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lots of bloody marys
Tuesday, October 6 1998
I went on yet another bike ride down into Mission Valley to have a third interview with a company for whom I very much hoped to work (especially for geographic reasons). My hopes were high, but Kim stressed the importance of not allowing them to be too high.
What can I say? I'd apparently shown myself worthy and was offered a job. This wasn't fooling around either, this was a real salary, real work, and real hours. I'm good at what I do and I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. But like many people, I'm haunted by an impostor complex. What if they discover that I'm really just that eight year old boy in a sandbox?
My success gave me incredible energy; it propelled me back up the 15% grade of Texas Street back home to Normal Heights despite the hot, dry Santa Ana air painfully desiccating my lungs with every deep inhalation. As I neared my own Mansfield Street, every block seemed to crawl by at an exponentially slower and slower pace. But then I was home. Tensely breaking the news to Kim, I suspected she wouldn't believe me.
All our problems suddenly seemed to have been solved. This whole gamble of moving to San Diego didn't seem so threatening. We hadn't even been here a month, and already we could put a check mark next to every major necessity. Conserving our dwindling savings suddenly looked like an unnecessary austerity. I suggested we go to a bar to celebrate.
We ended up at Hamburger Mary's in Hillcrest; it seemed like a better day bar than the Kensington Club. I knew Hillcrest to be a gay neighborhood, but I had no idea how gay Hamburger Mary's was going to be. It was full of rainbow flags and bunting and almost all the men seemed to have walked off the set of the gay steelmill from the Simpsons. They were all thin and their speech had that unmistakable affectation. But there is something reassuring about being in a restaurant full of gay men, especially when you're with your girlfriend. The burger I ordered was a monstrosity: two kinds of cheese, beef & bacon with a side of unpleasantly fat french fries. We ordered three rounds of bloody marys which I slurped down like mosquito sucking blood from a passed-out bum's forehead. The conversation was mostly about me and my sudden success; obnoxiously so, though Kim didn't care at all.
We hit the Kensington Club on the way home. The sun was going down and the Kensington was in that twilight zone between its day customers (elderly men) and its night customers (young alterna-folks of both genders). We continued with two more bloody marys each, chatting with a random guy at the bar. He too was into computers, though he spoke like a plumber or a construction worker.
Of course, we knew my new job would impress Kim's Mother (remember; she'd chided Kim on her decision to take up with an "unemployed bohemian"). So we called her up and both of us gushed about the suddenly rosy situation.
The only real turbulence in this happy evening was a drunken argument about my supposed continued infatuation with Jessika. You see, at the Kensington Club tonight I'd admitted to successfully guessing Jessika's Hotmail password ("blue") and then reading her email for some six months (in so doing, mind you, I learned nothing interesting). Kim, you see, wants me to be that obsessed with her.
(Eventually I wearied of reading Jessika's email; this coincided with a period during which she thought she'd been "hacked." So I suggested she be careful not to use an obvious password that anyone knowing anything about her could guess: "bigfun," "tussin," "blue," "chinese," "thegus," etc.)
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