Two things: Dusty said, "I put myself through school working as a waitress. The guys loved me. I brought them food and beer-and then I left them. Pigs."
Karla and Susan said, "Amen," much to my horror. They were all wearing those little drink umbrellas in their hair.
Michael noted that the Tonga Room uses a form of ice that is neither cubic nor slush-based: "Someone had better notify 7-Eleven immediately. It's a niche!"
Dusty gave Susan lessons in dating architecture: "Tech women hold all the cards, and they know it. Tech men outnumber tech women by about three to one, so the women can choose and discard mates at will. And let's face it, it's cool for a guy to be dating a tech chick."
I inwardly agreed with this. "Tech chicks" all seem so much wiser and mature than the guys (the Karla Attraction Factor) that I think they must get fed up. I overheard Susan and Karla complaining about tech guys at a geek party last month, and I started to feel a little insecure. Up at Microsoft, geeks looked exactly like what they were-nerds, misfits, Dungeons & Dragons players out on day pass. Down here in the Valley, these tech guys are good-looking-they can pass in the "normal" world without revealing their math team past. Whenever Susan and Karla started gushing over some cute guy, I started saying, "He's probably in MARKETING." It made me feel better.
Susan, nonetheless, wanted to know why she was having such a dating problem. Dusty said, "I think your problem is that you think everyone else is a freak except you, but everybody's a freak-you included-and once you learn that, the World of Dating is yours."
I thought Susan would go ballistic, but instead she agreed.
THURSDAY
Dad was out today-job hunting. Anywhere else on earth except here in the Valley he wouldn't have a chance, but here he might find something.
Bug is freaked out because Magic Eye stereograms, the black light posters of the 1990s, don't work with him. He's worried it's color-blindness linked, and he called the Garage Museum down in San Jose to see if it means some-Ihing bad. He remembers those genetics charts they had there. "I'm stereo-gramatically blind!"
Ethan and I went out for a drink again. He was really swigging down the drinks, and so I asked him if it was smart to drink while taking antidepressants. He said, "Technically no, it's a pretty fuck-witted thing to do, but drinking allows me to take an identity holiday."
I asked him what this meant. He said that since the new isomers of anti-depressants are rewiring his brain, and since he's becoming a new person because of it, every day he forgets more and more what the old person was who used to be.
"On the stuff I'm taking, booze never really makes you smashed," he said, "but it does allow me to remember the sensation of what / used to be and feel like. Just briefly. Life wasn't all bad back then. I'd never go back to it full time, but I do get nostalgic for my old personality. I imagine in a parallel-forked road universe there's a sad, fucked-up Ethan, achieving nothing, feeling cramped, and going nowhere. I don't know. Once you've experienced the turbo-charged version of yourself, there's no going backward."
He had another Wallbanger-"You know, pal-maybe I should de-wire myself. De-wiring would reconnect me to the world of natural time-sunsets and rainbows and crashing waves and Smurfs." He took a final sip. "Nahhhh..."
Susan caught a cold, "From having my panties systematically saturated with fruit pulp at the Tonga Room."
Tomorrow we move into our house-sitting house.
Before bed I told Karla about Ethan's identity holiday-of drinking to recapture the feeling of what your real personality used to feel like.
"It's all about identity," she said.
She said, "We look at a flock of birds and we think one bird is the same as any other bird-a bird unit. But a bird looks at thousands of people, at a Giants game up at Candlestick Park, say, and all they see is 'people units.' We're all as identical to them as they are to us. So what makes you different from me? Him from you? Them from her! What makes any one person any different from any other? Where does your individuality end and your species-hood begin? As always, it's a big question on my mind. You have to remember that most of us who've moved to Silicon Valley, we don't have the traditional identity-donating structures like other places in the world have: religion, politics, cohesive family structure, roots, a sense of history or other prescribed belief systems that take the onus off individuals having to figure out who they are. You're on your own here. It's a big task, but just look at the flood of ideas that emerges from the plastic!"
I stared at her, and I imagine she was assuming I was digesting- compiling-what she'd just told me, but instead, all I could think of, looking into her eyes, was that there was this entity-Karla-who was different from all others I knew because just under the surface of her skin lay the essence of herself, the person who thinks and dreams these things she tells to me and only me. I felt like a lucky loser and I kissed her on the nose. So that's me for the day.
Oh ... I found a big stack of old Sunset magazines for sale in a secondhand shop. I bought them for Mom. She's a Sunset freak. Mom picked them up like they were feathers. She's strong now. She's all for Dusty developing her body. She and Dusty have been comparing notes. It's such a relief when your friends date cool people.
FRIDAY
Abe:
Today I called 1-800 numbers and ragged on companies about therir products. I complsined to the Matell hotline (1-880-524-TOYS) that the new HotWheels aren't as cool the ones I had when I wazs growing up. The only decent one they have is a Lexzus SC400. I've bought 3 of them (the toys), but be this as it may, Mattel is NOT exonerated, where are the Bubble cars, may I ask? So this is my life, Dan. C'est la Vie.
Mattel karma! Susan came storming into the office late in the afternoon, having just visited a Toys-R-Us store in pursuit of a present for her niece. Susan was furious about Mattel products, too-in particular about Barbie dolls. As I was the only person in the office, I received the entirety of her postfeminist critique.
"The aisle-it was pink-I mean, the entire aisle was this shocking, moist, Las Vegas labia pink color, and it was a big aisle, Dan. Tens of thousands of Barbies gazing vapidly at me-this wall of mall hair-the aisle haunted with the ghostly sound of purged vomit yet to come-of unsustainable desire. Their necks thicker than their waists; sparkles; an incitement to eating disorders-"
Susan was just going on and on, so I used that tactic you use on little kids who won't stop crying-I simply changed the subject. I told her how weird it is to think that simply by walking down the wrong aisle at loys-R-Us at the wrong moment in your child's development, you can forever screw up their future: "They have a whole aisle devoted to McDonald's restaurant products-french-fry making machines, burger makers, shake makers . . . Say you overlook the computer aisle and walk down the McDonald's aisle instead-one tiny error and your kid's got a drive-thru headset surgically embedded in his cranium for the next seven decades.
"Toy stores are like Brave New World. Mom! Pop! Choose your aisle correctly. That's all I can say."
I later e-mailed this Huxleyan thought to Abe who replied:
*1959*
100th McDonald's: Fon du Lac, Wisconsin
*1960*
200th McDonald's: KnoHuille, Tennessee
*1964* Filet-o-Fish horn
*1966*
First indoor-seating McDonald's: Huntsville, Alabama
*1970*
First McDonald's breakfast: IDaikiki, Hawaii
*1973* ^ Quarter Pounder born
*1975*
Egg McMuffin born
*1975* Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonions-
onasesameseedbun
*1983* McNuggets born
At the office we've decided that instead of Friday being jeans day, we'd have Boxer Shorts Day instead. It's way comfier, way sexier, and it's funny watching Michael admonish the male staff members, "Er . . . gentlemen: no units displayed if at all possible."