THAT DAY

After my history class, I study a bit in the university library. But the only free chair I can find is noisy: three girls nearby babble on and on. Clothes! Boys! Make-up! Boys! I'm trying to figure out why Rome collapsed, and whether America is too, but it's hard to think with one ear full of arguments over nail polish and eyeliner. What is this, 1950? I hated those snotty cliques in high school, and still do. I give up and bike home.

My computer isn't Web-safe any more. So I try to update the World Dream Bank using the Mac laptop my friend gave me. The new files upload, but NOT into the test folder as I said. Instead, they go straight to the root of my site and overwrite my existing folders--without asking! And all filenames over 8 characters long are trashed! My site is now crippled. Thank you so much, Apple.

Try the Linux machine in the hallway. Download an FTP program. It won't unzip. Even the readme files won't open. Thank you, Open Source movement!

Try my friend Alder's old computer. Find one ftp program that'll work on her creaky Windows 98 system. It loads at least, but can't find any site outside our house. Thank you, Bill Gates!

I'm exhausted and furious. Hours of wasted effort. For nothing? No, it's worse than when I started! I'll have to leave the site crippled tonight, reload it all from the computer lab at school. But I don't want to depend on school to maintain it!

Watch "Inu-Yasha" with friends. Kikyo the ghost sure is ambivalent--gentle with her sister and the village children, but she wants to kill Inu-Yasha, believing he betrayed her long ago. I think. But one chance remark suggests she did listen to Kagomi and now suspects she was set up. If she's obsessed with vengeance, can she at least haunt the right villain?

THAT NIGHT

I'm watching a music video that claims the Mexican Mafia's selling drugs in a local park. An old white guy watching the video nods grimly. A cop, an academic? He isn't appreciating the song as such, that's for sure.

Now I'm in the park, seeing the police response. Pairs of undercover cops--all women in miniskirts posing as hookers. They go up to single guys in the park, especially nonwhite guys, and... no, they don't try to buy drugs, or trade drugs for sex. What they do is simpler.

Two blonde girls in cute little matching minidresses and berets bracket a lone guy walking along. Flirt for a minute, then one cop hits him in the face, hard. Says coolly "We can't arrest you until YOU hit US, but we can keep hitting until you have to defend yourself. Ready for blow number two, or you gonna confess to drug dealing?"

And now I'm their victim. What to do? From their confidence, I assume they plant a drug packet on you if you happen to be innocent despite their racial profiling. I'm outraged and don't intend to confess or endure a professional-grade beating. Their outfits have no room for large-caliber guns and they're facing each other and couldn't readily shoot me without endangering each other. So I grab my attacker and twist behind her, try to hold her hostage.

What happens next is hazy, but apparently her partner must have pulled out a gun and opened fire anyway. For the next thing I know, I'm on trial for murder!

I plead self-defense.

In his opening remarks, the prosecutor calls the dead cop "this poor hard-working woman who loved her family."

Representing myself, I take the stand for rebuttal. "That poor hard-working woman who loved her family was a cop gone rogue who attacked me in broad daylight and has been planting drugs to frame people just to advance professionally--by destroying others' lives. Her assaults were sexist and racist, too--they targeted only nonwhite men. She was as crooked as a cop can get, until her stupid, trigger-happy partner shot her. And I'm on trial?"

Seething with rage, I wake.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Injustice, anger = my rage when that user-friendly Mac cheerfully trashed my site.
• Bad cops = A new study says US soldiers killed about 190,000 Iraqis while "keeping the peace." And then you get to the Iraqis killed by Iraqis: 410,000. Maybe the new study's wrong and it's only half that--more than all the dead at Hiroshima. And Bush denies it's a civil war! But this study makes his critics seem just as oblivious. If we bring home all our troops tomorrow, how many civilians will die?
• Cute blonde cops in little matched outfits = those brainless loudmouth girls in the library! Fashion police who put down geeks and wonks, uncool people who, like, actually read. Still it surprises me how angry my dreams are at them--seeing them as not just vapid but evil. But then, apolitical morons like that are why Shrub is president.

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