Microserfs

Dusty’s older than Todd by about five years. During a carbo-loading break later in the day, she started telling me and Karla all this personal stuff. It doesn’t take much with Dusty. The distinction between herself and the public is muzzy.

“I made the switch and started liking younger guys about two years ago. The older ones kept getting all serious … and wanting to discuss marriage. The young kids are puppy dogs and when I want to get rid of them, I just start talking babies and before you know it they start giving me reasons why they have to hang out at their friends’, and why they can’t come over.”

She found a piece of skin on her chicken breast and picked it off.

“I think that once I start having babies, I’m going to forget my body. But tell that to Toddy and you’re dead meat. I think he’s ‘a keeper.’ Remember — I can crush you into cat food with my thumb and index finger alone.”

And she could!

Karla says that Dusty’s freaked out that any baby she might have will be a freak because of the fantastic quantities of scary digestibles she’s eaten over the years, on top of her implants and her flirtations with bulimia and extreme diets.

“She’s done it all,” says Karla, “steroids, uppers, downers, coke, poppers, Pritikin, Oprah …”

Went with Karla up to Mom and Dad’s and helped them sort things out for recycling. When nobody was looking, I hucked some fallen tangerines at the Valotas’ house down below ours. Mr. Valota is this Gladys-Kravitz- from- Bewitched type guy who somehow taps into all of the misinformation, apocrypha, and bad memes floating about the Valley and feeds them back to Mom in the aisles of Draeger’s in Menlo Park. He’s always saying discouraging things about Oop! to Mom. Gee thanks, Mr. Valota.

I liked hearing the tangerines go thunk as they hit the cedar shingles of his lanai. It’s never the Mr. Valotas of this world whose houses burn down.

I was breathing really hard as I was carrying the Rubbermaid Roughneck containers to the end of the driveway. I hope nobody noticed that I’m way out of shape.

Abe’s list of things to do on how to get a life:

1) Move out of a group house

2) Get involved in non-computer-related activities

3) Treat yourself to a bubble bath (I couldn’t think of anything else)

TUESDAY

Dusty’s twin sister, Michelle, came to visit. She’s a collagen sales rep for a biotech firm near San Diego and like a plumper, less turbo-charged Dusty.

She ambled around the Lego garden for a while, watched us code, then yawned pointedly. After further multiple theatrical yawns, she then pulled two Simpsons dubs on VHS out of her purse and started watching them on the VCR, and one by one we melted away from our workstations and began watching along with her.

Michael arrived with Dad, found us recumbent and laughing, freaked out, and sent us back to work, sending Michelle packing on the CalTrain. Michael is now Bill!

Dusty said Ciao, and resumed tweaking her algorithms. Dusty’s poor parents — all they wanted was a nice pair of folk-singing, shawl-knitting Leslie Van Houtens and Patricia Krenwinkels. Instead they got two lighter-complexioned Grace Jones replicants morphed together with a Malibu Barbie.

Date update: Susan is without a tattoo.

It turns out Dusty’s an expert on, of all things, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (UC Santa Cruz undergrad). Talk about pure randomness. She did this to please her Leftoid hippie freak parents. (“It was an accelerated program that only took two years,” she says. “Subjectivity is so much faster to scale.”)

Discovering that Dusty was well informed about some calcified aspect of European history was like discovering — I don’t know — like discovering that the happy face on the Kool-Aid pitcher is a cross-dresser. It’s so random.

I mention this because tonight Todd and Dusty had dinner with a crew of moping ex-Marxist buddies of her parents over in Berkeley — all of them feeling left behind by the tide of history, singing freedom songs with a 5- stringed guitar; facial hair. That kind of stuff. There were probably lots of candles.

I think the religious feeling made Todd homesick for his religion-frenzied parents in Port Angeles. He returned to the office, brooded, and then he started to cry, then he went out on the lawn and didn’t return for an hour.

Oh, and this afternoon I caught Ethan scrounging under the couch cushions, in pursuit of lost coins. The embarrassment!

WEDNESDAY

Big gossip — Todd has announced he’s becoming a … Marxist! Of all things.

“Oh, Christ, Todd,” said Ethan, “that’s like announcing you’re becoming Bugs Bunny.”

Karla asked, “A Marxist? But Todd — the Wall came down in 1989.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“No, of course it doesn’t,” said Ethan.

“Arrogant bourgeois cochon,” Todd slung back.

So anyway, Todd’s found something external to believe in. I don’t think it’s a matter of dumbness or smartness, just his need to need, as ever.

Ethan was on the warpath: “If Todd expects us to treat him with some sort of respect just because he believes in some sort of outdated, cartoon-like ideology, he has another thing coming.”

Ethan is being “reactionary” (Todd told me the word). But, as with any recent conversions to any new belief, Todd does exude a righteousness that is a touch off-putting, if not boring.

Michael said of the matter, “Everything else aside, his preaching interferes with his coding — as if bodybuilding didn’t already use up enough of his brain’s CPU. I think his parents being so religious and all, he has been trained with a deep need to follow.”

Karla said, “Let’s call them Boris and Natasha from now on.”

Karla and I were both perplexed as we discussed the change in bed. “Where on earth did politics come from?” I asked. “Todd’s gone from being historically empty to becoming a young post-Marxist, post-human code cruncher. Converted on the posing dais, I suppose.” “Red in his bed.”

So who says people don’t change?

Abe e-mailed from his mini-holiday in Vancouver:

I’m at the Westin in Vancouver. Room service asked me, inocently enough, “How many people will be eating?” and I replied, “2”, because I didn’t want to seem like I was alone. Which I wwas. How bad is this on a scale of one to ten?

My reply:

Abe … it’s an *ELEVEN*

Dad got a callback from Delta Airlines for a job in their billing systems department. “It’s tangential to high- tech — not really part of it — but …” Dad’s interview is in two days. Bug and Dad went into town to get their hair cut together at one of those barber shops with a stuffed bass on the wall. Bug said it was like going to a Toppy’s in Moscow.

Political nuttiness:

Todd: “Marxism presupposed that technology would never pass beyond a certain point …