Stranger in Paradigm was published by Allyn & Bacon in "Writing a Professional Life: Stories of Technical Communicators On and Off the Job." The book is part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication and is currently a required textbook in many colleges offering technical writing degree programs throughout the country. For more information about the book, click here.

THE PRELUDE

I sat at my desk for four months waiting to be transferred to another department, and because none of my superiors exactly knew when that was going to happen and since I no longer belonged to them as a real resource who could be counted upon as a full-time equivalent, the best they could do was to ignore me. Of course, every so often they requested I format a letter or design a brochure drawing me into the verbal world of doing things, but it was with such infrequency that I saw these occasions as mere anomalies in my otherwise unscheduled time. The truth of the matter is that no one gave a good triplicate form what I did during the day, and this, more than the fact that I had no work to do, came close to corrupting my spirit. Instead, I decided to become a desk. Not a real desk, but a piece of furniture quiet with drawers I could retreat into, where no one could give me the latest gossip about which department was being dismembered or who was on the cut list. I counted the number of push pins residing in my stationary tray. I arranged my paper clips so that they all faced in the same direction. Sometimes I worked on my computer, but I'd been through the tutorials so many times before that I chose to turn on the screen saver and remain inside my desk. Comparisons with the womb are obvious, but it was the construction of the drawers that really fascinated me. I've always been a person who likes to know how things are made.

Rabbit joints are common enough but it's the fit between two planes of wood that's crucial to the futurity of a piece, for example, if the wood was originally sanded with several grades of paper, and whether the glue was allowed to set. These things take time; you can't hurry them. Slowly, I begin to see that the drawers of my desk are of medium quality, the wood a kind of composition board with walnut veneer. I want to endow it with more dignity, even though the handle of one has been totally lost in its last reorganization, and the handle of another is coming loose, its screw reveals spirals of pink paint underneath. Any contribution I can make has to be made from the inside. Cosmetically, the desk is a wreck.

Each day I review the progress I make in organizing the insides, move the paper clips closer to the front of the drawer and decide that I really don't need to save copies of all my time sheets as long as I have copies of my pay check stubs. This frees up more room. The push pins stick out like miniature daggers and I know what to do: retrieve my time slips from the trash and tear them into confetti-size pieces, throw them at whomever cares to listen. I am bestowing membership on a new order where our days are not divided into REG hours, a piece of paper which has no meaning other than to give our time the exact names of the week.

I gather parts of the grid into my hands and release them over my head. They settle around my waist and orbit, a meteor shower. This makes it difficult for me to sit in my chair. Hornets whirl around my torso, a Van Allen Belt. I reach for my purse so I can grab a cup of coffee. I barely fit inside the elevator. Everyone is looking at me. I drink my coffee decaf with low-fat milk. I arrive back to the cubicle after my coffee break and I see that someone has swept up the time sheets from the rug to hide my indiscretion. Who?

ALARM CLOCK

Today I am an entrepreneur, and do whatever I want. I innovate my own meaning. I am building my own business and encourage people to call me at work. My voice mail system answers messages perfectly. I am building my own business. I am being an entrepreneur and listening to my own inner voice. Somewhere there is bliss. I am lost, left without instruction, trying to find you at the amusement park and all I see is the tattooed man and the fat lady, have this really sick feeling in my stomach knowing that I'm going to dissolve the way cotton candy does in my cousin's mouth. I want to be an entrepreneur but I know we came to the park together and that we're supposed to go home.

FIRST CUP OF COFFEE

I need to pick a server conveniently located at my nearest node, a place where I can dip into the well of the universe and taste the water, and wonder how so many Chinese women writing from inside the civil service system in the 18th century were shunted from one province to the next because their husbands fell out of favor with a certain official. Guess what my days are like.

TRAFFIC

Radio countdown to destruction liquid cool underwear duck my head in traffic waiting for the red light too long while a driver meanders between lanes, doesn't he know, I swerve, use the blinker, something in the car's back trunk thuds, doesn't he know; there's a run down my tights, a check I have to write, a phone call to make, and who knows what are we going to eat for dinner? Thank God. I did take this month's new parking stub to hang on the dashboard. I can t fit into small spaces. That's why I dumped ice-water on the construction worker's lap in the Korean restaurant.

TURN ON THE COMPUTER

For a week I didn't sleep, slowly admitting the truth to myself about a period that would never come, doing what I did when I was a nervous girl wondering if this month I had really gone too far, crunching a ball of toilet paper in my hand and rocking the top of my uterus, hoping to strike it rich.

I was hungry immediately, smelling out thick barley soup, shiny with rafts of white mushrooms; at every street corner, I wanted to eat. Why am I having a baby again now? An unanswered question, a need, an urge. This morning when we made love with the sunlight filtered through the white muslin curtain, my nipples were as sensitive as two joysticks to the pressure of your touch. And I can remember, disengaging for any instant from the circular motion of my hips to introduce you to the baby. What I mostly resent is being pulled back to an earlier imagery.

LISTENING TO VOICE MESSAGES

There were 256 shades of smog in the sky this morning, radiating outward from the bridge, a halo that encased me on the toll plaza. Sunnyvale doesn't even desktop publish their employee newsletter and they re at the center of the Silicon Universe Valley. Plus they don t have a whole lot of use for PG&E either, sending out their own utility bills and generating electricity while the storekeeper's daughter's taking care. The calendar's looking dated. We'll transmogrify the California Living publication into a community awareness piece and not even talk to the people who ve been doing it for the last six years. That doesn't make sense. Why does it become the norm for everything not to make sense (because sense is composed of a myriad of pot holes and overlapping roots all competing for water). Research: root systems, what are they like? I'm posting this note for you, babe.

THE MEETING

Today I understand government. It comes down to maintaining the appearance of a functioning and responsible organization because there are just too many other things to deal with.

Like this morning, when I put on my opaque stockings, I discovered a run, thigh level. I reasoned since I had no other stockings (I hadn't had the time to buy any), the rest of my clothing would simply cover up the tell-tale rip. So I resolved.

Next came a blouse that I reserve for the purpose of wearing with the black skirt I already had on. The clock was ticking. I had to get my daughter to school and myself to work. The blouse, unfortunately, had a stain over its right pocket which I hadn't previously noticed. I was miffed that it was one of my favorite blouses. A coffee drip, maybe, a stray pen. The kettle was boiling and I lunged toward the kitchen as my daughter cried because her hair was tangled. Mindful of my stockings, I finessed an etiquette charm move and began brushing, listening to my daughter's entreaties to make the tangles go away. I looked at the clock. It was getting later.

This forced a compromise: after I helped my daughter to brush her teeth, I decided that instead of removing what I was wearing and starting all over again, I reached ford at a time.

You were born in an aftershock of an earthquake, people still buried in the rubble of the Cypress Overpass. No one believed in having babies that night.

I watched you breathe for several hours, your lips blistered with milk. Twice you opened your eyes and smiled at me. There were no words, just milk.

Under the blue tensor light, the divining rod of your mouth seeks out my nipple.

An umbilical cord is a silk rope wet with the dew of birth, a blue horizon unwinding to the very ends of you, a tassel.

The staircase of your fingers spiral to your nose, a rope lattice for the air to climb.

If I had to choose, it s your feet I love the best. The way you pushed yourself from me like a swimmer shoving off from the edge.

Phone calls to make, rooms to vacuum, the wash is in the drier; we listen to music, your five fingers pressed to my hand.

You recognize the plaid of my bathrobe. I'm the magician who turns off and on the light bulb while you play kiss with the sun.

Dead jelly fish wash up on the beach. We find the snaky remnants of sand worm poop, coiled basket of cobras. A shark float bounces along the sand with the kids running after it. You collect wads of seaweed to make salad on the beach. Barbara shows me the six rolls of toilet paper in her new bathroom and jokes that it's time to go back to Costco to buy a new package of 24. Jiggedy-jig.

He would climb a mountain to punch an echo. He could throw a lamb chop past a wolf. Are we getting on the edge of the diving board here? All my squirrels are running up your tree. I crush my body with my mind until the shaking is squeezed out of it. Mabel has bought a cardboard condo in the valley and left me with one word of advice: don't let a witch woman take care of your baby because she will feed her chewed rice and uncooked beans and change the baby into her own liquids and what's running through the baby's veins will draw her away from me.I sit near the telephone and hate everyone who returns my phone call. These are the ones whom Mabel warned me against.

THE PRELUDE

I am going to work tomorrow and my daughter will be in child care. My husband says it's all right. He is trying to comfort me. Do you want to stay home? We both know that I can't, but he says I can do whatever I want. I don't know how to give myself that courage.

One day I will give myself a transfusion from the snow pack that turns into water each spring, and hangs next to my earrings and hairbrush. It's so strange that I have earrings and a hairbrush because once I was a feral child in the abandoned lot who only came upstairs for dinner, and really then only for bread, a thick crust. But there is no witch taking care of my baby. I keep telling myself that is a child's story, Mabel's story who thinks she can do everything.

Do you want to get a nanny, he asks? This is getting ridiculous because we both know that we cannot afford a nanny. But I know he is trying to be kind, and takes my hand over the dinner plate. My answer is Yes/ No, a branching pattern that lets in no sunlight.

Yes, because who wouldn't want to in my situation, and No because I don't want my Persephone bathed in fire and made immortal. I long for my mother to be on this earth because then she would know. But would she really, from a generation of women who were involuntarily joined at the hip to their children? A doctor commemorates the death of a Siamese twin who was about to reach her first birthday by saying she knew how to laugh and had a great smile. I read a newspaper article about the emergency room around the corner from where we live, where doctors deliver guns wrapped in plastic bags from the vaginas of 15 year old girls. I try to tell you, I am afraid of the violence that freezes our hearts. Isn't leaving our daughter so young an act of violence? I have to get up from the table because the baby's crying.

ALARM CLOCK

Time is the fourth dimension and I am living in fiscal year end budget time, an animal who hibernates during the spring. I burrow deep inside my life where there are no budget hearings and let others go on retreat to compose long agendas so they may sculpt their time according to bullet points. A point may be a wave and each issue takes an hour to discuss, more like two. Council goes around the table wearing plumed hats and t-shirts, thumbing through their packets for a paper to explain everything.

A new ice-skating rink is going to be built on San Pablo Avenue and legislators look inside their briefcases for pom-poms. I am studying field theory inside my burrow. A worm shares my apartment. She eats and excretes soil, which makes a lovely mound right next to my desk, a place for my feet. Sometimes I find items that she cannot use, a gold ring with a turquoise stone. Today there's a new flowchart being circulated beneath the door.

"This is the which way we make our decisions so early in the morning," sings the daily newspaper. I'm not sure which way is up. Does it matter? I decide that I'm going to be a worm also, a bosom buddy while the air smells of cinammon and spice and the white plum blossoms float down from the sky. For every action, she does something else. That's what s so maddening. I can never know how to introduce my agenda when the general symmetry is all over the place. Cronus X is one of the nicer assholes around here. Maybe he'll listen. I curl myself into another dimension and compress my time into an envelope the size of a paperclip. I wonder where I've been all these years. I have a twin that exists between the hours of 9 and 10:30 p.m., maybe until 11:00 p.m., if I'm lucky. On the morning train I see everyone folded into an accordion. I hear music, but there's only phone messages. Time and money warp me out of shape. Woman Travels Through Wormhole to Escape Creditors.

FIRST CUP OF COFFEE

I started at Primos, next to the BART station, a small regular, please. Several counter people were in their early twenties, pierced noses and tongues, and Victor whom I liked the most from Sarajevo because he made a great latte after my stomach forced me to let up on the caffeine. Primos also runs a cable cart in the lobby of the APL building because ever since the restaurant closed, people have to go somewhere.

Then there was my brief flirtation with Starbucks, Peet's Oregon nemesis, which is strategically located opposite the Federal Building. But now I buy my coffee from Mon Ami, a Mom and Pop store in City Center.

For less than a buck fifty a day, I've learned to discriminate between different kinds of coffee beans, decaf and regular, foreign and domestic, to taste a latte that hasn't been ruined by a sprinkling of cocoa. That's why I decided on taking a cup along for the ride into the wormhole. Clearly I couldn't rely upon finding a coffee stand anywhere close. Plus, the coffee cup signifies my ability to make real choices, something like my own personal time capsule. What else is left, I asked myself, although I'm still thinking about showing up at a City Council meeting and letting 'er rip.

Soon as I parked the car and got close to the office, I stopped at Mon Ami's for my regular cup. Pop rang up the cash register and Mom turned on the machine, milking the expresso spigot with a clean damp cloth. Two minutes later, I had my coffee and was about to catch the elevator upstairs. I turned to get a plastic cover, and for the first time I saw it: a whirlpool the size of a thimble kicking up the foam in my latte. I reached for one of those white plastic spoons from the counter and tried to stir down the ripple. I got pulled in.

TRAFFIC

I heard a voice cry, "Call 911!" but I am recycled through the other end of the cup until I bottom out. I don't have a clue where I am, on some kind of a grid that reminds me of my attic, just the wooden beams and nothing else in between except for the insulation. I realize that the spongy stuff is like the foam from my coffee, but on a grander scale. I am going to be late for work.

TURN ON THE COMPUTER

Deep inside I am scared with my adrenalin pumping. Each time I take a step, I can see myself go through the permutations of lifting up my foot and then putting it back down again. I see a thousand reiterations of my geometry on a backlit screen. Everything I do is sampled back and forth until I have no idea if I am moving. Plus, I think about my kids and my husband and how I'll never see them again. It s only morning and already my day has become such a mess.

LISTENING TO VOICE MESSAGES

She is in the second realm and comes to me on powder puff feet, smelling of soap and talcum and yeast that s discovered warm milk. She is exactly the size she wants to be after years of dieting and I congratulate her on looking so well. She smiles and flashes the wires of her bridge hooked over her teeth and points to one of the beams for me to sit down. The beam automatically molds itself to my contours and creates a Louis IV chair. I rest my elbows on the flowered upholstery. I can't believe this is happening.

How are you doing, she asks, and I say a few things about how rough the morning has been. She agrees that some days are like that and gathers me to her side with an arm that sweeps out from the insulation. Her hair is black and her lips deep red. She explains that many of the slaves didn't want to leave and I ask what she s talking about. They did not want to leave Egypt, she says, regarding me like I might be slow, even though she's my own mother. She explains that she's also assimilating her reality.

The words move out of my mouth at different sampling rates and I can't understand what I'm saying. She bends down and holds my palms inside her own. What I'm trying to tell you is that we couldn't talk about the destruction, so we moved as far away from it as we could. She looks at me more kindly now. Learn how to select things, she says. She does a slow molecule fade over the insulation and then it's back to me.

As I walk, I find an occasional penny strewn along the beams. The pennies have been minted in years that don't exist yet. I slip them into my pocket for my son, if I get back, that is. Only then does the immensity of my situation hit me: I am a flounder in the universe swimming with my eye to the floor. I throw a penny into the insulation and make a wish. I watch it drop.

Then I see him across the beams, the man with the cellular phone from the elevator and he asks me how my day's going. I say, Sheesh.

What a day, is right, he says. "There were hardly any coupons from the newspaper: just one for an ice-cream sauce with taste-alike pieces and chocolate sprinkles. And some blue-looking stuff to clean your carpet, but I don t have a carpet at home, just the linoleum tile from the other tenant, and a coupon for some of that fancy printed toilet paper. I tore that out, not because I really wanted it; the plain kind is good enough for me, but because I was so upset about not getting a morning appointment with the Mayor.

"Forget it, he said. Bonanza days are coming soon and you'll catch me in line down by 41st and MacArthur waiting to buy a jar of artichoke hearts; I enjoy those in my salad with a few sliced green beans and a red bell pepper. Now that's what I call living.

"I'm going to do it right, that's what I say. Every week I look at the newspaper, and separate my coupons into three piles. I've got a free pile, a save pile, like when they say 25 percent off, or 50 cents off, and an everything else pile, like a hummingbird feeder or commemorative plate but you have to send away real money for those. I'm wise to them. And then I take each one of my piles and organize it alphabetically, like C for all the cereal coupons: All-Bran, Cheerios, Froot Loops; you know what I mean, and whenever I push my shopping cart to the Safeway I carry my coupons in these same piles with a rubber band around each one. I move slowly because saving money is something you need to take your time with if you're going to do it right.

THE MEETING

Everything spins in a circle. The sky, the earth, the sun, and moon, people, and the waltz. I hear music but there's no one there. Then I come across an egg balancing on one of the beams. It's sitting in a pile of what looks like salt. I pick the egg up and realize that it's actually bone china with "Made in England" stamped on the bottom. The two halves are carefully latched together and when I raise the top, there are hundreds of candles burning inside the bottom, each one a different size.

The candle within the egg is a life waiting to be nourished. I announce that I m not cooking dinner tonight and that I plan to see a movie. Nature exhausts the energy of the parent in the launching of the child. But I recognize the possibilities and float across the insulation to a house near the beach.

Still ringing in my ears, the loyalty to products, why change now. Loyalty, standing by and saying nothing, going to the same monthly meeting for six months around the same table and getting work done badly, being in the basement together and bringing up a system that doesn't work because no resources are given to supporting it.

Loyalties are made in rooms and in coffee shops and in the elevator. Loyalties are made in the parking lot following Council meetings and at farewell luncheons. Loyalties are the number of coats you paint the wall and knowing together where the dirt comes from. Loyalty is not always trust but can be the unspoken word between those who have decided to temporarily put aside their own ambitions in the quest for power, an agreement to tell one truth. These are called alliances.

TIME TO WORK OUT: OPTIMUM HEART RATE

We never make love anymore. Of course, we might stumble across each other at the end of the evening news before we collapse from exhaustion with a quick kiss to signify goodnight. I'm not talking about that sort of thing. I'm talking about what we called making love 20 years ago, when our bodies were sleek and lean and itched with undiscovered corners that sang back when we touched them. I'm talking about burning incense and taper candles throughout the house with tins of smoked oysters and a good white wine, going at it for hours with an old movie here and there, several changes of clothing draped on the backs of chairs throughout the apartment, and if you forgive me for saying so, a great big fat joint of Wowie Maiu rolled up on the table, all the better to admire Artie from several angles and arched in different kinds of light. I was no tub of lard then either, back when we were young people, waiting for the refrigerator to spit out another round of ice-cubes for our pleasure; we indulged each other for hours, for days, that is, before parenthood staked a claim on us. I can't remember the last time Artie and I enjoyed an entire weekend together away from the two kids. So can you blame me for laughing at him in his face when he suggested that we hire a babysitter and send the kids away for an entire weekend?

SECOND CUP OF COFFEE

Some weekends my daughter naps and I celebrate the gift of time, a few hours when I go down to the basement to an area called my room and gasp, like a fish who's miraculously been thrown back into water. In a few hours I'm caught by another bevy of activity, metamorphosing between my job as a civil service employee before I return home to pass through multiple curtains. Now I hear the electric chirp of my neighbor's car alarm. Where are the real birds this morning? I get into my own car and drop off my daughter at child care. It's in the car where we have our most intimate discussions.

INTERVIEW

There's the man who stands with a cardboard sign, the letters drawn in black marker, at the intersection of MacArthur Boulevard and Lakeshore Avenue where a red light suspends people for a moment in the traffic. The sign asks for work and money to buy food. The man watches for a rustle of hands beneath a glove compartment, a slit of window from the driver s seat. The drivers on the outside lane keep an eye on the drivers on the inside lane nearest the curb.

I, too, am a spectator, participating in this organization called the City that's composed of departments, committees, groups, different layers of insulation, some of us located at the center of the solar system or on exterior orbits where barely a memo ever filters through, sometimes at a desk located in between each of us each here for the duration of our work careers, or until the next layoff, or until the next election, running into each other inside the elevator on our way up and down for meetings, coffee, more meetings, where we exchange hellos and mutual support for the day that lies ahead; rubbing up against each other in a constant friction that is polictics, a process that shapes the entire body into our collective image. And when one of us retires, another arrives to take our place.

But it's true, Prince Harry, my other passenger; attitude can make difference. The energy you bring to the job, your own particular chemistry when you face out and fan the organization, your work style, your way of connecting, of adhering to principles. For in the final analysis, we choose to work for a bureaucracy where we feel the least personally compromised, where our essential being can still remain intact. Yet even so, as we keep contributing to our pensions and to our deferred compensation plan, year after year after year, the price of that allegiance becomes apparent as we finally become what we first must hate.

IN THE ELEVATOR

I'm a package of popcorn burning in the microwave oven. I accidentally drove into a crowd of seagulls on Clay Street and killed one. I place the car keys back into the bottom of my purse where I discover a piece of my daughter's old baby blanket, a shred of a blanket really; loved so much, knotted in her sweat, her cuddles, whatever batting is left, filthy and wiped on the kitchen floor. I bought the blanket originally when I was about eight months pregnant, barely able to walk through the downtown Chinatown festival, a yearly September event sponsored by the local Chinese Chamber of Commerce with music, crafts and tons of food steaming in the street and smelling directly of heaven, outdoor stalls, little roll-ups of things. The blanket was handmade by a Laotion woman. I'm still trying to think of how it originally looked, a quilted square in the middle surrounded by a field of flowers on a light purple background. Over the years, the blanket began to unravel after so many washings and hugs, the stitching began to come loose even after I took out my own needle to hold it together.

WEEKEND

Pray standing in line at the cash register for meals that perfume kitchens with the anticipation of sitting down. Pray for the music on the car radio that makes the traffic flow smoothly. Pray for parking spots that appear in unknown places. Pray for plants to grow on the windowsills of office buildings.