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public transportation in the rain
Monday, March 15 1999
Let me give you an indication of how difficult my position is for my company to fill. We hired a third guy to do what Jay and I do: ASP and front-end web programming. The guy decided to try us for a day and see if he could do it. He couldn't. So again it's down to just me and Jay.
Today was a bleak cold rainy day, and Kim had dropped me off this morning on her way to Staples. Unfortunately, my colleague Al was off in Los Angeles checking out the top-secret Beastie Boys recording studio and I couldn't get a ride back to Ocean Beach with him at the end of the day. So I was forced to use public transportation, taking the trolley and the bus. Since the only bills in my wallet were fifties, I went to Hazard Center Barnes and Noble and bought a book called Mastering Linux (complete with CD), and returned to the Hazard Center trolley station with a few resultant small bills. As I fumbled for my money, a scruffy old man strolled up and offered me his ticket, saying it still had time left on it. I thought at first he was trying to bum money off me, but he was only trying to do his karma a favour. The ticket had a good half hour left on it, sufficient for my ride to Old Town. Every time I've bought a trolley ticket, I've wondered if anyone ever volunteered their still-good tickets to total strangers. This answered that question.
At the Old Town bus stop I watched two total strangers, a black guy and a white guy, become fast friends, evidently as a way to combat the dreary boredom of waiting for a bus in the cold rain. They ended up chatted with each other the whole way to Ocean Beach. There was also a girl on the bus who rather reminded me of Deya for some reason. She was narrowly focused on the tasks of writing with a red pen in her notebook in one section and then reading (or pretending to read) from another. I suspected that her mind was full of ideas about the world and the people and other creatures who occupy it, but that she was too timid to ever have a chance to explain these ideas to anyone.
The movie tonight was There's Something About Mary. It was almost as interesting for its flip and chaotic use of cinematic styles as it was for its substantial comic content. Overall, it had the air of the Wonder Years by way of the Three Stooges, with a dash of Fawlty Towers thrown in. In addition to that, it proved a wonderful showcase of great acting as deceptions were layered upon deceptions and people painted themselves into corners and then somehow extricated themselves in ways that belied the Schteveish stupidity of their characters. At the center of it all was Mary, the unwitting dudemagnet whose many ardent suitors somehow canceled each other out so effectively that she never managed to win or maintain a boyfriend. The sexual-social turmoil surrounding her rather reminded me of similar conditions surrounding Jessika.
How about that? Marilyn Manson said something catty about Courtney Love's hygiene (or, perhaps, her legendary lack of freshness) and she got pissed off and beat him up. So now their joint tour is canceled and they won't be playing the Sports Arena Stadium down along the San Diego River. How sad.
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