a great way to get to hate new york

Two weeks into the shoot, and for reasons that escape me I've become the de facto driver for the show (the name of which I am forbidden from mentioning but which, uncoincidentally, is a perfect anagram of "I am a worthless maiden, heed me"). The logic, for lack of a less sarcastic-sounding word, of putting someone who can count the number of months he's been in this city on both middle fingers in charge of piloting a massive 15-seat van through the traffic-choked streets of New York escapes me, but the upside is that every hour I spend screaming at some asshole triple-parked on Bowery is an hour of not being screamed at by a drug-addicted, alcoholic multimillionaire.

Short of the odd drunken taxi ride, I'd literally been in one car since coming to New York before starting this job, and my impression had been of a city composed entirely of tunnels. The subways are in many ways wonderful, as much for their convenience (which is ample) as for the voyeuristic, fight-or-flight thrill of being surrounded on all sides by an army of lunatics. And yes, yes, there's a certain...well shit, magic, to emerging from the dank tiled murk of the subway to find yourself suddenly in a different part of town.

And so for me this city existed as a series of islands. Go down into the subway and emerge in Harlem, Central Park, Union Square, Greenpoint, Bushwick. There are points of reference, yes -- the spire of the Empire State Building, the gaudy flash and bang of Times Square -- but the bits and pieces that make up the city never quite fit together. The Bronx is up, the Battery 's down. Everything else gets a bit hazy.

In the beginning, it's this simple dislocation that makes being anywhere for the first time so exciting. The simple act of decoding the geography of a place, of figuring out which roads take you where, is the first step to penetrating its mystery. Said mystery is stabbed, set on fire, pushed down a flight of stairs and then given the finger by a cabbie the minute you start driving. Yeah, the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, and between them, an endless sea of douchebags.

Central Park, once a sanctuary of calm in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the city, is now just a big green road block in between where I am and where I need to be, and shit, now I need to drive all the way the fuck up 66th to get over to the west side, even though the place I need to go to pick up the lens is on the same fucking street I'm on now, and jesus, for some reason the fire department has the street roped off so now I gotta go all the way up to -- the fuck?! The light's green you fucking moron! GO!! Don't honk at me, you prick, I'm not the asshole staring at a green light with my thumb up my -- Move your goddamn car! Yeah, you! And then once I have the lens I have to get all the way the fuck up to the Bronx to pick up some dry ice, of all fucking things, then back down to the lighting house in Greenwich that won't have our stuff ready until after lunch, which I'm goddamn missing right now, by the way, and after all that I have to make it back across the Williamsburg Bri--No, YOU fuck YOUR goddamn mother, lady!

Michiko Kata, 1959 - 2008

I've been struggling to write this post for a couple of days now, and although I'm finally sitting down and running my fingers over the keys, I feel no more prepared to tackle the great weight that hangs over my heart than I was when I first received the news; and so it's with a tremendous sense of sadness that I report the passing of a woman who meant a great deal to me.

Those of you who know me from our time in Japan will know what I mean when I say that Michiko Kata was my J-mom. Michiko was a woman of unparalleled kindness and generosity of spirit, and during my four years in Japan she and her husband were as much a family to me as anything else. When I was sick she brought me food and medicine. When I was lonely she invited me over to her house for dinner. When I was bored she told me which hikes were the best and which onsen were the most beautiful. Whenever I got angry or frustrated with life in Japan, she listened to me rant until I felt better. She was an avid mountaineer. She was a painter. She was a mother and grandmother of two.

It is easy to say about anyone who has passed that they were wonderful, that they were kind, that they were a good mother or father or husband or wife; but I am confounded -- not only as a writer, but as man choked with grief -- that I can find no words to say anything more than that. I can say nothing that will give deeper meaning to her life, nor more weight to her death. I can say nothing that will make anyone grieve with me.

But perhaps it's for the best that grief is such a peculiar and private emotion, that it strips us of our ability to be grandiose. No matter how eloquent our praise, no matter how sad and beautiful, in the end we say only that the person who has died was dear to us, and will be missed. It is this, the simple fact of our grief, the irreducibility of it, that is our greatest tribute to them.

And so I say simply, that Michiko Kata was dear to me, and will be missed.

welcome to the working week

One of the things I hate about web-blogs is the first line of the first post after a prolonged period of bloglessness. It's invariably something along the lines of "Hey guys, sorry it's been a while since I've written anything, but blah blah blah." And, as with a great many other things I've always hated about blogs -- monumental self-importance, coupled with a lack of structure and breathless, pathological fascination with the marginally interesting minutiae of one's own life -- I find myself wringing my hands as I search for a way to believe that what I'm doing is somehow fundamentally different.

There are two main reasons I hate posts like this one. First, and most aggressively obnoxious, is that it presumes the existence of a substantial readership and presumes that said readership is so ravenously dedicated that the three weeks you spent not blogging about the cute-slash-crazy things your cat does have not only been noticed, but have furthermore been a source of some anxiety in their lives. The second reason, and one that springs hydra-like from the bloody neck of the first, is that so much amazing shit has been going on happened that I don't know where to start! And so, the dilemma: Which funny/interesting/unsettling events and/or observations from the last month do I bother recounting?

Do I tell you about the heavily tattooed, sporadically toothed woman I met at Amoeba Records who was carrying her baby wrapped up in a sling over her stomach? Or how she saw me looking at Jackson 5 cds and told me how she didn't normally come into the Soul section but had started once her daughter had been born because she didn't think she should grow up listening to death metal? Or how, when I asked to see the baby, she said that her baby was at home with her husband, but that she carries a bundle of rags in swaddling clothes with her because when her baby is far away she has panic attacks?

Or do I tell the story about looking for the keys to my motorcycle that, y'know, isn't really about the motorcycle at all but is, like, a metaphor or some shit? Or do I tell you about the amusing subcultural/generational disconnect inherent in going out with a 22 year old straight-edge vegan? Or about the series of seriocomic near-disasters that constituted Christmas?

Each of these things is, depending on how far you lower your standards, blog-worthy. And, under different circumstances, each may well have led to a funny/interesting/unsettling entry of its own. But three officially heartwarming but secretly frustrating weeks with my family have left me criminally unmotivated, and so these things fall down the memory hole, however half-heartedly cliff-noted.

Lucky then, dear readers, that New York is so quick to offer up a bevy of bat-shit lunacy, for not two days have gone by and I'm already playing catch-up. From realizing half-way through our conversation that the oddly familiar woman next to me on the plane is a porn star, to seeing a lady blowing a guy in a car parked in front of the police station across from my apartment, to watching a drunk on the subway stand up and announce that he'd show everybody a trick, then puke into his hands.

Perhaps the best news, however -- beside the comforting knowledge that New York is still, as ever, awash in a sea of sex and vomit -- is that I have finally found a real live paying job. As of yesterday I am a production assistant for a show on the Food Network, and while I have yet to meet the hostess, almost every single person I spoke to on set described her using some combination of the words "crazy" and "bitch." The non-disclosure agreement I signed yesterday keeps me from mentioning her or the show by name, but I can almost guarantee that this job will not only line my pockets with sleazy green, but more importantly, provide me with access to a well of crazy so vast and deep that it promises to power this blog for months to come. Seems Every Major Indicator Has Offered Me Evidence My Argument Doesn't Err -- While I Truly Hope She Acts Nuts Despite Real Appeal, Let's Expect Embarrassment.

So. That.

there's no place like...

When I was 14, my family moved to Brownsville, Texas, a sleepy little border town best known for being the birthplace of Kris Kristofferson and the site of the last battle of the Civil War, in that order, and was (and I'd wager, still is) a cultural black hole for anyone looking to do more with their lives than go to the mall or slink across the border and immerse themselves in the kaleidescopic debauchery of Matamoros, Mexico. At 17 I left for college, coming back as infrequently as I could. Though my emotional connection to it was always tenuous at best, with each passing year I felt further and further removed from the city and its inhabitants. Eventually my antipathy turned into outright hostility, and I spent the hot summer days in my room, marking time until the day I could leave again.

No, not my room. The guest room. When I left for college, my parents gave my room to my sister, Sabrina. And for good reason. Sabrina and Samantha had been sharing a room since we moved. So I got the guest room -- bigger room, bigger bed, bigger TV, bigger shower, but the guest room still, filled with dried flowers and cowboy art and other vaguely Southwestern bric-a-brac. By the fourth day back I was referring longingly to California as home and no doubt breaking my poor mother's heart.

In 1999 my family woke from our collective stupor and moved back to our house in Oakland.
The room I grew up in was again given to one of my sisters -- again with good reason, this time to Samantha -- and when I came home from college I was once again shunted off into a room bedecked year-round in autumn colors and filled with wicker furniture and scented candles.

Ah! Then Japan, and my own decorative instincts -- or woeful lack -- were allowed to run wild. Not fancy, not even coherent, but definitely, unmistakably mine. Four years of accumulated J-crap covering every square inch of my apartment, from a framed 1000 yen stuffed into my shirt pocket by the head of the Owase yakuza for helping push his car to a gas station, to a 3-foot high plaster statue of the English teacher in the town just north of mine, given to me by my office for reasons that never really became clear, to a Christmas cartoon drawn by a 13 year old boy that included the words, "SANTA, I WANT THE BIG PINIS!" My room. Mine.

Then the day came that I packed as much as I could into four suitcases and returned home. My room, my old room, sat unused at the end of the hall, still filled with Samantha's effects while she was off at school -- but my parents were reluctant to let me move into it for fear of Sam feeling like she'd been squeezed out, so I moved back into the erstwhile guest room. I did my best to decorate it, going so far as to fill the shelves of my desk with the a bunch of j-trinkets -- a plastic diorama of level 1 from Super Mario Brothers here, a miniature bust of Stalin there. That, combined with the inevitable pile of laundry and bedsheets on the floor, and the room began to feel like home.

It was, in fact, the process of rooting through crates of my old stuff for things to further solidify the mine-ness of my room that, choked with something I thought was nostalgia but turned into something more, I came across a box of 8-mm films I'd made in college. A month later I was sleeping on my sister's floor in New York. You know the rest. I planned to stay there through the holidays, not because I particularly wanted to spend Christmas and New Year's cold and alone but because returning to Oakland for the second time in less than two months without having found a paying job felt like an admission of defeat. But then my parents bought me a ticket, and I was give the choice of coming to California or saying that I simply didn't want to come home -- not something you want to drop on your mom and dad a week before Christmas.

So, I came home to find myself sleepin in a room that has again been transformed into a khaki and burnt umber panic attack. My stuff has been crammed into boxes and thrown into a closet, while the room down the hall -- the room I grew up in, the room I still think of as irrevocably, fundamentally mine -- is now Sarah's, having moved back home to live rent free while busting her ass at law school. Home for me now is a rickety futon and inflatable mattress on a floor in Spanish Harlem. So it will be, at least for a little while.

And so, the lesson relearned. You can't go home again, and again, and again.

Why, lo! I mop well! -- Who will employ?

Reading over my blog so far, it strikes me that it has become less a chronicle of my time in New York City than a long list of humiliations, embarrassments and failures. Still, there's no denying that humiliation, embarrassment and failure are an integral part of the New York Experience, and they make for far more interesting reading than a bland retelling of what time I got up, what I ate for lunch, who I slept with, or how I'm feeling. But sometimes the unending wave of serio-comic tragedy that has thus far characterized my time in this city gets the better of me, and as much as I'd like to jump on the two-point-oh-happy bandwagon and blog about how OMG! LOOKING 4 WERK SUXCKS!!!!!!!11!!1, I actually find it necessary to process my complex and contradictory emotional psychoscape like a healthy, normal, functional goddamn human being. And sometimes I just want to talk about what I did today.

Luckily for everyone, today was a conflation of the two -- I can manage my frustrations through obsessive listing and categorization, and you can take some small pleasure out watching me squirm beneath this city's thumb. Hurrah!

OMG! LOOKING 4 WERK SUXCKS!!!!!!!11!!1 With no end to the writers' strike in sight, film and television production is at a stand-still, which means that any cachet my plucky-30-year-old-moves-to-the-big-city-to-start-all-over narrative buys me is being eroded on a daily basis. When you're on a set asking people for any leads on paying work having just flown into town the night before, you look like a fucking champ. When you're calling up those same people for those same leads a month into the most acrimonious, industry-shaking work stoppage in memory, you just look like an asshole with terrible timing.

And so today I took it upon myself to find a job. Rode the 6 train to Union Square around noon and resolved not to return home without some form of employment, however low-paid or debasing. By 12:30, there were a few important caveats:

1. I will not be a hot dog/pretzel/kebab vendor.
2. I will not sell DVDs on the subway, however hot/new the releases.
3. I will not busk.
4. I will not work anywhere that requires me to wear a hat of any kind.
5. I will not expose myself for money. For money.
6. I will not work anywhere that boasts of its number of locations, nor will I work anywhere that I can see two or more of without turning my head.
7. I will not work anywhere that requires me to remain behind bullet-proof anything.
8. I will not work anywhere that has punctuation in the name.

So, short of the myriad other jobs I am simply unqualified for, like lawyer or professional banking millionaire, the wide field of potential employers was quickly narrowed to bookstores, bars and coffee shops. Each has its relative advantages and disadvantages, but they all share one important thing in common: they are all, in the end, far too depressing to consider working there full-time. Plus I need to keep my schedule flexible so I can, I dunno, dick around. Write. Whatever. The dream is safe.

I. Coffee Shops

Advantages: Cute tattooed chicks, free caffeine, access to cork boards filled with information on improv workshops, open-mic nights, one-woman shows and classical guitar lessons.

Disadvantages: Low pay, incessant clicking of laptop keys.

Snobbery Level: Medium to High

The money isn't the best, but it's the only job I've ever held that was absolutely, irrefutably, cause-and-effect responsible for getting me laid. She and I were working the special midnight to 6 am shift during finals at USC. I was 19, it was late, we were alone and she was kind of crazy. One thing lead to another lead to a bit of the ol' nudge-nudge, wink-wink. So far so good, but I heard she tried to kill herself my senior year, which is why thinking back on it fills me less with the manful pride of the conquerer than with terrible, creeping guilt. Am I right, fellas?!


II. Bars

Advantages: Cute drunk chicks, free alcohol, tips, the irony of having been a drug and alcohol counselor AND a bartender within a year too sweet to pass up.

Disadvantages: Even nice bars reek of piss and vomit, don't own any skin-tight black shirts, couldn't mix a Cosmopolitan to SAVE. MY. LIFE.

Snobbery Level: <scoff> Is that how you always dress?

The advantages are considerable, but almost half of the bars I walked into require a headshot before the manager will even speak to me. And while the idea of a job where it is not only acceptable, but expected for you to be drunk at work is almost too good to be true, there's some small part of me that thinks it probably is. Plus, I don't know if I could bring myself to serve any thing with more than two words in the name or "-tini" affixed to the end.


III. Bookstores

Advantages: Cute nerdy chicks, free books, can say "Oh, well, that's Kierkegaard for you," and not have anyone call me on my bullshit.

Disadvantages: Air of quiet desperation, tried to hire me before I even asked for a job.

Snobbery Level: Can you start right now? How about tomorrow? Maybe you should fill out two applications, just to be safe.

Like most writers (or rather, like most people who tell people they're writers to make their unemployment seem noble) I love bookstores. My favorite used to be Book Soup on Sunset in L.A. I applied for a job there right after college, made it through the interview, and passed the drug and lie-detector(!) tests. I was set to start work the next week. That was on September the 10th. Then guess what happened? Maybe I should work at a bookstore just to stick it to Osama and finally even the score.

It started getting dark around five. With no job and no real solid leads I was feeling pretty rotten and decided to head home. On the way to the station I passed another intern on The Show Which I Am Contractually Forbidden From Naming. I told him I was walking around looking for a job, and we talked for a few minutes about unemployment and its general suckiness. I'm just a set intern, so I only go in on days we shoot. He's been doubling as an office intern, which means he is getting not paid to do five times the work. Or was. Turns out he was fired from the show last week. By Rosemary. He seemed reluctant to say more, but I said a few unkind words about her myself and he relaxed. Then he said a curious thing: "I thought you guys were friends." I assured him we aren't.

"Really? She talks about you all the time."

Suck it, Rosemary.

dream a little dream of me

When I was in junior high school I spent a lot of time in the school library. Not in the studious, bookish way, but in the mopey, bad at sports way. Read a lot of Stephen King. That kind of way.
And as a kid who spent a lot of off-hours at the library (splitting my time between there and the band hall -- that kind of way) I was witness to a bit of behind-the-scenes action. I knew which students won the contest to come up with a slogan to increase interest in reading days before it was announced at a school assembly (one of whom was yours truly -- that kind of way). I knew that Bart Simpson had been elected both president and vice-president of the student body, but that Mr. Lorenzen decided to award the positions to Angela and April, the two twins who'd received the second- and third- most votes respectively, rather than hold a re-vote. I heard my science teacher Mrs. Keane admit to another teacher that the graffiti mural that had been sprayed onto the side of the auditorium one weekend and had been painted over despite overwhelming student protest was "Really fucking cool." And I remember that there were two books banned from the library, and that I was an accomplice in enforcing -- and subsequently undermining -- the ban on the second.

The first book was The Diary of Laura Palmer, a Twin Peaks spin-off that contained descriptions of, among other things, the titular prom queen being raped by a ghost. Needless to say, the complex Lynchian meditation on sexuality, voyeurism and the fluid nature of identity was lost on the dick-dumb 13 year olds passing the book back and forth beneath their desks and breathlessly scouring the pages for the word "pussy."

Banned.

The second book to be removed from the Montera Junior High School library was The Dream Dictionary: A Dictionary of Dreams. It was, as the name suggests, a guide for decoding the various signs and symbols from your dreams, but with a special emphasis on the dreamer being gay. Naked in public? Gay. Missed a test? Gay. Was there water in your dream? Gay. Did a little girl say something to you in your dream? Gay. Were there stairs? Gay. Were you having sex with that girl from your pre-algebra class while Mrs. McCabe ran around the room setting everything on fire? Gay. And weird. Of course none of us really knew what gay was, except that it had something to do with the reason we all covered our dicks with our hands when we walked past Mr. Miller in the locker room, and why we all kind of snickered whenever Mr. Black referred to his "wife."

And so it was, that The Dream Dictionary: A Dictionary of Dreams (I swear to god that was the title) caused a number or problems for students and teachers alike, and I was in the library when the decision was made by the librarian, who seemed genuinely upset at the prospect, to remove it from the shelves. Unfortunately it wasn't where it was supposed to have been, so she asked me to help her look for it. I dug through a pile of returned books while she looked through the stacks. I found it and, after debating it for a few minutes, dutifully turned it in. She thanked me, put it on her desk, and went about her business. I wondered what was to become of it, and left.

Word soon spread that the book had disappeared, to the chagrin of the bullies and the relief of the bullied. The prevailing opinion was that it had been stolen, probably by some rules-flaunting badass, and I was hesitant to reveal my role in what was the decidedly non-badass truth -- less out of shame in being a tool of literary censorship than in ruining the fun. A couple of days later I was back in the library and saw the book sitting unattended on the librarian's desk. I stole it, along with a book on how to make sound effects with your mouth, written by that one guy who wasn't Michael Winslow. It was the first time I'd ever stolen something. I felt horrible.

The idea was to use the book (the former, not the latter) as leverage to boost my cred, but I made the mistake of letting my friend Robert McKnight borrow it. The next day I saw him in the hallway at school, holding the book and bragging to a bunch of people that he'd been the one who'd stolen it. And so it goes.

Eventually the novelty of the book wore off, replaced by pages ripped from Playboy and Penthouse and decidedly seedier fare, but from time to time I've thought back on it and decided that it must have been some sort of elaborate joke -- like those gag books that say "All I Know About Women" on the cover and are filled with blank pages. Still, every once in a while I'll wake up from a particularly confounding dream and wonder to myself, what would The Dream Dictionary: A Dictionary of Dreams say about that one? You know what? I think I already know.

Then there are dreams that are so obvious, so head-slapping blatant that, to paraphrase my friend Joe, you wake up kind of mad at yourself. Late for football practice, naked in public, that sort of thing.

And so, the point at last.

Last night I had a dream that I was back in school, taking a math test I hadn't studied for. I then realized that I was at least a decade older than all of the other students in the class. I stood up to tell the teacher that I must be in the wrong room, but she said she wouldn't speak to me until I put some clothes on. I asked where I could get some clothes, but she told me there was no time, because I had to solve all of the equations in order to defuse the nuclear missile headed our way.The kids started crying, and she told them to hide beneath their desks while I hurried to finish the test. Of course, it turns out I was also illiterate, so I tried to squeeze beneath my desk, but it was a children's desk and I couldn't fit. The missile exploded outside the window and I was caught in the blast. I survived, but I knew I'd been poisoned. No time to worry about that, because there was an army of faceless robots walking toward us across the rubble. I told the kids in the class to hide in the shadows, then realized that was a terrible idea and that's the first place they'd look. If I didn't do something everyone would be killed and it would all be my fault, so I came up with the idea to sing the national anthem in order to distract the robots and to inspire everyone to rise up and fight. I stood up and started singing, but everyone was staring at me, and I got nervous and forgot the lyrics. Suddenly the robot leader morphs into Condoleeza Rice, and challenges me to a sword fight. I said that that was completely unfair because robots can't be hurt by swords, but nobody was listening. I screamed and screamed that robots can't be hurt by swords, everyone knows that! But the kids around me just keep telling me not to let them down. Then I woke up.

Dreams are an important window into our own subconsciousness, and are a way to defuse the various stresses and anxieties built up within us. I just wish my subconscious didn't think I was such an idiot.

"...because if I don't say something, who will?"

Well, the big day has come and gone, and I'm sitting in a cafe still fighting off the last of a hangover that, all things considered, is blessedly mild. My original plan of staying at home and eating a turkey sandwich in the dark didn't pan out like I'd hoped, and I instead went out to Brooklyn to celebrate Thanksgiving in the traditional manner.

I met up with Cat, an old college friend whom the past six years have seem to have left untouched, save for her hair, now a decidedly un-Asian blond. Cat's roommate, boyfriend, boyfriend's brother and boyfriend's mother rounded out the night, and though I didn't know any of them, they broke out a bottle of Glen Livet and the scotch made us all fast friends. Dinner: turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans. Talked a little about the state of the world but couldn't pin down each other's political bent and so kept things vague. Moved on to movies and literature. Cat's roommate likes Gabriel Garcia Marquez and No Country For Old Men and is pretty. Her boyfriend's brother has a copy of Moby Dick on his bookshelf, but also owns Spiderman 3 on DVD. By the time dinner was over we'd emptied a few wine bottles and I'd move back to the scotch. Fast friends.

Then the Scrabble board came out.

I'll get right to it: "reteed" is a word. It is the past tense of retee, which means "to place upon a tee again". As in, the wind blew my ball off the tee, so I reteed it. Then I used my club to beat the editor of the Official Scrabble Dictionary so savagely that his own children couldn't recognize him.

Now, I am a man of many inconsequential but nonetheless fervently held beliefs, and chief among them is this: Scrabble, like life, is so much more about the spirit of the law than the letter. If reteed steals bread to feed his family, then truly, what crime has he committed? If reteed withholds ten percent of his taxes to protest the war in Iraq, or uses the copy machine at work to make copies of fliers for his band, or doesn't wait for the light to change before dashing across the street to pull a child from a burning building, there are some who'd stamp their feet and shake their fingers and wave the scrabble dictionary in his face and call him a rule-breaker -- and though they may be right in the strictest sense, their stubborn adherence to such arbitrary and unjust rules flies in the face of the very social fabric that those rules are meant to protect.

I'm not saying that reteed can go around planting evidence on people he knows are guilty to guarantee a conviction, or that his drinking problem can be overlooked because he isn't hurting anyone other than himself. Addiction hurts everybody. Reteed is a really great guy in a lot of ways, and yeah, he's charming, he doesn't go around starting fights, he never drinks in front of his kids. Look, we can go around all day coming up with a list of reasons why we can look the other way, but it falls upon those of us who care the most about him to take a long, hard look at the situation. If we hesitate because it's uncomfortable or embarrassing, then we don't deserve to call ourselves his friends.

My point is this: reteed is a word. In fact, it is so obviously, irrefutably a word that I grabbed the Official Scrabble Dictionary from Cat's boyfriend's brother's grubby little hands and called the phone number for the National Scrabble Association, which they'd listed -- foolishly -- on the copyright page. After navigating the computerized menu for a few minutes I was directed to the voice mail of marketing coordinator Katie Schultz and left a reasoned, articulate and almost entirely profanity-free explanation of why reteed should be included in the next printing of the Official Scrabble Dictionary. (I did drop an F-bomb toward the end, but I was caught up in the moment and immediately corrected myself). And just to show I wasn't fucking around, I left my real name and real number just in case she wanted to discuss the matter further. That reteed isn't included among words officially recognized by the Scrabble people is an injustice, but it will compounded immeasurably if if their mistake is left uncorrected.

I'm waiting on the call.