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genuine lounge
Saturday, July 31 1999
Today marks the third birthday of my online journal keeping adventure.
Sadly, I have to admit that yet again I went to work on a Saturday. Not only that, but my boss, the Director of Web Development, took me to task for not coming back to the office after "Energy" on Friday night. He'd wanted to launch my message boards at 5:00am this morning. All I have to say is that it will be a very sad day indeed when I start showing up for work at 5:00am on Saturday mornings. For an employer to even mention the possibility of such a thing should be an OSHA violation accompanied by a stiff fine.
Speaking of OSHA violations, the ant plague continues in the back office where we in the Product Team reside. But it's not really the ants that are the problem, it's the zealous over-use of products like Raid and Black Flag by my colleagues, who appear to be working under the delusion that insecticide can't possibly harm human beings. After one particularly noxious (though surely ineffective) bout of spraying by the statistics girl, I knew I could no longer work in that environment. So, taking a cue from advice found in the book Death March, I relocated my entire office into an unoccupied cubicle out in the main space. It was a radical move, but no one told me I couldn't and indeed it seemed there were those who admired my pluck and the fact that I was, as one of the company slogan goes, "doing what I had to do."
At around 9:00pm, after a hard day of programming, I was getting ready to connect with Al for a ride back home to Ocean Beach. But he was chatting up a girl named Azar, a member of the staff from a Boston company that our company recently acquired. She's a fairly cute little Jordanian chick and our only female programmer. By the time I knew anything about it, they were planning to hit a bar. Al had it in his mind to hit Kelly's Steak House & Lounge, a genuine Swing bar in Mission Valley's Hotel Circle. It sounded like an adventure and I definitely wanted to go, but first I needed to change out of my sweat pants and get my wallet, which was back at my house. I knew I'd be carded if I tried to go to an unknown bar. Azar, who is 22, agreed, saying I looked "about 16." After the usual quiz, when she found out how old I really am, she was completely flabbergasted. "Gus has found the fountain of youth and he's not sharing," Al observed.
At my place, I let Sophie run around a little outside, put on some real pants and grabbed my wallet. At his place, Al fetched himself a sparkly white shirt. After some difficulty with her Bank of Boston Bank Card in a regional California money machine, Azar had success with the Bank of America.
Kelly's Steak House & Lounge was surprisingly genuine. It had the red carpets, the padded bars, and the late-Renoir-style semi-pornographic paintings. But more important was the sincerity of the customers. They were smartly-dressed middle-aged and elderly people, many of them dancing to the live piano music (which came from a convincing-sounding electronic keyboard). They were having such a fine time that for once it seemed that growing old wasn't such a terrible thing.
It was the sort of scene that I could easily imagine my friends (particularly my female friends) in Charlottesville enthusiastically embracing.
As we took our corner booth seat, the hostess, a bouncy late-30s variation on the Wacky Jen theme, dressed shoulder-to-knee in black lace, plopped down in front of us and said "I have to card everyone who looks younger than 50. She proceeded to pour over our IDs as if they were Tarot cards with something to say about our fortunes."
Perhaps best of all, the drinks were cheap. We all had stiff ones: whiskey on the rocks for me, bourbon for Al, and sex on the beach for Azar.
Al and I mostly conversed with Azar, who could go from excited discussion of arcane programming concepts to an "it really sucks" description of the nature of her relationships with men. She had a way of saying "it really sucks" as a form of punctuation, not necessarily intending criticism of the concept just mentioned.
Azar told us that hanging around boys (programmer boys, no less) all day and all night is driving her insane. Their palpable sexual frustration no longer amuses her.
Azar has a boyfriend back in Boston who is deeply committed to her, but I didn't get the sense that the feelings were completely mutual. One big thing going for the Boston boy, however, is the fact that he's an Arab. "I am such an Arab that I could never date a non-Arab ever again. It's a cultural thing," she explained. "Are you Muslim?" I asked. "Of course," she replied. "But what about that?" I asked, indicating her sex on the beach. "Well..." Obviously certain liberties had to be taken. I've dealt with enough college kids discovering their Jewishness to know exactly what she was going through. It wasn't about God; she was far too much of a logical person for such things. It was about culture. She's an Arab and this makes her proud. (By the way, this was the first time I'd ever spent any quality time with a Muslim, and I definitely got a kick out of the irony of it taking place over booze.)
After Al and I dropped Azar off at her place, Al said, "She's alright except for two things: she has a boyfriend and she only dates Arab men." Suffice it to say, Al is not an Arab.
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