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And then I simply held him. And then we both fell asleep, and that was six hours ago. And I have been thinking about it, and I realize that Ethan has fallen prey to The Vacuum. He mistakes the reward for the goal; he does not realize that there is a deeper aim and an altruistic realm of technology’s desire. He is lost. He does not connect privilege with responsibility; wealth with morality. I feel it is up to me to help him become found. It is my work, it is my task; it is my burden.
At geek parties, you can sort corporate drones from start-up drones by dress and conversation. Karla and I stood next to two guys who work on the Newton project at Apple. They talked with unflagging enthusiasm about frequent flyer miles for about 45 minutes. They had a purchasable Valley hip. One guy had the mandatory LA Eyeworks glasses and a nutty orange vest worn over baggy jeans. The other guy had Armani glasses and a full Calvin Klein ensemble, but not a matching ensemble, mind you—“thrown together” in “that expensive way.” You can’t help but be conscious here of how much everything costs, and where it comes from.
Newton Guy One: I’m trying to make United Premiere Executive 100K. Are you 100K yet?
NG 2: Oh, yeah, right after Hanover this fall. And you’ll never believe this—I was late for a flight the other day, and when the woman at the United counter pulled up my record, I looked at the monitor and my name was surrounded by DOLLAR SIGNS. How subtextual.
NG 1: Wow, great! (Obviously genuinely impressed) I think I might make it if they let me fly United to Japan the next two times. Fucking Apple Travel. I now have frequent flyer miles on Alitalia, Northwest, JAL, Lufthansa, USAir, Continental, American, and British Air. I wish we flew Virgin Air … that would be the coolest.
NG 2:1 like the toiletries case from British Air.
NG 1: They used to be cooler … all the stuff used to be from the Body Shop. But Virgin Air rules because you get your own video game monitor and you can play SEGA Games with other passengers.
NG 2: All over the plane? Or just business class?
NG 1: I don’t know. Business class only, I think. I guess it would be cooler if you could play with the 13-year old kids back in coach … SEGA should send group testers on flights and do market research that way! (Titters.)
Random moment: This afternoon I was in the McDonald’s on El Camino Real near California Street and they had this Lucite box with a slot on top where people put their business cards. It was stuffed with cards. Really stuffed.
But the weird thing was, I couldn’t locate anything on the box saying what the cards were to be used for. So I guess it’s just this human instinct to stick your business card in a slot. Like you’re going to win … what—a free orange drink machine for your birthday party? I saw a woman’s card from Hewlett-Packard and a card from some guy in Mexico saying “Graduate from Stanford Graduate School of Business.” Here’s this Stanford graduate at McDonald’s putting his card in a box at random. I just don’t understand people sometimes. Didn’t he learn anything at Stanford?
lmao
I can’t stop marveling at how together geeks are in the Valley. At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award. Easy. Black and White.
Here, it’s so much more complicated—you’re supposed to have an exciting, value-adding job that utilizes your creativity, a wardrobe from Nordstrom’s or at the very least Banana Republic, a $400,000 house, a cool European or Japanese car, the perfect relationship with someone as ambitious, smart, and well-dressed as yourself, and extra money to throw parties so that the whole world can observe what a life you have, indeed. It makes me miss Redmond, but at the same time, it is kind of inspiring. I feel conflicted.
Even Michael noticed, with a rare lapse into pop culture: “Perhaps David Byrne was talking about the geeks inheriting the earth in that Talking Heads song, ‘This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! My God! How did I get here?”’
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.
She said, “We look at a flock of birds and we think one bird is the same as any other bird—a bird unit. But a bird looks at thousands of people, at a Giants game up at Candlestick Park, say, and all they see is ‘people units.’ We’re all as identical to them as they are to us. So what makes you different from me! Him from you? Them from her? What makes any one person any different from any other? Where does your individuality end and your species-hood begin? As always, it’s a big question on my mind. You have to remember that most of us who’ve moved to Silicon Valley, we don’t have the traditional identity-donating structures like other places in the world have: religion, politics, cohesive family structure, roots, a sense of history or other prescribed belief systems that take the onus off individuals having to figure out who they are. You’re on your own here. It’s a big task, but just look at the flood of ideas that emerges from the plastic!”
I stared at her, and I imagine she was assuming I was digesting—compiling—what she’d just told me, but instead, all I could think of, looking into her eyes, was that there was this entity—Karla—who was different from all others I knew because just under the surface of her skin lay the essence of herself, the person who thinks and dreams these things she tells to me and only me. I felt like a lucky loser and I kissed her on the nose. So that’s me for the day.
kinda cute
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 dumbells and rubber flooring mats. “My body was just something I could believe in because there was nothing else around.”
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.
what???
Dusty was trying to tell us all about “Mehrwert“—surplus value per unit of time/labor: “A worker creates more value than that for which he is compensated. You know?”
Michael went purple, like a Burger King manager who hears one of his employees discuss unionization.
And then Karla screwed Michael’s notions of production up even further by passing along a meme somebody spammed her on the Net that day, that any multiple of 6, minus one, is a prime number. Easy as this was to disprove, all work stopped immediately as everybody set out to prove its validity.
Karla pointed out that there are more Gaps than just the Gap. “J. Crew is a thinly veiled Gap. So is Eddie Bauer. Banana Republic is owned by the same people as the Gap. Armani A/X is a EuroGap. Brooks Brothers is a Gap for people with more disposable income whose bodies need hiding, upscaling, and standardization. Victoria’s Secret is a Gap of calculated naughtiness for ladies. McDonald’s is the Gap of hamburgers. LensCrafters is the Gap of eyewear. Mrs. Fields is the Gap of cookies. And so on.”
lol