Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

by David Sedaris

A representative from the real estate agency met us at the front door, and when I spoke to him in Japanese, he told me I needed to buy myself some manga. “Read those and you’ll learn how people actually talk,” he said. “You, you’re a little too polite.” I know what he was getting at, but I really don’t see this as much of a problem, especially if you’re a foreigner and any perceived rudeness can turn someone not just against you but against your entire country. Here Pimsleur has it all over the phrase books of my youth, where the Ugly American was still alive and kicking people. “I didn’t order this!” he raged in Greek and Spanish. “Think you can cheat me, do you?” “Go away or I’ll call the police.”

Are all "the ugly [nationality]" the same?

In the last month of the presidential campaign, I tuned in to conservative talk radio and listened as callers considered the unthinkable. One after another, they all threatened the same thing: “If McCain doesn’t win, I’m leaving the country.” “Oh, right,” I’d say. “You’re going to leave and go where? Right-wing Europe?” In the Netherlands now, I imagine it’s legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church. The doctor might be a woman who became a man and then became a woman again, all on taxpayers’ dollars, but as long as she saves the stem cells, she’ll have the nation’s blessing.

If you don’t want to marry a homosexual, then don’t. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor’s options? It’s like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

Does there come a day in every man’s life when he looks around and says to himself, I’ve got to weed out some of these owls? I can’t be alone in this, can I? And, of course, you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Therefore you keep the crocheted owl given to you by your second-youngest sister and accidentally on purpose drop the mug that reads “Owl Love You Always” and was sent by someone who clearly never knew you to begin with. I mean, mugs with words on them! Owl cocktail napkins stay, because everyone needs napkins. Ditto owl candle. Owl trivet: take to the charity shop along with the spool-size Japanese owl that blinks his eyes and softly hoots when you plug him into your computer. Just when you think you’re making progress, you remember the owl tobacco tin and the owl tea cozy. Then there are the plates, the coasters, the Christmas ornaments. This is what happens when you tell people you like something. For my sister Amy, that thing was rabbits. When she was in her late thirties, she got one as a pet, and before it had chewed through its first phone cord, she’d been given rabbit slippers, cushions, bowls, refrigerator magnets, you name it. “Really,” she kept insisting, “the live one is enough.” But nothing could stem the tide of crap.

In the seventeenth-century jungles of Peru, a girl that age would have babies already. Half her life would probably be over, and that’s if she was lucky. To have your chopped-off head preserved and then wind up in a Tesco bag some six thousand miles away—that was the indignity. Tesco! At least the arm was in a Waitrose bag. It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than the head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn’t consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.

I told him I was sick of the president talking down to me. “Like I’m some kind of a… some kind of a…” “Uninformed idiot?” he said. And I told him that was it exactly. “I’m tired of being talked to like I’m an uninformed idiot. I think a lot of Americans are, but we’ll see who’s the idiot when I join that historic march on Washington!” Todd agreed 100 percent, and then he took me to the Greyhound station, where I got on the bus for Seattle.

I wonder how many Seattle references I missed when I had nothing to do with the city.

When the two of them finally lumbered off toward the elevator, I approached the counter, hoping the woman behind it would roll her eyes, acknowledging that something really needed to be done about people like the Dunstons. She didn’t, though, so I decided I would hate her as much as I’d hated them. When she told me that her little stand didn’t serve regular brewed coffee, I hated her even more. “I can do you a nice cappuccino,” she said. “Or an iced latte, maybe?” This last word was delivered to my back as I stormed out the door. Then it was up the street and around the corner to a real coffee place.