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my livingroom
Friday, April 2 1999
Today was the day before the day Kevin the DBA was supposed to go off his zero-carbohydrate diet. We went out to Schlotzky's Deli for lunch and he celebrated the impending end of his diet by cheating on it, eating a small chicken and pesto pizza. "It was better than sex!" he exclaimed as we headed back to work.
Scene from the bathroom at Schlotzky's Deli:
Scribbled: FOR BJ CALL
(it stopped there; obviously its author was interrupted as he wrote; next was written:)
WHAT, YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER?
My mailing list is finally beginning to mature. No longer are people talking about me and my life, they're being themselves and talking about various subjects that interest them. When you go hang out at somebody's house, you sit around and shoot the shit, you don't talk about the guy whose house you're chillin' at. That's done later at somebody else's house. That's how I feel about my mailing list. I think I'll get in the habit of nuking stupid people too. That capability is a luxury one doesn't normally get with a living room.
This takes me back to a memory from Oberlin, Ohio, 1990, a period following my being kicked out of school, though I was still hanging around town. In those days, my buddy Shandi Hopkins wished he had an eject button on "the Stoner Shack" he was operating out of his dorm room on the second floor of Harkness. That was back when he was diverting funds from his full scholarship into hefty bi-weekly marijuana purchases. He was king of the world in those days. A year later he'd been kicked out of school and was still hanging around town, collecting welfare with his blond girlfriend Janie.
It was Good Friday, of course, but at my internet startup company it was a workday like any other. I might have been present physically, but, in honour of the crucifiction of my lord and saviour, I discretely managed to have a chemically-altered mind the entirety of the afternoon. For some reason this afternoon was crammed with meetings, people virtually standing in line to get the chance to go over their projects with me.
One such person was Brandi, the gung-ho sales girl whom all my frustrated engineering colleagues want to bone. Unlike them, I don't think she's attractive at all. As I put it to Kevin, her face looks as though it's made of plastic. Looking at it today I realized that the two halves of her seemingly-plastic face are completely different in overall shape. On the right side she has a fairly masculine face, featuring a prominent jawline and cheekbone and a deep-set eye. But on the left side she has delicately feminine features with soft contours and understated bone structure. The substances aiding my perception of the world made this all very clear to me and I felt empowered. By the way, the unusual flipness with which I addressed Brandi did not go unnoticed by the likes of Kevin.
Along with Brandy was Lydia, the firebrand mistress of statistics, also involved on this latest sales scheme. Lydia is Chinese (in both senses of the word) and has much better bilateral symmetry. Surprisingly, I've found working with her fairly easy. Up until fairly recently I've found her stoic determination extremely intimidating and at odds with my own jokingly cynical style.
Interestingly, with the database all tied up in knots, sales has been forced to come up with ideas that can be accomplished completely in the non-database programming layers. At this point, that's my expertise, so I'm much in demand. And when I need to store stuff, I'm the widely-acknowledged master of the file system object.
When I finally had a chance to do some work, I looked around engineering and noticed everyone had slipped away and gone home, the way I do, without saying anything. So I got on my bike and headed home. It was only 5:00pm.
After fighting gale-force oceanic winds the whole way home, I enjoyed some vodkatea with Kim the girlfriend. We had plans tonight to eat sushi with Scott and Justine and some of their many friends.
Kim and I went down to Sapporo's on Ocean Beach's Newport Street and found the crew, most of them strangers, most of them girls. Before too much sushi had been eaten and sake had been drunk, Kim and I got in a squabble over my repeatedly sighing and wondering aloud where Jenna the German Girl might be. I desperately wanted her to materialize so I could make fun of her.
Later we all went to Tony's, and while the others shot pool, I sipped my beer and experienced a very familiar form of Friday night boredom. I get bored easily when I'm socializing drunk. Since I'm banned from flirting in the presence of Kim and since I don't much like pool, a bar can be a dull place to hang out, even though I feel like I'll miss something if I leave.
When Kim was completely fed up with me, she took me home and put me to bed and then returned to Tony's to continue where she'd left off. She ended up hanging out in our living room with this one Ocean Beach girl named Michelle, having found the other girls irritatingly judgmental, square, and, in one case, having eyes too-closely set.
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