"But before you go and think I'm a lost cause, you should know that I gave my Barbie admirable pursuits - I took apart my brother's Hot Wheels and made a Barbie Toyota Assembly Plant, giving Barbie white overalls, a clipboard, and I provided jobs for many otherwise unemployed Americans." She paused and looked up from her keyboard. "God, no wonder my parents refused to believe I was intelligent."
MONDAY
This afternoon while visiting Todd and Dusty's cottage in Redwood City, I tried to find a snack in their fridge.
Bad idea.
Pills, lotions, capsules, powders . . . anything except what normal human beings might call "food." There was a Rubbermaid container of popcorn. There was Turbo Tea, Amino mass, pure Creatine, Mus-L-Blast 2000+, raw chickens, Super Infiniti 3000, and chromium supplements as well as small bottles I thought it more polite not to inquire about.
I really have to wonder if Todd's doing steroids. I mean, he's just not physically normal. We're all going to have to face this.
Dusty was out at the Lucky Mart buying bananas and kelp. I asked Todd, "Shit, Todd - what is it exactly you want your body to do for you? What is it your body's not doing for you now that it's going to do for you at some future date?" Not really Todd's sort of question.
"I think I want to have sex using a new body which allows me to not have to remember my ultrareligious family." Todd mulled this over. We looked around the apartment, strewn with hex dumbbells and rubber flooring mats. "My body was just something I could believe in because there was nothing else around."
* * *
Susan was sulking about her dating architecture here in the Valley. Her fling with Mr. Intel ended long ago - she says Intel's culture is too macho to accept macho women. Phil the PDA was history eons ago. She kept talking about that Mary Tyler Moore episode where Mary tabulates the number of dates she's had over the span of her dating career and gets depressed. And then there was a big debate as we tried to remember if that was the episode where she began dating Lou.
Susan only seems to meet techies. ("Well, Sooz," says Karla, "you do spend almost all of your time in the Valley . . .")
"It's not just the techiness, Kar - it's that the number of flings I've had in my life now outnumbers the number of relationships. I've crossed a line."
Tonight she has a date with a Marina District tattoo artist, so we're all expecting her to show up tomorrow with a Pentium chip etched into her shoulder.
The thing about Susan is that she's making the leap into self-reconstruction so late in life. Her new dominant attitude comes from a genuine need, but it's so twisted by years of - I don't know exactly what. I don't know as much about Susan as I ought, I suppose. Her IBM upbringing and all of that. But the subject. . . how to broach it?
* * *
Ethan seems to have forgotten his partially completed freeway. We've nicknamed it the "Information Superhighway."
* * *
Susan reformatted and zinged-up Dad's resume on Quark. He used a (oh God . . .) dot-matrix printer to do his old resume. Mom's Selectric would have even been cooler.
* * *
This afternoon I mistakenly said Palo Alto was in the "Silicone Valley," and Ethan snapped at me, "Silicone is what they put inside of tits, Dan-O. It's Silikawn . . ."
Boom! Dusty began telling us about her first breast implants at age I 9, its subsequent failure, her litigation and her support groups - tales of black goo seeping from nipples, ". . . immunosuppressive globules of silicone gel migrating through my blood system, triggering this never-ending yuppie flu. It was awful. That's how I got into body manipulation and extreme health . . . because of the globules."
Yet again, the Dustmistress had us all riveted. Karla and Susan are now totally obsessed with Dusty's arms, which are like leather-sheathed steel cables from the Bay Bridge, all digitally animated like Spielberg dinosaurs. When she flexes her arms, you feel queasy - like you're going to be eaten. She says that because she has long arms, she has to work "harder to the power of three" to make them appear as proportioned as they would on a shorter woman. She's a calculus whiz.
The cattiness with Dusty ended quickly. Now they all like each other. Actually, I think it goes deeper than "like " - but where or how, I don't know.
* * *
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 . . . Marxism's 19th-century creation lends it an attractive distance in the postindustrial, late capitalist era."
Ethan: "There is more to prosperity than envy and redistribution."
Susan: "I'm sure the Hollywood unions are just waiting with bated breath for coding and multimedia production to unionize. What's it going to be - I write the code and then somebody from I.A.T.S.E. comes in and has to press the return key?"
Me: "TIME OUT!"
Politics only makes people cranky. There must be some alternative form of discourse. How is political will generated? Susan is embarrassed to be agreeing with Ethan over something. Normally they squabble over everything.
* * *
Michael caught us playing Doom on the office operating system and flipped out . . . or rather, he deleted it from the system and gave me a lecture about lost people-hours when I later asked him to please reinstall it. In the end he did, because it would be catastrophic to worker morale to not be able to hunt and kill your co-workers.
"And Daniel, they have a new version called Doom II coming out in October, and rumor has it that pirated versions have a hard-drive-trashing virus, so all I ask is that you don't even consider installing it."
Good luck.
Bug was so mad that he wanted to write a Marburg virus and stick it in Michael's machine, but this is just typical Bug ranting. The Marburg virus is so dangerous, it can't
even be studied. Thirty-seven German laboratory workers died in conjunction with it.
THURSDAY
Todd called me a cryptofascist today. In honor of this,
I'm formatting this particular paragraph
flush right.
* * *
Michael said something cool today. He said something remarkable and unprecedented has occurred to us as a species now - "We've reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalized in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there's more memory 'out there' than exists inside 'all of us.' We've peripheralized our essence."
He went on:
"Given this new situation, the presumption of the existence of the notion of 'history' becomes not necessarily dead but somewhat beside the point. Access to memory replaces historical knowledge as a way for our species to process its past. Memory has replaced history - and this is not bad news. On the contrary, it's excellent news because it means we're no longer doomed to repeat our mistakes; we can edit ourselves as we go along, like an on-screen document. The transition from history at the center to memory on the periphery may prove to be initially bumpy as people shed their intellectual inertia on the issue, but the transition is an inevitability, and thank heavens we have changed the nature of change itself - the prospect of cyclical wars and dark ages and golden ages has never particularly appealed to me."
Finally:
"And the continuing democratization of memory can only accelerate the obsolescence of history as we once understood it. History has been revealed as a fluid intellectual construct, susceptible to revisionism, in which a set of individuals with access to a large database dominates another set with less access. The age-old notion of 'knowledge is power' is overturned when all memory is copy-and-paste-able - knowledge becomes wisdom, and creativity and intelligence, previously thwarted by lack of access to new ideas, can flourish."
I changed the subject to that of tickets to the upcoming Sharks game in San Jose.
FRIDAY
Todd apologized for calling me
a cryptofascist and called me
"benignly centrist," instead.
The formatting for this paragraph is
obvious.
* * *
Dad had his interview with Delta. "An interview's an interview's an interview," he said. I think he just doesn't want to overly raise his hopes.
* * *
I later told Dusty Michael's theory of history being dead and she went goggle-eyed. Dusty said conspiratorially, "Michael may be a crypto-Marxist." (Oh God . . .) She kept blabbing, and it's so weird to see Dusty's mouth moving and genuine political words emerge. It just doesn't mesh with her computer image. I get the impression she should be discussing exfoliation or tanning factors instead, but then, bodies are political, too. Or so Dusty has informed the office.
I surprised Dusty. I said, that "since Marxism is explicitly based on property, ownership, and control of means of production, it may well end up being the final true politik
of this Benetton world we now live in." She said, "Hey, Danster - I underestimated you."
It was interesting to briefly enter the political realm - as such.
SATURDAY
Dusty made a "Bulimia Top Ten List." Dusty
is so incredibly willing to discuss her body. She even confessed she had to become a big-time shoplifter to support her habit. "Hey babe - bulimia ain't cheap." Karla was, needless to say, silent on the subject.
Bulimia Top Ten List:
• several buckets of Haagen-Dazs strawberry
• two large spaghetti dinners
• large box of Godiva chocolates
• stack of eight grilled cheese sandwiches with ketchup
• entire cheesecake
• two dozen chocolate pudding cups
• four hundred grapes
• bucket of McDonald's french fries
• even larger box of Godiva chocolates
• largest box of chocolates in the universe
* * *
Dusty is designing a cosmetic surgery program for Oop! as her creative project. Basic body and facial structures are loaded into the system, and by sucking and implanting bricks in and out, Oop! users can reengineer whatever body shape they want.
Dusty's being stringent in using 100 percent genuine medical parameters, so even if you wanted to, you couldn't transform Arnold Schwarzenegger into Christy Turlington. "You can only max out the potential of what's already there. Users must know the body's limits."
She and Susan are sharing bone parameters from Susan's dancing skeletons product.
* * *
Speaking of Christy Turlington, I have noticed that a fair number of women seem to want to be her. In fact, I have noticed that if modern conversations don't switch to the disappearance of time, they shift to discussions of super-models. I guess supermodels are like geeks, but instead of winning the Punnet Square of brains, they won the Punnet Square of looks. It must be bizarre being fabulously good-looking. I mean, at least you can disguise brains.
* * *
Supermodel; Superhighway. Coincidence?
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