Minus: faces resemble those of beloved but unfunny cartoon characters in Family Circus
Plus: generic, Gap-like outfits
Minus: height/weight-disproportionate bodies imply eating disorders: bad role model for millennial youth yearning to be functional
Lego Minifigs:
Plus: interchangeable, unisex hairdos
Minus: clawlike hands are scary and potentially traumatizing
Plus: bodies can be incorporated into architecture
Minus: bad fashions
Dad hates his boss, "the 32-year-old prick."
"He's a humorless Total Quality Management freak who uses Anthony Robbins pep talks to motivate me into learning humiliatingly simple input codes. Hell, I'm younger than him in everything but body."
Dad's only one-third the way up the food chain in his division at Delta, and it must be really degrading for him. Mom said, "I know your father wanted a job badly, but maybe this isn't his cup of tea. Can't you people teach him C++ a bit faster?" We had to tell her that learning doesn't scale. But the idea of Dad being a hip and with-it coder is one that appeals to all of us in the office. Who knows where this will lead.
FRIDAY (one week later)
Dad quit his job. He showed up at the office around two in the afternoon to tell me. Michael promptly gave him some C++ manuals and put him in an empty chair in the corner and said, "Time to learn for real, Mr. Underhill."
Mom was P-I-S-S-E-D off. But even still, she knew the Delta thing was going nowhere. She figures Dad's just caught in this weird demographic glitch: too young to retire; too old to learn new tricks. She figures Dad's around for the long haul, so she told Dad two new rules she's made up for day-to-day living:
1) I'm never making you lunch.
2) You're never allowed to come shopping with me.
Other changes: the Gang of Two traipsed in this morning. "We have ceased being Maoists. We are now ideologically basing ourselves on Product Theory."
Being numb from all of their flip-flop-and from extreme politics in general-once again nobody bothered to look up. "Gee kids, that's nice. See Star Trek last night?"
Todd added, "The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth-it's about the redistribution of time."
His eyeballs were rolling inside his head with pleasure. "Instead of battling to control rubber boot factories, the modern post-Maoist wants to battle for your 45 minutes of daily discretionary time. The consumer electronics industry is all about lassoing your time, not your money-that time-greedy ego-part of the brain that wants to maximize a year's worth of year."
"But that," I said, "is exactly what Ethan believes."
Silence.
Ethan shot me a self-satisfied glance, and the ex-Gang of Two went to work without much ado.
"Really," said Michael, "I hope this here is the end of politics."
Karla said to me later on, "Did you know that Michael spends one hour a day on e-mail talking to someone named BarCode who lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada? Has he ever mentioned this to you?"
"Michael discussed his interior life?"
Todd overheard and added, "You know, if I read one more article about cybersex I am going to explode," to which Dusty said, "Now, Toddy, if you shoot one more vial of 'roids you will explode." Which shut him up.
But Todd's right. The media has gone berserk with Net-this and Net-that. It's a bit much. The Net is cool, but not that cool.
I thanked Michael for being nice to my Dad, letting him hang around the office and that kind of stuff, but Michael said, "Nice? I suppose so. But once he gets the basics down, he'll make an excellent representative for Oop!, don't you think? All that silver hair, and best of all, no dandruff."
Two pounds of solid rippling muscle gained this week! Maybe. It could have been my extended visit to the water fountain before the weigh-in that tilted the scales upward.
I had to drop off some diskettes at Todd and Dusty's tonight. I walked up to the house and through the main window I could see Todd slathering Dusty with barbecue-tinted goo as she was standing on a posing dais in front of a full-length mirror, happy as a clam. He was brushing Dusty's tummy; I peeked through the bougainvillea, thought twice about interrupting their ritual, and drove into the flower-scented, gasoline-powered California night.
SATURDAY
Karla and Dusty disappeared around ten this morning, returning around noon, with Dusty blubbering and her words spilling out of her-to Todd and to everybody else in the office-that she's pregnant.
"Oh fuck," said Dusty, "I've done so much weird shit to my body that I'll birth a grapefruit." She was howling. She was a real mess.
We made the usual "Version 2.0" jokes you have to make whenever a techie gets pregnant, and cooled her down. Ethan called a doctor friend on his cellular phone and bullied him out of his golf game and made him give Dusty a pep talk. And we all had to promise to come to the ultrasound with her. Todd bailed out and visited the gym all afternoon.
It was actually a lovely, lovely day and the sun was hot and we walked down the streets, and the colors were so exotic and bright and the air so quiet and we felt alive and living.
MONDAY
''The petty bourgeois ideal of withdrawal into Jeffersonian autonomy is no longer sustainable in a simultaneous, globalized environment with the asynchronous, instantaneous transfer of capital from one cashpoint to another."
"Just piss off and get into the car, Dusty."
Karla and I drove with Dusty to her clinic in Redwood City. She's so convinced her baby is going to be a grapefruit. I foresee seven and a half more months of extreme anxiety and ultrasounds. On the way out she said, "It's leaving me, you know."
"What's leaving you, Dusty?"
Dusty was looking out the back window of the van. "Ideology. Yes-I can feel it leaving my body. And I don't care. And I don't miss it."
We drove a while-caught all the red lights-they were doing construction on Camino Real. At stoplight number seventeen, Dusty turned around, looked out the Microbus's rear window one final time, and whispered, "Bye."
She then turned to Karla and roared, "Off to Burger King, now! Three fishwiches, double tartar sauce, large fries, and a Big Gulp-type beverage. Are you with me, kids? I'm rilly, rilly hungry, and if you tell Todd we went to Burger King, I'll grind you both into Chicken McNuggets."
"Revolutionary, babe. We are there. Whalers ahoy!"
Poor Todd-"Pops"-he was in a daze all day, and vanished off to the gym around six. I went out the door to follow him because maybe he needed to talk, but instead of going to get into his Supra, he walked down the street, and so I walked behind him, wondering what it must be like to be hit with the notion of spawning. He then surprised me a few blocks later by entering a small Baptist church. I waited a minute and then I followed him into the church, feeling the small whoosh of cool interior air on my face, and I walked down the center of the aisle and sat next to Todd who was praying in a pew. He looked up at me and I said, "Hi," and sat down next to him.
He wasn't sure what to do with his hands. I hummed, "Stopped into a church..."
He said, "Huh?"
I said, '"California Dreaming'... the song."
He said, "Right."
I said, "Here's a deaclass="underline" I'm going to sit right here, right beside you, and I am going to dream. And you ... well... why not continue praying?"
"Right'' he said. And he prayed and I dreamed.
Oh-Ethan finished his freeway.
6. Chyx
MONDAY (One week later)
From behind the fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions of our office I heard Emmett mumble to Susan: "Hey, Sooz-want to go out tonight?"
"I don't know, Emm ..."