé on Monster!" when I'm staying for longer hours or helping with interviews.

God, do I hate helping with interviews. Since everyone is moving up a notch, we're looking to fill the departing senior person's position with an entry-level hire, so we're interviewing a lot of college kids. They're all eager to talk about the C# and .NET stuff they know, reminding me that my skills are a little out of date. And, of course, seventy-five percent of them are guys and seventy-five percent of those stare at my boobs at some point. It used to bother me as a reminder of what I thought I should be or how it reminded me I was a freak, but I've apparently been a woman long enough to have lost a bunch of lingering empathy for how guys can't help but check an attractive woman out.

Anyway, the busier work schedule and the crappy weather were both part of why it took so long to see Amy and finding out how her trip "home" went. She didn't want to just discuss it online or over the phone, so we ordered some pizzas and sat down to watch the ballgame. Which we didn't realize was an afternoon game. Well, that kept us from getting distracted.

It was, Amy said, very strange. She kind of thinks "mom" never really understood what she was getting at. Her father was hard to convince, and she isn't sure that he really, truly believes her. She showed them the blog, and all the medical and scientific evidence Mags and company had produced, but that just made it look like an elaborate prank. Eventually, she convinced her father to call Agent Jones, although Mrs. Sanada started to protest when she heard the letters "FBI", saying they'd done nothing to help find Amy and all they wanted to do was spy on people.

Eventually she persuaded her father to talk to them, and though he found it hard to believe, he eventually did accept it. After that, she said, things got strange.

"We didn't quite have a funeral, but we did some of the rituals. I'd met some of Amy's old friends before, but there were more of them this time. They said goodbye. Most of them just thought 'Amy' had heard from doctors, and wouldn't ever get her memory back, and had maybe had some sort of mini-stroke that affected her personality. It was nice, actually. You ought to do it for Michelle."

I told her I wasn't sure she was totally gone.

After that came a harder discussion. The Sanadas had said goodbye to their daughter, but she was still there. It was, they said, like discovering a daughter you never knew you had or finding her returned after a long abduction. They felt that kind of connection, Amy said, but weren't sure what to make of it.

So she's still part of the family, although they're still trying to feel out just what that entails.

-Marti

Tape delay

2007-04-10T22:52:00.001-04:00

Ugh. I'm tempted to change the archiving on this to monthly when I make some changes later in the week, just because I hate seeing gaps in the archives. It exposes me as lazy and it will make me feel like there are gaps when I use this blog as notes when I write my memoirs someday.

It also means that maybe my life has settled down a little, in that I no longer have something huge and weird to write down every few days. In some ways, that's kind of reassuring; it means I'm content and happy for the most part. But, even if I didn't have a crazy science fiction story of a life, I think I'd hope for something new and exciting to write about every day. Who wants to lead a boring life?

I don't, of course. I've got a job I enjoy and I'm going out with a wonderful girl. My mother, as you might expect, wants to meet Kate badly. She's heard me talk about how Kate is exactly the type of girl I went for in my previous life and hopes it'll work out.

I'm pretty anxious to hear from Amy; I half-expected her to call me at some point during her spring break, and I don't know whether being quiet is a good or bad omen. Maybe she wants to work a few things through herself before getting my opinion.

Man, to look at this, you'd think my whole life right now was on tape delay (as I type this, I'm watching the Red Sox home opener that I recorded this afternoon. Sox up 13-1. That's awesome). I kind of know that things are going to happen, but they haven't quite yet.

-Marti

That was... Hm.

2007-03-23T20:58:00.000-04:00

Amy's spring break started right after her last mid-term today, so she met up with Kate and me last night to try and get some courage up. She wasn't terribly worried abou the test - psychology is one of the subjects she does very well in. In fact, she's looking to adjust her major to reflect that. She's already dropped her music minor, since not only does the scarring on her hands make it hard for her to play any instrument (well, maybe she could be a drummer), but it's not a subject that really interests her. It's something she finds very frustrating. Amy's brain is apparently structured in such a way as to make music and mathematics easy for her to learn (she jokes about being an asian girl stereotype), but whatever knowledge and skills Amy had picked up has been displaced by whatever she knew in her old life. She figures she retains much of her old life's personality, even if she doesn't have the memories which formed it, and that personality just wasn't interested in that.

She figures it's progress of a sort that when she balances her checkbook, she has the distinct feeling that it wasn't quite so easy "before". Her therapist finds that interesting, even if he doesn't know about how different "before" really was.

Of course, neither do her biological parents, which is what she might be facing right this moment, taking the time difference into account. She's terribly worried that she'll be showing up back on my doorstep before the weekend is out, looking for a couch to sleep on because the Sanadas don't want anything to do with her. And if that's the case, what will happen to college? Sure, for all she knows, she may have a PhD's worth of knowledge from her other life, but it might be in a field her brain's not good at and even still, without proof...

I wish I had some more encouraging words for her. I don't get along terribly well with my own biological mother, but it's not as if Michelle did either. I don't see Telly very often these days. My own mother did get along pretty well with Carter for a while, but then... I look at Kate and blush. "It got complicated."

I write down my mom's contact information, anyway. Even if she can't tell the Sanadas everything they want to hear, she can tell them something.

We invite her along to the first feature in the Boston Underground Film Festival, which is called "American Stag", a documentary on stag films of the early twentieth century. You know it's a mellow festival when the prizes for trivia questions and the gift bags handed out at the opening night party include vibrators.

Didn't really expect to see Amy eagerly raising her hand to try to win one, either. But, then again, it's not like she can remember having anything else.

-Marti

Winter could be distributed better

2007-03-17T16:06:00.000-04:00

I never really liked winter, but in previous years it's seemed to be a smoother season. I remember growing up, snow would come down fairly steadily between December and March. It melted, and we had mud season. Now it seems like we get a bunch of snow once a month, and then it turns into slush and junk right away. I think part of it is that I live in the city as opposed to the burb where I grew up, and the sewer and subway and all melts the bottom layer.

The snow killed my plans with Kate last night; we were going to see the first part of the Brattle's "Hot Fuzztival", hoping maybe to score pass for the free preview of Hot Fuzz next week. But, it took me forever to get home from Waltham last night, and even if you're making that trip on a bus, it saps any desire to head back out into it afterward.

Kate totally understood, although we might hook up later this evening if we feel the sky clearing up is for real. Besides, there's no food in this apartment, so it's an excuse to go out.

Side note: I'm glad we decided on a simple system of alternating checks when we go out. The first time, it was a bit of a thing: The check comes, and we both just kind of look at it, since we're both used to the other person picking it up when out on a date. I reach for it, because I've got more guy stuff on my resume, but Kate points out that just because I remember what it was like to be a man doesn't mean I have to fill that role now. I say I don't mind, but she says it's not a cool precedent. She takes out a coin, flips it, I pay that time and we've taken turns since.

At least I was able to get home. Amy was out with friends, working on projects that they wanted to finish before spring break, and opted not to come home. When she did make it back this morning, she found her place had been broken into. Again. At least nothing was stolen this time, just everything out of place in a way not exactly consistent with her roommate being a slob (which isn't the case, anyway).

She called me and Gertie about it, although there's not much I could think of to do. She got busy cleaning up before Tricia got home. I told her that it's probably about time to call Agent Jones; this is way past a job for amateur sleuths. She's beginning to think that way, but she wants to consult with her biological parents, first, even if that means telling them everything. They've got a right to know, she figures, and they deserve to find out in person, before the FBI starts turning their lives upside down.

-Marti

Amy calls shenanigans

2007-03-06T21:42:00.000-05:00

I can't really blame her. A couple weeks ago, I'm telling her "my tastes are different now, to say the least" when she asks if going on a date with a guy would be weird. Then, less than a week later, I've got a girlfriend. That could, generously, be called sending mixed signals.

Maggie, at least, is satisfied that Kate and I are both still who we say we are, and are in our right minds. There's no repeat of three years ago going on, so we should have been relieved. Still, there was a bit of tension when Mags laid all the data showing our blood work as normal on the table at the restaurant where we met Friday after work, and she commented that we didn't look pleased.

"I just don't think of myself as liking girls, you know, so the idea that this was some outside stimulus was kind of a security thing. I mean, sure, there were a couple times back in boarding school, but that's different, you know? That was just not having another outlet, and it wasn't exactly satisfying."

Hey, Maggie says, I'm just here to tell you what's going on in your blood. Besides, it's just Marti.

I clear my throat for effect, but we all know what she means - I am not exactly a representative sample of my sex.

"Still," she continues, "I am a little hurt. Back before Marti decided she liked boys, she was jealous enough to try and get rid of my boyfriends. You'd think that now that she's looking at girls again..."

We both must have looked kind of uncomfortable because Maggie busted out laughing. "Kidding. Seriously, I don't need that drama. Besides, if he'd met you while we were still together, I wouldn't have stood a chance."

We soon had our attention distracted by the televisions tuned to NESN and Daisuke Matsuzaka making his first spring training start for the Red Sox. It was kind of funny, considering what we'd been talking about, for the three of us to be giving our opinions of how cute he is - with the stipulation, of course, that we'll find him much cuter if he can manhandle major league hitters the way he did those kids from Boston College.

Anyway, we had documentation saying there was nothing funky going on when Amy arrived last night and found us sharing sofa space after Gertie let her in. "Like I told you, weird is part of our lives. I don't think you can read much more into this than 'Marti likes Kate and Kate likes Marti'."

Are you sure, she said, because I went out with Akira on Saturday, and it was kind of weird.

Kate and Gertie lean forward, asking how at the same time. Kate laughs, saying that's a girl reaction Amy and I haven't assimilated yet. Gertie agrees, then starts practicing interrogation. "Was he a creep?"

"No, he was very respectful. Almost... I kind of wondered if maybe I was a jerk with women in my previous life, because there were two or three times when I realized that I was expecting him to touch my shoulder or my butt or something because, you know, the opportunity is there and in his situation, I'd maybe take it in his position, and I didn't want him to, so I was glad he didn't..."

Hey, I said, it's tough adjustment. But it's kind of good that you're thinking that way, right - it's kind of access to your previous life.

Yeah, but... What if I don't like it? I mean, if that's how I was thinking, and what if I was that Korpin guy? Maybe it's better that I don't remember.

Well, you're not Korpin, Kate says, there's two sets of nanos in your bloodstream. If you were, you'd probably instinctively speak Russian, right? And you don't. Besides, even if you do remember - you don't have to be bound by that. New life, right?

I guess. Just... He's asked me out again.

We can't tell you what to do. If you like him, just hang out. Look at us, I said. You really never know where anything will head.

-Marti

It's not coming out

2007-02-27T23:08:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure what the thing Kate and I have going is, and it probably doesn't matter, but there is, as you might imagine, some pressure on us to name it. Jen's probably stumbling on it the most - the three of us have hung out together, going to movies, concerts, and clubs, or going shopping, for three and a half years, and she's known Kate even longer. She's seen how Kate's and my tastes lined up pretty well, and now she's wondering if she was a third wheel all that time.

Because of that, she was one of the first people we told last week, even though it had seemed way too early to tell anyone. Gertie, after all, was going to catch us together on some night where there was no snowstorm for an excuse, and we each came up with a couple scenarios where that resulted in Jen finding out in a way that would feel like we'd been hiding something from her, and that wasn't what we wanted. So we met up for dinner last Tuesday at Fire & Ice. We were kind of insistent, and she looked a little embarrassed bringing Eloise into the restaurant with her. She apologized, although we said she never needed to apologize for giving her a chance to see our favorite girl.

"So what's the big..." she started, then stopped as we grasped each other's hands on the tabletop. "Oh. I... ah... I see. Uh, how long?"

We told her about Valentine's Day, but, really, that seemed like it was just an acknowledgment. "After all," I said, smiling a bit, "she's been chasing guys away when we've gone out together for weeks."

"I have not!" Then she thinks a little, and blushes. "Well, not so I was thinking about it."

Jen finds her food really interesting at this point, and we're all eating when she blurts out. "Pheremones. You remember the whole targeted pheremone deal, right? Could it be that again?" I tell her I've already called Maggie, and she's going to take a whole bunch of blood in a few days to make sure we're each ourselves and that there's nothing else wacky in our bloodstreams.

"Oh. Okay. So, when you're... you know... which one..."

Kate tells her that we both kind of do everything. Yes, I say, it's not like either of is pretending to be a man or anything. Although Kate points out that I apparently still totally do the holding doors open thing.

Huh. I hadn't noticed.

-Marti

So, how was your Valentine's Day?

2007-02-20T21:47:00.000-05:00

Mine was good. Real good, in a way I might have predicted if I were in an optimistic mood three and a half years ago but which kind of took me by surprise in the present day.

It started out inauspiciously enough - we were getting hit with the first real winter storm of the season, and I foolishly decided to go in to work. I can work from home, but I generally don't get much done - home has a TV, you know, and though I generally say I'm just putting it on for background noise or something like that, I end up engaged. Besides, there was a conference call scheduled, and both my cell and landline don't mix with those so well.

So I hauled my butt out to the bus stop, waited until the bus was fifteen minutes late, and was about to turn around and work from home with no great regret when the 70A showed up. Ah, well, to Waltham it was.

I got some work done, but not as much as I'd have liked - my theory is that since we have to access a number of off-site databases, we're a bit vulnerable to weather-related problems like downed wires or whatever else jams phone lines and the like. Not that this theory has a lot of merit, but it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense to me. Anyway, nothing makes a day go slower than just waiting for queries to run, so I was quite happy when I was offered a ride back into town at around four. Even in a car, rather than a bus, it took the better part of an hour.

My favorite comic shop got its deliveries, so I picked up my weeks pop culture in Harvard Square and then started walking toward the Brattle. It's there I bumped into Kate, hanging back at street level. (If you've never been to the Brattle, it's a bit architecturally odd - you have to go down some steps to get to the box office and concession stand, where you're directed upstairs to the actual theater). "Doing Casablanca?"

"That's the plan," she said, "But I don't know - it doesn't start for another forty-five minutes, and it's sure to be crowded with happy couples all dressed up and kissing and proposing to each other. I may puke."

I had to admit, I didn't feel much up to it either. We scrounged up a copy of the alterna-rag to see what else was playing, and noted D.O.A. and Rocketship X-M as part of a Cold War series at the Harvard Film Archive. That sounded a heck of a lot more appealing, so we (carefully) headed in that direction.

It was, in fact, a good time. Rocketship X-M was pretty bad, but D.O.A. is a bit of a blast - cheesy at times, but energetic, and blessed with one of the greatest hooks a noir has ever had (what Crank did with that basic idea was borderline criminal). It'd been a long day, so I nodded off a bit during X-M, with Kate threatening to bring this up if we wound up tied for most films seen during the Watch-a-Thon.

It had more or less stopped snowing when we got out, but what traffic there was seemed to be moving pretty darn slow and there weren't many cabs to be found. I told Kate it was okay to crash at my place, and we headed there. The walk was kind of invigorating, getting the blood flowing and the like. We turned on the TV to watch Bones (Stephen Fry!), and then... it was weird. We shared a look, and then we somehow knew it would be okay. We kissed. We broke it off and looked at each other.

She gave me a little half laugh. Are we that lonely?

Well, I said, I had a crush on you the first time I saw you. But since then, I got so used to everything, and I thought I just outgrew it...

Evidently not, she says, and then kisses me, hard. We somehow make our way to my bed, and...

Well, I'll give Kate her privacy. The next morning, she was adamant I not write about it, at least not until she was sure. But as you might expect, I've been able to think of little else since. We saw each other again the next night, when we both had tickets for a show by the Alloy Orchestra, and it was awkward. But we met up again when the Alloy accompanied The General on Saturday afternoon, and we were all like "I missed you", spending the whole day together.

Bizarre. Anyway, we told people tonight, so it's okay for me to write about. I'll probably write more when Kate and I figure out just what we've fallen into.

-Marti

I'm not going to get all mopey about being alone on Valentine's Day

2007-02-09T20:35:00.000-05:00

I say that every year, and every year I mean it, but damn if it doesn't get harder. What the hell is the deal with my relationships not lasting until winter? Aside from the great appeal of having another body in the bed to keep a girl warm, there's both New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day as big date days, and the possibility of giving and getting romantic gifts at Christmas. I don't remember it being like this as Martin; is this body subject to some weird seasonal cycle that only causes the pheromones to work in warm weather?

It's not just missing out on Valentine's day festivities, though. It would be fun to be brought out for a big romantic evening without being under the influence of Love Potion Number Nine, but Valentine's day is like a big relationship status amplifier. If you're happy and in love, you feel more happy. If your relationship is strained, you fel even more like you're going through the motions and a big phony. And if you're single, you feel even more single.

It doesn't help that I had one of my three birthdays last week - the Martin Hartle one, the one which tells me I'm the oldest. According to that, I've got thirty-three years of experience and memory in my head, even if the body's only got twenty-eight years or so of wear and tear and the total package has been a unit for three and a half. Not old, but my contemporaries are marrying themselves off and having kids, and I'm feeling too old to be so unsettled.

Plus, you know what else makes me feel old? People asking me for advice. I ran into Amy at the Brattle the other night - they were playing Shinobi: Heart Over Blade, and she was there with a group of other Japanese, Japanese-American, and proudly otaku students. They all seemed to enjoy the movie. I didn't stop by and say hi - even on my most vain days, I look about five years older than them - so when the movie ended, I made a call to Unique Pizza so I could pick something up on the way home. It didn't get done in the five minutes I spent walking there, so I was waiting when I saw Amy run into the place, all "I was afraid I was going to lose you."

Hey, I said, you can stop by the apartment at any time, you know that. What's up?

It turned out that even though Cindy had invited her along with the group, it was at the behest of Akira, who liked her and wanted to know whether she had any plans for the weekend. I told Amy that I wasn't her secretary, so she didn't need to come to me because of that.

"Ha, ha, ha. No, it's... You know, I used to be a guy. Wouldn't that be kind of weird?"

"Amy, weird is part of our lives. We can't escape it, and trust me, unless we chimeras start having relationships with others like us, it's going to be part of the package, no matter what. And since there aren't that many of us, that's not a big option."

"But what if I like him, and then get my memories back, and it suddenly seems really gross?"

"Hey, for all we know, you could have been gay in your last life and thrilled with a catch like Akira."

"That's unlikely."

"Maybe, but... Look, I've found that my tastes are different now, to say the least. You've met Maggie, you know Martin-me used to go out with her. But a good chunk of attraction is physical - chemical, biological, that stuff. You've got to trust your gut. Does your gut like Akira?"

"I... uh... I mean, at first, I was trying to fit in with 'my' old life, which didn't have a boyfriend, and now..."

"Well, this is your life now. One date probably won't hurt. Who knows, maybe you'll like it."

Good advice. Maybe I should take it.

-Marti

Local action

2007-02-02T13:18:00.000-05:00

As of last night's screening of Nashville, I'm behind Kate, fifteen movies to seventeen, and she's killing me on money. I think I'll pull ahead this weekend, since I won't be spending a whole Saturday in front of the computer(s) trying to buy Red Sox tickets like I did five days ago.

We ran into Amy at just about every one of the Altman films The Brattle ran this week. It's an experiment, she says, to see whether she remembers the having seen the movies, or even if she's old enough to have seen them theatrically. She figures that's unlikely; they're all films from the 1970s, and why would someone with options go from being nineteen to being in their fifties? Even if Korpin really disliked being a girl, or Japanese-American, or short, it didn't seem to make much sense to age thirty-five years instantly.

The experiment wasn't a huge success; Nashville seemed kind of familiar, and she said she was able to tell they'd changed the end of The Long Goodbye despite the shitty print, so she'd probably read the book at some point in her life. That was actually encouraging; knowing she'd liked Raymond Chandler was knowing something about her old life, and while it wasn't as useful as a name, it was something. Her head-shrinker is encouraging her to get some Chandler out of the library - maybe there's some association with events that can let her jump from knowledge to memory.

Anyway, we split a pizza and an argument afterward. In case you missed the news or are reading this later, the Boston area got turned upside down Wednesday when someone mistook a bit of outdoor advertising for Aqua Teen Hunger Force for a bomb and called the police, which set off a chain reaction that led to bridges and roads being shut down, the mayor calling for the heads of the people responsible, and, as Kate put it, a whole lot of unnecessary panic over some jury-rigged Lite-Brites. Amy took the opposite view, that it's almost impossible to overreact to a potential terrorist threat, because the consequences of doing too little are too severe and there's things like what happened to her and me that most people don't even know about. Kate argues that this will have a chilling effect on public art, and that incidents like this are likely orchestrated by the Republicans in order to maintain a climate of fear.

I don't know that I necessarily disagree with either position. The world is a stranger and potentially more dangerous place than many people know, but on the other hand, I don't think it's a healthy situation if a false alarm - and that's all this was, no matter how much the papers may put the word "hoax" on the front page - can cause this amount of panic and inconvenience.

She has the time, but I have the will

2007-01-23T23:52:00.000-05:00

Long-time readers probably know how fond I am of the Brattle Theater, a Cambridge landmark that has had to up its fundraising goals over the past few years to try to stay around. Right now, they're engaged in another "Movie Watch-A-Thon", in which the participants pay an entrance fee, try to get sponsors to pledge a certain dollar amount per movie or a flat fee, and he who raises the most money and/or sees the most movies by the end wins.

As you might imagine, Kate and I signed up roughly the first day we could. I'm pretty sure that there's no way I can beat her in dollar amount, but I think that I can pull ahead of her in movies seen by the end. It's easier for her to get more movies, working in the city and thus not having to commute back and forth to Waltham, but since we've agreed to a "no repeats" rule, I can probably pull ahead of her in numbers, since I'll eventually swallow my pride and go see the likes of Night at the Museum to get my numbers up. Besides, she's got other interests, like theater and music, that might pull her away from maniacally seeing films.

(We also agreed to a "no strangers" policy, so if you want to donate, here's a neutral party and his progress. And you do; it's a good cause and if you own any Criterion Collection DVDs, remember that Janus Films begat Criterion and the Brattle begat Janus)

Naturally, a bunch of films are on both our lists to see, and we have been hitting the theater at the same time when we can. I suspect she makes last minute changes to plans to try to trip me up - we were going to see The Case of the Grinning Cat tonight, but she put it off until tomorrow. I just switched gears and went to Notes on a Scandal instead, where I met the aforementioned neutral party. The contest is also going to make Oscar catch-up a bit more thorough, as I might otherwise dismiss The Pursuit of Happyness, but if it gets me a stamp on my card...

The last time our paths crossed was Saturday, when we met up to see Letters from Iwo Jima. Pretty darn great film - I think it would be amusing and justified if Clint Eastwood were to swipe another Best Director Oscar from Martin Scorcese, although Kate disagrees. She isn't quite as attached to Infernal Affairs as I am, so she's more impressed with The Departed. Anyway, we both liked it a lot, talking about it non-stop over dinner.

I'm not sure who's idea it was to go out dancing afterward, I'm just sure that it indicates too much wine was consumed with dinner. Because, let me tell you, while pantyhose is warmer than it looks, it's not exactly as warm as it needs to be, if you get my meaning. Also, even if you've got a warm coat wrapped tight, somehow the wind finds a way to blow up your dress and down your cleavage. I almost passed out when we got to the club, going from the ridiculous cold to the room heated by both central heat and human bodies. Once we got past that, it was fun. It's been a while since either of us did this sort of thing, and I don't know how often we've ever been single at the same time. It was fun, not paying for drinks and having each other's backs.

I think the most entertaining part of the evening was when a couple guys came over to talk to us and Kate looks at them sweetly and asks them which of them is the wingman. Because what's the odds of two guys together being attracted to the two of us with our opposite body types. I think she really got a kick out of making them squirm. I honestly don't know if I could do it; I've got a little too much sympathy for a guy trying to get somewhere with a girl who's there with a friend. Still, I kind of appreciated it; it helped to weed out the guys who weren't genuinely interested in us both. Besides, I don't know how much either of us really felt like meeting guys that night; we'd been hanging together all day and weren't really looking to go separate ways.

-Marti

Another break-in

2007-01-16T10:34:00.000-05:00

Amy's room was ransacked sometime yesterday. She and her roommate had just returned from a long session at the library, studying for finals (I don't quite understand how Harvard's system works), only to find her desk and dresser emptied, and all sorts of papers strewn all over the place - just separating her stuff from Tricia's would be the work of an evening. Whoever did this even removed the hard drives from their laptops.

They called the campus police right away, with Amy specifically asking for Gertie. They couldn't quite think of a pretense for asking me over, although we met Amy for a late dinner afterward. I don't know how much Amy's roommate knew about the whole mind-swapping thing before - I think she might have heard us talking about it but thought it was some sort of weird role-playing thing; she'd never taken it seriously. Having one's privacy invaded that may makes it serious, though, and she was more than a little horrified to find out that the Amy Sanada she's rooming with is not the one she met last year. That Amy had thought she was until fairly recently didn't much matter; Tricia stuffed some clothes into a bag while running down the list of every contact on her cell phone to find a new place to sleep, at least for the night.

I don't think any of us really blames her. Sure, she had already kind of bought in to getting to know Amy all over again when she returned from the summer with amnesia and they had built a new friendship in the past four months, but the bottom line was that living with Amy isn't exactly safe, and even if they've had a month to get a little complacent, it may not be safe for a while.

I ask if anything has changed recently, and Amy says not really. She's started keeping a dream diary on the advice of both her psychiatrist and the neurologist she went to see after we found out her amnesia is likely the result of physical trauma, but it's not like she'd even partially remembered anything useful since she'd started - a vague dream of playing basketball, which nothing at her parents' house suggested any previous affinity for.

Gertie was the one who suggested they may have been looking for the diary; after all, whoever "they" are may be okay with letting Amy be so long as she doesn't remember anything, but as soon as she does she'll become dangerous. She asks how this group would even know about the diary, and we quickly come up with a dozen ways. We'll try to dig up any information we can - Amy's neurologist works at Wei's hospital, so maybe we can find something out that way - but it's gotten to the point where it's really a job for professionals.

-Marti

City Girls

2007-01-08T13:02:00.000-05:00

Well, it's another day - another week in fact - but I don't know how story-worthy bailing from work on Friday was. Kate's sister Lisette had gotten her theater tickets for Christmas, for a show that Friday. It seems like kind of an odd thing to do - Kate isn't seeing anybody right now, and hasn't for months, so why give her a pair of tickets for something just four days away?

Of course, it's not like Kate would have any trouble finding a man to go with her; I figure it would take her roughly thirty seconds if she just went into and made it clear she was looking, and I told her as much. Well, sure, she says, although it might take her a full minute because she can't just whip out the boobs quite like I can, but what kind of first impression does going to "The Evil Dead: The Musical" make on a guy?

I'd have thought it was hot, evidence that there was a really cool geek girl hiding behind the designer clothes. Exactly, she says, and you'd be dead right and in luck if it were my little sister who walked into that hypothetical room trolling for guys. But does "The Evil Dead" really reflect her tastes?

I had to admit, it didn't. She can take that sort of thing in small doses, but going out with someone who wants to do that all the time? Uh-uh. She's sorry if that makes her sound like a snob, but that's who she is - she's not going to give in to start a relationship.

Anyway, Kate and I wound up taking the Acela to New York, grabbing a quick supper, and then heading to the theater. I, personally, enjoyed the show immensely; I've liked Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies in both my lives, and not only did the lead actor do a good job of capturing Ash despite not being Bruce Campbell, but some of the songs were fun, too. I'm usually not a big fan of musicals - there doesn't seem to be much middle ground with them, they're either a whole lot of fun or terrible. But I liked "Cabin in the Woods", "What the Fuck Was That?", "All The Men In My Life Are Killed By Kandarian Demons", and "You Blew That Bitch Away!" I like me my horror movies, and this was more fun than the usual whiny ballads or self-serving odes to how great music is.

We stayed the night at Lisette's apartment, since her roommate was out of town visiting her own family. That was a little freaky, since said roommate looks to be a complete girly-girl with photo collages on the wall, a terrifying dresser with a lighted mirror, fold-out jewelry boxes and mannequin heads to hold her wigs, and a pink CD player stocked with music I'd never think of owning.

And morning... Three of us trying to use one bathroom. Kate had apparently told Lisette about me because she had a comment when I was in an out in ten minutes and didn't bother with much makeup on a Saturday where I'd be spending a fair amount of time on a train. I like Lisette, and got a chance to talk with her while Kate made herself pretty for the day; she's a grad student at NYU and wanted to know if she could write a screenplay based on my life - only more artsy and with an actual conclusion. I told her I was reserving that right for myself.

So, not a whole lot of drama - the city was even more overcrowded than usual with New Year's Eve coming up, so we bolted in the afternoon. I don't regret cutting work to see the show, but I'm wiped from trying to basically fit an extra day's worth into last week. I've barely had time to touch base with Amy to see how she made out with her trip home, but I gather she's busy too - Harvard's got a weird schedule where there's a "reading period" between Christmas Break and the actual Finals, and her current life is all about studying.

-Marti

To and Fro

2006-12-31T20:48:00.000-05:00

Gads, am I glad to be at someplace, rather than between places. My trip to Florida was quick but something I needed badly. And I think Mom did, too. She occasionally does still speak with Carter, but it's getting less comfortable for her. He's still a familiar voice on the phone, but they have nothing to talk about. But that voice is still what she associates with her child, so it's probably good for both of us if we actually try to spend some more time together, let her get comfortable with me in a way that's kind of tough on the phone or via email.

Of course, I wasn't the only one trying to reconnect with my family during the holidays. Wednesday evening I got home to see Amy in my building's lobby with her suitcases. I asked her what was up, and she said she wasn't sure she should go home, even though they were shutting her dorm down for the holiday break. She had a plane ticket in her hands that she looked at without really seeing, and didn't meet my eyes as she said that. I invited her in to talk.

I had to admit, she had a poser on her hands. The Sanadas were her biological parents, but as we discovered at the start of the month, they weren't the people who raised her - even if the nanomachine overload just suppressed memories as opposed to erasing them, she doesn't have warm feelings about them that will suddenly come rushing back.

Don't get me wrong - she likes them, even loves them a little, considering how much they tried to protect and help her these past months. Knowing that those actions are based upon a misapprehension - that she's the girl they've known since birth, just a little damaged - creates a lump in her stomach when she thinks of getting off the plane, having them come to hug her, take her home to spend time with her supposed family...

"Well, if you want to stay here over the break, we can go get a duplicate key made for you. You'll have to put up with Gertie trying to figure out your story whenever she's around, but there's worse ways to occupy your time." She looks surprised, like that's not what she meant to ask, even though it's the question she came in with. "No, I didn't want to..."

"So the question really is, what do you do when you get out there?"

"Yeah."

I told her that it was like a decision tree. You can tell them or not. If you do, they may not believe you. That's how it was with my biological brother, originally. In that case, they'll probably try to help, and you'll maybe feel guilty. They may believe you and love you anyway. They may believe you and decide they want nothing they want to do with you. That may be good or bad, depending how you look at it. How do you look at it?

She says that would make her life harder - good-bye Harvard, hello living on her own - but it might give her a clearer conscience. Maybe, she says, but what about them losing their daughter all over again?

Well, in that case, I said, you can keep your mouth shut. If we and the FBI understand the situation correctly, it's not like there's a "real" Amy Sanada out there anywhere - not like I used to think there was a real Michelle (there still might be, but it's starting to seem rather unlikely). You've got as much right to be Amy as anyone.

She grumbled that it didn't seem right - after all, I had been so insistent on telling everyone in my life the truth.

But, she figured, she at least had a cross-country plane ride to think about it on.

That story hit me pretty hard. I do tend to believe that honesty is the best policy, but if you have to start totally fresh like Amy did... Well, maybe just going with what you've got is best for everyone. That's what I told my mother when I got to Florida, before asking her what she would have wanted in that situation.

She said it was a silly question. What you'd want in an outrageous hypothetical situation has little relation to what best when it all plays out. Looking back, she thinks it may have been better to know - the year we lost while waiting for me to feel safe telling everybody isn't something we can get back, and that looms large at her age. But, then again, if I had tried to be Martin right away, I might not have been able to become the woman I am today; I could have wound up angry and bitter and ashamed, and then we wouldn't have everything that's coming.

My mom's wise.

There was also a little rum in our egg nog for this conversation. I was wiped out from flying down, having a hassle picking up my rental car and checking into my hotel, and I started regurgitating that whole deal when she asked me about my week. I probably wasted about a hundred bucks on the hotel room because I selpt on her couch that night.

We drove back into town the next morning, since I hadn't brought a change of clothes to her place. She held up one of my skirts and made a comment about how I didn't like wearing shorts as a kid. I replied that I looked better than that chubby kid did, and she said she wasn't going to compare. I did feel a little weird about some of what I brought down, but she pointed out that my generation didn't invent the mini-skirt, and, besides, it was warmer down here than it was in Boston.

I did eventually choose something a little more conservative, though, since one of the things she wanted to do that day was to take a family picture. Nothing fancy, just me and her, with a rush put on the enlargement so that we could pick them back up on the way to the airport Tuesday. I already hear that her neighbors - at least the ones who don't know about Martin and the whole story - are telling her that we share features.

We did some touristy stuff Saturday and Sunday, but stayed close to her home base on Christmas. She made me cookies to bring home and a dress that I'll have to find some reason to wear, even if I don't know quite what occasion it fits. Because, really, for my mother to make me a dress... That's huge.

And, of course, we had to stick around for when Nat and Marty called. It wasn't until almost nine - they are, after all, in Seattle, and Marty's other grandparents had a big Christmas celebration at their place. Mom looked so delighted listening to his voice on the speakerphone that I had the stray thought that I hope she gets that excited if I ever (sort of) give her a grandchild.

And then it was back home. A short, but fulfilling vacation. Of course, I wasn't done traveling yet - Kate convinced me to play hooky on Friday - but I don't have a lot of time left to get ready to head up to Jen's for their New Year's Eve party, so that'll be a story for another day.

-Marti

Just an aside

2006-12-18T19:48:00.001-05:00

I want one of these.

Shoppin'

2006-12-18T19:29:00.000-05:00

The holidays have never been a particularly chaotic time for me - as Martin, I was an only child of only children and I had lost my father some time ago, so it was always just me and Mom, and maybe whatever girlfriend I had at the time, especially if her family was in some other part of the country and she couldn't travel.there easily. They often said it sounded lonely, but it was all I knew, so I never relaly thought of it that way.

And now... I mean, compare them to these past three years. The first couple showed me what loneliness was, and last year... Well, the big family was a neat experience at first, but now all I can think of is how it was part of some sick plan on Korpin's part to get to the U.S. and then... Well, I'm not sure what the "and then" is, just what it left Amy Sanada dead and the guy in her body amnesiac. I may not particularly like Michelle's mother, but she and Telly didn't deserve to be used like that.

So, this year I'm trying to get back to basics. I've booked myself a seat on a flight to Florida for Friday, returning Tuesday. Not a big trip, since there's end-of-quarter things to do at work and just swinging this much required pleading and inflicting my strange circumstances on the HR lady, but I think it's important that I make it. In the past three and a half years, I think I've only visited her once, when Nat and I told her she had a grandchild coming. We had a good talk on Thanksgiving, though, and I'd like to keep us from becoming distant again. She's had some health problems this year, and while we're far from saying goodbye, we can see that day coming.

Bah. Gloomy. Screw that. It is making this year a little more chaotic, though - aside from her, I've got to do other shopping, too - even if I'm not fond of Ma Garber, she and Telly deserve Christmas presents from their daughter/sister - blood's not everything, or even the most important thing, but it does count for something. Then there's little Marty, and while shopping for them, Kate & I found stuff that Jen's little girl Eloise would absolutely love. Gertie gets something. Maybe Amy, too... Oh, and Secret Santa at the office.

Fortunately, I had Kate to help me out. Guys make girls into the butt of jokes about shopping for a couple reasons: Credit card debt and boring afternoons being dragged along while they play dress-up. I'll admit, I've occasionally done the second, although I think I've been all right about not putting guys between a rock and a hard place by asking their honest opinion and then taking what they say as an insult. I think I've matured past that by now; I'm not so impressed by my female body as I was couple years ago.

Kate isn't either of those - she's got her own money, and she doesn't particularly worry about getting others' opinions. She's the scary type of shopper - the ruthlessly efficient one. I met up with her at Boston Common, and she had a map. This map had numbered stars on the shops she intended to visit, with the numbers refering to a set of notes about who she intended to shop for at each place. Not what she was going to buy them, of course - that would ruin the spontaneity.

I kid, I kid - a little. She's not the whirling dervish of crazed shopping madness I'm implying; she was actually very helpful in showing me places I wouldn't have otherwise known existed, giving color advice where necessary (I still have no eye for that sort of thing), and, of course, assuaging guilt when I saw something I wanted for myself: She would simply find something she wanted that was about the same price, put it in my basket (while I put mine in hers), and ta-da, we're each getting our best friend exactly what she wants for Christmas!

She was glad to hear I was going to be spending Christmas with my mom. She doesn't visit or really talk about her family a whole lot, mostly because she and they don't have a lot in common - she's a city girl while they like island life - but she also has never felt shut out by them like I occasionally have. She says it must be awful not to have someone there for you. Except for her, of course.

One thing that was funny comparing secret santa gifts; I was able to get something amusing and under fifteen bucks at Black Ink while she wound up paying three times as much for a gift basket. It reflects the difference between the parties, though - we're going to be using the break room and meeting up at a bar after the gift exchange tomorrow, while her company is renting a place on Landsdowne Friday and encouraging people to bring a plus-one and dress nicely. There will be speeches and wine and a DJ.

I told her I'd trade her, since it's been a while since I've had a good reason to break out the sexy Santa dress, but that I'd be on a flight south by then. She laughed and said she'd totally love to bring me and unleash me on the guys there, or at least have someone to talk to. It sounds very much like a "no fun to go as a single girl" situation.

Well, I said, give me a call if they're doing anything for New Year's; I'm about ready to start meeting new people - although not for another week. Let me honestly tell my mother that I'm not even looking for a guy when I see her.

-Marti

The women in my life

2006-12-12T23:57:00.000-05:00

The way these nanothings work apparently means they only work between members of the opposite sex, which leads me to a few idle questions. LIke, what if someone with a weird genetic structure ingested them? You do, on occasion, get people with an extra X or Y chromosome. I asked Maggie what she thought of that one; she thought that such people are rare enough that it wasn't likely to happen, but if it did, the computer probably wouldn't be able to map the "paired" brains properly, much like she suspects it can't find the appropriate correspondences between two male or two female brains.

Then there's the transexuals. Someone who has had sexual reassignment surgery would probably still be their original sex, although it's possible they'd just be immune, depending on how much structural change their hormone regimens created. It's an area where there's not a whole lot of research, just because it's taboo in a lot of cultures.

The other thing I notice is that pretty much all of my friends today are women. I've always had female friends, but the only male friends I've made in the past few years are boyfriends, mine and those of my friends. I don't think it's the "guys only have one thing on their mind" thing; I know what an oversimplification that is. But that's the way it's worked out.

Of course, part of that is because I wanted a female roommate and because of Amy. Not that Amy is exactly a "friend", but we've been keeping in close touch lately. We're both extremely curious about what's going on, but it's hitting a lot closer to home for her. She's the one who can't remember her life, and there's apparently other people even more curious than her. She thinks her dorm room has been broken into, and her roommate is starting to get worried about the situation, almost to the point of asking to be transfered somewhere else.

Meanwhile, I'm hanging out with Kate a lot. We're both single and at the point where we don't really mind, and the award-bait movies are starting to come out. Of course, we're lousy at planning, so Sunday we wind up at the theater and there's nothing playing soon but The Holiday. It's kind of cute, especially how Nancy Myers loves the old movies, and she's trying really hard to make something like them, but she really just isn't Ernst Lubitsch, no matter how much she wants to be.

Of course, it opens me up to a lot of ribbing on her part. She finds me buying a ticket to a chick flick of any kind absolutely hilarious, even at this late date.

-Marti

I want them out of my head NOW!

2006-12-06T23:52:00.000-05:00

I don't know whether I have a loyal friend and advocate in Maggie, or whether the mind-exchange thing is just too fascinating for any self-respecting scientist in the fields of biology or nanotechnology to drop. No matter which is the case, the Feds' gestapo tactics certainly haven't discouraged her co-workers from investigating what the deal is with the mind-switching nano-machines and why they didn't seem to be present in "Amy". I have to admit, the results are kind of disturbing.

We can, at least, put quotes around Amy's name with some certainty - she's not who she appears to be, although we're not exactly much closer to figuring out who she really is. Diego Cablan, one of Maggie's colleagues, finally managed to finagle some time on an electron microscope. The first thing he and Mags showed me was one of my own nanos, blown up large enough for the magnification to require scientific notation. It's an ugly thing, like a squid combined with a remora, made out of what look like ping-pong balls at that level of magnification. He pointed to the things at the end of the shorter octopus tentacles. These little clusters, he said, were what attached to nerve cells, and were relatively well-understood. They're like the protein receptors on pretty much any virus, although these guys are pretty good at not only attacking themselves to brain cells, but the synapse area specifically. That long, tail-like structure - "long", of course, being a relative term - serves as the antenna. Diego thinks that it had a different configuration when it first attached itself to my brain, but receiving the "go" signal had a number of different effects - it reconfigured the antenna into a slightly different configuration and caused the machine to release a chemical payload that causes the neuron it's attached to to fire in a specific way.

I thought I grasped it. "It does a PEEK, right?" Then I had to explain how old versions of BASIC (back when it actually stood for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) used the PEEK command to examine a given memory location.

The guy looked impressed - I sometime forget how young I look. Five years isn't a whole lot, but it's the difference between be able to directly screw with your computers memory and having no recourse but to point-and-click. Anyway, that's basically it, and that as soon as it gets a response, it transmits. Then, it maybe reconfigures again, or not, because the computer which is doing the cross-matching retransmits, strong enough for these nano-scale transceivers to capture. Then it somehow pushes what it receives into the synapse - a POKE, so to speak.

Okay, I had the general idea before, although the specific chemistry, which I didn't understand at all, was new. Then they showed me what they'd taken from Amy's bloodstream.

My nanos were more or less intact. Hers were in pieces, bonded to other chemicals, twisted. My first suspicion was that they'd made the nanos better, so that they would break down after being used. But then they showed us some more pictures - these, they said, were my samples, after running a few hundred thousand volts through them. Looked pretty darn similar.

At this point, Amy looks at her hands. "These... these are electrical burns. Do you think they burned me in order to cover their tracks?"

"I don't know - I mean, I'm just a molecular biologist. You really want to ask the FBI that question - they would know the why better. But, I think it may explain something else."

"My amnesia?"

"Yes - it's not something we can test, but maybe you notice how the electricity contorted them. Normally, these things should only be activated by specific frequencies - you say there are people who have three different sets in their brains, and they apparently never interfered with each other - but run enough electricity through it, and the ones still attached to the brain..."

"They erased my memory?"

I looked at her. "No... They probably wouldn't zap you on your hands. This... I mean, it looks like you grabbed something."

"Hmm..." She stared at her hands. "That sounds about right. I'm trying to escape, maybe there's high-tension wire or an electric fence, somehow I'm not electrocuted... Do they know it left me with a clean slate and let me go, or assume I'm dead and now wonder how much I know? Maybe that's why you said the guy was trying to tap my phone..."

Maybe. "So, guys, is there any way she can get her memories back?"

Diego, of course, reminds us that he's a chemist by trade, and Amy really should talk with a neurologist. That's when I realize...

"Oh my god... I've still got these things in my brain, don't I? I get zapped by something, and it's clean slate time for me, isn't it?"

The scientists all look at each other, apparently not having really considered this as something that might happen again, or at least to a specific individual. They get out some calculators and figure out that, assuming a two-year half-life, I've probably only got about 37% as many nanos in my brain as Amy did when she was zapped, so I probably wouldn't be wiped clean...

"So, what, I just maybe forget my mother? My best friend? Maggie? That 'page six' was a good place to put short machine language subroutines when programming an Atari 800? Or maybe my personality just changes a little bit? I already spend enough time worrying about who I am, and now I have to worry about brain damage every time I get a static shock!

Everyone looks a little horrified. Diego, at least, seems interested in helping. It means more blood samples, and he'll only be able to fit this in around the research he gets paid for. I think he's trying to charm me a little by saying it would be a shame if a bit of stray electricity were to change me, but I don't really think of it until Maggie mentions it later. I'm just too freaked out, as is Amy. This girl used to be a man, like me, but she's forgotten all about it. And as much as it drives me crazy, I'd hate to lose that part of who I am.

I'll be realistic; I probably won't ever get these things out of my brain - even if Diego finds a way to do it, I certainly wouldn't try it without testing, and how do you test this? But I suddenly feel a whole lot more vulnerable than I have in a while.

-Marti

Gertie is going to freak when she sees the phone bill

2006-11-30T22:34:00.000-05:00

It comes in my name - that's what being the "senior" roommate gets you - but bills are communal property, so that we can make sure that the other isn't trying to rip the other off in terms of paying half the utilities. Not that either of us has ever tried that, but who hasn't had a roommate that would try and pull sneaky crap like that? So, as soon as they come, the suckers go up on the refrigerator and don't come down until Gertie has put a check in their place.

I wound up spending most of Thanksgiving on the telephone. The plan had been to spend it in a movie theater, doing a little catch-up, and maybe a little flirting. As much as being single is fun, I do occasionally like having my drinks and meals paid for, along with, you know, getting laid. I figure anyone going to an afternoon movie on Thanksgiving is pretty darn available. But, I slept in late, and by the time I showered, dressed, filled the void in my stomach, and figured in how long it would take to walk to a theater, I would have arrived at one of those times when the next block of shows I wanted to see wouldn't start for another hour and a half. So, figuring it's the thing to do, I called my mom.

The woman whom I remember raising me, that is. Even if she wasn't tied up with memories of how I met Korpin - and there's multiple reasons to be uncomfortable there, isn't there? - she's sort of the kind of person that, in my snobbier moments, I like to think I wouldn't know otherwise. We've all got those people - folks with whom we know by relation or random chance, and avoid when we can. It's petty, I know, but there's no harm in behing honest here.

I don't call her very often. It's uncomfortable for her. Even after two and a half years, my voice isn't familiar on the phone. That's a vicious circle, of course - I would be more familiar if I called or visited more often, but I don't because I can sense how much she doesn't like it. This, of course, was part of our initial conversation - I say hello, she says hello back, with just a bit of "who are you, anyway?" in her inflection, I say it's Marti, she says she hasn't heard form me in a while, I say I'm sorry. Then there's a pause, and I mention that at this point, she used to tell me I should come and visit.

Well, she says, that would be a little difficult to explain to the neighbors. I agree, but say maybe not so much as she thinks; I get by pretty well. She makes a comment about how expensive it is, but I tell her I'm making decent enough money now, and I've got most of my credit card and other debt paid down or at least at manageable levels. It kind of dawns on me that I'm kind of pushing for this, which I haven't done, in either identity, for almost five years. Part of it's sitting around in an empty apartment at noon with no smell of turkey; I'm really feeling alone.

I decide to change the subject, because as stilted as the conversation is, I don't want to hang up. I ask if she received the latest pictures of little Marty, and she says she has, and he's adorable - really starting to look like his father. "His father" comes out after she's half-said "Martin", and I wince a little, which she thankfully can't see. She has a little complaint about how expensive color ink cartridges for the printer, because she prints off all the photos Nat e-mails her to hang up. I agree, half the time it's cheaper to buy a new printer. Then something hits me.

"Mom, do you have any pictures of me in your place?"

"Oh, certainly - your college graduation, that one with you and your father--"

"No, not of... I mean, you know, of me, like I am now."

"Oh." She's quiet for a second. "I don't think I do. You don't send them to me."

I start to mention that she's never asked, but I realize that that's really sort of irrelevent. "No, I don't suppose I have. Would you want them? I mean, would you put them up, even if it means your neighbors ask who I am?"

She's quiet for a few moments. "This is important to you."

"Yeah," I say, "I guess it is."

"Well, then I guess I can find a way to deal with the neighbors."

Hearing her say that was such a huge relief. I may have even let a tear or two out. "Thanks, mom. I just... I just feel alone right now."

And then... We talked. We talked about my last breakup, Carter and Kate, Amy, trying to deal with the FBI... Just let it all out. I briefly feel a little pathetic, someone with over thirty years of life-experience laying all this on her elderly mother. She's nearly seventy, and shouldn't have to be dumped on like this. But, she's my mom, and that's apparently what moms do.

Gads, I don't know if I could do it. I can't imagine being in that position forty years from now.

-Marti

Coming to where I work is not cool

2006-11-21T22:20:00.000-05:00

I've been working at my current job for almost two years. It's not the greatest job, but my supervisor accepts me for who and what I am. I never liked the interview process, and that was before I had to explain my science fictional life story to a human resources person who hadn't heard of anything like it before. Most of the folks I work with are cool about me, though I haven't made any close friends like I did at BioSoft. That's due in part to being a city-dweller taking a bus nine miles into the suburbs; when folks want to meet up for Happy Hour after work, I've got to examine bus schedules and either not come, leave early, or impose on someone to drive into the city (or to the nearest T stop, which makes both of us feel like jerks). It's a hassle, and I'm usually ready to just go home at the end of the day. Besides, I suspect this body's got a greater tendency to overindulge than my first.

Still, during my time there, folks have more or less come to think of me based upon who I am, as opposed to what. And the folks who have been hired since then, unless they're management types who need to know why I'll occasionally be absent because of weird drama stuff, don't get a big spiel on my history. You wouldn't bring the new hires in and start pointing out that George is gay, Diane's jewish, Mark's got a mentally retarded older sister, and Marti's had the contents of someone else's brain dumped into hers - that's for us to bring up if we feel its any of your damn business. I don't think people avoid bringing it up - fewer new co-workers in the typical age range try to hit on me than I'd expect, for instance, and when I miss a day, folks prod a whole heck of a lot less than I do when the shoe's on the other foot.

So. Anyway, I'm not particularly special most days at the office - I'm more likely to spend lunch discussing the previous night's episode of Heroes with the guys than gossiping with the girls, but that's not totally unusual in a tech environment, either. I'm just one of the guys.

Until the FBI comes in, flashing badges and stopping to get directions to where I sit every other cubicle.

I should have known this would happen - the Feds would have to be stupid not to be keeping tabs on this blog, just in case I mention something that seems trivial to me but fills in some missing puzzle piece for them. And I am cool with that - I want to know things about what has happened to me as much as anyone else. Anything I can do to help. And when I posted Thursday about convincing Amy to get some tests done, I'll bet everyone on the nanomachine invetigation started to feel a powerful hunger for knowledge. And if they'd just given me a phone call and said, hey, Marti, could you send me an email describing what went on, I'd have been totally happy to do so. As much as Amy doesn't trust them, she said I shouldn't jeopardize my generally good relationship with the authorities on her account.

But do they do that? No, they send a couple agents to bother her during class. And another couple to Maggie's job. And Agent Jones personally leads the charge to find out what I know. The idea, of course, is that people figure the Bureau wouldn't be visiting you without cause, and you must be somehow unsavory or suspicious to call their attention. So it's in your best interest to just try and make them as happy as possible, so that they might smile on the way out the door, say you've been very helpful, etc., etc. It's not quite as effective as leading you out of the building so that they can talk to you downtown, but when there's no crime they can link you to, it's the best they've got.

Of course, I told them what I knew, which wasn't a whole lot more than I said in the previous entry; I just included more numbers. At least it wasn't as bad as it was for Maggie's co-workers, who had to explain why there was an off-the-books project going on while keeping the agents from confiscating it. I imagine Maggie and her boyfriend must be catching a little heat for that.

I have to admit, I kind of don't get it. We're learning things, even if only what questions to ask, and not being shy about sharing it. There's no need to be so territorial

-Marti

Investigating nano-machines

2006-11-16T23:08:00.000-05:00

They're attached to my brain cells, probably several per synapse. It's speculated that each one is slightly different, with affinities for different types of cells. Or they could be able to somehow create keys for the two neurons they sit between, allowing the computer they transmit to to build a dynamic map and find correspondences between two brains. Of the ones that attached to my brain in July 2003, only about a third are left, because they're falling away at a reasonably quick rate - they've got a half-life of about two years, which means after two years, about half will have detached in that time, eventually being carried out of my body as waste. That's why a scientist with the appropriate equipment can tell how roughly long it's been since someone has had the contents of their brains swapped from a blood test - work out how many of these things are in our blood stream, and converting that number to a length of of time is just math.

You've got to have the right equipment, of course, since these are nano-machines. You can't just stick a drop of blood under a microscope and count them any more than you could with a digestive enzyme. Indeed, calling them machines makes them sound much more complex than they are - they're fairly close to molecular-scale and are in many ways more akin to being chemicals than they are to conventional electronics. So you need to be able to pick something with a certain molecular weight and structure out of the crazy stew we call blood.

Fortunately, there's Maggie.

Mags can't get all that done herself; she does mostly genetic research, which is pretty far from the work I'm describing. But that new boyfriend of hers? He's a research chemist, and he knows a guy or two. That's incredibly helpful, because Amy isn't willing to work with the FBI at all. I don't necessarily blame her; figuring out how long somebody has been having nanos fall out of her brain and into her bloodstream is just barely within the purview of what you'd expect a scientist on their payroll to be able to do. It's cutting-edge stuff, but it's basically forensics. Figuring out what her deal was, what makes her situation different from mine with the memory loss, that's research.

Besides, finding missing persons is what the FBI is really good at, and they let her down there.

Anyway, soon after she showed up on Halloween, I gave Maggie a call and asked if this was something she could do after hours or she knew someone who could. She gave me the expected lecture about how she wasn't a movie scientist and had a specific specialty, but she did know someone. Apparently, they were fairly enthusiastic: No-one has actually published anything about the mind-exchanging technology yet, but everyone in the nanotech and neurobiological and biochemical communities knows about it, and the chance to work on some of this stuff is a big deal. I kind of wish I'd known about that a couple years ago; I bet I could have paid a few months' rent by selling a pint or two of blood. Maggie called me back, I called Amy, and she reluctantly agreed to have some blood taken.

I made sure Maggie was there, just so that Amy would deal with someone I could assure her was trustworthy.

At first, nothing came of it; in fact, the first time Maggie called us back she asked if I was absolutely sure that Amy was like me, because they couldn't find any nanos in her blood work - by which they mean, the molecules they have which usually react to nanos weren't yielding the usual end products which they could detect. However, something was happening which they couldn't quite account for, so they've asked me for some blood to be used as a control group.

I just did that yesterday. Hopefully it can help them figure out what the deal with Amy's blood is.

-Marti

J-horror

2006-11-01T00:49:00.000-05:00

With so many of my friends married or otherwise coupled, there's no big Halloween thing going on this year for me to participate in. Heck, since Jen's historically been the one that throws the parties, that's sort of in limbo while she tends to her baby. And then there's the whole deal where going out so soon after (effectively) breaking up feels wrong. The folks I would normally hang in lacking a significant other are all busy: Kate's got a Tuesday evening class, Gertie is dealing with more drunk college students than usual, Mags has a new boyfriend, and I haven't spoken to Telly in what seems like months. That's why I wound up spending the night on the couch, having myself a little Takashi Miike film festival to celebrate Halloween, pausing it on the rare occasion when some munchkin neighbor rang the doorbell to yell "trick or treat!"

That's kind of fun, actually. The apartment doesn't have an outside door, so it's generally really little kids whose parents don't want them out on the streets. They probably barely know what's going on, but they understand free candy. Happy kids are great. Also, you can feel like you've dressed up for Halloween even though your entire costume consists of a robe and a hat. I don't want to make that too much of a pattern - opportunities to deck oneself out in something crazy sexual just for walking down the street and have people approve don't come every day, and one would be a fool not to take advantage of them. But little kids are awesome too. I can't wait to see what sort of pictures Nat sends me of little Marty.

Arg. Tangents. That's what happens when you try to get something down while your thoughts are fresh despite it being late and wine having been consumed. Or, indeed, because of them - I have a sneaking suspicion that if I don't get this down now, then there will be details missing tomorrow morning.

Anyway, it was about nine-thirty and I had just put Gozu into the DVD player (insert Kate's joke about that being an apt choice for me here) when there was a knock at the door. I was kind of surprised, since it had been an hour since the last kid and I was calculating how much swimming I would have to do to counteract all those leftover peanut butter cups, but I went up to answer it.

I didn't recognize the girl at first - she was in a nurse costume, holding her shoes in her hand, crying. "I can't walk in these. I keep trying, because there are so many pairs like them in my closet, and I'm getting better, but they just feel wrong."

Then it clicked. "Amy?"

But she barely heard me. "I failed two of my midterms, and my parents say I've never failed a test in my life. I knew I was going to, because I'd been doing so bad in the classes, but I just figured it would come like in my other classes. My psych classes, for instance - even though I couldn't remember taking the prerequisites, I knew everything I needed to; it all came so easy

"And I can do other things. My friends and I were coming back from Salem Saturday night, and I was the designated driver. The roads were slick from all the rain. We were almost in three accidents, but I avoided them each time like nothing, and Annie says that I could barely parallel-park last spring.

"And tonight, my friends and I were at this party, and even though this costume seemed so cool while I was picking it out and trying it on in front of the mirror, as soon as I walked into the fraternity, I just panicked, and I couldn't stand the idea of any of them looking at me, so I just ran! That when I remembered I had you guys' address in my purse, so I just kept walking here."

I put my hand on her shoulder, and she hugged me like she'd blow away otherwise, burying her face into my breasts and crying. I patted her back a little awkwardly, and suggested we maybe move into the apartment. I was pretty sure at this point that she wasn't Korpin - it's one thing to fake crying, but this girl was shaking.

As I closed the door, she looked at the paused TV and pressed play on the remote. "I can't understand any of this."

I refrained from saying something about no-one really understanding Miike, because that's clearly not what she meant. "Amy's bilingual."

"You heard my mom - she barely speaks any English. I've supposedly learned both English and Japanese since birth. So why would my brain block one and not the other? It just doesn't make any sense!"

Yeah, I said, I know. I told her to stay calm - that even if you can't remember who you are, you're not just a blank. You've got likes and dislikes and skills and weaknesses and a personality, you just have to trust yourself to let it come out. You can be yourself if you just don't worry about being yourself.

She thought that sounded fine as far as it went, but I hadn't started as a completely blank slate. It made her worried - did any of the other cases I knew about involve memory loss? None that I knew about, I said, but I suppose it could explain why we haven't heard from the original Michelle Garber in almost three years now.

Of course, Amy's not entirely convinced that she actually had the whole mind-switch thing going on; she wants some way to prove it, but doesn't want to deal with the FBI. I point out that it severely limits our options, but that I knew some people. I'll make some calls when I get up tomorrow... Well, later today, I guess.

I'm assuming, of course, that she really does have amnesia and it's not just some ego thing, where she can't admit to someone else either that she's a guy in a girl's body or that as a guy she can't handle some girl stuff, or just doesn't want anyone figuring out who she is because of how embarrassing the whole situation can be. I hope that's the case, because amnesia just makes things more complicated even if it makes all of us trying to figure out what's going on jump through hoops that might not be necessary.

Selfishly, at least I've got something to occupy my time with.

-Marti

Neither of us admits it openly...

2006-10-30T23:32:00.000-05:00

... but it's over. We spent the weekend packing Alex's things to put into one of those Door-2-Door boxes - which was, of course, outside in the driving/pouring/miserable rain, with the help of his roommates. I think he's trying to keep all his options open, because he never made any remarks about me doing anything to bring us closer together. He doesn't say "you only have to say the word", he doesn't say Austin is a decent market for IT work, or that the Alamo could replace the Brattle for my offbeat movie house needs.

It's because, I think, neither of us wants to make the move that sets a break-up off. We're taught that such things are awful, that they mean we've failed somehow. That once you've committed to saying "I love you" in the present tense, you've also obliged yourself to the future tense. Or that being in a relationship is so natural, that once one has started, it should just gain momentum like a stone rolling down a hill, and if something happens to stop that momentum, you must have screwed up, especially if you can't identify any one part of it that is obviously doomed from earlier on.

I don't think that's the case. I think the experience of being in a good relationship is so good at the time - and it really is, having that kind of trust and closeness and somebody with whom to share the things we love - that when it falls apart for whatever reason, we try and recreate that, assuming that we know enough from one big break-up to keep it from happening again. It resets not just our goals, but our expectations.

I might be kind of lucky, in that I've been able to have my expectations re-reset, but with the experience to recognize that that's what's happening. Three years ago, I knew sod-all about dating as a woman, and I think it's helped me to realize that we never truly stop learning how to do this. Every relationship is a learning experience, and not every one is going to have the potential to last forever and ever. Point-blank, Alex and I don't have what it takes to work around this obstacle. That's just how it is, and I'm good with that. The past few months haven't been wasted; they've just been what they were, no more, and no less.

Of course, I haven't delivered this speech to Alex. I don't want to say "you're not worth uprooting my life for", even if it's the literal truth. He doesn't want to say "you're not worth staying for". I know it's the truth, but I know it will hurt to hear it. So we do what reasonable people do instead - we spend Saturday and Sunday night having great good-bye sex, with visits to favorite shops, restaurants, theaters, and the like in between. We resolve to exchange emails, and we all know full well that sometime, maybe next month or maybe next year, we'll each use those emails to say we've met someone new, we don't want to compare this new person to each other... It's just different, and this is easier, and I hope you'll like him/her when you meet.

And I'm good with that. I hope he meets someone nice. My ego would just prefer it not be tomorrow.

-Marti

I'm not a romantic person, but I always liked the ideal.

2006-10-23T16:50:00.000-04:00

Alex has been offered a job. A good one. In Texas.

I've been kidding myself for the last week, saying we'd find a way to make it work. I'm making pretty decent money right now, and he will be to, and I, at least, do not fear air travel. I could look for work in that area. Talking by phone and online is cheap and instantaneous, so it's not like we'll really be out of touch.

It sounds less reasonable when you're not saying it to someone who wants to believe it as much as you do. Or who will at least pretend she wants to believe it as much as you do. Jen was there with a story of a friend who realized she missed her boyfriend enough to quit her job and go back home; Gertie doesn't even think of ending it with her boyfriend, even though he's been overseas a long time now.

Of course, Kate's been at a convention. She would have given the idea that this is just a bump or a test the scorn that it deserves, the same thing that I feel just writing this now. In a way, I guess, there is a test here, but it's not the separation. It's the knowledge that there will be one. And I think I'm failing it.

Or, "failing" it. It's become pretty clear to me that I'm willing to accept one element of my life changing because of what somebody else is doing, and passively accept it, rather than to actively change the rest of my life in order to preserve that one. It's not a right-and-wrong thing, but just a case of being forced to examine my priorities and thus realize that my boyfriend isn't quite so high a priority as having stability in other areas of my life.

Which sucks, to be honest. I'm not a tremendously romantic person, but if you're going to be with someone for better than half a year, it should be harder to walk away from. Hell, I've known more than a few people who were already engaged after that length of time. When Kate got dumped by Carter, she talked about the wasted time, how she'd invested a certain amount of her limited time on Earth when she was good looking and could conceive children on a relationship that was at best a learning experience, but when I look at the coming end of my relationship with Alex, I don't feel that, and maybe I should. Maybe I'm just relatively new to the whole biological clock thing, but maybe I'm lacking certain instincts that make it even possible for me to have a really great relationship.

Which would suck even more - just the idea of not even being capable of something more than "friends with benefits" is scary.

Of course, who knows? Maybe Alex and I will go out to dinner tonight and he'll tell me that he's turned down the job because the very idea of being that far away from me is too much for him to bear. But looking at what I've written, I think that would make me feel worse, because I can't reciprocate the way he would deserve if that were the case.

-Marti

Reunion

2006-10-10T00:30:00.000-04:00

Reunions are weird. Especially this one.

I mean, even if I wasn't who and what I am, it would have been a strange one. Everyone had kids in tow, and I guess we're mostly at that stage in our lives. Heck, things go a little differently, and Martin Hartle is there with his wife Maggie and a kid who's about to turn three. And then there's little Marty out west. So I'm not totally disconnected from this baby boom.

It's just that so many are on the same path, and comfortable with it. And then here's me, tossed back five years or so and not knowing who and what I'm supposed to be. Looking at all those kids and realizing that if I'm going to have one of my own, it will be a considerably different experience than I'd grown up expecting.

It's kind of disappointing to see so few people I remember from my own graduating class aside from Kurt and Wei. Five years ago, there were about a dozen people I shared a dormitory floor with freshman year, and we had a great time after the official reunion. This year, there were many fewer people there, and I wound up just hanging around with Alex, Kurt, Wei, Denise, and Jim. We kind of found it funny that we didn't have to go all the way out to Worcester to do that, and indeed, who wants to go to Wormtown if they don't have to?

That doesn't mean I completely avoided all questions of what the heck I was doing there, at least wearing a Class of 1996 tag rather than a Class of 2001 one. I didn't hide anything, although when people saw my nametag reading "Martina Hart '96", a few people did jump to the conclusion that I'd had a conventional sex-change operation. I was tempted to let them think that, because it's easier, but it didn't feel right. It seemed like a betrayal to let them get the idea that as Martin I had been so unsatisfied with my life, so unwilling to accept who I am, that I would do that. It's a flat contradiction of how I choose to live now.

Fortunately, no-one called me a freak to my face. A couple folks were more interested in the science of it than in me, which is fine - it's darn cool science. Others would hit on me with Alex standing right there. Of course, I gather from Maureen that people assume that about anyone whose sexuality doesn't fit neatly into the common box - people assume that just because she's gay that the monogamous relationship isn't her standard, and she's into anything kinky. Bleh.

Overall, though, it was kind of disappointing. I think I expected weirder reactions than I got.

-Marti

My life is a friggin soap opera

2006-10-03T20:53:00.000-04:00

I won't back away from being called brave - who doesn't like an ego boost from time to time, after all, and "brave" has good connotations despite being devalued to the point where people will hall it out on the basis of being willing to face reality. I've generally got no use for "daring", though - I'm not one to poke a bear with a stick and then accept cheers because I put myself in harm's way unnecessarily.

Gertie's daring, though, and generally in a good way. She puts herself out there if she thinks it'll help others, and that's a pretty good thing in my book. Once you've put yourself out there, though, there's no going back in, so to speak, and she's definitely out there where Amy Sanada is concerned. The thing I didn't quite realize before the other day is that when there's no going back, you have to push forward.

Sunday night, my roommate was walking a freshman girl back to her dorm when someone jumped her. Not the student, her. Gertie says he was dressed in black, jumped out from a shadow, and had her up against the wall with his hand around her throat before she quite knew what was going on. She tried to fight him off, but the guy was big and evidently good - he knew how to hold her so that Gertie couldn't really punch or kick at him without choking worse. He didn't talk much, she said, growling too low for her to really identify his voice later. The content of what he said was that a campus cop was over her head in what she was sticking her nose into. Then he hit her a couple times, tossed her to the ground, and left.

Obviously, the guy doesn't know my roommate Gertrude. It's not just a matter of thinking she can be scared off, but not giving her credit for brains. As she explained to me, even if it's just about her personal safety, she's at risk as long as she knows as much as she does, and she's not forgetful. The only way for her to be safe is to find out what's going on and get people in jail. She looked at me after that, and I was in.

So, last night, I left work early and we headed to the campus. We camped out on a bench outside the dining hall and waited until Amy showed up. Fortunately, there was only one other girl with her, and we walked up and asked if she'd like to get some better food elsewhere. Her first, completely reasonable response was "who the heck are you", but then she recognized Gertie out of uniform, saying that she was the one who called the FBI on move-in day. Gertie nodded and said she was evidently paying for it while scratching at her band-aid. Amy's eyes went wide, and she asked if it was safe to talk to us if that was the case. Gertie shrugged, and said it was up to her.

Amy grimaced, then decided to go along with us. Her friend went on to the dining hall, and we went to Fire & Ice. I kept an eye on Amy, checking for signs that she might actually be Korpin or some confederate, but it seemed no less inconclusive than it had been before. I'm just not a good enough observer for that, I guess. It would be great if we had access to an FBI profiler, but we're, as they say, the "just us" department. Her food choices shed no more light on her identity.

Once we had our food and were back at the table, Gertie got a serious expression on her face and a somewhat blunt demeanor. "So, just who are you?"

"Amy Kie Sanada. Second-generation American from California going to Harvard. I'm majoring in mathematics, and I was minoring in music, but I've 'decided' to focus on my major for now." She said it without a lot of inflection, aside from the implication that dropping the music wasn't entirely voluntary.

"Sounds like something you've memorized."

"It is. You know how sometimes you can block out a traumatic experience? I must have gone through something pretty fucking horrible, because I don't remember anything from more than two months ago."

Gertie nodded. "Amnesia. That's pretty clever. It's unlikely, but not as unlikely as reality, right? The Sanadas are so happy to get their daughter back that they don't question it, and the trauma is enough explanation for everyone else. But, listen, the same thing happened to my friend Marti here. We will believe the truth."

Amy turned to me. "The same thing happened to you. And what, exactly, was that?"

"You know. Three years ago, I got hit with a bunch of nanomachines that allowed someone to switch the contents of two people's brains. As far as my memory is concerned, before July 2003 I was Martin Hartle; I'd only met this Michelle Garber person whose body I inhabited once. So, last May, who were you?"

She looks at me in fairly genuine-seeming disbelief. "I'm just who I appear to be. I went through a trauma. I can't remember it or anything before it yet."

"Look, Amy, I know it's scary to tell people about who you really are, but it's worth it. At least give us some reason to believe you're not Mikail Korpin or some friend of his. I don't think you are, because if you were, then just the FBI would be investigating you, and they generally don't bug phone lines in a way that can get caught or attack innocent people in the dark. So you've probably got bad people interested in you."

She stared at her food while Gertie picked up where I left off. "What Marti's saying is right. Look, you can save your name for the FBI. If they have that, then they can find the person with your original body and maybe help you switch back. Or not; maybe you like the Sanadas or the free ride at Harvard or you were a lot older and being Amy is a step up. But while you pretend to be Amy, you're helping a dangerous man stay free."

She looks up at us, angry now. "Don't you think I know? Don't you think I want the bastard that did this to me captured and punished? But your story's ridiculous, and the idea that you think I might actually be this Korpin..." She pulls on her sweater's sleeves, and I hadn't really noticed that they were the extra long kind, which just allow the fingers to poke out, or at least not given it any significance. "Would I have done this to myself, just to make it look like the person I'd figured to switch with had escaped before being switched?"

Gertie and I gasp; the palms of her hands and her wrists have burns on them. They're scabbed over, and healing a little, but they're nasty ones. "I'm just a girl who was kidnapped by some sicko and can't play the piano any more because it hurts too much to move my fingers quickly. Now, please, don't bother me again."

So, as you might expect, Gertie and I feel like complete shit. It could very well still be someone else in Amy's body, but we're still jerks for harassing someone who's been through something horrible.

-Marti

It's nice to actually know detectives

2006-09-28T21:45:00.000-04:00

Carlos doesn't have much time to help me out on this, but Gertie does. Some day - some fairly soon day, I imagine - Gertie is going to be a great investigator. She's on track to finish up her criminology degree this spring, and I wouldn't be surprised if she winds up going straight to Quantico after that. She's smart, observant, and makes connections quick, and she'll probably get a nice letter of recommendation from Agents Jones and Lowen. Still, she could probably use a little more time in a job a little more... well, I don't want to wish for my friend and roommate to be in danger, but "campus police" isn't exactly primo work experience. Sure, it's for Harvard, but I imagine anybody looking at her résumé will look at that as just writing parking tickets for new BMWs rather than old Fords.

It's not, of course - I'm always surprised when I hear she had to face down some guy while escorting a student back to the dorms after dark; she's not that big and doesn't carry a gun - but, hey, how much respect did you have for the campus cops when you were in college?

I think she sees helping out with the whole body-mind-exchange affair as a way to stand out once she moves on, and I can't blame her - something like this lands in your lap, you'd be a fool not to take advantage of it. But I'm a little more cautious about how much I go poking around then her. She doesn't really have a lot of experience with the "people die" end of it, either in terms of the dead body of a former lover at your feet or accepting that the person you remember knowing or being doesn't really exist any more. I do. I don't have as many nightmares about it as I used to, but they come occasionally.

(That's not to discount her part on the night Korpin killed his original body; just that it wasn't as personal to her as it was to me)

As a result, she's a little impatient about my reticence to talk with "Amy Sanada". She sees it as a chance to gain information no matter who Amy actually is; I see a good chance that Amy has either Korpin or some friend/ally of his in her head, and both situations represent people I don't want to deal with overmuch. This frustrates Gertie, because she figures that the only way we're going to learn anything is by confronting her. I apparently have more patience than she does; I figure that Amy couldn't have disappeared for a few months - or, more importantly, returned - without leaving some kind of trace we can look up. It's not data we have a lot of access to ourselves, unfortunately, but there's got to be something - a mention in her local paper when she came home, for instance - that can give us enough information for me to feel comfortable being more direct.

Gertie gets that, but she wants to be more active. So she's been keeping an eye on Miss Sanada. Not in a stalker way, just paying more attention when their paths cross on campus, keeping watch on her dorm in particular. I have to admit, based on what she told me tonight, It seems to be paying off, at least a little.

She was escorting a freshman back to her dorm, which happened to be connected to Amy's, and while using the restroom she heard a noise downstairs. She went down to investigate, but didn't call backup because, honestly, if it had been any other dorm, she would have assumed it was a student doing laundry despite the late hour. But it was Amy's, so she got nosy. Good thing, too - it wasn't coming from a laundry room, but an electrical one; she saw a guy in there with the phone box open.

She got suspicious, beause she hadn't seen any scheduled maintenance on the day's schedule, and she knows what Verizon's work clothes look like. That's when her walkie talkie chose to squawk, the guy looked up, and he was running before she got a good look at them. She called for backup, but by the time she caught up, he was gone.

Gertie saw something in the box that she thinks was a bug - tiny, little antenna, attached to a stripped bit of wire. No way for her to know whether that was Amy's phone line or not, but it's not a big leap to figure that there's someone else interested in her.

-Marti

Fancy meeting you here

2006-09-20T15:12:00.000-04:00

The last Sox game of the season - or at least the last I had tickets to - was an ass-kicking, with rain on top. Those types of games are never much fun. It didn't help that getting to Fenway from North Waltham can be a bear on game days - transfer buses in Watertown, wait twenty minutes for a bus that's supposed to come every ten, and then grit your teeth as it stops at what seems like absolutely every corner on the way. I sweat, at one point I pondered getting off the bus to switch to the B line because it might be faster. Anyone familiar with the MBTA's Green Line may find that unlikely, but I swear...

So, that's how I wound up at Fenway half an hour late for the game, just in time to see the Twins start teeing off on Wakefield. Superstitious folks may choose to blame my arrival, but I wasn't exactly the only Sox fan on that bus, so they can stick it.

After a couple innings, not having eaten since noon had counteracted the damage the game was doing to my appetite, so I gave my boyfriend a kiss and headed down to the big concourse to find some eats. I wound up with a panini even though I usually stay pretty close to the basics at a ballgame (hot dogs, sodas, peanuts, ice cream bars). Shortest line, though.

Anyway, I had almost made it back to the ramp for my section, when I caught someone out of the corner of my eye. I must have annoyed a bunch of people, just stopping in the middle of the floor while I stared, trying to figure out where I knew her from before it hit me and I started walking over. "Sam? Samantha Haskins?"

I was too far away at first, but when I got over there, she looked up, especially when I started including her last name. Then she turned away from the girl was walking/talking with, saw me, and spread her arms for a hug. I didn't know that I exactly rated a hug from her, but she gave me one anyway. "Small town, isn't it? Wow, it's been almost two years!"

"I know... I almost didn't recognize you! Seriously, are you really you?"

"Believe it or not, I am, although I get why you ask the question. The red hair was her idea." She nods at the other girl, whose own hair is blue, then says realizes she's being a little rude. "Marti, this is Koni Momoa; she's my roommate at BU."

"You're here for college? That's... don't take this the wrong way, but I never thought of you as the college type."

"That's okay, I wasn't... But what happened to us... I tried to hook back up with my old friends, but they had a year of stuff, of life, that I had totally missed. There was only one girl who even asked me what had happened, and when I tried to explain the whole nanotechnology thing to her, I realized I didn't understand it, and it suddenly seemed really important that I understand it. So I started reading, told mom and dad I wanted to go back to school even though I had my GED because of Carter, and I wound up taking some summer classes and testing into a couple A.P. courses for my senior year... So here I am! I'm a year older than this kid and all my other classmates--" Koni stuck her tongue out; apparently this was already a running joke between them. "--but I'm majoring in biochemistry. Maybe I'll be able to help figure all this out after I graduate."

"Wow. That's awesome." Sam grinned sheepishly - I don't think I ever saw that expression on her face, not as Sam, Michelle, or Carter - and I looked over at Kon "So, how much of that made any sense?"

Koni says that Sam's life was obviously way weirder than the coma she mentioned, and Sam said she'd explain later. Koni nods, tells Sam she's going back with the other girls, leaving us to talk. She asks about Carter, I say he dumped my best friend. Wow, she says, and Koni's going to think her roommate's life was weird. She asks about Maureen, and I say that she and her family are more or less getting along now, but it's taking a while to get them on board with the idea of same-sex marriage. She asks if maybe I've heard about any progress from the FBI that she hasn't, but it looks like we're just as informed as each other.

There's not much more to say after that, and the game's supposed to be a thing for her to meet her dorm-mates anyway, so we go our separate ways after exchanging phone numbers and the like. I finally get back to Alex after missing two full innings. I tell him where I've been and who I met, saying it was weird to see her not wearing any black and just generally being cheerful. He chuckles, reminding me that it's probably a good thing.

I tell him I know, but I just think it's odd - that of the people I know who've been on this little swapping adventure, she's the one that's got her original body and mind in the same place, and yet in some ways, it's like she's changed the most.

Funny how that works sometimes.

-Marti

Gertie certainly had a busy day

2006-09-14T21:21:00.000-04:00

For me, it was just another day that started out kind of bland and turned dark and rainy as it went on. Those aren't much fun; I look up from my cube at around three o'clock, see the weather outside through a window way on the other side of the room and start grumbling about how I didn't remember an umbrella or the like. I get more work done, because I wind up putting off going outside to catch the bus until maybe next time, because it might not be raining by then.

I was kind of curious to get home, just because of the text message I got from my roommate. I suppose she didn't have much time to type it out, but I would have been even more intrigued if her message had been more informative than "Omfg i saw amy s!" Maybe I'm just older than my apparent years and cranky, but what good is such a ubiquitous communications device if you're not actually communicating?

It wasn't until I got home and talked to her that I found out she meant Amy Sanada. I have to admit that even for me, the name took a second to fully register. It is, of course, the name of the girl Korpin switched his mind with before switching out of it a few weeks later. She's been missing ever since, or so I thought; it turns out that she has been out in California for the last two months or so. Gertie spotted her movie into her dorm room this afternoon, surprised, as you might expect - we'd just sort of been presuming her dead, since Korpin didn't seem much like the leaving loose ends behind type. After all, if someone is willing to kill the body they must have thought of as theirs, whoever it was in Amy's body must have been nothing, right? So we figured he'd kill her and destroy the body completely, so as not to leave any trace.

Anyway, immediately after text-messaging me, Gertie calls up Agent Jones, figuring he's probably aware of everything, but what the hell? Apparently, he and the FBI were completely unaware that Sanada - or whoever it is - was no longer missing. They set a new record getting from the Federal building in downtown Boston to Harvard Yard, where Gertie's been keeping an eye on Miss Sanada. Jones and his partner find Gertie, who points them to her.

It's apparently not a very long interview; as soon as Jones and Lowen are within her sight, Mrs. Sanada starts yelling in Japanese, holding her daughter. Mr. Sanada gets between them, and tells Jones that Amy and her mother would prefer not to speak with them. Gertie doesn't get everything - Lowen kind of gives her a look every time she has edged a little closer - but what she picks up is that Amy and Asuka were not at all impressed with the job the FBI did in finding her. Jones says it's important to know how she escaped in order to bring her kidnapper to justice, but Sanada says that Amy doesn't remember any of that - that everything was very traumatic. Lowen says that maybe with some help, she'd be able to remember how and where she got free, but Mr. Sanada asks why anyone would want to remember that. Lowen suggests that Amy's kidnapping may not have been an isolated incident. Gertie doesn't think Jones liked her bringing that up, but it does make Sanada a little uncomfortable. Eventually, he takes one of Jones's cards and says he'll talk to Amy, but he doesn't think she'll change her mind. The important thing, they seem to think, is that Amy get back to her old life.

"So," Gertie asks after telling me all this after we get home, "what do you think is going on, body-switching expert?"

Well, I figure, there's a few possibilities. First, Korpin never switched out of that body - the whole thing back in May was just an elaborate misdirection. He lays low, maybe uses that time to learn all he can about the Sanada family, and tries to live her life. I don't think that coming back to Boston makes a whole lot of sense if that's the case, but Korpin seemed to like dancing near the lion's mouth in his original body; maybe Korpin 2.0 does too. Or, I suppose, it could be misdirection of another sort - he could have been in some other body all along, having kidnapped Amy Sanada, got the Feds looking in the wrong place, and maybe switched to a third body at some unknown time.

Or this Amy's story could basically be true but incomplete - someone else could have been switched into that body, and is choosing to lay low because Korpin has threatened him/her or he/she is afraid of being thought a nut. Lord knows that's possible; it's basically my story.

Hmm, Gertie says. Well, if that's the case, we do know where she lives. We could go talk to her.

I say it sounds like she wants to be left alone, but she asks me if I would have wanted to know if there were others like me three years ago. I suppose I would have, even though I wouldn't have been able to tell anybody that. I say it probably can't hurt much to talk to her sometime, and Gertie is practically giddy. I've known she was excited about the whole mystery deal, but I don't know if she realizes just how dangerous this game could be.

-Marti

Next year, we're planning a trip to Toronto

2006-09-12T22:29:00.000-04:00

It wasn't too long ago that the Boston Film Festival was a real festival, where you get the program and plot out where you want to go, figure on maybe seeing two movies on a weeknight and up to five on the weekend. You had to ponder whether you could get from one of the three movies playing at Copley Place to Boston Common. You could go through two books of ten tickets, decide whether you wanted to do a movie that might not play for months or might not play at all, see stars or see indies, all that good stuff. Last year it just imploded, and while there's a few more choices this year, it's not what it was.

Kate lost patience during the short program Sunday morning, which was a technical nightmare. That's when she made the crack about just going to the Toronto Film Festival, which runs at about the same time period as Boston's, and just has more movies and more choices. It's a big Oscar-preview festival, too, while some of the stuff at Boston... well...

She's bouncing back well, though, which is cool. As she puts it, thirty is staring her in the face and she can't afford a lot of self-pity time. I suppose I should get used to thinking that way, because women can't wait forever to start a family. It's funny, though, that she's a little jealous of my brain not being programmed to get married and have children before middle age makes it less likely, but we've got that programming for a reason. As much as having it can make us nuts, it does keep use continuing the species. It's quite possible I'll wake up in ten years and realize I'm not married and getting into "high-risk pregnancy" territory.

Bah. Thinking about that's not doing me any good, and it detracts from the important thing, which is that Kate's well past feeling sorry for herself and looking at other guys.

-Marti

Like I said...

2006-09-07T20:55:00.000-04:00

It would be nice to decide I'm going to have nothing to do with Carter after his dumbass dumping of my best friend, but I can't. As much as our lives have diverged over the past two or three years, he's still a connection to things I feel are rightfully mine. For instance, I write him a check for a couple hundred dollars every month to pay my student loans with. After all, he already paid for his knowledge by serving in the Air Force; why should this brain get a discount college education while that one has to pay twice? Mom suggested I get Sallie Mae to assign the loan to me, but anyone who has been to college can tell you what fun they are to deal with. This is much easier.

(Now, real fun would be to try convincing them that the original Martin and Carter are both dead and we're "new people", and neither of us should pay the bill

There's lots of things like that, especially where my alma mater is concerned. I don't necessarily mind that Carter gets all the bulk mailings about how the Alumni Fund would really like a donation, of course; I figure they can at least wait until I finish off paying my loans before hitting me up for more money. There's some folks there who know what my deal is, but every department seems to maintain its own mailing lists and other data, so while my old professors can connect me to the "Martina Hart" people may talk to them about, the alumni association doesn't have any way to enter a case like me into the computer.

Carter occasionally stops by to drop off mail that comes to him for one reason or another - there shouldn't be any by now, but some places are just perverse in how they update their databases. He's got my old Social Security Number, and any attempt to explain the situation to some people just gets the name changed in the list, as opposed to shifting things to me with Michelle's old SSN. Apparently, the Alumni Association (distinct from the Alumni Fund) has sent him a couple of notices about Homecoming in October, which was the most interesting stuff he handed over Monday.

Man, I must have spent about an hour just staring at the little postcard. It's been ten years, so a lot of people in my class will be showing up, and even if I haven't thought of them in years, seeing the card made me miss them, remember what a tight bond I formed with the folks in that freshman dorm, all that stuff. For a moment, I felt pretty crappy that I hadn't realized this was a big ol' divisible-by-five anniversery. I guess it's a sign that I'm pretty settled in my life as it is that I'm not giving much attention to Martin-oriented stuff.

I mean, that's what I'm always telling people in general and Carter specifically, right? That I'm neither Martin nor Michelle, but a new person. Do I have any claim to Martin's anniverserys? Does wanting to go to this thing make me a total hypocrite?

I called Kurt and Wei to ask them what they thought. They were a little embarrassed to say that they hadn't really given it much thought, but I told them it was OK; I'm not quite so self-centered that I expect other people to get an invitation to their ten-year reunion and think "how will this affect Marti?" At least, not any more. They were kind of helpful, kind of not. "It's up to you," they both said, "but if you do come, Chris/Denise and I will have your back." They were at least pretty straight-up in saying that they didn't figure everyone else would be as cool about me as they were, which only makes sense; they've got a two-year head-start on dealing with it.

I'm not really sure what Alex thinks about the idea. He said he'd come if it was important to me, but if I were in his shoes, the prospect would freak me out. Who wants to be pegged as the boyfriend of the chick who was a man the last time all these people saw her? Even if there wasn't inevitable homophobic or "he/she's a freak" stuff in the offing, we probably can't help but wind up the center of attention, which isn't something he's totally fond of.

I've got a couple weeks yet to decide as yet. I want to go, but I'm not sure I really want this kind of attention, either.

-Marti

Sometime's there's benefit to being the bearer of bad news

2006-08-28T20:00:00.000-04:00

Not necessarily direct benefits, but you can kind of do all right. Kate had bought a pair of tickets for Saturday's "Futures at Fenway" event a few weeks ago, but as one might imagine, wasn't in any particular mood to go with Carter. So Alex and I wound up reaping the benefits. I tried to pay her back, but she said to forget it, I'd eventually return the favor. A paranoid person would wonder if she thought my relationship with Alex weren't long for the world, because that's what the analogous exchange would be, but I think it was just Kate saying I'd have something I couldn't go to eventually.

It was a fun day at the ballpark. It was obvious who the stars of the show were - Joshua Papelbon, the recently-drafted younger brother of Sox Rookie of the Year candidate Jonatahn Papelbon, and Carlos Pena, who grew up in the area and played his college ball at Northeastern University. Neither let the fans down; Papelbon the Younger threw a one-two-three ninth just like his brother is wont to do, and Pena drove in the winning runs in the second game with a homer over the Red Sox bullpen. Judging from the crowd reaction, both could be real popular if brought up to the big club.

Josh Papelbon is fun, too. His older brother is a straight-ahead fireballer, but he's a submarine-style pitcher who nearly scrapes the ground with his knuckles as he pitches. Throwing like that's got some disadvantages - like, the ball may already be heading in an upward direction when the hitter catches it - but I'm surprised you don't see more people throw that way, just because it seems to do much less damage to the shoulder. I mean, try it yourself - throwing overhand causes much more strain (and, no, it's not because lifting your arm lifts your breast). Anyway, the really amusing thing is watching him warm up in the bullpen - from where we were sitting, it was like he was ducking down and out of sight behind the bullpen wall every time he threw a pitch. That's just funny.

Still, I couldn't completely enjoy it - it's a bit rough when you only have the opportunity to have fun because something crappy has happened to a friend.

Alex stayed at my place that night; we had breakfast at Zoe's before going our separate ways for the day, since I'd promised to hang out with Kate, tell her what was what from seeing Carter and just generally hang out. Finding yourself suddenly single isn't a lot of fun, because there's this socialization cartography that you get knocked around: The single people are here, the couples here, the married people here, and the families are way over here, and the distance between those points might actually be physical space. Couples live in the same neighborhood, but they have to figuratively travel to see the single people. So now Kate suddenly finds herself living a little further from most of the people she knows and on the opposite side of town from Jen.

Okay, let's stop before I abuse that metaphor much more.

Anyway, Kate and I hung out. We wound up in a tea shop during the worst of the rain, which was were we finally got around to talking about Carter. I told her what he'd said, and felt like I'd punched her in the gut, but I liked her reaction: "At least it was something stupid."

Most folks, I imagine, would feel extra broken up if they were dumped for a stupid reason, but Kate's smarter than most of us. A breakup with a rational explanation, she figures, is seldom cathartic or a clean break; you understand why it's happening, still have some respect for the guy, and maybe convince yourself that you can make it work, if you just help resolve whatever the obstacle is. You just keep making yourself miserable, and no good can come of that. When you get dumped for a reason that is completely irrational, though, it's an eye-opener - the guy's an idiot and you deserve better. You can be finished with regrets about the past but not the future, and move on to the next, better thing.

(Note: Do not take this attitude if you have less self-confidence than Kate, because you will be lying to yourself, and making yourself more miserable)

I bristled a little when she said this, and she noticed. When pressed, I said I did understand the twisted logic that Carter was using a little - I told her she had no idea how often the sperm donor scenario had gone through my head. Okay, she says, I get it, but suppose Korpov had actually turned out to be Michelle. Putting the fact that it could happen the old fashioned way aside, would I feel any sort of obligation to get knocked up for him if he decided that it would be really cool to have a kid that was genetically half new-him and half old-him? Or even have eggs harvested? Carter's got to learn he's a new person and deal with it.

I tell her I've told him the same thing, but then I do something hypocritical like ask if Mom's called him since the last time I talked to her. There doesn't seem to be a right answer.

-Marti

Explanations which I don't like

2006-08-25T00:39:00.000-04:00

It's a bit of a kick to make people cringe when you approach them via entirely non-physical intimidation. Sure, guys can and do occasionally confront each other the way I confronted Carter yesterday, but there's still the implied threat of an ass-kicking. It's a reminder that women by and large control the social network when we want to; I really can't do much to him other than say mean things, but that's enough.

I knew that between meetings wasn't going to be enough to say all that needed saying, so I went to the office kitchen the same time he was there, crossed my arms, and stared. He blushed a little, looked away, and muttered "so, I guess you've talked to Kate, then." I nodded, still not speaking. This leads to "look, it wasn't something I wanted to do, but I had to." I think I throw him a skeptical look at that point, and he says look, I have to be in another meeting now, but meet me at five-thirty, I'll explain everything. I grumble a little, but I did corner him. Really, what I want to do is say screw that, I just came to tell you that you're on my shit list, but that's not really an option. At the very least, I told Kate that I'd try and find something out.

Six o'clock rolls around and I get into his car, my hand on my pepper spray just in case one of Kate's more paranoid theories actually has some merit. He doesn't do anything threatening, though, and pulls into a Waltham Central Square restaurant's parking lot. I say something sarcastic about how he hadn't even dumped Kate a week ago and he's already trying to buy me dinner, and he responds that it's neutral ground to talk on and he's hungry. I suppose that's true, and it beats talking in the car. It's a casual dining chain, Margarita's or something like that and I figure if his goal was to seduce me he'd try harder.

Even though we're hear to talk, he tries to avoid conversation by looking at the menu, but I'm not really having that. I put down my menu and just go at it: "So, why the hell does someone dump Kate? I've used that brain, so I know you're not stupid."

He laughs a bit, nearly choking on his water, and says, no, there's nothing wrong with her, and he probably can't do a lot better, but she's not the girl for him. I say that doesn't make any sense, and he says he knows but let him try to explain.

A couple weeks ago, he says, they were eating at S&S, and Kate saw something in the window at Stellabella that she thought Eloise would like. So she bought it, called Jen if she was busy, and when Jen said no, they came over. He goes off on a tangent about how maternity leave was driving her stir-crazy and her entire life now being about Eloise would drive her crazy if she weren't the greatest thing in all the world, so it was great to have visitors, and (this is me) get to the point already! Right, so, he's looking at Kate playing with Eloise and he realises that if she's not ready to start a family now, she will be soon.

And you're not?

No, he says, he looked at Eloise and Jen and Carlos and realized that that's what he wants, too.

I'm stumped. Apparently, I say, having had your brain doesn't mean I understand how you think.

He sighs, and looks relieved when the waitress comes to get our orders. After she leaves, he says he's not sure how to say this without it sounding terrible. I say don't worry, my opinion of you is pretty low right now anyway. Okay, he says, and then as if to stall, says he's glad I'm the person he's telling, becaues maybe I could help him explain it to Kate. I'm like, whoa, you're not really still stuck on me, are you? He's like, no, I mean, I still like you, even if I'm over you, but you're not right for the same reasons as Kate.

I'm still not getting it, and I'm getting frustrated. Just what are you saying? He looks uncomfortable and says that he looked at Jen, Carlos, and Eloise, and they looked like a family, and he knew that if he settled down with Kate, they'd look like one, but not his family.

It takes me a while to get it when he stops there. "You're not serious. You're dumping Kate because she's not black? That is the stupidest..."

I guess he's expecting that, because he's ready to throw it back at me - my last couple boyfriends are and have been movie and sci-fi nerds, and that was one of the things I'd liked about him. I say that's just common interests, but he says that's only part of it. It's natural, he says - we want to propogate ourselves into the next generation. That's part of the reason that people tend to date and marry within their own ethnic group - we want to try and reproduce ourselves; it's natural. And our self-image, what we're trying to bring forward isn't the bodies we're in.

I say that may be true, but if you know it, you don't have to be a slave to it. He says he knows, but he doesn't think it's a bad thing. His body's dead, and even if he can't extend his original family, he can at least try to approximate it. It's something he feels he should do.

Look at it this way, he says - if he were to go to a sperm bank and make a deposit, so to speak, with instructions that it was specifically for me without any strings attached, would I tell them to destroy it? I admit, the question stops me. I've thought about this, actually. But, still, I don't think I'd throw out a good thing for it, let alone just the idea of it.

But I can understand it, damn it.

-Marti

I Wish It Could Explain Everything

2006-08-21T23:35:00.000-04:00

My friends are a fairly close-knit group, or at least we feel that way. We're united by our proximity to the odd, the acceptance of strange things that other people doubt exist. Sure, Carlos and Jen are settling into a nice, comfortable family life, but they know things. They know them in a way that all you folks reading this blog, much as I appreciate you, don't; they've seen it first-hand, had to make peace with the fact that their friends and lovers are something different. It's a bond between us, and I like to think that our relationships are stronger because of it.

I'm sometimes wrong about that.

We were doing a sort of girl's afternoon out thing - me, Kate, Maggie, Jen, and Gertie. It was sort of ad hoc and last minute; we'd only heard about the Brattle Movie trivia fundraiser at AllAsia a few days before. Jen had Eloise with her in one of those sling deals, so we joked about filling a team of six. We got our butts kicked, but the theater raised a little money. The thing is, part of the reason we got our butts kicked was that Kate just wasn't in the game at all, and she's usually really good at this.

We stuck around for a drink afterward, and at first Kate said she didn't want to talk about it, but it was one of those cases where she obviously really did. She hadn't taken but one sip of her drink when she put it down, composed herself a little, and flatly stated that Carter had dumped her.

Our jaws all dropped - none of us had any idea there were problems. Apparently, neither did Kate. It just came out of the blue. She looks at me and Maggie and asks if we have any idea what's going on. I'm like, no, it's been years since we were together, and he was literally a different person then. Yeah, he tried to get back together once he wound up in my old body, but that was just reflex. He hasn't really talked to me much in months. Certainly, there's been no indication that he's still attracted to me.

Oh. My old body. That's why you're asking Mags, right? It's like Natasha two years ago, wanting to know if this is some thing inherent to that body, something hormonal that he can't help. If it's something that came from me, or the old me, sort of. Which is disconcerting and a little hurtful, because Kate's about my best friend and she thinks I could be that way. Maggie assures her, though, that she and I broke up out of typical male potential baby freak-out and her reaction to the same.

Which leads Kate to "do you think he's still Carter"? And we all stop, because we love Kate and really do think that someone would have to be out of his mind to break up with her. Carter not being himself would explain that, but it's hardly sufficient reason to ask the FBI to start giving blood tests.

But, man, I don't get it. I think Carter's going to be at the Waltham office on Wednesday; I'll have to corner him and ask him then.

-Marti

Scary things

2006-08-18T15:34:00.000-04:00

"Watching" the Sox game on Gameday right now is driving me up a freakin' wall. The Red Sox have no business being behind a team whose pitcher just abjectly refuses to throw strikes. Maybe it's not quite so frustrating watching it on TV, but when it's wait... ball.. wait... ball... mouse over to see that, yes, Wang has thrown twice as many balls as strikes... These things should be translating into runs.

And I can't look away, because I've got a query that's taking forever to run, and then failing, and then taking forever to run again after I fix the error. So there's no just paying attention to my work like a good girl and maybe occasionally getting a peek. Nope, this is just constant torture.

Anyway, the actual scary thing for this week was having my period come three days late. Thankfully, it did come, because I do still find pregnancy scarier than regularly scheduled internal bleeding, and as much as I'm very fond of little Marty and Eloise (even if I haven't actually met little Marty ex utero), I'm in no way ready to give them playmates. I'm closer, in that I can now at least conceive of myself pregnant, but I think I want a couple more years of single unattached girl before I become someone's mother. Jen asks if I don't feel like time's running out, but like I tell her, I made it almost to thirty once without settling down that way, and I don't see any reason why I can't do it again.

I'm not sure what's scarier, though - the feeling of unease you get when your period is late, or the very idea that it's such a reliable thing. I'm lucky in that mine doesn't particularly hurt or flood my brain with personality-altering hormones, but when you get right down to it, why should I be able to buy an appointment book at the beginning of the year and mae an annotation every thirty days, and generally have the one in December only be off by a day or two, if that? It's a biological processs; shouldn't my diet and other activities have more of an effect? I know it can in extreme conditions (I saw a documentary a few months ago where an anorexic mentioned her periods had stopped because her body was so messed up), but just a little more variation.

-Marti

I am a high-maintenance girlfriend

2006-08-07T20:44:00.000-04:00

I don't mean to be; it's not a goal I've set for myself. And I don't do the sorts of things I've always associated with demanding women. I don't expect presents, or get mopey when a guy forgets an anniversery (though I should really try having a relationship last long enough for it to be a year anniversery rather than the month type); I don't mind splitting a check, and have zero interest in flowers. A guy wants to do something with his friends, it's no big deal; I can find something else to do.

Makes me sound pretty easy-going, right? I mean, that's how I like to think of myself, but that's not always the case. I've got a bad habit of taking my coolness for granted, so to speak. My tastes are more in line with what guys like than the typical girl, so I tend to assume that when I want to do something, it's likely to be something that the guy I'm with wants to do. And then, since I'm kind of attractive, a lot of guys want to please me on top of that. Not in an "I've got the world wrapped around my little finger" way. It's almost more insidious - I suggest something, and Alex maybe isn't really enthused, but it doesn't sound bad, so why not? Martin's been there, and didn't even recognize that it was happening until after resentment's built up like something toxic.

And now I'm doing it, without realizing it. I mean, I can see Alex wasn't really hugely enthused about Fantasia, but he can't really make an argument against Montreal and a bunch of good movies, right? So he goes along, and enjoys himself, but that's a bunch of time that he might have used another way. I don't mean to, and I don't think I'm really being a bitch, just kind of self-centered. And if he says yes, it's only natural to assume he means it.

Maybe I'm overreacting because he didn't seem terribly enthused about the movie I wanted to see last night. But I know about this from his side, and I like him, so I should probably try and make a little more of an effort.

-Marti

I almost think I might be done with this

2006-08-03T16:52:00.000-04:00

... and then I see a big-time spike in readership when I wasn't doing much of anything, so I guess some people are still interested in my situation. I haven't been posting much for a number of different reasons: Stuff piled up at work during vacation - us database folks basically have a queue that we attack, and when one person goes on break, it doesn't empty out as fast. Since the department is sort of rotating vacations starting with me, that delicate equilibrium has been upset. It's also been ridiculously hot and the air conditioner in my bedroom where the computer is has been on the fritz, and the super has been taking his sweet time getting it fixed. (Oooh, if we hadn't just signed another one-year lease...) So I've been spending less time sitting at the computer when I'm home and more time sitting by the river, trying to work my way through a pile of reading material that I've been accruing for a while.

But, mainly, there just hasn't been anything really mind-transfer-oriented in my life lately. Which is great; it means there's less stress and I imagine Alex is enjoying the lack of reminders that I may have had more girlfriends than him back in my first life. Still, it makes it tough to fill this with content; after all, I don't like to spend my time reading about the ordinary. It's why I love comics and science fiction and the like; show me something that I can't get by eavesdropping on the people at the next table in a restaurant, you know? And my life hasn't exactly been full of that lately.

Still, I miss the writing. I've started taking to outlining things on a pad when I'm on the bus. Trouble is, when I'm writing a story, I always quit on it because once I've figured out how it ends, I sort of lose interest. I need some discipline.

-Marti

Does doing nothing for your birthday make you mature, or just old?

2006-07-19T22:00:00.000-04:00

At least, I don't think I'm doing anything for my birthday today (and there's not much today left); I certainly haven't planned anything. It would, after all, be kind of tacky to get back from vacation and then immediately expect your friends to do something for you.

It is kind of amazing, though, that after three years in this body, it's still finding ways to surprise me. Alex and I took the bus to and from Montreal for a week and a half of the Fantasia film festival (which is great fun and something that everyone in the Northeast or that part of Canada who likes sci-fi/fantasy/horror/asian film should try to go to), and I found that I could not get to sleep on the bus ride home. In order to squeeze as many movies as we could it before returning to the day job, the plan was to take the 11:15 bus from Montreal to Boston, get some sleep while riding, and then head off for work when we got in at 6:30. Sure, it would have allowed a maximum of seven hours of sleep, but I routinely function on less.

I didn't try to get to sleep before midnight, though - we learned on the way up that everybody would have to get off the bus at the border to show their passport and answer a few questions that any would-be terrorist would have information memorized for, and since that's about an hour outside of Montreal Alex and I felt kind of clever that we had our books out for the first hour - we may have been the only people with the little overhead lights going, but at least we weren't staggering around half-dead when it came time to get off the bus. So we finished that, got back into our seats, and prepared to hit the hay.

And I couldn't.

Alex did - he dropped off within minutes and mostly slept all the way to South Station, but I was completely unable to get comfortable. I don't know what it was, specifically - I'd always been able to sleep almost anywhere in my old life - but it just wasn't working. Maybe my butt's rounder so it's harder to fall asleep with my legs straight out; I notice that when I'm relaxing on the couch, I do tend to get into that "legs-up" posture. Maybe it's having more curves so that when I lie back on a flat seat, my body is being supported by less surface area or something. I don't know. I just know that no matter how I fidgeted, I wound up uncomfortable, or with some part of my body spilling into the aisle or Alex's side of the seat (the bus was too crowded for us to grab seperate seats at any point). Which is tricky; Alex isn't fat, but he's sort of husky, so there's not a lot of spare room there.

And he's a guy who defends his turf when he sleeps. I've known girls who think this is mean or insensitive, but you can't exactly train yourself to behave differently when you're asleep. So if I tried to rest my head on his shoulder or chest, or my butt was pressing against his legs, he'd sort of push me away. It's just reflex, and he doesn't do it when I'm being frisky in bed (I guess the sex drive overrides the defensive imperative), but otherwise, he's a fortress, staying put and repelling all invaders. I suppose I could have given him a little punch or two and either shifted him or woken him up so that we could fall asleep tangled together - that would have been okay - but I didn't want to interrupt his sack time. I know I would have been annoyed if the shoe had been on the other foot.

End result was that I was dragging all through work Monday, and dropped off pretty darn quick when I got home. Then last night I had to go with him to see a band one of his friends plays in. They're not very good and the beer at the pub was crap, but he'd just spent a week and a half doing the thing I wanted, so I couldn't really say no.

Not that he didn't enjoy the trip. It was gorgeous all week long; I figure a vacation is going better than expected when you have to buy new clothes because you'd packed under the assumption that you'd need to dress for rain at least one or two days. We ate breakfast at Cocktail Hawaii four times and fit dinner in around screening at the film festival, and did touristy things in between.

It was, really, a nice vacation; I'd planned to update here during it, but there was no time. Which is the way you want it, right?

-Marti

I... am... wiped.

2006-07-03T23:19:00.000-04:00

The past week and a half has been seriously crazy. Nothing to do with me being me, either - just crazy stuff that can happen to anyone.

For instance, the day after my last entry - 23 June - my boss gets out of a meeting and assigns me a new project. It's a big one, the kind that shows how impressed the company is with my work because they're entrusting this thing to me, or at least the back end of it. Due 14 July, or at least it has to be in shape so that the user-interface guys can take control by then. Fine, I say, no problem. I am, admittedly, kind of looking to get out the door; it's four-thirty in the afternoon on a Friday and he's giving me a whole bunch of documents to study over the weekend. I've got no intention of doing so, of course - weekends are for movies and finding a spot by the water where you can read and get less pasty at the same time. I'll never get rich with that attitude, I know, but I'll probably live well.

Actually, that weekend, Alex and I are doing the Brattle Anime Festival. After all, we met at the Sci-Fi Marathon, and even though he's not into the manga and anime like I am (even the young guys at the Marathon are kind of old-school), we figure it's a kind of chance to do something like the Marathon together without waiting a whole year. Besides, it's pretty miserable bikini weather anyway.

So we do that, and then stumble back to my place with the intention of falling asleep in some sort of naked tangle. I'm dumping the freebies and trivia prize on my desk, but the whole contents of my purse comes out, and that's when I see them right next to each other - our hotel reservations for a week and a half Fantasia and my project due two days before I get back.

Ooooooooohhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

The next morning, as you might imagine, I march right into my manager's office and say, hey, I can't do this; this thing is spec'ed out for three weeks but I've only got a week and a half. He's all "you accepted it, and I made all the other department assignments based on that"; I point out that he made me stake out vacation time two months in advance so he darn well should have known I couldn't do this. He says that in a company like this, everyone has to make some sacrifices. I say my reservations are non-refundable. He asks if they've got internet at my hotel so I can VPN in. I say if I do, I expect those vacation days not to be charged against me. He says they're not going to pay me extra to sit by the pool and see movies. I say I see movies after work anyway, so what if I'm doing it in Montreal?

I suspect I lose the argument entirely based on senority.

Which means that for the past week and a half, I've been busting my ass to get this project done in half the time. I'm making damn sure to note the twelve-hour days in the project tracker system, so that when performance review time comes and someone other than my immediate supervisor is analyzing my June... Oh, yeah, there will be a bonus or an acknowledgment or something.

Of course, this plays hell with my other plans. I miss a Red Sox game Alex had tickets for, gritting my teeth and saying that ten days in Montreal is worth three hours in Fenway. I'm just incredibly thankful that it's not the Pedro game, but the one before. That would have been too much to bear.

The Pedro game winds up being the only one I even get a chance to watch semi-live on NESN. Thursday, I'm on my way home from work when my phone rings; it's Carlos, saying that a friend in Harvard Square whose moving out of town on Friday had a pet turtle that couldn't come with them, and he'd offered to take it, but it had to be picked up tonight but he's on duty and don't I live near there...

So that's how I wound up in Carlos & Jen's doorway with a reptile in a cage when she announced that she was having contractions.

No sooner had the turtle been put down than I've been given keys and drafted to drive her to the hospital. Scared me out of my mind, it did - Jen's something like two weeks early, which I gather is unusual for first children (how would I know that part of health class would be so relevant later in life?), and I haven't driven a car in a year or two Maybe longer. At least five years since it was a stick.

At first I'm driving very cautiously, because of precious cargo and my own rust, but she says that, hey, I can't scare the baby out of her, so put some effort into it. Besides, she's got a stopwatch, and that's what's going to determine whether she has the baby in the car or not. So I floor it.

Fortunately, I call Carlos and he somehow gets the local cops to leave me alone; says he'll meet us there. He gets there just after I do, and goes to see his wife while I wait a couple hours.

I didn't screw anything up. Eloise Maria is a beautiful little girl, apparently perfectly healthy. Jen looks like she's just run a marathon, sweaty and tired and deliriously happy, when she holds their little girl in her arms. I call Kate, Carter, and every mutual friend Jen and I have while Carlos talks to family. For a second, I'm a little jealous of her, but it passes. I'm not ready to be a mommy yet.

That was just extra excitement. I am glad that I got to be around when my friend had her baby, though; she was due during my vacation and I'd have hated to miss it. And I'm pretty sure I'll get to go on that vacation - I didn't get out of work until nine o'clock tonight and had to take a taxi do the train station because the buses don't run that late, but I have the end in sight. Wednesday should just about do it.

-Marti

Stuff we really shouldn't be doing on our work computers

2006-06-22T23:07:00.000-04:00

For me, at least today, that was booking a hotel room and bus tickets for Montreal. I'd like to say it's bus tickets just because I'm cheap, but I'm not - Alex apparently hates to fly. Not like Sam does, apparently, but enough to get nervous. I'm pretty cheap, anyway, so I'm not totally annoyed, but the difference between ninety minutes on a plane and a seven-hour bus ride is worth a couple hundred bucks.

It's going to be fun. The second thing I've been doing is repeatedly checking the Fantasia website to see if they've started putting the list of films up yet. It's rather nerve-wracking, planning a vacation around an event without really having much specific idea what it will involve. Of course, that's also half the fun - getting there, looking at the program, trying to figure out which films you want to watch based on the program, especially if they're going to be doing the DVD-o-trailers thing again (another reason why Fantasia kicks ass - the program is three dollars Canadian and includes a DVD with an hour and a half of trailers. More film festivals should do that).

Of course, I'm not the only one doing that. Not necessarily booking travel arrangements, but I walked past Dave's cubicle and caught him looking at... Well, not quite porn, but girls with not much on.

It's tremendous fun to walk up behind guys when they're doing that and say you're trying to read the URL. You've got to be wearing quiet shoes and hoping that you're not casting a shadow, but sometimes a guy can jump like a very twitchy thing. I did it back in my previous life, and it would just be embarrassing, just being caught doing something you really aren't supposed to be doing. I've been on the other side, too, of course, so it's just, you know, awkward, and you hit Alt-Tab and say that a friend, you know, sent you an email, and that friend is a jerk...

I do it now, and awkward doesn't really begin to cover it. I'm beginning to think that there's no way to get it down to awkward, which is a bummer. After all, I still like looking at pretty girls even I'm not looking to sleep with them. You try to tell someone this, though, and not everyone gets that aesthetics and attraction don't have to be linked together. They're afraid I'll make a sexual harrassment suit out of it.

Not likely, unless I'm sexually harrassing myself.

-Marti

Hotness

2006-06-18T22:21:00.000-04:00

Walking home from a movie this afternoon, the time and temperature sign on Brookline Avenue said 97 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is much hotter than it should be. I mean, that's still under body temperature, right? So it shouldn't bother us so much when the mercury gets so high. But we've got an ocean and a river to pump humidity into the air, and skin's a pretty good insulator, so it's not exactly comfortable.

Speaking of skin...

It's just the perils of meeting new people and being honest with them, I guess, but I have to have this talk with someone every year, when the mercury rises and I start wearing smaller clothes. Yesterday, Alex and I are walking down by the Charles and some guy makes a comment we're probably not meant to hear after we walk past in the other direction ("God, I love summer!"). Alex asks me if that bugs me, and I have to remind him that I know what's going through a guy's mind better than most girls. Heck, I thought some of them while I was getting dressed in the morning. Although I was a little more critical. I mean, I went for the short shorts and put the cleavage on display, but I didn't figure I was quite ready to show off the belly button. I'm not fat by any means, but there's still a little cold-weather weight I need to swim off.

Fortunately, Alex is being cool about it - or as "cool" as you can be in this weather. He got to peel the white top off me after it started to rain a little on our way home last night.

-Marti

Civic duty

2006-06-13T22:20:00.000-04:00

Massachusetts isn't kidding about the average length of jury duty being three days. It's not often that things actually work out actually on the average, but it did this time.

I won't give the details of the case, although it was the second one I was called for while at the courthouse. The first was a case of credit card fraud, and the defense used one of their free dismissals on me. It was kind of an amusing bit of questioning, though:

"Have you ever been the victim of identity theft?"

"You mean..."

"Someone acquiring your credit card or social security number and exploiting it."

"Oh. Then, no."

I'm sure me being in the information technology industry didn't help matters. You never know what our attitudes are going to be about internet security, after all. It depends on our personal experience. In a previous life, I had some dot-com experience that would make me totally sympathetic to the idea that five thousand dollars in home electronics could be shipped to someone and paid for by another credit card without him knowing why - there were some bad start-ups in the nineties. Other places I've worked at not only put that idea to rest but would make me feel vindictive about it - violating a database is just a monstrous thing. Throw the book at 'em.

So, I wound up on a civil case. No details about it from me; even more than a criminal case, talking about that seems tacky. Fortunately, it was done with quickly, pretty open-and-shut. Finished that at about three this afternoon.

I actually bumped into Agent Jones on the way out; he was evidently getting some records for one of his other open cases. Much as I'd like catching Korpin to be the entire focus of the FBI's efforts, that's not going to happen. Nice to see him, though I don't think I'll ever get used to being greeted by a tap on the shoulder followed by "hey, sexy", especially in a place where I don't expect to know anybody.

-Marti

Family stuff

2006-06-05T20:25:00.000-04:00

I spent a little time with Telly yesterday. It hasn't exactly been a while; we'd see each other in passing while helping the FBI with the Korpin dragnet, but with the number of people spread so thin, and him really wanting little to do with me, we didn't spend a whole lot of time together.

How little time? I've apparently missed a four-month relationship that's starting to get serious. He and this girl - Linsdey something or other - headed north for the Memorial Day weekend to meet his mom and friends from school. He's apparently weighing the idea of asking her to marry him, to the point of asking his mother about "our" grandmother's ring. It's not a conventional engagement ring, but it's much nicer than he could afford (I was very polite here, not interrupting with my "the diamond engagement ring is the most successful scam in advertising history" rant). The thing is, it had been promised to Michelle, so...

Sure, I said. I'm sure it's a lovely ring, but I've never seen it, and it's not like it has any sentimental value to me. He sort of winced at that, and I can understand why. His life is easier if we're just estranged, if he doesn't have to think that the really important part of his sister is missing or dead somewhere on the other side of the world.

Of course, when she was up in Vermont, she also couldn't help but noticed family pictures with Michelle in them. Telly said she asked about them, but he and his mother just sort of gave vague answers - that things with "Michelle" were complicated. He does this in part out of respect for my privacy or not wanting to intrude on my life, but she's kind of weirded out by the less-than-complete information: She wants to know what kind of messed-up family she's getting involved with, if this indicates some sort of harshness that she hasn't seen yet.

So I told him I'm not hiding, and if he chooses to explain me, go with the truth. If you think she won't believe you and that will cause a problem, I understand. He's thinking about it. It's not that he's ashamed of me, just that he's afraid of the strangeness messing with something that's working well.

And I ask him, not so much trying to be a big sister as just curious, if this isn't kind of fast? If they get married next June, they'll barely be old enough to drink the champagne. Is he just trying to achieve some sort of conventional happiness with all the craziness in his life. No, he says, he doesn't think so. It just feels right.

I kind of have a hard time imagining that. I mean, when I was his age in my first life, I was still finishing college, and there just seemed to be so much I had to accomplish before being ready for marriage. Graduate, start a career... It just seemed there was always something that had to be done first before I could concentrate on moving ahead in that part of my life, and by the time of the switch, I'd screwed things up with my best chance at that sort of settling down. Now, man, I don't know.

But, what do I know? I don't understand relationships that work that easily.

Speaking of family things, I got a call from Carter today; apparently my mother had a fall last night. She's okay, just has to wear a wrap on her arm. It's just a little distressing that he's her "in case of emergency" contact. It makes sense; she probably just never changed it when "Martin" was missing and Carter is Martin in a legal sense. It just doesn't seem right.

-Marti

Eerily quiet

2006-06-02T14:36:00.000-04:00

And I don't just mean that my life has been pretty much melodrama-free for the past week. This morning there were very few cars on the road or pedestrians walking around as I waited for the bus to take me for work. It's the sort of quiet morning that makes me wonder if Saturday came a day early and no-one told me, or I'd just lost track of days of the week. I mean, that happens, especially after holiday weekends. It wouldn't be unusual at all for me to get out of bed tomorrow, get dressed to go to work, only to realize that I only had four days to work this week.

But, no, it seems to just be a matter of the students being gone. The population of the Boston metropolitan area swells when college is in session, and although folks have been trickling out of town throughout May, the end of that month is when they really abandon us with a vengeance. It made this morning seem a little freaky - although not quite surreal, like when everyone tucks in in their apartments after a heavy snowfall and you can walk down the middle of the street for a mile without seeing anybody. On a more practical note, it means that Gertie's suddenly got more free time to hang around.

Not a whole lot more - the campus doesn't get totally abandoned during the summer; there's still plenty of graduate students and undergrads around, and summer programs. They just don't need quite so many campus police officers in any given shift, so Gertie gets fewer shifts. She's using the reduced time to take classes - she thinks she'll have enough credits for a degree in criminology by the end of the fall term - and pick up a few shifts as a security/information desk person at some of the buildings up by MIT. She's keeping about as busy, actually, but more of it's being shifted to daylight hours, so it means we'll probably be hanging out together at home more often for a while.

While she's attending to that, I'm getting some other stuff done. My jury duty from April got pushed back a month and a half when I wrote and explained that Ayer wasn't going to work for me; that's next Friday. What I'd really like is to go, get told that they won't be needing any jurors at around eleven, buy some standing room or other walk-up tickets at Fenway during the afternoon, and then kill the time in between by watching a matinee of Cars. That would just rock all.

I'm also looking at going back to Montreal for Fantasia this summer. I had a lot of fun last year, but Alex is being kind of weird about it, going on about how it's something I did with my last boyfriend, so he's worried that it'll be all "we should do this, since Chet and I had so much fun" or "ooh, Chet and I really liked that restaurant". I get that, but we only did that the one year; that just makes it a thing I did with Chet, not a Chet-and-me thing. Besides, if I had to swear off everything I did with my exes, Alex wouldn't be getting laid very much, would he? That wouldn't be very convincing logic.

The headache is trying to get a passport. Bad enough I waited until I was fairly sure I'd be going back north this summer, so I had to drop the extra $60 to get expedited service, but the guy at the post office got nosy about why someone would change her name from "Michelle Garber" to "Martina Hart". Sure, you can drop "it's none of your damn business" on them, but having "aliases" other than a maiden name seems to make things go slowly.

Too bad the guys at the FBI couldn't help, but by the time everything went through the right channels to get from them to whoever handles these things in the Department of State, it would probably be too late to do any good.

-Marti

Temporary lowering of the paranoia index

2006-05-25T21:35:00.000-04:00

As much as last week's events were unnerving, they do sort of mean a little pressure is off me. The Feds aren't having me watch people to see if I recognize Korpin-ness where there shouldn't be any; after all, I'd have to watch everybody I met with a Y chromosome and then presume that the person I was looking for was still in the city, state, or country. Which is scary, sure, but no scarier than how any person you meet could be a suicide bomber, sex offender, ex-con, you name it. It's a danger you have to live with.

But, until about the end of the month, Korpin's locked into a body; everybody who has examined the design and knows what they're talking about says that it takes a couple weeks for enough of the nanothings to dislodge from the brain to make using another set safe. This means that, since all the men in my life had blood tests on Thursday, I got a surprise gift of a week of freedom from the fear that anyone I know isn't who he or shee appears to be when the results came back clean on Monday. That is something awesome that we really shouldn't take for granted.

It's also comforting to see that this new round of switcheroos isn't about me. I don't think I've ever met Amy Sanada before in my life, and she wasn't just a convenient place for Korpin to stash his mind until he could get close to me and my friends again. I'm glad; it means I'm probably in very little danger from here forward; I'm going to be free to be myself, my friends are all safe, and the FBI can worry about tracking down Misha Korpin version 3.0; they're way better equipped for it than I am. Sure, it's a bit of a blow to the ego that I'm not considered awesome enough that he wants to be with me even in a new body, but that's fine with me - who needs the affection of a psycho who was in it for the power trip, anyway?

So I can relax, at least a little. Alex and I were still reflexively scanning the crowd when we went to Monday's ballgame, of course; it's all I've been doing for the last month, so it's become force of habit. Alex would catch me doing it and point to someone in the general direction that was entirely unlikely (like a man in his seventies with his grandson) and say, "think that's him?", and we'd laugh a little, even if we probably shouldn't.

Because, as much as I'm relieved, there's some very not-funny aspects to it. Agent Jones and his team are back to where they started - a missing girl. The Cambridge Police Department didn't officially consult with them until Tuesday morning, after the Sanadas flew up from New Jersey to find out why they haven't heard from their daughter on the weekend she was supposed to come home for the summer. They had a head start, of course - they've been looking for her ever since I spotted her a week ago, although they naturally don't hold out much hope of finding her alive.

Still, recovering the body would be good for everyone. It would give the Sanadas closure, and the body and where it was found would hopefully be a source of valuable forensic evidence.

God, that's morbid. Hopefully, there's a very confused girl out there, so there's at least something left of Amy and whoever Korpin switched with.

-Marti

I feel ill, literally and figuratively

2006-05-21T16:38:00.000-04:00

Well, I don't feel sick any more. "I felt sick" just doesn't sound right as a title. But the figurative part is still true, even if I got over the literal part fairly quickly.

Basically, everyone on the investigation from the FBI was working overtime last week and I was along for the ride, as was Gertie and Telly and everyone else who could swing it. It was the last week of undergraduate classes and finals at Harvard, and half the suspects would be heading out of town as their classes finished up, and who knew what would happen then. That meant a lot of trying to get to work early so I could get out early and help spy on college kids, and then doing that into the night. You almost inevitably eat like crap when you try to keep that sort of schedule, so by Friday afternoon, I was completely wiped out. I wasn't the only person at the office who thought something was up with the climate control - the guy in the next cube had his jacket on when I walked past - but I seemed to be the only one who couldn't find a happy medium. I'd be shivering with a chill, but a couple minutes after I put my coat on, I'd be feeling almost feverish, centered right behind the eyes.

I'd have bailed early, but I spent all of Thursday being questioned/debriefed after what happened Wednesday night. And, of course, any sort of incident with the nano stuff just makes me even more hyper-conscious of any sort of headache or feeling weird in general. I think it freaks me out more than everyone else involved because I've more or less accepted my new life and thus have a harder time looking at it like "oh, I'd still be me in a new body" if that happened. I know better.

But I think I'm more angry than freaked out. We had her! We were in the right place at the right time and we still stumbled. Gad, it pisses me off.

I'd grabbed a seat in the back of the Harvard Square Boloco, having a burrito while watching kids study and come in and out for studying fuel. Or just food because their fridges are cleared out and who needs to go grocery shopping for just a few days? Anyway, I'm trying to look like most of my attention is on my laptop when I notice that someone else has left their laptop unattended for almost twenty minutes. This strikes me as weird, since I generally don't leave mine around at all. I remembered it was a college aged girl, and I'd seen her get up to go to the restroom. I squinted a little and saw that what I'd assumed was a Wi-Fi card didn't actually have any stickers or brand-name or marks of any kind. Oh, hell, I think, it's like the one at the hospital.

I pull out my cell phone and speed-dial Agent Jones, saying I think I've found her and she's got the equipment out to switch. He says to stay put, but I say we may already have lost her and the only female agent on the team is across the river at the med school, so who's going to follow her into the ladies' room? Besides, she's tiny and there's no way I could have won a fight with a bigger girl three years ago - a month and a half is long enough to get everyday stuff down, but trusting your reflexes and instincts in a really physical situation? Uh-uh. Jones reminds me that I hadn't planned to be in a new body while Korpin most likely had, says he knew involving civilians was a bad idea, and says just to be very careful and that agents were on the way.

I grunt, get up, and keep him on the line. As I'm walking past the girl's laptop, I snap it shut, figuring that this will put it into hibernation mode. After a couple steps I double back and pull the card out of its slot and drop it into my purse. One of the girls at the counter yells "hey, you can't do that" and chases me to the ladies' room, which is empty.

I look around, and I'll be damned if I know where she is. The counter-girl grabs me, and I shake her off, pissed, and start yelling like I actually have some authority. I ask if she knows where the girl who this thing belongs to is. She doesn't know, and asks who I thought I was, and thankfully that's when the FBI comes through the door with their badges out.

Jones walks over to me, asks me to point out the laptop. I bring him over and show him the show him the PC card I swiped. He tells me it's good thinking, and I smile a little. He opens up the laptop, and the Windows desktop shows up. That's weird, I say, I didn't know you could disable entering your password there. He stares at the screen, and then says we've been set up. A second later his phone rings. "Yes?" "Can you get a location?" "And the other?" He listens for a second, says to keep doing what they can, and hangs up.

He shuts the laptop and calls the other agents over. "That was the listening post; they just detected the switching signals. They could only find one location, within a couple hundred yards of here, so either they're both in that area or one's out of range. In any case, the clock is ticking, so let's get looking."

I start to follow, but he stops me. "We're not talking about a ninety-five pound girl who doesn't know how to handle herself anymore, Marti. You'd better go home; we'll debrief you tomorrow."

I protest, but it's not like there's much anyone can do. They're looking for a new needle in a haystack without a search warrant.

Damn it! We were so close!

-Marti

Well, that's one bit of tension relieved.

2006-05-15T10:01:00.000-04:00

Say this about the rain: As much as it kills plans to do stuff outdoors or even watch baseball, it's not always entirely bad to be driven indoors. After all, it's getting dark in mid-afternoon, you've got wet clothes to peel out of, your boyfriend's roommate is stuck up in Maine because the roads are flooded. After what seems like a month of situations conspiring for us to not have sex, it's very nice for it to become inevitable.

And good, too - Alex occasionally talks like he hasn't had a lot of girlfriends, but he seems to have been paying attention. That, and he sort of sheepishly admitted that he'd done a fair amount of research in his teens and early twenties, figuring that he had to have more to offer than just his body. There's a story, apparently, about him paying his sister ten bucks to buy a four dollar romance novel back when they were in high school, because the guys at the bookstore knew him from haunting the sci-fi section and he always had a friend working in the supermarket. I laughed at that, because I honestly never would have thought to do it (no sister, anyway), and because otherwise I might have had my suspicions about how he knew what women like.

It is, by the way, hugely reassuring to see that he didn't make love anything like Korpin did. I'm not saying that that's something you can't disguise, but instinct sort of takes over, and even though a certain amount of that instinct is hardwired, I think Alex would have slipped at some point Saturday afternoon. Or Saturday night. Or Sunday...

Yeah, you get the picture; not much spying done for the FBI this weekend. It's finals week, so most everybody is in their dorms, apartments, or libraries studying away. Jones is depending on the tech guys a lot, which worries him. It's not that he's a growling old-schooler who feels the best way to crack any case is legwork; it's just an indication that getting to that point likely means he's failed. They've reverse-engineered some of the equipment recovered from the laptop Carter used to re-switch Sam and Alexei, but right now all they're sure that they can do is detect when nanomachines have been used and triangulate locations, given enough detectors in the area. Which they've done; I don't know what story they told the Harvard people, but they've been setting them up on campus just conspicuously enough that Korpin should know what they're doing. Gertie tells me that they're describing them as jammers, although I'm not sure that's really the case. I mean, if I were designing the switch equipment, I'd have it make sure there was a perfectly signal before activating the nanomachines, but this is pretty jury-rigged prototype stuff. What if it doesn't? Would the signal being jammed mean it just doesn't work, or would there be two people with their brains fried and empty afterward?

I don't know. And I don't know if the feds know. Which may be half the point; Korpin knowing that he might wind up not in a new male body, but in oblivion, has got to be a powerful deterrant. But I don't know if Jones and company are willing to risk an innocent life like that.

-Marti

Aggravation

2006-05-10T22:09:00.000-04:00

I've grown to hate my cell phone, just in terms of how Agent Jones knows about it and will call it at any point to go give a look-see to what some nineteen year-old girl is doing, and does it look like she's got the mind of a man in his mid-thirties trying to impersonate a nineteen year-old girl? I almost wonder if he'd be better off asking Kate and Jen to handle it, since they've observed me and can probably spot Korpin doing anything weird that I also did better. Of course, Jen's right out because she's seven months pregnant. Apparently the doctors are discouraging her from thinking of "pregnant" as a synonym for "disabled", not that Jen's the type to think that way in any case. Still, she's getting conspicuous.

Kate and Carter did hang out with me and Alex at a sports bar last night. There were at least three of them there, seniors and grad students. At least the game was pretty kick-ass, better than tonight's. We made sure to nurse our drinks, stretching out two apiece. By now, if Korpin is one of the girls we were looking at, she's got to be totally aware she's being watched, and is probably going home, noting how long it's been since the last time one of us was keeping tabs on her, seeing it's been five days instead of four, speculating that either the investigation is being downgraded or we're off her trail.

So, that's disillusioning. I suspect that we're not going to know anything until very close to the end of the semester, if not after that. I think it's going to be a near thing.

- Marti

Working on deadline sucks

2006-05-06T11:56:00.000-04:00

Bad enough I've been up against a project with a hard deadline at work - the government apparently needs data for a certain transportation study right now or nobody will be able to get from Houston to Chicago or something. Of course, when it comes to processing someone's tax return, that they'll take their sweet time with. But what's worse is coming home from that - or more accurately, not coming home from that, but going straight to FBI headquarters or Harvard Square or wherever else Agent Jones wants me to try and sniff Korpin out.

Because there's a pretty hard deadline on that, too. Harvard's school year ends May 19th, and since Jones and Gertie both tell me that no students, faculty, or staff have done a disappearing act yet, Korpin-in-whoever must still be around. But in two weeks, folks start dispersing to all four corners of the globe, landing outside the FBI's reach or meaning that the Boston office will have to let a lot of other agents in on it, and they'd like to keep it quasi-secret. One girl with a blog isn't a huge threat to national security, especially when it's usually categorized as "fictional", but once we start talking about interagency co-operation and a nationwide search, the rest of the world starts to take this seriously.

And it's not like Jones's task force has a whole lot of support. It's about four agents, and though they don't admit that Gertie and I are important support or let us into meetings. They'll have us and Telly watch them question people from behind the one-way mirror so that we can try and pick up on Misha-isms, but the thing is that Telly and I almost never agree. They've got the field narrowed down to a couple dozen more likely suspects, but that's too many for us to keep tabs on, and even if we do narrow down which one is "Korpin", what are we supposed to do, arrest her? For what; any crimes that were committed were committed by Korpin in his original body, and the person still walking around is legally someone else, much like I'm legally Michelle Garber with a name change. And they would really rather I didn't blog my daily life, since this now takes up a bunch of it. No need to tell Korpin the details of how she is or is not being surveilled.

Anyway, that's my life for the next couple of weeks and the past month or so. Which is why I was so happy to be able to play hooky and go to a Sox game with Alex Thursday night (or was there a suspect there, too? I can't say...). Our relationship is getting sort of weird, I guess - we're going out, we're having fun, but we're not having sex, though not through any apparent reticence on either of our parts. Jones has wanted me to "work" a lot of weekends, since that's when most of the suspects are doing things other than class or studying and might be able to be caught in something incriminating. So prime dating time is being used up, and weird stuff keeps coming up.

I still weird him out a little, too - we were sitting up in Section Seven (same as Patriot's Day), and there were an unusually high number of pretty girls around, so he was sort of looking at me, then them, then me, just like, man, you fit right in here.

I pointed out to him that every new person requires the combination of male and female pieces, and I just took an unusual route. He liked that - it is, after all, an awesome metaphor - but it served to remind him that I was odd. Good when you're talking about the latest Doctor Who; bad when you're trying to get him to stay the night at your place.

-Marti

I think I've found my limit in how much movie-watching I can do.

2006-04-25T20:27:00.000-04:00

Trying to take in an entire film festival was Kate's idea. She, of course, blames me, saying that it was me talking about how kick-ass seeing a couple dozen films in a week and a half at Fantasia was that inspired her to suggest we see as much of the Independent Film Festival of Boston as possible. Since Carter was out of town for the weekend and I had just blown Alex's mind, it seemed like a good idea, so we pre-ordered tickets.

It's not. I was on vacation for Fantasia, so there was no trying to get to work early and then riding the bus for an hour (with a transfer to the subway or another bus) on the way back hoping to get to the theater on time. Stressful! And by the time the festival comes, me and Alex are trying to make nice again, so I want to fit time for him in, because otherwise he's kind of "so, you'd rather spend a whole weekend with another girl than me".

It's kind of funny, really. He met up with us at the Coolidge on Friday night for The Legend of Lucy Keyes (a Massachusetts-based ghost story) and Death Trance (I told Kate that if we were doing this, we were seeing the crazy midnight action movies). Kate's done the pass thing so she saves us mere ticket-holders seats. I don't know whether he's turned on or weirded out by me saying how hot Julie Delpy is and that I had a crush on her in my first life. Or maybe he was just ticked that Kate brought it up.

I wouldn't necessarily blame him if he thought Kate was trying to mess things up. She wasn't; it's just that keeping quiet about something is not in her nature, and having done the "don't mention Marti's past" when around Alex had driven her nuts, so she was just really enjoying being able to talk about it, not quite realizing that "Marti liked hot French girls when she was Martin" would creep him out.

And then, after the crazy Japanese heavy metal swordplay epic, we just miss the last train for her to get back downtown, and just miss the last bus (man, I miss the Night Owl service), so we wind up walking back to my apartment. Gertie and I have a couch that folds out, but that's not quite enough for everyone. Alex gets all weirded out sharing a bed with me for the first time with Kate in the next room, but isn't exactly thrilled with the idea of her sharing my bed, either. Eventually, Kate calls a cab and Alex takes the couch anyway, since the mood is pretty much dead.

We go out for breakfast the next morning, and hash some stuff out - Kate and I both prefer guys for the sex, so get over it, and you thought Kate was pretty cool before you knew how I came to be. I concede that I should have told him early on, because no good can come of holding it in. I promise that unless Korpin resufaces, this coming weekend is all his.

Kate and I meet up again around five, and I think we were both pretty spent by the time we got to our second movie of the day. She claims to have been awake for enough of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes to explain what was going on, but I can't very well verify that, can I?

Last night was The Proposition, a damn good Aussie Western that opens in a few weeks. Kind of slow going at first, until the "OMFG that's half his head!" moment, from which point forward it's just completely intense. That started and ended late, so by the time I got to bed last night...

Well, let's just say I'm really enjoying sitting in a comfy chair watching the ballgame tonight.

-Marti

I called him

2006-04-19T08:24:00.000-04:00

I really didn't want to be that girl - you know, the one who crawls back to a man after he treats her badly, but I also don't want to be the one who thinks she's so perfect that any man who doesn't immediately apologize is obviously mentally deficient and unworthy of her. I know what it's like to deal with that kind of woman, and I've given Alex a lot more reason to be wary than most women do.

Besides, I felt stupid this weekend. I had bought a couple four-packs of Red Sox tickets before Christmas (two each for four games), and the first was Monday's Patriot's Day game. Those not from New England probably don't recognize this as a Big Deal, but it's an event here - Patriot's Day is a holiday that commemorates Paul Revere's ride and the battle of Lexington & Concord, celebrated the third Monday of April. It's called "Marathon Monday" because, duh, that's when the Boston Marathon is run, and the ballgame has a special 11am start, so that it should let out at just about the same time that the runners, who started out from Hopkinton at noon, pass by the park in the Kenmore Square area. It also makes it a nightmare for people trying to get anywhere in Boston, but we'll save that for later.

Anyway, Alex and I had planned to go to the game, taking the day off work and all, but, of course, as of last week he got all freaked out when I told him my life story, and didn't talk to me all week. So I've got the ticket but I don't know whether or not he's going to come, and I'm too much of a wuss to actually call him and find out, so that I can give it to Gertie or something. Because he's got shit to think about where I'm concerned, and it's more important than a baseball ticket in the cheap seats.

So I go, and I wait outside of Gate B until the game's almost started, and then as I hear the national anthem I go to the will-call booth and ask them to hold it for Alex in case he decides to show.

Fortunately, the game is nerve-racking enough to take my mind off things. Not completly, of course: A woman sitting at a baseball game with an empty seat beside her is going to attract some male attention, especially once guys who have seized the opportunity to start drinking at 10:30 in the morning start to notice. Sure, they may start the question by asking about the back of my T-shirt saying "Bellhorn" (I've been busy! I haven't had time to buy a "Papelbon" one!), but they're more interested in the front. I made sure to limit myself to drinking hot chocolate in the early innings and soda later on, lest I do something stupid. I did all right deflecting them with "my boyfriend got called into work unexpectedly" and talking about the game. I'm kind of grateful to them, though - sure, horny college kids are generally annoying, but they beat the hell out of moping. And even if the Sox were behind most of the time, it was a kick-ass game, with two homers from Ortiz and Ichiro robbing him of a third, plus Loretta's walk-off shot at the end.

Alex didn't show up, and I killed the rest of the afternoon trying to make my way up the marathon course toward the finish line. The one mile marker is right in Kenmore Square, and it was interesting looking at the different runners. Some looked ready to die while others looked pretty good, like they'd been keeping this pace for 25 miles and could keep it up for another 25. Crazy healthy people. Anyway, it took me a couple hours to get to the Copley Square area, the streets were so crowded, and then you couldn't even get near the finish line. To make things more confusing, the way the streets were blocked off between Copley and the Common meant I practically had to detour to South Station to get to the red line.

I was tired when I got home Monday, but that just allowed it to eat at me. So after work yesterday, I asked Gertie if I could borrow her phone, since Alex would probably recognize my number. She applauded my sneakiness, and I called.

He was surprised to hear my voice, but he didn't hang up immediately. He said he'd been looking over his shoulder for the past week, wondering about people. That he had a hard time sleeping, both because he was worried that he might wake up in another body, or that something might have happened to me. I told him that was sweet, but that the former, at least, was something it isn't worth worrying about. It's scary and potentially catastrophic, but also so almost completely out of one's own control that there are few precautions one can take. Like, you don't really worry about some bioterrorist releasing ebola, even though you'd be pretty screwed if that happened.

It was a good talk. I'm glad I made the call, even if I would have really liked him to be the one who called and said it all didn't matter because even if he wasn't sure he loved me yet, it wasn't because of that and so on and so forth. That would have been just ideal.

-Marti

Explanations are, of course, demanded.

2006-04-11T10:21:00.000-04:00

Well, it was only a matter of time before I had to tell Alex about myself. I'm not sure of the exact ettiquette for what to do when a date becomes a visit to a crime scene, a Federal one no less, but even if I'm not under any societal duty to explain everything, he's going to be naturally curious. It might be easier for me if I surrounded myself with people who just saw a nice body and tended to be good sheep, ignoring anything unusual. I figure someone like that would have broken up with me soon after Korpin's murder, and perhaps used the nights I was spending watching tapes of the FBI interviewing a bunch of female Harvard underclassmen (instead of with him), and I wouldn't have blamed him for it.

But, that's not Alex, or anybody I know outside of work. So, today, when Agent Jones said they didn't have anything for me to look at yesterday, I invited him over so I could give him dinner and answer any questions he may have.

That probably sounded a lot better to him than it wound up being. I cook like a chemist, in that I can follow directions, but I really have no creativity at all. I'd be tempted to call it a boy-girl thing, but that's stupidly sexist. And I've shared meals with Maggie, and unless there's something she's never told me, she's all woman.

Anyway, I marinated a couple chicken breasts and threw them onto the contact grill when Alex arrived, and in about ten minutes we were sitting at our table, still not talking about anything. "So," I said, "last Friday. The man who was killed... He and I have a history."

"I figured as much. You said you dated him."

"Kind of. It's like... Remember when we met for the first time, and you recognized me from the marathon, and I asked if you were really into science fiction or if you had just been at the marathon with friends? You see, it's not just a matter of making sure our tastes line up. If you're going to be a part of my life, you've got to like sci-fi, because eventually you're going to be living it."

He gave me a funny look. "The man, the dead man. The FBI found something in his bloodstream and in his brain, a sort of large molecule that lodges in synapses, unfurls a tiny, molecular scale antenna, and on receiving a signal stimulates the neuron, and broadcasts the information while at the same time receiving information and overwriting the data in the synapse. It's a kind of nanotechnology, used in conjunction with a computer that rapidly maps and redirects the information. The net effect is to exchange the contents of two brains. The body Gertie found belongs to a man named Mikail Korpin, but Agent Jones and I are pretty sure that the brain had someone else's memories and personality."

He, of course, did not believe me. Look, he said, I understand if this is some sort of matter of national security and Special Agent Jones told you to give me some sort of outrageous cover story. I don't need to know everything.

Yes, I said you do. I'm involved in this because my brother Telly and I thought he was someone else when he first appeared. We thought he - well, we thought he was me.

Come again?

"I... I've only been around, like this, for a little under three years. Before that, I remember being someone else. His mind and Michelle Garber's were switched--"

"Did you say his??"

"Yeah. It's got something to do with how information is recorded in the brain; evidently men and women do it in a complementary fashion, which means that the switching has to be between members of the opposite sex."

He started to laugh, and I said, look, they've been keeping quiet about this, but all my friends know, and now that you know, they're going to stop tiptoeing around it. We're not playing some sort of prank on you. Those blood sample they took from me and Gertie? To make sure. Laugh it off, but your world just got a lot weirder

"How about dangerous? Did it just get more dangerous?"

I nodded. It may have. We don't know why Korpin is sticking aorund Boston; it would make much more sense for him to get the hell out of Dodge. Whatever girl's body he's in, I don't think he'll stay there longer than absolutely necessary. If I'm important to him somehow, he may see you as a way to stay close to me. It's happened before.

He looks at me, and I don't like the look. "You're breaking up with me."

"What? No! This is important!"

"But it's ridiculous and insulting. Just say it - say you think you can do better. That's what this is all about, isn't it? You're telling me this story because you being a man will freak me out and make me break it off."

"Oh, right. I murdered someone so that I could make up a ridiculous story that may push you away or, you know, really turn you on."

"I didn't say that! But I think there might be something going on between you and that FBI guy."

"Me and Jones? No! I freak him out. Even if he were interested, he's still not my type. I like guys like you, Alex. Maybe because I remember being one, maybe because we like the same things. OK? My life is weird, but I'm not kidding about liking you. That night Misha was killed, I was really looking forward to having sex with you."

"Well, I'm glad you didn't!"

"Now, that's just stupid." Probably the dumbest thing I've said in a while.

Needless to say, we didn't get to dessert. I do hope he calls after he's had a few days to think about everything, though.

-Marti

It looks so much easier on TV

2006-04-04T22:29:00.000-04:00

The people who follow my life with rapt attention are probably wondering how Friday's date went. Let's just say that Friday night was... eventful.

Things went well at first. I snuck out of work at 4:30 so that I could take the bus home and have some time to get looking nice before meeting up with Alex. It was looking really nice out, so I went with something that shows off the cleavage and legs rather than a tight sweater. I admit it - I was looking to get laid. It's been a few months since Korpin (ptui!) and I like Alex, plus the fact that he's a little intimidated by me is a little bit of a turn-on. It's not like he hasn't slept with a girl or anything, or that I'm just so super-hot as to make men cower, but there's a lot of girls who look at him and say "I can do better". That they're just looking without speaking to him doesn't matter, of course, but we've all seen those high school movies. Anyway, the shorter hemline meant shaving my legs, which just eats time. I think Gertie had her "breakfast" while waiting for me to get out of the bathroom.

Worth it, though. I looked hot, even with the pasty skin only a New England winter can bring. I was going to be late meeting Alex at Legal Sea Foods, but part of the fun of being the girl is that the right outfit can make up for a lot, and I had the right outfit on. Of course, I also had a coat on because I was going to walk to the T and ride a train (and it might not be so warm later), but by the time I met him at the bar it was over my shoulder and he was impressed. He didn't look that bad, himself. He's the sort of guy who's never put much effort into making himself attractive - he's got ten pounds he could stand to lose or turn into muscle, and it wouldn't hurt to put a little more effort into the shaving - so I really did appreciate that his pants had seen an iron and he was clean-shaven. I've been on the other side of the table, so I know how annoying it can be when you don't really feel like it makes you look that much better.

So, we eat, and we've just bought our tickets for Inside Man when my phone rings. If I'd had it longer, I might have just ignored it, but this mobile phone thing is new to me and I still tend to think that if it rings, it must be an emergency.

It's Gertie, and I don't know if I'd call it an emergency, because there's nothing that anyone can do. She had been called to walk a music student home; the girl said she didn't usually use the escort service but there were bangs on the wall between the practice spaces so she was nervous. Gertie had a master key, unlocked it, and found Korpin's body. The girl screamed, Gertie told her to sit back down in her practice room while she called the police, and then she called me to get Agent Jones's number.

Yeah, like I was just going to give her that and then quietly go see a movie. I flipped through my contact list, gave her Jones's number, then told Alex we were going back to Cambridge to make sure my last boyfriend was dead.

We got there at about the same time as Jones and his partner, who saw us and told Alex to stay back. "Not that we usually ask this of potential suspects, but what do you think?"

I told him that when it was all said and done, he'd have a tough time deciding whether it was technically suicide or murder. He grunted agreement before showing the Cambridge detective his badge and saying that the Bureau would be taking over the investigation, as Korpin was an international fugitive, and that "Miss Hart will be assisting with our inquiries." I don't know if that's actually a legitimate reason for the FBI taking over a murder investigation, but people well above both Jones's and the detective's pay grade had been talking and Jones was in charge.

He didn't let me actually go into the room because the crime scene guys were still in there, but I was able to verify that, yeah, it was Korpin's body. I had to put my head between my legs for a minute or two. It's funny, because this didn't look nearly as bad as Carter's body getting shot in the face two years ago, but somehow it feels worse. Maybe it's because of that. This seems more premeditated. "Sorry," I say. "This... this is just cold. I mean, even when it was Alexei in my old body and I was still attached to it, I couldn't..." One of the crime scene guys looks at me funny and Jones leads me a few yards away while his partner tells him to look at his work.

"We don't know it went down that way." I give him a look and he says, yeah, that would be his guess too. So what do you think?

I'd been thinking about it on the train ride up here. What I think, and what I tell him, is that I don't think Mikail will stay in his new body for long. If he's got the tech to switch, he'll do it as soon as it's safe to do so. I just don't think he'll be satisfied staying a woman. Which means the Bureau had better find him quick, because this guy seems much less tolerant of loose ends than Dmitri and Alexei were.

Yeah, he sighs. Just hoping you had a different read on the situation.

There's not much more I can do at that point, aside from talk to Gertie. As much as I trust her, let's face it: Boy. Girl. Same place. I tell her Agent Jones would like to draw some blood, from both of us, to make sure Korpin's not hiding right under our noses. At first, she doesn't get it, and then she's like, oh god, everyone really is a suspect. Everyone with a vagina at least Then she looks over at Jillian, the girl who called her for the escort, and, yeah, could be. I tend to think that she wouldn't want to call attention to the corpse, especially when the person who came to escort her was someone who'd recognize Korpin, but I've got no idea how that bastard's mind works. Like, he knew he couldn't pretend to be Michelle forever, so why get himself noticed? It just doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, it seems that fingerprint analysis and DNA tests don't come back nearly as fast as they do on TV, even when you're dealing with the FBI instead of a local police department. And I imagine that practice room was just covered with prints, and how many female Harvard students, faculty, and staff are in the database? They've started making some headway on figuring out which girls were away for spring break, but you can't exactly compel blood tests for everyone who may have been in the building (I'm guessing that they don't have any security video).

Which is where I'm coming in. They had me come in after work this evening, see if I could spot any of Mikail's body language or speech patterns in any of the people they interviewed after confirming that Korpin's body has nanos in it now, along with a pretty nasty poison. After all, I'm the person who spent the most time with him. Well, second most. They had Telly doing it in another room, so that we couldn't influence each other. I don't know if a judge will see me and Telly independently saying that this girl kind of moves like Korpin as reason to order a blood sample or a search warrant, but I can't think of many better ideas.

As to whether they found anything, well, I'll be looking at more video tomorrow. At least they rushed mine and Gertie's blood tests, so we don't have to sleep with one eye open any more.

-Marti

Saw a good movie last night.

2006-03-30T23:12:00.000-05:00

But first, it was workout day. I've slacked a little on that for the past couple weeks, because it's been cold or there was that Underground Film Festival. The other thing is that I usually go swimming with Jen, and she tends to pester me about working out - she sees how I'll eat left to myself, and it's something we can do together as friends - I was unattached until recently, and she kind of glazes over when Kate and I hit a movie. Now that she's starting to show, however, she's kind of self-conscious about hanging around with other people in tights or a bathing suit. And of course, she won't believe it when folks tell her she's glowing and all that; she just feels heavy and awkward and goes on about how the human birth canal is designed for a mammal that walks on four legs and is really ill-suited for something walking upright.

I'd say encouraging words, but I completed a lap faster than her for the first time ever last night.

Anyway, after that I met up with Kate and we went to see Unknown White Male. Kind of a showy director, but the central idea of how a guy who suddenly loses his memory without any explanation rebuilds his life and personality is something that, obviously, interests me. I'd read up on a lot of this stuff, so I knew about the three types of memory, but it was interesting to watch this documentary about how someone else with identity issues pieced together his self. The guy in the movie lost all his "episodic" memory, and apparently some "semantic", but kept most of the "procedural". He had to re-experience what things tasted like for the first time, but still knew how to do stuff. He'd meet his family again and not necessarily recognize them, but feel a connection. The film ends about two years after it starts, and he's got a new girlfriend, his photography is markedly different, and he's not terribly interested in regaining his memory, since he's afraid it'll make him a different person.

Not stuff that's directly applicable to my situation, although thinking about memory raises a whole bunch of interesting questions. Like how, since we don't record memories like video tape, but as heavily cross-referenced metadata, I might sometime start remembering my first life in terms of my current one. Probably not so extensive that I'll "remember" wearing a dress to the prom, but maybe I'll slip up and "remember" pulling my hair back when I had to puke or something.

Fascinating stuff, and it's always nice to have a reminder to get on with your life instead of moping. Not that I need that, but there will come a time when I'm apt to mope later.

Anyway, time to head for bed and get a good night's sleep. Alex is finally getting lucky tomorrow night after he gets me dinner and a movie, so I want to do the "early to work, early home" thing so I can take advantage of even-more-casual-than-usual Friday at the office and still have time to look snazzy after the hour-long bus ride home.

-Marti

Girly Stuff

2006-03-27T22:35:00.000-05:00

Chose not to see Modify again Friday night. Did see a trailer, and that was enough for me. Who does that? The funny/embarrassing thing is the movie I wanted to see was something called "Pony Trouble". I mean, okay, sure it's about people obsessed with My Little Ponies to the extend of LARPing as them, but come on, this thing looks sick. Friggin' cannibalism. Totally not a girly-girl movie, but Alex see the trailer? No. So he's probably thinking I'm something I'm not. In totally the wrong way.

By the way, I know I've mentioned this before, but Gertie gets stir-crazy when Harvard goes on break and she gets her shifts cut. I'm thinking this might be a good week to see lots of movies after work and hit the sack early. She's a great gal, but when she has spare time, she does revert to girly. I narrowly escaped a makeover Christmas break because of the whole "Misha" thing.

Anyway. 24 on Replay-delay coming up. I wonder who's left to kill.

-Marti

Sometimes, doing the girly thing is mortifying

2006-03-24T10:26:00.000-05:00

I wussed out on a movie that my boyfriend wanted to see because it looked gross last night. I didn't think it was a big deal at the time until I was IMing with Maggie this morning. Alex and I had just seen the Bill Plympton program at the Boston Underground Film Festival, and the next thing on the schedule was Modify, a documentary on people who, well, modify their bodies with surgery and tatoos and such. I didn't think of it as any big deal at the time; near as I can tell, I've always been squeamish about that. I had a friend in college who worked in a tattoo parlor during breaks and had a fair amount of ink on his skin, and even he would look at stuff in body art magazines and be saying "this is too much. Why would you do that to you penis?" I probably shouldn't be surprised that when I saw him at the last reunion, he was living in Salt Lake City, married with a kid on the way, as he wound up being way more conservative than he thought. I wonder what they make of him in Utah. Anyway, that's my big beef with that sort of thing; aside from it never making someone look better and risking infection and needless pain, you're going to be in a context where it works against you.

And that's before you get the thought that someone else could wind up stuck with the band logo injected into your shoulder or the metal jammed in your nose if you have my life. There's plenty of ways to express your personality without breaking the skin, I figure, so why screw around with self-mutilation?

Anyway, I didn't want to be a total buzzkill, so I mostly deflected us away from it without complaining about it being squicky. I wanted to get my stuff at the comic shop, which killed fifteen or twenty of the forty-five minutes between shows, by which point it was almost 9:30 and, hey, I hadn't had time to eat before the first show. Besides, it would be quarter past eleven by the time it ended, and while Alex may not have an hour on the bus in the morning...

Shameless, really. It's amazing what lame excuses a woman can get away with when a man is still worried about missing his chance to sleep with her. It's a good thing we get horny, too, or else the balance of power would tilt so far in our favor it's not even funny.

So, I mentioned some of this when Mags IMed me this morning, and she's all like, aw, we'll make a real girly-girl out of you yet. No amount of "hey, you dated Martin, you know this attitude toward messing with one's body doesn't just come from the female brain" could sway her. Or saying that it's not like I wanted to go into Crate & Barrell to look at cookware or Jasmine Sola to look at clothes (to name a couple places that are closer to the Brattle theater than the Million Year Picnic); we went to the comic shop. And it wasn't like I was calculating that he'd choose an eventual chance to score with me over seeing a movie; I was just trying to run out the clock.

Sure, she types, make a sports metaphor. That you didn't think about it just shows how ingrained those female instincts have become. She also said something about guys having a herd mentality so that if I was still a guy, I wouldn't have balked at seeing the movie because that would have been an admission of weakness.

Now, granted, she said it with a bunch of smiley emoticons, but, still, does it matter why I wound up doing the girly stuff if the upshot is I did it? Not that it's a bad thing, per sebut I don't know if I really want to be just another girl. My first thirty years of experiences should matter, darn it, and make me unique.

-Marti

So how 'bout that World Baseball Classic?

2006-03-21T22:24:00.000-05:00

Didn't expect much from it, but it wound up being pretty darn good. I have to admit, I was disappointed Japan got in over Korea. The ROK team was surprisingly good, and as much as I like Ichiro, the smack he was talking about the rest of the Asian teams wasn't cool. Besides, I've got an irrational fondness for Byun-hyung Kim (or is it Kim Byun-hyung?); he really saved the Sox during the summer of '03 and got about ten times as much crap dumped on him than he deserved when things went wrong. I don't really believe in chokers, and think it's unfortunate that people remember him giving up home runs and not his arm being slagged the previous game.

That game kept me up late enough to make me late for work this morning. First time at this job. Not actually late, I guess, but in after nine, which means staying until almost six if I'm going to get a full eight hours in, then it takes an hour to get back here...

You know, the first time I was in my mid-twenties, I think I was more ambitious. Of course, it was the whole dot-com boom back then, but I was glad to work ten hours a day and come in on the occasional weekend. I tell myself that I was motivated by the whole stock option thing, where the harder you worked the more you built the value of the itty bitty chunk of the company you owned, and now I know better, but I wonder sometimes if it's a brain thing. How ambitious was Shelley? The impression I get sometimes is that she wasn't lazy, but didn't exactly live to work.

As much as I like being a little more relaxed, I don't think I quite want to be that girl. I'd like to build toward something. I hope I'm not hard-wired not to.

I suppose I should talk to Telly about this, but we haven't talked much the past couple months, and I don't know as that's the conversation I want to start with.

-Marti

Quick thoughts

2006-03-15T23:37:00.000-05:00

Heh. If I'm going to change ISPs, I should probably change my email address, shouldn't I? --sigh-- There's one instance of where my address exists on the internet changed. Roughly twenty thousand to go.

Also: If anyone knows how to make an older model ReplayTV (mine's a 3060) download schedule data without having it connected to a telephone line, I'd greatly appreciate it. Right now, I have to program mine like a VCR, which is annoying. It also made me miss the USA-Korea World Baseball Classic game, because apparently neither ESPN station could be bothered to show it live, and I recorded four hours of other stuff by setting the manual record to ESPN rather than ESPN2. Sure, I could have gotten it right, but I paid good money to have the scheudle data there.

After two and a half years, certain ladies' attire things still confuse me. It's especially brutal now, when we're on the cusp of the season's changing. It got pretty close to sixty degrees this weekend, meaning that there were folks wearing shorts to do their jogging. Now, I like breaking out the warm-weather attire early as much as anyone, if only because it means doing less laundry, but that's too soon. What I really don't get is the sweater Gertie was wearing. Knit woolen, but bend a little one way or the other and she's exposing skin. I mean, if it's cold enough to wrap yourself in a sweater, it's cold enough for that sweater to overlap with your pants, right?

I wonder how much stuff like that people pick up on. I was at the comic shop, and I was getting some goofy old Dan DeCarlo sci-fi/cheesecake thing. Is that a girly thing? How weird is me not wearing jewelry or only wearing makeup when I'm going out? My friends get it and Alex seems cool with it, but he's only known me a few weeks and doesn't know what he's getting into.

Not that I feel any obligation to act girlier or anything. I'm kind of settled into who I am; I just don't know how I come across to others sometimes.

-Marti

Communication

2006-03-12T22:06:00.000-05:00

So, here's the deal. The phone service in our building crapped out a couple weeks ago. Some sort of problem with the Network Interface Device. The surprising thing, of course, is how much I didn't miss it. After all, most of the messages on the answering machine are someone trying to sell us satellite TV, despite none of the windows in the apartment facing the right direction, and Gertie and I saying we don't want a satellite dish and please take us off the list every time we answer their calls.

Anyway, it wouldn't be expensive to add a second cell phone to Gertie's plan, so we decide to do that. We look online and find a pretty decent deal on broadband service via the cable company, so we do that. Unfortunately, Gertie was a little too enthusiastic about cancelling our local phone service, so we wound up without communications at home for a week. I got my mobile phone a few days ago, but not many people have my number yet. It's weird; as much time as I spend online, reading or writing about every subject I have interest in, I don't feel like I'm going to burst when I can't.

Maybe it's good to step away from spending time talking about what you're doing to do more for a while and actually do a little more. I feel a little recharged, and, hey, Alex appreciates having more of my attention.

It's weird to meet someone in one context and then in another. Alex was at the sci-fi marathon, and I think we traded some comments during the trivia contest. Then we bumped into each other looking through CDs in Newbury Comics, recognized each other, and clicked. We wound up seeing Kairo at the Brattle over the weekend, agreeing that where horror movies are concerned, the freaky Japanese original is almost inevitably better than the American remake. I said I wished the marathon would show more import stuff, he's more fond of the old cheese, but that's not a crippling philosophical difference. We've gone out a couple more times since then, mostly being casual. It's been good, because I haven't been obsessively examining it. Normally, when I go on a date, I'm trying to sum it up the next day, so that leads me to the "how will I tell him", "am I living a lie by not telling him", "what does this attraction say about us sexually", and basic guilt and fear. That's there this time, but not as strong. We're having fun, we'll probably sleep with each other within the next two dates, and I'm not worried right now.

-Marti

Another SF marathon

2006-02-21T22:17:00.000-05:00

I was kind of whiny in my last post about Valentine's Day, doing my usual thing and acting like the world revolves around me (which it doesn't, even if this blog does), that I didn't mention that the whole thing more-than-kind-of sucked for Gertie, too. Her boyfriend is deployed somewhere in Iraq, and he apparently didn't get a chance to make a phone call. They email all the time, but it's not the same.

I can't imagine that. I haven't had a long-distance relationship in either life, and it strikes me that I probably haven't loved someone enough to do it. I haven't been tested, but considering I haven't made a relationship stick longer than a year when it was convenient, but Gertie and Steve have apparently stuck it out for close to that long in the current situation, longer than they were together before that.

(If I ever did do the long-distance thing, it would probably be out of laziness more than passion - I'd be able to have a boyfriend and thus avoid the whole dating thing)

Still, she was kind of bummed out last week, and when she had the holiday off, she decided to tag along with me to the Boston Sci-Fi Marathon (in West Newton). After all, she says, it's not safe for a girl to descend into that hive of nerdity alone, so she'd be doing me a service by being more attractive, and thus deflecting much male attention because she's taken. I point out that I know nerds, for they are my people, and they have simple tastes; my boobs will probably trump her cheekbones and naturally blonde hair. And I speak their language. Ah, but she says, they're smart, and thus likely have more discerning tastes. I mentioned that these people were paying money to see Konga, so both intelligence and taste were in question.

It's fun, of course. The last time I went to the West Newton Cinema I was a man, so it's kind of been blotted out and distrusted because all my context is different. I recommend it if it's local or you can get transportation schedules to work out (which almost never happens - the buses go directly there don't run on the weekend, and the commuter rail doesn't stop at the station on every trip); it's an eclectically programmed arthouse with really good popcorn and decent projection.

The Marathon itself had a good mix of stuff from different decades. Gertie had never seen the original King Kong, and I had somehow missed Eight Legged Freaks when it was in theaters. We bailed for pizza during Buckaroo Banzai, and kept each other awake except for about fifteen minutes during The Crazies. There wasn't much opportunity to flirt; it's an event that has been going on long enough to be bringing their kids, or at least having my apparent age being under their half-and-seven numbers. Got more notice at the pizza place, but he turned his nose up when I said I was there for the sci-fi thing. Like you'd have had any chance, musician.

-Marti

See, I didn't get crazy about Valentine's Day

2006-02-15T22:24:00.000-05:00

I could, I suppose. It's tempting. Even more than selling greeting cards, certain dates on the calendar are designed to get us to think on specific subjects, and though Valentine's Day can be a kind of sadistic way to cause one to ruminate on love and romance, it's worth thinking on.

My friends are all paired off, even if it's not serious in some cases. Jen's pregnant. They're all moving through this process, forming certain types of connections in order to establish families. Even Maureen and Anna are doing that, though not in the same exact path, obviously. Whereas I, right now, don't feel like being on a path. The part that sucks about that is that not wanting to be on a path doesn't keep a person from being lonely, and not just in terms of wanting to get laid. I want to do stuff with people, but not have it be pointed at anything, so to speak.

Maybe it's time to start dating again. I don't feel like less of a woman for not having a man, though sometimes I do feel like less of one - less of a person, even - for not wanting to go after one.

-Marti

Made in America, dammit!

2006-02-12T23:37:00.000-05:00

So, I was out at the mall yesterday, picking up DVDs instead of canned goods because I don't watch the news and thus major storms just hit me with no warning. I go into Borders looking for reading material, gravitate toward the puzzle magazine section, and find "Dell Kakuro Cross Sums Collection Volume 1", labeled "America's Newest Puzzle Craze! From the creators of Original Sudoku Puzzles!"

That's right. Apparently cross sums, which for the uninitiated are sort of like crossword puzzles where the entries must add up to a given sum without repeated digits, have taken the same migratory path as Number Places, which went to Japan, then were picked up by some UK paper that liked the exotic "su doku" name, and finally hit the US and now get just as much space in every freakin' newspaper as the crossword.

I'm not complaining, really, because I have loved puzzles in both my lives, and have often bought some of the lamer Dell magazines to get, like, 10 cross sums. I have completeld roughly 40 in just the past two days. If this will make the darn things easier to find on the newsstand, I'm in favor, although you will never see me calling them "kakuro". It's just that, man, why did these things have to circumnavigate the globe before people started liking them?

And can diagramless crosswords be next?

-Marti

Time passes

2006-02-09T22:55:00.000-05:00

Not much time tonight, since Blogger is apparently doing a maintenance thing at midnight. Figures, right? Since this is one of the first times I've had time to sit down and write a little bit and had the inclination to do so after being at work in front of a computer all day, there's a time limit on it.

Last week was my Martin-birthday. Thirty-two years of life experience for me, thirty-two years of wear and tear on the body for Carter. We had our first double-birthday party, since last year things were still really weird between us, and Carter wasn't really into really acknowledging the composit identity back then. Now, he's a little more accepting. I guess it's a matter of him not finding that body as completely unacceptable as a girl's, but having to confront the real differences. Basketball, apparently, isn't nearly as much fun as it was for someone six inches taller. It's an adjustment.

So, anyway, double party at Kate's place. Good job on her part, too, throwing a surprise party for two people with different but overlapping groups of friends, one of whom is not just her boyfriend by lives nearby. It was also a sort of substitute for Jen & Carlos's usual Super Bowl party, since they're in the middle of moving. Also, Jen's starting to show, which means no drinking, and time to be all grown-up and not going to parties and stuff.

This conveniently means there's no Valentine's Day stuff going on. Which is cool, because I'm having trust issues, as you might imagine.

Other random stuff: This would be my thirty-second birthday, which is a big one in nerd terms, power of two and all. 10,0000 years old, binary.

Also, I've apparently been summoned for jury duty in April. Out in Ayer. Which is like an hour away on the commuter rail. Which doesn't run early enough in the morning to get me there in time, so I'd have to get a ride from someone or stay in a hotel the night before. I mean, gads, they've got courts in Cambridge, why send me to Ayer?

Well, five minutes left. Better save this.

-Marti

Travesties of justice

2006-01-31T19:51:00.000-05:00

Revenge of the Sith not even NOMINATED for the Best Visual Effects Oscar? Come ON. I liked King Kong as much as anyone, if not more so, but I really wonder how someone could watch that opening scene and not say, wow, that's one of the very best bits of effects work of the year, and we're only five minutes in. And the way they're building whole worlds, that's amazing. And, especially, when you consider that both previous prequels, which were similar kinds of astonishing in how every scene had effects work and both lost to inferior films which did the same sort of thing but didn't do nearly so much of it.

That's the sort of thing I was IMing back and forth to Kate today. We are, of course, trying to figure out our plan of attack for seeing what we've missed. My most glaring solo omission is Crash, while neither of us has seen Brokeback Mountain; Kate hasn't seen Good Night and Good Luck.

Kate thinks it's funny that I haven't seen Transamerica yet, but truth be told, I don't think I'd identify with stories about transsexuals as much as people think I would. I wind up feeling bad about myself, like these people have spent a great deal of money and time trying to match their bodies with their self-images, while I didn't exactly commit to a struggle for very long. On my less good-natured days, I think they're making a lot of effort in the wrong direction. But different people need different things, I guess.

Meanwhile, I'm not seeing Mikail Korpin around absolutely every corner any more. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad; what's the line between a healthy concern and being paranoid in this situation? Hell if I know.

-Marti

Thoroughly trivial crap

2006-01-26T22:31:00.000-05:00

I've probably written this before, because the comedown from the drama is always quicker and more complete than it seems like it should be. Lots of crazy shit happens one week, which came at the end of an eventful month, and then it just gets eerily quiet. Telly's still not talking to me, and I haven't pressed the issue. Agent Smith and company say that Mikail Korpin hasn't been spotted in any local airports or bus or train stations. No fingerprints at any crime scenes in the past week.

I gather the Russians are pissed. I can't say I'd blame them - wanted criminal not only enters the country despite all the "security" added since 9/11 (aside - I don't recall feeling safer when people at the airport were rifling through my underwear on the way to Montreal), but actually spends time in the local FBI field office without being arrested and extradited. They, I imagine, are getting drama, specifically ass-reamings from their superiors, both from the ones who are officially in the loop and the ones who aren't. I am so glad I am not part of the official investigation, or I would be afraid for my job.

And me? Nothing exciting. I got really frustrated by it seeming to take twice as long to get to work Monday morning because of the snow. I waited a long time in line at the post office to send something to my mother, and had all my bills come back the next day because I forgot the price of a stamp went up. I spilled coffee on a brand new pair of pants.

Maybe I shouldn't be this on edge, but I think I'd feel an awful lot better if maybe there was some small weird thing going on right now, just so that I could sort of come down slow.

-Marti

I've had worse weeks. Not recently, though.

2006-01-21T10:55:00.000-05:00

It's no fun to write about being made a complete ass of. I suppose it just goes to show that there's no sort of "gaydar" among those of us who have been exchanged; otherwise, I probably wouldn't have slept with two people who aren't totally who they said they were. And no pheremones making my brain goofy this time. This was all just me believing something because I wanted to. I'm an idiot.

So, my message of Tuesday got to everybody but Telly. Since I was way the heck out in Waltham, I missed all the "good stuff", with the Feds going to Telly's apartment, finding Mikail Korpin not there, because he's gone to meet with Telly after he got off work at the record store. I didn't find out why half the Boston FBI office was on this case until later, but they apparently got to where Telly works just after they'd left.

Korpin, I'm now told, has international warrants out for his arrest. He - and I'm throwing up in my mouth just thinking this - traffics in black market transplant organs. According to Jones, this makes everything make a lot more sense: Why would a smuggler want to hide out as a computer programmer. But if he just facilitated someone else... Yeah, that'd be more his business.

So, they finally caught up with Korpin and Telly while they were eating, but Korpin had experience in spotting police officers, and a hostage. He must have been looking over his shoulder the entire time, just waiting for the Feds to finally figure out who he was. He wound up giving them the slip, but not before using his steak knife to give Telly a nasty gash on his arm. That must have been horrible for Telly. He still hadn't put together that Mikail had been playing us for the past month - hell, playing everyone since at least August, starting with emails to see if he could fool Michelle's friends long enough for whatever he's been doing. Telly thought his sister was cutting him.

He doesn't want to see me right now. He must figure the whole thing is my fault, like I should have known Korpin wasn't who he said, or I shouldn't have been in Shelley's body in the first place. I can't really blame him. I should have seen something.

And now this guy's loose, and I hope the FBI can get a list of American contacts from their counterparts in Russian and Interpol, because I really don't like the thought of this creep being free.

IMPORTANT: If you see Telly or Misha...

2006-01-17T15:37:00.000-05:00

God, I hope Telly hasn't mentioned this blog to Misha. And that I had my contact information on the laptop rather than just at home. This is just too damn risky.

Anyway, Kate, Jen, Kurt, Carlos, Carter, Mags, everyone else, and especially Telly: In case you haven't heard from Agent Jones, I just got a call from him, and he said said they just got the "advanced" bloodwork back from Misha's physical.

There are no nanomachine remnants in his blood.

They tested every sample they took. And sure, it's been two years, but every blood sample they've taken from me, Carter, Sam, and even Alexei has trace elements of spent nanomachines in it - even me, who has gone two years without having them used on me. And even if it were just a case that the formulation he used doesn't enter the bloodstream, wouldn't that mean Sam wouldn't have nanos from that exchange, either?

Telly, if you're reading this, Misha is not your sister. If any of you see Misha, call the FBI immediately, and keep your distance.

-Marti

$ = :)

2006-01-15T19:41:00.000-05:00

Yeah, it's shallow, but seeing your paycheck half again as large as your last one is just really awesome. Well, not half again, three-quarters, because it only covered the first week, but when you double it to figure out what it would be in comparison... OK, I'm a big nerd. I'll get my last paycheck from the warehouse in the mail sometime this week, so I'll be back ahead of the game then.

It is not yet time to start buying frivolous things at an accelerated rate - or, if you ask my friends, a more accelerated rate - but it's still a good feeling. Besides, it's been tough picking up the check when I have a night out with Misha.

Yeah, I know. Kate laughed about it last night, when she saw me buying both movie tickets, because at first she was going to snort, but then looked at us and Carter and figured that maybe, in a way, this was the natural order of things. Misha looked embarrassed, saying that it was only temporary; when he's got a job, he'll be picking up more tabs, but until then. Kate says why, you've got a pretty good situation going on here, but he laughed it off, saying that it's part of the whole peeing standing up deal - if he likes one part of the new arrangement, he's got to go with the rest.

I have to admit, though... I like picking up the tab. Sure, when I first started going out with guys, it was more a "the world owes me some restitution" thing, but even after I got cool with my body, I still accepted that the guys were going to pay the bills, and I understood and was OK with it. When you're a guy, and you're out with a girl, you're bigger and usually a bit older in most pairings, and there's this knowledge that she has likely spent more than you on her appearance and such. So you pay and it's the right thing to do.

And, okay, I've been a girl for two and a half years, and even if I'm able to feel some wind because there's a few inches of bare leg, or I can taste my lipstick, or the clicky heel sound is in tempo with my steps... Thirty years of training is tought to ignore. I still want to be the guy, even if I know there is a perfectly good reason for my date to be paying for everything. The new job just encourages that line of thought; I feel like I'm finally able to pull my own weight.

I'll have to dial that urge back a little; Misha's been hitting every Help Wanted sign in town and is trying to work out a way to present his hospitality industry resumé to get a job in that area without having to go through an interview process even more insane than mine (I've already put him in touch with Mo, in case she knows of anything). Of course, he's got to get some new paperwork, which the Feds are working on, so that's making it difficult - his body was born oversees and thus doesn't have a social security number, and I'm kind of using the one she instinctively writes on forms. He's lucky that Telly and his roommates are good with him crashing there.

But I'll miss it, even if it does mean more money in the bank for me. It feels good to be responsible.

-Marti

I am technology's bitch

2006-01-12T22:22:00.000-05:00

Although, using the word "bitch" to describe myself has a different connotation than it did in a former life. Let me re-iterate that I've been nothing but sweet and gregarious for the past week. Misha and Telly don't really get me being so excited about a job aside from the money being good, especially with the hours potentially being longer, the office being a pain in the neck to get to, and the work being harder. It's tough to explain to folks who haven't done this kind of work how exciting the challenge can be. It feels good to be working with my mind again; I even got a Mensa puzzle-a-day calendar to warm my brain up at the start of the day.

Got my laptop the other day, too. Typing on it right now. It took some doing, of course - I had to get a new wireless hub, then getting a wireless card for Gertie's machine, since we were both getting sick of wires leading from my bedroom to hers, taped to the ceiling, and sometimes drooping down and being a pain in the neck. Of course, Gertie decided this was my job despite my protests that I'm really not that good at the whole network thing. And, of course, she's got a Mac, the computer I inherited from Michelle is running Windows 95, the laptop's running XP Pro... Ugh.

Finally got that done last night, but when trying to set the Replay up tonight, I found it was nearly full, so I've been watching TV all night. It's minor-league annoying; the idea of one those things is to make it easier to watch things on one's own schedule, right?

Ah well. At least Misha's physical came back looking good.

-Marti

The Week

2006-01-08T21:11:00.000-05:00

I'm so used to having time to write in this at work, that having my day be full is new. I'm not the only new hire, so we've been trying to work together at learning the database, both using the same computer. Our work machines were supposed to arrive before us, but apparently the best-made plans are ganging aglee as usual. It'll be a laptop, which is potentially cool, although I'm used to a real keyboard and mouse. I'm trying to keep to myself that I see it as a nifty new toy.

The Misha thing finally struck us as weird upon seeing each other sober last night. Not in an "everything's awkward" way, but in a "this is the strangest, funniest thing that ever happened" way. We're seated in Uno's, kind of giving blow-by-blow of what we each remember from Sunday night, and both laughing hard. I ask how Telly's taking it, and he's like, total ostrich situation. Treating it like his "brother" met a girl, and his "sister" met a guy, but these two stories don't necessarily overlap. Not that they have to, right?

Right. We were just satisfying curiosity, or at least I was - what it's like to sleep with someone who knows your body like their own. Yeah, he says, curiosity.

So, of course, we never made it to the movie.

Afterward, I'm rubbing the burn on the back of his neck, saying it must have a story, and he says he's not one to talk about what happened in the Ukraine. It's apparently not as bad as what Carter went through, but bad enough - they didn't want the newly big and strong Shelley to be in any shape to chase them down. I asked him why they didn't just kill him, and he says he doesn't know. Not complaining.

I still don't know whether we've got a real thing going here. I just hope like hell that there's no pheremones involved.

-Marti

Resolution

2006-01-04T22:03:00.000-05:00

Really just one New Year's Resolution this year, but it's kind of a biggie: Get this thing published in some way.

Probably just a Print-on-Demand thing via Lulu.com, but it'll be something to hold in my hands, which is, of course, the coolest thing imaginable. So, anyway, this blog will probably get rather meta on occasion, as I make entries about the process of taking the blog you're reading and making a book out of it.

Anyway, one thing I'm going to do, just to make sure I'm covered legally, is offer anyone a chance to opt in or out of having their comments included. The Blogger terms of service state that the "ember will retain copyright ownership and all related rights for information he or she publishes through Blogger or otherwise enters into Blogger-related services." Which means I own all of this, but once we get down to the "Add Comment" section, it seems to get murkier, which could be trouble, since some of that stuff is pretty vital, and I'd sort of rather not write substitute entries (can you imagine Volume 1 of this being published without XY and Proud? Just wouldn't be the same).

So, new rule here: I'm going to assume that comments made to this blog are OK for inclusion. If you don't wish your comments to be included, please respond with a comment here or an email to transplantedlife@verizon.net, and I'll try to work around you.

Also, I'm going to need some sort of cover and maybe spot illustrations, and although I can't pay anything up front for them, I'm willing to allocate up to 25% of the profits to the artist, especially if they can help with layout and design work.

So... That's it. Back to wacky adventures tomorrow (or it could just be a quiet day).

-Marti