Their eyes met and they squeezed each other's hands-it's a good thing they like each other, because otherwise it would be like two monster trucks chewing each other up at the KingDome.
Karla and Susan were being catty about Dusty:
Karla: "Dusty-sounds like the name of someone who rides in a radio station traffic news-copter."
Susan: "She looks like she just escaped from an Ice-Follies Smurfs-on-Ice mall show-tousled mall hair, spandex, and perky perma-smile."
Michael closed his door. He doesn't like this side of human nature, but later Karla said it's because he's attracted to super-strong women. "Trust me," she said. "I can tell these things.''
Ethan is building a Lego freeway cloverleaf. Once it's finished, he's going to smash it and repair it. He's been horrified by the Northridge quake in Los Angeles. He's indeed a Valley boy.
At a Canon photocopy shop he enlarged a news wire photo of the collapsed Antelope Valley freeway to up to wall-sized and hung it in the office as a model to build from. I suppose he should have used the money to pay his CABLE BILL, but Karla thinks he likes to have an excuse to visit us more at the office.
Michael wisely allows no cable in the office and has forbidden us from playing Melrose Place and hockey fight dubs on the office VCR unit.
Ethan has already demolished the Wilshire Modernist block of the Palo Alto City Hall Dad constructed.
"Reconstruction is part of the plan," said Ethan, and Dad, although miffed, took pity on Ethan and decided not to get huffy.
We LOVE our new office and we no longer have to worry about rubbing our fingers on surfaces and finding accumulations of Ethan's dead scalp particles. Dad has a Dustbuster mounted on the wall. We also have SPACE.
Nobody scored last night. Susan got Phil's phone number and Bug got the PF Magic guy's number, even though he's not sure if he's straight or not. The 1990s!
Susan was a bit sheepish around me and Karla, because she knows Phil is a loser, and she knows that we know.
Tech moment: we have our own Internet domain and are subservient to nobody. Our house is wired directly to the Net with a mail-order 486 using Linux on a 14.4 modem with a SLIP connection to the Little Garden (an Internet service provider down here). I am now daniel@oop.com. "@" could become the "Me" or "Mac" of the next millennium.
Surprise: Mom told me that Dad's been looking for work elsewhere- and that Michael knows about it. "He needs to be among his own kind, dear."
Actually, today was just a big waste of a day, work-wise. I didn't get anything done because I had too many interruptions. I'd start to do something, then I'd be distracted by something else, forget what I was doing in the first place, and then get so worried that I wasn't getting anything done, that it wrecked even further my ability to get anything done. Sometimes too much communication is too much communication. I should rent a Nature video and relax, but instead, tonight we rented The Poseidon Adventure and watched the ship turning upside down scene over and over about fifty times and then we rented Earthquake and watched LA dismantle itself about fifty times, frame-by-frame.
Mom was in the breakfast nook typing a letter to her sister on an IBM Selectric and we got into an argument about whether anybody made them anymore. Maybe in Malaysia.
WEDNESDAY
Dusty is now working with us! Michael hired her under the condition that she devote herself to the company and confine her body experimentation to off-hours-as well as to forgo aerobic instruction moonlighting altogether until shipping. "And no smart drugs!" said Michael. "Not that it's my business, but smart drugs turn people into Tasmanian Devils, not Einsteins."
"Touché, Michelangelo," said Dusty. "That's French for meow." She has a hard time calling anybody by their real name.
Dusty was trying on a new marigold yellow posing bikini she's hoping to wear in this Fall's Iron Rose IV Competition in San Diego. Dusty herself was the color of a roasted turkey.
Karla and Susan were once again certainly gaping. But in the end they broke down, approaching her, asking probing questions, touching her body like it was the monolith in 2001. They've-we've-never seen such a hyper-articulated body before. It reminds me of the first time I ever saw an SGI rendering at full blast.
"Toddy" has bailed out of his geek house near the Shoreline off-ramp and has moved in with Dusty up in Redwood City. Eyebrows shot up at the news of such speedy cohabitation, and then Todd confessed he and Dusty had been seeing each other for MONTHS. How could he keep a secret like that in an office as small as ours?
Look and Feel escaped this afternoon from their newly reconfigured Habitrail and chewed up the caboose on Michael's Lego train. So they're on probation now.
All of us went to the Tonga Room at the Fairmont in San Francisco to celebrate Dusty's first day as our hacker, working with Michael. It was this incredible blowout, like in college. Dusty cut in front of all these people who were lined up to get in and then blithely waved us over to the table she'd procured. Cool! She's a bulldozer.
The Tonga Room is filled with rich dentists from Dusseldorf watching this Gilligan 's Island fake Tiki raft float across an old swimming pool while fake thunder and rain roar, and a live band plays disco medleys. We ordered these ridiculous umbrella and fruit-wedge drinks with high centers of gravity, so every time somebody got up to dance (Oyez Como Va!), all the drinks fell over and the waitresses just wanted to kill us. We had to switch tables three times because of the fruit pulp buildup, and the ochre tablecloths looked like swamps of barf.
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."