Microserfs

week. She wants to set up forums about Fry’s not selling tampons being a metaphor for men’s fear of women, new product ideas, Barbie cults, and so forth. She’s obsessively into it.

“I could structure the forums and bulletin boards like an issue of Sassy … there’d be comments, and a place to ask other women for advice … what’s that column called?”

“Zits and stuff,” Karla promptly replies.

“Oh yeah. Well, I wouldn’t call it that, but something like personal narratives: ‘IT HAPPENED TO ME’.”

“I was the best programmer in my division and that jerk Tony got a promotion!”

“It happened to me: I dated a marketing manager and he turned out to be an asshole!”

“It happened to me: I was the only girl in Silicon Valley and still couldn’t get a date!” (Susan).

“It happened to me — I wrote a Melrose Place scriptwriting program that generated vibrant, nonlinear, marginally controversial plot lines and made a fortune!”

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:

ATMLIFCOMHISFLXNUCMEMCNTVEH

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 75$.

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