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on the coffee wagon
Tuesday, November 14 2000
I don't know what the hell was wrong with me last night, but come this morning I feel like I have a new lease on life. I decided to forgo coffee entirely today and hopefully I'll find the willpower to forgo alcohol as well, even though my house is fully stocked with many different varieties of it.
I managed to avoid coffee all day, but I suffered for it, believe me I did. I actually went further than simply avoiding liquid stimulants; I taunted my chemistry with Chamomile tea, which is (I'm told) a depressant. But I wasn't completely caffeine free either; I did have a little flavored black tea.
In the evening Maria, housemate John's sister, took John and me out to eat at a Wahoos franchise on Wilshire, near the dot com where she used to work as a project manager. Wahoos, she says, is her favorite fast food type restaurant. Their cuisine and decor isn't especially different from a Rubios; it's just somewhat more expensive and slightly reminiscent of TGI Fridays (in other words schteveish). As it happened, though, Maria actually paid for my $5.50 dinner, which was comprised of three fish tacos.
After we had our food, Maria proceeded to spend the bulk of the meal bitching about her new dot com job, where she's only been working for a few weeks. She says she finds herself doing mostly secretarial work in exchange for her $70,000 salary and it's humiliating. The company hired her because of her extensive dot com project manager experience and then apparently couldn't figure out what to do with her. She also spends lots of valuable time sitting in pointless meetings, for example one where top brass debated the question, "What is a community?" for three solid hours. The technical staff, such as it is, struggles with the cruel job of integrating a variety of mismatched web applications built by other companies. In hopes of encouraging a flourishing of community, they're looking to buy the Webcrossing "forum solution" - something I already know to be a steaming pile of poo built around a proprietary database.
After dinner, back at the house, John called for the opening of his other bottle of wine, and once it was uncorked I couldn't refuse. And so, dear readers, I fell off the alcohol half of the wagon I'd been riding since this morning. But I only drank half of the wine John poured for me, reserving the rest in a CD-case-covered jar up in my room.
I don't really mind the nasty things Bathtubgirl said about me in her interview at BadAssChick.com (an interview that she continues to have edited - the BadAssChick webmistress must love that!). Bathtubgirl and I have a tempestuous post-relationship, and if she doesn't want to acknowledge the indispensable work I did actually building (and continuing to build) her website, that's her business. What I don't appreciate, however, is for her and Dirtygirl to stay up all night taking powdered nasal refreshments and calling my phone repeatedly demanding to know why their web pages aren't loading as fast as they should over their cruddy Venice Beach DSL connection. I answered Dirtygirl's call at 2 something in the morning, and when she wouldn't accept my "I don't know" as a believable response, I simply hung up on her. Then she (and Bathtubgirl) took turns making my phone ring and ring and ring. I unplugged the phoneline in my room, but I could still hear the electronic cries of cordless handsets downstairs. Both Bathtubgirl and Dirtygirl are exactly like Bathtubgirl's mother. They overplay their hands with precisely the people whose talents they would be nothing without.
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