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 all 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
Champaign-Urbana
Her parents are engineers but that wasn’t enough to keep them together.
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.”
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
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
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 [email protected].
“@”could become the “Mc” 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
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.
