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sushi as surrogate bungee jumping
Tuesday, August 24 1999
The whole front-end/back-end paradigm under which engineers work in my company has completely broken down for me. I've become far too impatient to do front end to some else's back end. In the latest death march project (the last one of the summer, thank God!), I'm supposedly doing the front end stuff while Dave the Web Developer is handling the back end. But I've found it's a lot easier for me to just write my own SQL stored procedures than to explain to Dave what I want and then wait for him to write them. It's bad enough to have him tweaking my ASP functions without really knowing what they're supposed to do. So I'm not really playing by the rules anymore. From now on, I suspect, I'll either be doing complete projects all by myself (like I did for my message boards) or else I'll be doing everything but the most superficial of front-end things. Already people know better than to approach me with simple front-end things unless they're hankering for some sort of robotic script.
I got a call from Kim this afternoon asking me to go out tonight for dinner. The story was that Rash, the online journal keeper from Silicon Valley who is still staying with his might-have-been girlfriend in Normal Heights, wanted to do Sushi with us.
So again I split from work a little earlier than normal (and far earlier than any of the other engineers).
Riding my bike towards the lower San Diego River near sunset, I noticed that the tide was particularly high. The unusual height of the tide had something to do with the nearly full moon. As I crossed the Sunset Cliffs bridge, in the distance I could see that Dog Beach (the swath of sand choking the San Diego River mouth at the Pacific Ocean) was smaller than I'd ever seen it before. Inspired, I took a detour from my normal ride home and rode all the way to the ocean to see how it looked during such an unusual natural condition. Oddly, I felt kind of guilty for doing so, like I shouldn't be "stealing" this time from Kim. But it wasn't pure guilt, it was the sort tainted with a trace of bitterness that I felt the guilt at all, that my personal feeling of freedom was so abridged.
The ocean was crashing almost as high as the driest, softest of sand, the sand that never gets hit by waves except during storms. The many dogs of Dog Beach were as happy as always, dashing about and chasing objects thrown by their masters into the joyous waves of high tide. Like me, there seemed to be others present just to see the high tide or perhaps just the sunset. I've always been a big fan of unusually high water. When I was a kid (and even during my adulthood) I used to build rock dams in the creek and then go on tours of the ever-expanding shoreline.
When I got home, I spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time trying to install a cabinet locking system on the door beneath the sink. The idea was to have an easy way to keep Sophie from getting into the trash. We've been relying on 50 gallon drums of bottled water placed in front of the door, but that's a terribly cumbersome latching mechanism. Unfortunately, Kim had bought a completely ineffective latching system based on flimsy plastic pieces that, in theory, were intended to hook into each other. But what I'd really wanted was a simple hook and eye system, the sort with which farmboys like me can latch any two pieces of wood together. Kim had actually bought such a system (it cost about 50 cents) on her first trip to the hardware store, but when she got home she couldn't visualize how it could possibly be installed (yes, I'm still trying to fathom that particular mental block) so she took it back to the store and got that $3 plastic system that really couldn't be installed. The moral of this story: Kim is no handyman. She was rather embarrassed about the whole situation, so I'm sure she'll be none too pleased when she reads this paragraph. For my part, I found the whole episode sort of funny in an aggravating kind of way.
We were both kind of stoned as we sought out Rash at the Old Town trolley station. He definitely had a sort of Matt Rogers air about him as we picked him up.
Never drive a car stoned if you actually intend to be going anywhere. After we picked up Rash, Kim became hopelessly lost in various unfamiliar pockets of Pacific Beach and Old Town. It wasn't that we didn't know where we were, we just kept forgetting where we were trying to be. Distractions from our purpose just kept popping up out of nowhere. Overly-cautious U-turns would metastasize into involved excursions through strange parking lots and unknown neighborhoods. I really don't know how we ever found our destination, a sushi bar on Garnet Street in Pacific Beach.
It wasn't one of those overly-hip blacklight-lit sushi places with loud industrial music and black-painted walls groaning beneath inaccessible art. Instead, it looked a bit more traditional, if that's what I mean, like a clean cafeteria. About half the customers were genuinely Asian in appearance.
I'd thought that Kim could hold her own against anyone when it came to the language and customs of sushi culture (and yes, as I'm learning, in America there is definitely a subculture centered around the rituals of sushi eating), but it turned out that Rash is a big sushi connoisseur in his own right. He's been eating sushi since 1980. For my part, I'd never heard of sushi until the late 80s, never had a sushi-loving girlfriend until Kim, and would be utterly lost in a sushi restaurant if Kim didn't do all the ordering for me. But I like sushi and I even dig the weird sushi rituals.
Kim brought up an interesting fact about sushi eating. Despite all the cleanliness and emphasis on freshness, every now and then she's been to a sushi bar and gotten terribly sick, usually on the way home. It occurred to me that part of the excitement of sushi is the risk inherent in eating raw fish. In a way, eating sushi is a little like bungee jumping. The cleanliness of the restaurant and the overly-fussy nature of the rituals are sort of like the reliability of the bungee jumper's bungee cord. The weird thing is how visceral and even surgical the whole thing is.
For whatever reason, we split the bill two ways, between the respective credit cards of Rash and myself. That was part of a deal that also included driving Rash back to Normal Heights. Ah, Normal Heights. Being back on the plateau made us more nostalgic than expected for our old neighborhood.
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