Security Theater

Yes, I am one of those assholes who brings everything as carry-on on the plane that she isn't suppose to. My most frequent candidates are a set of lockpicks which I have in the past three months carried through no less than seven different airports (props to Flagstaff Arizona for at least removing them from my bag to look at them before permitting me to carry them on board.) Other frequent fliers are the more mundane large bottles of shampoo and conditioner, tubes of toothpaste, wires, electronic pieces, breadboards, and various other oddities. The only things I have ever had confiscated were a pair of cans of Rockstar, and a part of me thinks that might have been mostly because the TSA employee was thirsty. I did have a pretty near miss though when those same Flagstaff employees took a long hard look and an extra scan of my copy of The Little Prince. I guess you never can be too careful with those terrorist French and their mindless propaganda.

For a long time I attributed this to the fact that I would intentionally wear clothes to the airport which marked me as working for the feds. I learned the power of flying with a federal logo stamped on you once when confronted by a slightly baffled TSA employee who had recently extracted a cast-iron wok from my carry-on luggage (long story).

"What is this?"

"That, sir," I slid my thumbs along the top of the zipper of my ratty hoodie to flick what would have been the collar forward, emphasizing the federal logo on the right breast, "is a wok."

"Oh," he said, but I watched his eyes catch the logo.

"Will that be all?"

"Uh, yes," he said and handed me the wok. I took it and walked before hearing one of the last calls for the boarding on my flight, at which point I bolted down the terminal, still carrying the cooking implement in my left hand, trying to hold it as little like a club as possible. The TSA employee never said a word, he had probably gone on to the next customer by that time.

The "official-looking" hoodie was out of the gift shop. It wasn't like there had been a whole lot of other places to buy clothes when you're stranded on a federal base.

After I was given my uniform jacket I felt comfortable pushing the limitations much further to almost no resistance. Eventually I decided to forgo the effort of donning the jacket, as while it is very comfortable I dislike the stares I collect when wearing it in public.

It seems I am not alone in this activity. In this hilarious and rather well-written article one Jeffrey Goldberg describes bringing scissors, multiple large bottles of anything he pleases so long as they are labeled to be contact solution, a false beer belly of beer, a knife, and various other things as carry on. To make this more amusing he did it while also carrying things like a three foot by four foot Hezbollah flag and wearing shirts printed with lines like "Osama Bin Ladin: Hero of Islam." His article brought up another fun issue in the ID triangle: namely that you can fly if you are on the no fly list. This is done in a few simple steps.

1. Buy a ticket that isn't in your real name. This is where the name is checked against the no-fly list and so your fake name will not trigger anything.
   
2. Print your real boarding pass.
   
3. Print a fake boarding pass with your real name.
4. Go through security with your fake boarding pass and your real ID. All that is checked here is that your boarding pass matches your ID. It is not checked against the master no-fly list.
5. Present your real ticket at the gate. Since your ID is not checked here, nobody will notice the name does not match. Since it is a real boarding pass it will pass the barcode scanner, when your fake one would not.

The article recommended using photoshop but Christopher Soghoian made a wonderful little tool which will generate passes for you automatically for Northwest Airlines flights. While the FBI eventually shut him down the mirror of the code was left. He also wrote a neat little paper on it with plenty of information about how these loops might be closed. It has been available two and a half years now and ignored by official channels quite efficiently aside from their attempts to bring him to court for publishing it.

More disturbing are the words of Bruce Schneier (of crypto war fame) from 2002 warning (summarized by another author: Mann) about these large scale systems, which have also been primarily ignored.

The argument that a system which relies on secrecy to function (as our airport security system does) is inherently ineffective because such secrets are not well kept is part of what has made modern cryptology what it is today, and considered a well-beaten dead horse by many.

However, some other concepts pulled from the article I found quite novel. For example, if a piece of facial recognition software is accurate 99.32% of the time as claimed by certain manufacturers, and if good-quality photographs of all the terrorists are available, and if an airport had 25 million people go through it a year (such as Boston according to 2001 statistics) then you flag up to 170,000 people each year as terrorists from a single medium-sized airport. Consider that we have had well under 100 terrorists on airplanes nation-wide over a span of about 10 years and that this alarm would go off approximately 500 times a day per airport of this size. This is an alarm which would get rapidly downplayed or ignored by stressed-out TSA employees who are just trying to contain a small mob of people who are all frantically trying to make their flights. What does this mean? It means the enterprising young hacker will still be in an environment where a little charisma will get him through the gate, and the same of a terrorist.

Biometric information suffers many of the same abuses in the article: that as long as we continue to put our absolute faith in imperfect technology (as all technology always is) and have no proper situation to handle its failure, we will be left disappointed in the results. Inattentive guards in the Mann article permitted researchers to game the fingerprint and other biometric readers in any number of ways in the middle of airports. This included doing things like holding masks up over their eyes to fake a retina scan.

Part of this we have fed ourselves. To admit that our systems are fallible or downright ineffective would be to admit a mistake. Every time something bad happens the public wants to believe that Something Is Being Done, and as time passes we are putting more into making sure that our "corrections" are highly visible than that they have impact. Here's a great example:

Special measures have been taken to make it impossible for a terrorist to repeat the Detroit bombing attempt. Mr Abdulmutallab had emerged from the toilet, put a blanket on his lap complaining of an upset stomach, then tried to set off the bomb. Passengers and crew restrained him as flames leapt from his clothing.

In the final hour before landing in the US, passengers are now banned from standing up, using toilets and holding blankets.

Aside from the ACLU which I am sure is already drooling over the fact that use of a lavatory is generally not considered something you can reasonably deny a person in need (it is not legal for things like schools to operate when the bathrooms are broken for this reason) comes the general point that causing a four year old child to piss themselves will not make America safer. Small children (like most sane people) hate plane bathrooms. They are renowned for holding it in as long as possible, and for disregarding parent's warnings that "if you don't go now there won't be another stop for a while." Ask any parent who has taken a small child on a significant car ride. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure whoever gets to sit in a wet seat next flight won't feel America is a whole lot safer either. What will, for the most part, happen? When people have to go, they have to go, and the attendants will probably let them go if they beg hard enough.

What does that mean? It means this is a rule we will put our faith in, but that people will not keep. This is a common security problem: take offices where password changes are mandated so often that people have trouble remembering them. Instead they just slap an incrementing number on the end of the password or write it on a slip of paper on their desk. Other examples are the numerous recorded times when government officials have taken restricted information off of the protected government networks to unsecured computers. They do this because doing work on the secured computers is made slow and tedious by the oppressive security measures.

As long as our government continues to take this heavy-handed blanket approach to our security in airports people will keep adding loopholes, where formal (such as permitting people to print their own boarding passes) or informal (such as using tha bathroom), to keep the system functioning. These gaps, combined with our absolute faith in the technology which is meant to prevent them, provide fantastic exploratory spaces for hackers. I genuinely hope to see many published exploits in the coming months from clever young minds, and I hope they are found, made public enough to be an embarrassment, and corrected before anybody malicious takes advantage of them.

Happy hunting.

Related Posts:

• What happens to what the TSA actually does confiscate
• Security theater in locks
  

Blood

It is a warm Christmas morning in the Torii when a kid with sandy blond hair comes in to find me playing my guitar.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you live with your family right?"

"Yeah."

"And it is Christmas..."

"Yeah..." he sighed.

"So... they let you live there for free... surely you're on good terms for a holiday..."

"No, my mom asked me to move back in, I think she was lonely, but now that I am there she takes every opportunity to look down on me and try to push me around. My sister too, it starts with the little things like 'Dusty, pass me a fork,' but it escalates on as long as I put up with it. She just wants to see how much she can push me around."

"Huh, your family too."

"And this year, it occurred to me, as they were doing all this garbage, that I didn't have to put up with it, so I left."

***

I went to the beach with her yesterday, but she looks really tired today. "Family," she explains when I ask. I give her a little verbal hug and she brightens, "but I'm off to see my made-family now."

"That's wonderful, tell them Merry Christmas."

Billy, who came with us on our beach trip, looks about the same and won't say anything about it except "Family is tiring." He is usually one of the most cheerful of us but today he is worn and wants to do nothing but zone out and watch TV.

***

I think the portrayal of the biological family as the epitome of goodness is one of the silliest habits of our society. We'll all admit that there are some people in this world who just don't know how to be decent and respectful to one another, but we never admit to ourselves that they are probably somebody's parents or siblings.

We put up with rude, selfish, and harmful behavior from these people that we would never tolerate in a boyfriend or girlfriend, in a coworker, of a friend. If any of those people treated us like this we would have no problem advising ourselves to steer clear of those people, but when our own flesh and blood treat us like this we feel an obligation to go back to them, year after year, for another dose.

Family, they tell us, have known us all our lives and will be there for us when all else fails but why would we want them there in the worst of times when they do not know how to treat others with respect and decency at the best of times?

This is not to say that I do not love my family. I love my family with all of my heart. I understand that they are doing their very best to be accepting of me, that they are never intentionally mean, and that, for many of them, this is simply how they were either born or raised and how much work it would take to change. What I am saying is just because you love your family doesn't give you an obligation to show up every year, nor them a license to treat you like shit should you choose to. As a matter of fact, I would almost say you have an obligation to yourself and to them to take a stand and explain that their behavior is not alright and that you won't be participating until everybody can be civil. I can not tell you how many people, myself included, I have watched completely dread the holidays and waste so much effort and time trying to salvage the truly demolished family structure.

If you have one of those wonderful families that really is all it is cracked up to be, I really hope you appreciate them. Send them a hug for me.

And if you don't have one of those families: accept that some people just don't win the lottery and move on with your life.

***

"You'd better be grateful," my mother sneered, "because nobody will ever love you like your family loves you."

All I can think is, "I most certainly hope so."

Eric

My room was a funny toothpaste shade of green and the closet door was white. Inside the closet was a tupperware tote which my mother encouraged me to store various artifacts of places I had been: movie ticket stubs and the like.

I was balanced carefully on the edge of the tote, leaning out as far as my short arms would permit while still holding on to the closet rod and not knocking any of the coat hangers off it. One of my mother's shirts formed a dress with a tie from my dad's closet as a belt, and my little pink toes curled around the rim of the tote as I waved a stick like a magic wand.

"Onward!" I shouted, and then, holding my wand in my teeth jumped from the tote to a chair in the middle of the room. The chair lurched from my inertia then stood still. Mime jumped on my bed and ran from end to end of it.

"Come on!" I called, waving the stick, having now regained my balance, "We have to escape the lava before the bad guys come back!"

"I can't. I'm locked in the dungeon."

"Well then I'll save you."

"Prince Eric has to save me."

"I don't want to be a prince, princes are boys."

"Fine then, but I'm going to get saved by him."

"Why?"

"Because he is my true love."

"We don't have anybody to play Prince Eric."

"He's like the bad guys, we don't need anybody to play him."

I was thoroughly unconvinced and so we played in the same room with the same story but not together. While I hopped around from unstable furniture item to unstable furniture item battling henchmen and solving puzzles that the evil genius had trapped us in, Mime paced her cell anxiously awaiting her savior.

***

We were playing approximately the same game again downstairs with me jumping from place to place. Mime was jumping on a couch.

"Are you waiting for Eric still?"

"He is my true love, he's going to save me."

"That's a really stupid game, it is always the same."

"No, it is fun, you should try it."

"Fine."

So we stood on the couch and paced and fretted, and she called "Eric, come save me!" so I shouted "Eric, come save me!"

"Eric can't come and save you."

"Why not?"

"He's my boyfriend, you need your own."

"He can't free both of us? We're in the same cell."

"That isn't how it works. My true love frees me, and yours frees you."

"That seems silly."

"It is how love works, now what is his name?"

"I don't know, I haven't met him yet."

"You are not doing this right."

"This is lame!"

"What is his name?"

"I don't know!"

"Fine then, his name is Ken."

"I don't want to date Barbie's boyfriend!"

"He's a different Ken."

"That's a name for an ugly boy!"

"You have a better name for him?"

"No."

"Fine then, now we wait in our cell and call for our true loves to rescue us. They are brothers you see... and they are battling valiantly to save us..." She paused for a moment and then added, "and mine is more handsome than yours!"

"This is STUPID."

So we paced back and forth on the top of the couch for a while until I got bored of it and saved myself by climbing from the arm of the couch to the doorknob of the closet to the top of the piano and over the banister, (but more importantly, out of the way of the lava). Mime was pretty irritated about it, and that was the last time we ever tried to play dress-up together.

***

Our mothers were always closer than we were, and so while Mime and I continued to grow apart over the years, we continued to hear about each other a lot, even when she moved a few states away.

We spoke once on 9/11. She wasn't doing a lot, and said that I always had been the one with the brains, and that she needed to find another path through her life. She also said that 9/11 wasn't a big deal and wanted to talk about clothes. We had a big fight, and we've never really had much of a real conversation since.

She ran though a large number of "Erics" in highschool, all of them far older than her, and most of them in college. A part of me is surprised her mother never separated them on statutory rape charges.

By the beginning of her senior year of high school she had selected a particular Eric and was obsessively attached to him. He was an engineer at Georgia Tech, and Mime would tell me about how much money he was going to make when he graduated. I asked her why she didn't just become an engineer herself, like I was, so she could have her own money, or, if she still wanted to marry her Eric, twice as much money. She got angry with me, and told me that wasn't how it worked.

Forgoing college, she moved to Atlanta and played house with her Eric, who, as it turned out, had a drinking problem and a nasty temper. He would beat her, and God knows how else he abused her. He finally tried to drown her in a pool at a party. Thankfully he was slow and drunk, and some of their mutual friends had time to intervene and save her life. That was when she finally realized it was time to leave him for good.

I saw her three years ago. She drove a nice car, had just come from the bar after a few drinks, and wore a little black dress. She reeked of cigarettes, and her face felt worn and dead. There seemed to be nothing genuine or alive left in her, and certainly nothing left of the little girl who had run around my green room playing dress up with me, who had been imprisoned by wicked sorcerers and escaped lava-filled traps with me, who had been one of my closest friends. Apparently, she still stops by her family's house if she thinks what they are serving for dinner is good enough.

"Pika!" she stumbled up in heels and hugged me, "oh look at you! You're all famous now, working for the feds..."

"I... I guess so."

"That's so good. You know, you always had a knack for making your own way..."

"Thanks."

"Come on," she gestured back to her car, "we have to get out of here before mom catches me smoking..."

"Have you been drinking?" her sister Plato cut in.

"Only a little..."

Plato nodded to me, "I'll drive."

***

Eventually I did meet an actual pair of brothers named Ken and Eric, and while I found great humor in this, I never shared it with them.

I still have a strong aversion to calling anybody in my age range Eric. All it reminds me of is the image of what is is left of my friend: drunk in broken heels, sucking down cigarettes, and still waiting someplace... waiting for him to save her.

Appeal to Authority

The police man looked down at Py.

"You've got to stop that."

Py looked up, still holding the fireworks, mildly bewildered.

"I've gotten three complaints about you from parents who want you to stop..."

"Really?" Py asked, not cheeky but genuinely bewildered, "Nobody has said a word to me."

***

Lines and lines of feds sit glassy-eyed in an auditorium while an African American woman paces up and down the front to continue our Prevention of Sexual Harassment Training. Personally, I liked it better when they called it Sexual Harassment Training because I could respond that I did not require any further training in how to sexually harass people.

"We have to be," she says, "understanding of the comfort levels of different people. For example, some people might not feel comfortable with something you consider harmless, such as a miniature of the statue of David..."

For a split moment I considered the image of my laboratory decorated with dozens of miniatures of the status of David. To distinguish them I could put little feather boas and ill-advised flamboyant hats...

"But you have to realize it is wrong even if nobody says anything. Your coworkers might not feel comfortable confronting you, so you need to be considerate on their behalf and think of how other people might feel."

***

I understand that sexual harassment is serious business, but I can not agree to see it as a reason to automatically stoop to the lowest common denominator.

***

"Mom!" a seven year old me stomped into the room, "Why does Amy always go first and chooses everything when she comes to visit us?"

"Because that is proper manners. Amy is our guest."

"But when I'm at her house she always gets her way because her mom says it is her house and her rules."

"What does Amy say?"

"She says what her mom says goes."

***

This pattern became familiar to me over the next few years: my peers, who were either unable or unwilling to advocate for their own needs, appealing to figures of authority to enforce a system where they would be catered to as much as possible.

***

"SHARPIE!" I shouted the first time I saw him in the cafeteria. He was year older, but still the same shaggy looking kid. His eyebrows raised and then his face cracked into a huge smile, "Hey Pika!"

"It is so good to see you!" I ran up and hugged him. Sharpie flinched and stood stiffly when I reached out to hug him, and then, as if to not to rub in my foolishness, extended his arms to offer the most contact-free return of my gesture humanly possible. I stepped back a little puzzled, when I lived with him and Carne I always hugged him hello.

"Uh, so they just hired you recently didn't they?"

"Erm, yeah..."

"Alright let's get some food."

***

"Look," I said, pointing to the mini roller coaster we had hastily erected on my new boss' desk when he was out for a day.

"Where?"

"There," I returned, still futilely pointing.

The man down the hall turned his head and still missed the obvious point.

"Here," I said and grabbed his wrist, carefully by my thumb and index finger, and took two steps away, dragging him along with me to a better view.

"Woah!" he said, "You can't do that."

"What?"

"You touched my arm, that's sexual harassment."

I looked at him as blankly.

"No physical contact man..."

***

I would like to tell you that Amy grew up and eventually learned to advocate for herself and make reasonable compromises, but I haven't any idea what happened to her. I do know that by the time I moved away she, like so many of the little girls I spent childhood playdates with, was royally fucked up.

The scarier part is that I know that there is absolutely no reason she should have grown out of this trend. We have created a society where appealing to authority to force others to cater to you is a wildly successful tactic, and if done right, requires no compromise at all. This is opposed to confronting people with your issue, discussing it rationally, and seeking a compromise.

People have all but completely done away with person to person conflict resolution. Now you always need a mediator, or so many top-down rules that you have completely rewritten normal human interaction.

This constant appeal to authority and top-down thinking means that everything eventually gets boiled down to a series of rules which are made to handle all situations. The reality is that our world is far more complicated than these rules can handle, and that you can not lawyer morals into a society. The rules enforced on us tend to swing from extreme to extreme depending who is winning the appeal to authority, and they make an awful lot of people spend time doing very stupid things.

"Pika." Gadget had a fantastically wicked grin as he walked out of the Sexual Harassment Prevention Training, "Do you think I can order miniature statues of David online?"

Join the Circus

I almost literally walk from the blood donation table to the cafeteria to the bus where I promptly fall asleep.

I wake to be pulled along with the crowd which streams toward a separate tent. Somebody places a red tag and a lanyard about my neck and the crowd flows into an area labeled "VIP," dotted with tables. The tables contain glasses of wine or small food items which appear to have required significant assembly and application of cholesterol.

"Isn't this nice?" somebody to my left asks, raising a crimson glass of wine.

"Yes," I nod, understanding my cue.

"Is this," he asks, turning to another, more senior member of the company, "as good as it use to be in the good old days?"

"Well," the man looks uncomfortable, "In the really old days we use to just have BBQs and relax..."

"No, not then... you know, before, when they paid for really legendary parties... there use to be really nice things I hear..."

"Crab cakes?" a voice asks behind me. An approximately 27 year old woman stands in black clothing offering us a tray of bite-sized cakes. I smile at her and she returns the favor out of politeness but her eyes are glassy. I'm the "them" in "us and them" to her. The more senior man is looking edgy.

"I like BBQs," I said, taking a cake.

I make things for a living, and I planned to for the rest of my life. It occurs to me, however, that even if I invented something so efficient that everybody who currently works 8 hours a day only had to work 6, that within a few years people would be complaining of how hard it was to work a full 6 hours, and dream of a day when they would only have to work 4. The reality is, that despite the vast improvements in the quality of our lives over the past several thousands years, that humans as a whole are not any happier. We are healthier, better cared for, longer lived, and less of us do hard backbreaking manual labor for sure, but we are not particularly happier people for it. What then, is the point of all of this? What then, would actually be worthwhile?

If it is making people happy, what does make people happy? There is no way to explain this without dabling in cliches, but the idea of learning to be happy with what you have is not far off the mark. The power to remind people that their lives are wonderful and the world is beautiful would probably do more for a person's general happiness than a new iPhone, especially when you consider how rapidly the iPhone will be outdated.

I've sobered up now from the party (and received numerous stern lectures about donating blood then drinking) and I feel rather foolish. On the one hand my idea sounds completely laughable, and on the other hand my sober mind is unable to refute the logical conclusion I came to there, drunk and dehydrated, watching the acrobats dance in the cascading lights and bright costumes, watching something that really touched people and made them smile.

Perhaps if I want to do something truly meaningful with my life, I ought to quit my job and join the circus.

Old Perceptions

The man just inside the door of the Torii beats his hands against his upper arms and stomps his feet. "It's cold!"

"Yeah it is," I laugh. A few days ago I was giving Dreamer shit for complaining about the weather, but I've had to abandon the flipflops myself recently for a pair of sneakers, and I rarely take off my hoodie anymore to run around in a T-shirt, "I can't wait for my winter stuff to arrive."

"Oh?" Billy asks, straightening is lab coat.

"Didn't I tell you? They threatened to impound it and left it all in New England."

"What?"

"Yeah. The state wouldn't let them bring it in because they thought I was importing moths."

"Moths... like ugly butterflies?"

"Yeah it's totally absurd. I stayed home the day they were suppose to deliver and when they missed their dropoff appointment of my crate I called... and that's when they told me it was still in New England."

"That really is absurd," Billy laughed.

"Can't you have them spray it down?" the man in the doorway asked.

"There are no moths in it! Just old computers and clothes!"

"Well to convince them?"

"I filled out some import forms stating there weren't any moths. My stuff is suppose to be here in another 2-3 weeks... unless the shipping company messes up again."

"I have a women's coat in my car," he said.

"Oh...well um... I don't need... I have mine coming you know... in the shipping crate."

"I'm not going to use it."

"I don't want to take your things..."

But Chris was gone again in a gust of cold air which ripped in the doorway, and a few seconds later he handed me a warm heavy jacket.

In college I wore the same light coat all four years through the New England winter, with various layers of sweatshirts and hoodies underneath it. Heavy winter coats were expensive.

The embroidery on the front of the new coat said "The North Face." I remember kids in Waldorf, and rich girls from high school having coats like this.

"I don't..." I said, "want to take your things..."

***

I got paid last week, my first real paycheck. It was combined with my relocation bonus, and even with taxes the amount made me laugh because of how much of a year's cost of living it represented.

It will not be my entire yearly living budget, however. The knowledge of this permits me the luxury of buying things like a single coat which will replace many layers of other clothing.

I dress a lot better than I have in years. There are no tears in any of my clothing, and all of it is relatively comfortable and moderately fashionable; yet I still come across as that kid who is too broke to get herself a winter coat. That's not the person I want to be. There isn't a lot more despicable in my mind than a person who projects a need with isn't real, and which is filled by the charity of others. Charity should go to the people who need it most...

***

I am most certainly not lamenting the change of my financial state, but I find it puzzling at times.

"Atom," I ask, "I'll make more than I need this year. What should I do with it?"

"You need me to tell you that?"

My head filled with the image of filling my home with playpen balls.

"Ok," I corrected myself, "What would a responsible adult do?"

I could hear him grinning through the text box, "You're asking me?"

"Answer the fucking question..."

"Invest it?"

"I don't want to play the stock market."

"A wise choice,"

"But you said..."

"Invest...yes, forex, bank CDs..."

"Whats?"

Atom sighed, "Well, it looks like we have some studying to do, don't we?"

I guess I'm not quite as prepped to not need parents as I'd like to pretend I am.

Real

"Pika," she asked, "Tell me a story about my life."

I am always amazed at how the very old and the very young are similar. Firefly use to ask the same things, "Tell me about when I came from China," "Tell me about when I was little and we drove to the beach."

Grandma is dying of Alzheimer's, but she has an usual variety. She can remember recent events well, but her early life has become a blur over the years.

"You were a total badass Grandma!" I exclaimed, "You went to Rice at 14 for mathematics. It was completely unheard of! Then you kept getting all the A's in the classes until the professors told you you were ruining the curve for boys who needed those A's for their career, so you got a degree to be a schoolteacher."

Grandma smiled.

"So then World War II happened, so you became a spy in the Navy. Not like a secret agent, but you listened in to tapped phones to see if anybody in Hawaii was conspiring against America. That is where you met grandpa. He was working in the army as a Rabbi.

Gramdpa was an amazing man. I never met him, but I wish I had. He was a Rabbi who did not believe in God, but his family had put him in rabbinical school when he was quite young and so that became his profession. He came to terms with it by decided that even if God did not exist, that belief in God was an amazing and powerful positive influence in people's lives, and that by helping other people believe in God he could make people's lives better. They say he died 5-10 years early because he kept sneaking out of his hospital bed to do last rites for other patients."

Grandma chuckled a little bit, "Oh Pika, you don't need to make up things like that to make me feel good. Why don't you tell me a real story?"

***

"I wasn't always old you know."

"Of course not Grandma!" I said, "Everybody was young once, and you were so cool too!"

Grandma smiled that smile which says she thinks I am humoring her again. I suppose some people can not be convinced...

"Tell us a story grandma!" I said. Grandma never brings up being young unless she remembers something.

"I use to ride horses. I use to gallop across the fields..."

"That's wonderful!" I said, "English or Western?"

Grandma tapped her hearing aid, "What?"

"I said English or Western riding?"

"What?"

"Did you jump?"

"What?"

"Did you ride the horse over jumps?"

"No."

The room gets quiet as the debris of my attempt at polite conversation settle. Grandma looks ashamed at having to ask me to repeat myself so many times.

***

Three years after my attempts to tell Grandma about Rice, Grandma barely ate in front of us anymore. She had trouble using a fork to put food in her mouth, and she was very ashamed of it.

"Nathan liked this," she says as she passed time rearranging the food on her plate with the tines of her fork.

I catch the cue and ask loudly, "Tell us about Grandpa!"

Grandma smiled, "Well, Nathan was a very interesting man. He proposed to me on the very first date."

"No!" I say. Grandma finds it easier when I talk more in emotions than words, and with very few words at a time.

"Yes, yes he did." She smiles one of the first genuine smiles I have seen in a while, "He really did." She paused and then laughed, "I thought he was crazy."

"Well," Mom asked like you might ask a small child, "What did you do?"

"I went home to my father and told him about it."

"And what did he do?"

"He said that sometimes in life you just have to take a chance."

"And you were happily married until he died!" Mom finished.

Grandma nodded.

"That's beautiful Grandma," I said, but Grandma was done talking. I could tell she was having problems with the subtleties of what Mom had said, but she didn't want to go into a "what" cycle again. I'm never sure if Grandma can catch the horrendously condescending tones of voice Mom uses on her, or if perhaps I'm just sensitive to her because I have seen a great deal of her interactions with very small children.

If our culture had stories like The Fox and the Bear, maybe they would tell us that old people lose their hearing but not their speaking because they don't need to hear as much anymore, and because it is their turn to be heard instead.

I wonder if I was to tell her this story again later if she would not believe this one was real either.

***

"But it’s the truth even if it didn't happen."

I'm awkwardly balancing my books on the little L which forms the armrest of my seat, unable to move my feet very far because I'll kick the person in front of me. High school and air travel both sometimes seem to be the fine art of getting people to accept being treated like cattle.

"What did Ken Kesey mean by that?" My American Literature teacher is pacing the front of the room.

"Wasn't he high all the time?" one girl asked, twirling a chunk of her hair in her fingertips, "Maybe it is just nonsense."

Junior year of highschool meant I had already had several experiences of hallucinating from the medication I was being fed. Perhaps that is why this book was probably the only piece of literature I was forced to read that year that I liked.

"Maybe," I said, "These things seemed so real that they impacted him and had effects on him as if they were real things."

"Ah," the teacher asked, "So that makes them real?"

"Of course not," I said, "Real things are real, fake things are not, all I'm saying is it doesn't have to be real to be important." I'm sure at the time I was nowhere near as eloquent.

"Yeah," another student said, "Otherwise real things could be fake if everybody forgot them."

Fireflies

My sister has adopted her peer's habit of attempting to use youtube as her own personal music library. She's a legitimate thirteen year-old teenager now, complete with a smart phone grafted to her hand, horrendous spelling, and the belief that capitalizing every other letter makes her cooler. We've settled upon some music we can both enjoy, and now the computer screen is filled with a man at his keyboard and a series of whirring mechanical toys.

	Owl City - Fireflies
	Found at skreemr.com

I smile. Before I left I had trouble enough grasping that she was eight, my clearest memories of her are when she was closer to five or six, before I got sick.

You would not believe your eyes
If 10 million fireflies
Lit up the world as I fell asleep

Cuz they'd fill the open air
And leave teardrops everywhere
You'd think me rude
But I would just stand and stare

I can remember running through fields at that age where long grass licked my ankles and tugged at my bare feet, chasing fireflies. My grandmother brought me a jar from the kitchen and we tapped holes in the tin lid with the point of a Phillips screwdriver. I remember the sheer joy of seeing them hovering in the twilight over the quad at college for the first time, that fantastic feeling of coming home to something familiar.

"You remember fireflies," I ask her, "from our old house?"

She doesn't hear me, she's absorbed in her texting. I go back to stirring the rice pudding on the stove.

***

Even at 9 I had known something very big, and probably very bad was happening when my mother had taken me to my favourite restaurant for "special time together." I could normally count the times we ate out on one hand in a year.

"Pika," my mother said gently, "I have some very big news."

I dug into some ice cream with a spoon. If mom was going to spring bad news on me I was going to at least get a chance to eat desert first out of it.

"Our family is going to be a little bit bigger soon."

"You're pregnant?"

"We might adopt a little girl from China who hasn't got a family."

I remember being overwhelmed by two thoughts. The first was that at the point where my mother was telling me this there wasn't really any actual "might" involved here at all. The second was that my mother was in her mid-fourties and dad was scraping fifty. I couldn't think of anybody that age with a newborn child, and couldn't figure out why that was.

"We're going to be about 10 years apart?"

"Yes."

"Are you...expecting me to help raise her?"

"Only as a sister."

I took another scoop of ice cream, thoroughly unconvinced.

***

By mid-high school my sister was calling me "Mom" by mistake more often than I was comfortable with. I remember doing the same thing in early elementary school with my Waldorf teacher, first calling her mom once by accident and then repeating the "mistake" because a part of my head really liked that idea.

***

My memories of being sick are blurry, but I distinctly remember finding and watching Grave of the Fireflies. More friends than I could count had told me I would bawl like a child at the end, but instead I couldn't remember being more enraged at a film. The boy had an obligation to his sister before his personal pride, and no matter how wretched his aunt was being I felt he should have stayed there until the food stopped, in order to try to provide for his sister. At 10 years apart he needed to care for her and put her above all else, as she'd never be able to look after herself at that age. Just looking at that little tin of candies in the grocery store made me mad for months.

***

Leave my door open just a crack
(Please take me away from here)
Because I feel like such an insomniac
(Please take me away from here)

***

I went to college more resentful of my parents than you'd believe, and every time I thought about them I worried for my sister. Issac and I were too close in age for me to protect, and my mother had always gotten along very well with him, but my sister I could do something about. All I had to do was graduate well-decorated, land a steady reputable high-paying job in a very good school district and get a chance to take care of her during her high school years. This desire stemmed from very simple logic: either my parents were not as bad as I thought they were, or I would be a terrible person to leave my sister to the same fate when I had the capacity to do something about it.

***

But I'll know where several are
If my dreams get real bizarre
'Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar

***

"Why don't they light up?" a six-year-old me asked, shaking the newly-re-purposed peanut butter jar.

The jar was hastily steadied by my grandma, "Don't shake it, you'll hurt them. I guess they just don't feel like lighting up right now."

My cousin Tom taught me how to kill the bugs when they lit up and smear their color on the pavement, but this was not what I wanted. I wanted a living, breathing nightlight which I could care for and in return could light my room.

Leaves, sticks, more air vents, I even once opened the jar after mom tucked me in to let them roam my whole room, but the results were always exactly the same. The next morning I had nothing but dead fireflies.

"Well, maybe they are just fragile," Mom offered.

Almost fifteen years later I am standing in the Torii lobby asking out of the blue if anybody ever mastered this.

"I just don't think they survive the night," Jen offered, "they are probably short-lived..."

I sighed, "I just probably never knew how to care for them."

***

There are curling irons mixed in with the rockband controllers. She's fooling with the wires and a little upset.

"There was a man outside when I was walking the dog," she informs me. "He was smoking and drinking."

I smiled a little bit. My sister was still untangling the cords.

"He asked if he could pet the dog and I was scared, so I said no because she bites and came back."

Thirteen. What does a good parent of a thirteen year old do? Certainly no drinking, no hardcore partying, limited going out late, having to stay out of trouble, and forget doing any serious dating... I'd essentially skip the lifestyle of my early 20's for four years, followed by another four years of being careful and financially stable to provide her a good college education. I'd need to move into an apartment with space for her and shift my work hours so I could be with her. Would the company feed her like they feed me? Otherwise I also need to make meals for her...

Even if I could do all that, could I provide her a good home? Would it be any more realistic or do her any more good than the stick and some leaves in a jar with air holes did for the fireflies? Single working parents have to be nearly heroic to raise children well...and here I've barely figured out all the stuff I have to not do, let alone be sure to do.

"Shit," she says, tugging on the cords.

"You're getting a little gratuitous with the swearing." I add, "It doesn't mean a lot if it's every fourth word."

She looks up at me with an expression I cannot quite fully read, but it definitely says "but you swear."

I'm not sure I can do this.