Ethan said Susan still felt guilty for putting too much work and money into our gift baskets at Christmas.
I thought that overdecoration and nice houses might be the regional version of the never-used kayak in the garage up at Microsoft. But a darker thought emerged: these may possibly be techies who HAVE A LIFE, and they're upping the ante for the rest of us.
Susan, in spite of ragging on the decor with us, started fellating our hostess, Ann, over the subject of houses. They were talking about some expensive store in Pacific Heights where no doubt all of this furniture comes from.
Ann: "Fillamento, it's on Fillmore and Sacramento. They have the best stuff, I just got this amazing coverlet for our bed there. They had to special-order it from Germany, but it is so gorgeous ... do you want to see it?"
Susan: "Of course!"
Off they went, comparing decor purchases. You'd never know that Ann used to be a chip designer.
The local rage is obscure, expensive premium vodkas-it's the litmus of cool at geek parties. Later on, Susan, Karla, and I were standing around drinking Ketel-1, when some guy who'd been checking Karla out came up and said, "Hi, I'm Phil, I'm a PDA."
PDAs are what Newton is-it's an acronym for Personal Digital
Assistant.
"You look more analog than digital," Susan oh-so-wittily batted back at
him.
"It stands for Peons Down at Apple!" Phil chortled, ignoring Susan, and zooming in on KARLA. It was really embarrassing, because Susan wasn't picking up on the fact that she was being ignored by Phil. Karla was grossed out by Phil, and I was on red alert about this big hulk zooming in on Karla. I inserted myself between him and Karla. "Maybe it stands for Public Display of Affection." I put my arm around Karla and introduced everybody.
Susan was laughing at Phil's jokes- she's so desperate for a dating architecture in her life, and when Phil turned around Karla mouthed the words: REMOVE HIM FROM MY LIFE to Susan, then grabbed my shoulder, and we went off to the den to marvel at the amount of stuff owned by our hosts. We felt like East Germans visiting West Germany for the first time. Phil, meanwhile, sensing defeat, finally noticed Susan, and began chatting her up.
For the next hour, we watched Phil regale Susan with exciting tales of product meetings, shipping deadlines, engineering crises, and code names for products.
I can't stop marveling at how together geeks are in the Valley. At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award. Easy. Black and White.
Here, it's so much more complicated-you're supposed to have an exciting, value-adding job that utilizes your creativity, a wardrobe from Nordstrom's or at the very least Banana Republic, a $400,000 house, a cool European or Japanese car, the perfect relationship with someone as ambitious, smart, and well-dressed as yourself, and extra money to throw parties so that the whole world can observe what a life you have, indeed. It makes me miss Redmond, but at the same time, it is kind of inspiring. I feel conflicted.
Even Michael noticed, with a rare lapse into pop culture: "Perhaps David Byrne was talking about the geeks inheriting the earth in that Talking Heads song, 'This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! My God! How did I get here ? "'
Bug talked to a guy who's a game producer at a company called PF
Magic. (What's up with all of these companies named "Magic"? Is it some-New Age/George Lucas-type deal or what! Uniquely Northern Californian.) Bug thinks the guy might be gay, but it was hard to tell. "All the guys around here dress well enough to have their heterosexuality be suspect . . . it's not very helpful for me."
Bug has done a little damage himself over at the Stanford Shopping Center, as part of his new program to "become enculturated into my new lifestyle."
It would be so weird to all of a sudden have to take ail of the myths and stereotypes and information about another kind of sexual orientation and somehow wade through them in order to construct yourself within that image. Susan's kind of doing it, too, but within heterosexuality-all of a sudden she's a Sexual Being, and I think she's having to learn as much about sex as Bug is, even though theoretically she's been heterosexual all her life.
Many geeks don't really have a sexuality-they just have work. I think the sequence is that they get jobs at Microsoft or wherever right out of school, and they're so excited to have this "real" job and money that they just figure that the relationships will naturally happen, but then they wake up and they're thirty and they haven't had sex in eight years. There are always these flings at conferences and trade shows, and everyone brags about them, but nothing seems to emerge from them and life goes back to the primary relationship: Geek and Machine.
It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out-something more "user friendly."
Ethan got through to his parents on a cellular phone around sunset; he learned they were having the grandest of times, barbecuing burgers and corn on the front lawn, and meeting their neighbors for the first time in years. "Mom said the Ronald Reagan Library was untouched. Like I care."
I think he wanted more drama. I think he would have been happier to hear that his mother was pinioned beneath a collapsed chimney, trickling blood into the phone receiver held up to her ear by his father.
Todd didn't come to the party. He was out on an actual, real, genuine, not-fake, date-style DATE tonight.
I'm coming to the conclusion about the human subconscious . . . that, no matter how you look at it, machines really are our subconscious. I mean, people from outer space didn't come down to earth and make machines for us ... we made them ourselves. So machines can only be products of our being, and as such, windows into our souls ... by monitoring the machines we build, and the sorts of things we put into them, we have this amazingly direct litmus as to how we are evolving.
Champaign-Urbana
Her parents are engineers but that wasn't enough to keep them together.
Pull the wires from the wall
Chelyabinsk-70
TUESDAY
Shake-up: Todd has begun seeing a female body builder named Dusty, so I guess Armageddon can only be a little ways away. And here's the freaky part-Dusty codes! She's done systems for Esprit and Smith & Hawken. But she's the uncodiest female I've ever met.
"We met at the protein drink sales case at Gold's Gym," beamed Todd, showcasing Dusty, who emerged into our office like a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. "Dusty," Todd called, "strike the pose!" From offstage a ghetto blaster pumped out thwomping lipstick-commercial Eurodisco.
Dusty-late twenties or early thirties, with titanium hamstrings (and perhaps too much time spent in tanning booths) in ragged fringed hotpants and a ripped T-shirt commenced vogueing official International Bodybuilding Federation poses. We gaped openly. Such brazen posing!
Dusty then grabbed Misty, who Mom brought downtown and then promptly left with us while she did some shopping, and twirled her by the paws in circles above our office's Lego garden. All that was missing were popping flash bulbs and a smoke machine, and Misty, unused to being picked up in such a manner, was blissed and became Dusty's instant lifelong fan.
Dusty put down the now-dizzy Misty and said, "Yeah . . ." in a Chesterfields-smoked-through-a-tracheotomy-slit voice (Dusty gets her voice from barking out aerobics commands, which, Todd informs us, she teaches) ". . . all those big plastic tubs of branch-chain protein growth formula with gold lettering-Toddy and me were fighting for the last container of MetMax."