Susan's on a crusade. Or a rampage.
Karla printed out the following letters and posted them all on her cubicle. They're HAL 9000's letters from 2001:
ATM HIS
MEM
LIF FLX CNT
COM
NUC VEH
Ethan flamed some of Bug's code this afternoon. "Jesus, Bug-what are you making here-hot dogs? You've put in everything including the snout . . . everything but the squeal."
Bug told him to piss off, and who does he think he is ... Bill? The old Bug would have held a local McDonald's hostage with a sawed-off carbine. Good for Bug.
We were discussing computer-aided animation and we realized that it would have taken every computer in the world then in existence to morph Elizabeth Montgomery's nose into a twinkle-twinkle on Bewitched-
"ENIACS and all that," said Karla. "You could do it on a Mac now. In two minutes."
Jeremy came over this afternoon, and he's Bug's double. Twinsville.
He showed up at the front door of the office and all seven of us stampeded foyer-ward like 101 Dalmatians to gawk out the front window as he and Bug walked away to Jeremy's Honda.
Karla said the relationship had to be somewhat serious because "you know how hard it is to lure anybody down here from San Francisco." She's right. You could offer San Franciscans a free Infiniti J30 and they'd still have some excuse not to drive 25 measly miles down to Silicon Valley.
Actually, there's a slight back-and-forth snobbery between the Valley and the City. The Valley thinks the City is snobby and decadent, and the City thinks the Valley is techishly boring and uncreative. But I can see these impressions starting to blur. This all sounds like that old Joan Baez song, "One Tin Soldier."
While taking Misty on a walk with Mom through the Stanford Arboretum, Mom was telling me about this conversation she heard between two people with Alzheimer's down at the seniors home where she volunteers:
"A: How you doin'?
B: Pretty good. You?
A: How you doin' ?
B: I'm okay.
A: So you're doing okay?
B: How you doin'?"
I laughed, and she asked me why, and I said, "It reminds me of America Online chat rooms!" She demanded an example, so I gave her one:
A: Hey there.
B:Hi,A.
A: Hi, B
C:Hi
B: Look, C's here.
A:Hi,C!
B: CCCCCCCCCC C:A + B=A + B
A: Gotta go
B:Bye,A C: Bye, A
B:Poo
C: Poo poo
"This," I said, "is the much touted, transglobal, paradigm-shifting, epoch-defining dialogue to which every magazine on earth is devoting acres of print."
Oh-Misty's fur was covered in burrs, and it took us fifteen minutes to remove them.
Mom really has all of this new energy now that she swims every day. And her confidence has swelled enormously since winning the swim meet. She's been restacking her rock pile with extra vigor.
THURSDAY
Astounding gossip meltdown: Susan and poor, meek little Emmett Couch, our manga-phobic storyboarder, went nuclear. It was SO embarrassing- right in the middle of the office Emmett started bellowing, "You just think of me as a piece of meat, Susan-I'm not sure I like that."
And Susan said back, "I don't call you a piece of meat. I call you my
fuck toy."
(Susan surveys room for rebuttal, we all sit there, pretending to work, our eyes like sad-eyed velvet painting waifs, staring at our keyboards.)
"Well, I'm not sure I like that," Emmett says.
"Well, what do you want-to take it further? You want a relationship?''
"Well. . ."
"Stop sniveling. I thought the deal was, we just have sex and leave it at that. Don't annoy me. I have to get back to work."
So Emmett went back to work. We, of course, were silent, but the instant-mail was flying on each other's screens. Blink blink blink. We were riveted. Poor Emmett's in love, and Susan doesn't want that. Or maybe she likes this type of relationship. People always get what they need. She's truly earned her stud medal on this one.
I went to Price-Costco. My weekly job is to purchase in-office snacks, all set up in an IKEA shelf unit in the kitchen. Everything costs 750.
Mr. Noodles (for Dusty)
Pop-Tarts
hot chocolate mix
Cup-A-Soup
granola bars
Chee'tos
Famous Amos cookies
Fig Newtons
microwave popcorn
BBQ potato chips
Karla, Bug, and I went on a tour of "Multi-Media Gulch" later in the afternoon. What a joke. There's nothing there! Or rather, there's lots of stuff around the north end of the Bay Bridge, in around the warehousey neighborhood-many companies doing cool things-but there's no public interface, so you might as well be in any warehouse district anywhere. No T-shirt stands.
We met up with Jeremy, who, as it turns out, is highly into body manipulation: tattoos, piercings, and (scary) branding. He's really political and he talks about queer-this and queer-that and the whole thing reminds me of our office's recent fling with Marxism, and I try and pretend it's fascinating, but my mind does wander off. Like when someone starts describing their stereo.
I couldn't help thinking, though, that it was a good thing Bug moved (o San Francisco-being gay is such a nonissue here. You could be an ultrapolitical gay activist or a gay Republican; there's no overriding clique dominating. And fortunately for Bug, there seems to be a bigger dating pool to draw from than in Coeur d'Alene or Seattle.
Anyway, Bug, Jeremy, Karla, and I stopped by Body Manipulations on Fillmore Street. The guy in front of us was waiting to get a "Gigue"-a pierce inserted onto the strip of skin between the scrotum and the anus.
"But your body is your hard drive!" said Karla, to embarrassing withering stares of everybody in the store.
Karla, Bug, and I blanched and Bug asked Jeremy if his earring could wait. Jeremy was furious and stormed out. So the piercing's on hold, at least temporarily, and Bug is in the doghouse with Jeremy. Bug said, "I think there's a lot about this new culture I don't quite understand yet. I'm coming to it pretty late."
Whenever Abe e-mails me, he uses a fast-food-related tag line. I've compiled a list. Herewith:
Ample Parking
Ask Your Manager about Unionizing ... No, Don't
Batter-fried Batter: Yum
Backlit Plexiglas Signs: Excellent BB Gun Targets
Cat Food: The Next Level
Customers Are Taking too Many Free Napkins
e coli. 157 Bacteria Colonizes Undercooked Patties
Elderly Employees Easier to Bully
Everybody Fears Clowns
Fishwich ... Real Word ... Yes or No?
Focus Grouping Deems Lamb-burgers Unpopular
Garish Color Schemes Discourage Loitering
Gift Certificates Make Shitty Presents
Hairnets
Hard to Envision Ronald McDonald Dating
More Orange Drink Machines at Birthday Parties
Muzak Discourages Loitering Teen Thugs
Pictures Instead of Words on Cash Register Buttons
Pseudo-randomly Shaped Beef Patties
Shamrock Burgers Unlikely
Swan Nuggets Tempt Yuppies
28 Dead in Random Sniping Bloodbath
Unhappy Meals-And That's Okay
Uniforms Must Affirm Asexuality
Younger Staff Exhibiting Insolence
FRIDAY
Susan and Emmett have made up, but Karla says that it’s going to be tempestuous between them. Susan likes bullying, and Emmett likes to be bullied. They were down in the parking lot earlier on filling up partially rotted green bell peppers with red marine alkyd enamel paint which they will then hurl at sexually exploitative billboards later tonight. Emmett wears the same expression on his face that Misty wears whenever Dusty twirls her around like a Maypole. He's just frighteningly in love. I mean, / love Karla, but Emmett seems, what is the word . . . enslaved.
*UH OH*.
But then, Susan's the obsessive type, too. So they're a pair.
Mom and I took Misty for a morning walk today and Mom was chattier than usual. Her work at the seniors home has her thinking quite a bit, it seems. Between the seniors home, swimming, the library, and Dad, she's so busy nowadays.