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geyser
Friday, September 10 1999
weird weather in an artificial world
Eric the Web Developer and I pulled up to the Frazee food court as usual for a Friday lunch to find a four-story high geyser pouring unexpected
humidity into the cool September air. Some idiot had backed into a fire hydrant. I love shit like that. Why don't more people do this sort of thing and keep Mission Valley interesting?
Aside from a prolonged local network squall, it was a quiet day at work. All the string pullers were off at some fancy Hilton having their heads stroked for managing a company at the sexy phase of its investment burn.
Energy's slow, lingering death
At around 5:00pm I decided, like many of my colleagues, to discretely vanish from the workplace. The alternative was the weekly motivational ritual known as "Energy." At this point in the development of our corporate culture, we all know that only dorks show up for Energy. Back in the day Energy might have meant something, but now, with our employees spread out over two floors, with an old guard jaded from having survived all the injustices of an internet startup (combined with a management-system-intensified decentralization), Energy is a dying institution.
When I emerged from the front of the building, I was sure I was in the clear. But, as if in a nightmare, there they were, in the parking lot with a direct view of the front door, Courtney and Karin, the member support posse. I tried discretely waving at Courtney and moving on, but she wouldn't let me off so easily, raising up a fuss. I was immediately disoriented and confused. It wasn't so much Courtney seeing me escape that had me feeling this way, but Karin. Karin seems so sincerely committed to all the company institutions that it feels like I'm personally insulting her whenever I weasel out of them. But when she looked up at me, Karin had the look of resignation on her face. She knew that not only was my attendance at Energy a loss cause, but so was Energy itself. She's like that. She might seem zealously committed to the most ridiculous little nuance of corporate culture, but then, as the climate changes, so does she, without complaint or any apparent indication of loss. If Energy were to (perish the thought) die this week, I'm sure soon enough she'd have something else for which to run yelling down the halls, rallying us.
Karin and Courtney resumed what they were doing in the parking lot and, as their eyes were averted, one of the VPs of Whatever materialized behind me with a conspiratorial bounce in his step, thinking, as I had just thought, that he was in the clear. But having just been burned, I couldn't let him off so easily. I don't know exactly how it happened, but I guess I shouted something and got Courtney to look up just as the VP of Whatever was slipping out of view. She went through her teacherly motions, calling out his name with a disappointed cadence. He stopped in midstep to curse his luck. Busted. Then he turned to me and started threatening me with characteristic tongue-in-cheek wryness. Karin and Courtney didn't even care anymore.
Earlier today this particular VP of Whatever had drawn my attention to a new book called Nudist on the Late Shift, supposedly about an internet professional who lived through startup hell, made his millions, and went on to tell the tale. If nothing else, the VP of Whatever is a good salesman; he got me to do an Amazon one click purchase based only on his recommendation. And if you're observant, you've probably noticed a meta-something similar.
Sophie's eyebrows
This evening as Kim and I gradually prepared for another Friday night sushi dinner at Sushi on the Rock in La Jolla, Sophie lay on the couch with a look of resignation, her sad face between her paws, her brown eyes, wide open but not excited, glancing back and forth between us. It's clear after you've lived with her awhile that she tracks all the little things about our body language and clothing and uses this information to make predictions about how we intend to spend the evening. As Kim pointed out, Sophie was well aware that we hadn't taken off our shoes. That's always a bad sign. She knows that we rarely take her with us when we go out at night.
I realized something about her poofy eyebrows, a characteristic of the Schnauzer haircut that she gets on a regular basis. They make her face considerably more expressive than it might otherwise be. When she cocks a brow to listen or brings them together in a moment of thought, the motions of small muscles in her forehead are amplified at the tips of the eyebrow hairs, transmitting an exaggerated facial expression. In fact, I'll go further; I'm sure the eyebrows on humans are partly there to aid us in making facial expressions. If these lines weren't stuck on our faces, it might be a lot more difficult to convey an expression. People who shave their eyebrows or (like Deya) have eyebrows that contrast little with their skin colour seem much more impassive than those with contrasting eyebrows.
realities on the ground
Back when I was a kid, my parents used to have a subscription to National Geographic. The writing was never very good (except perhaps for the picture captions), but the photographs were uniformly impressive. I hadn't seen National Geographic in a while, but somehow a copy of the September 1999 issue turned up recently in our apartment. It's good lite non-linear reading and I've been digesting pieces of it here and there. There was some good stuff about the Galilean Moons of Jupiter and a fascinating time line of the history of manned balloon travel (props to the guy who, in 1960, parachuted from 102,000 feet, where the air is so thin you don't even feel it rustling your clothes!). But tonight, the article that really affected me concerned the north Indian province of Kashmir. Again, it wasn't the writing that had me thinking. In this case it was a map, and not even a very good one. It showed the border being claimed by India juxtaposed with the actual on-the-ground borders, all of them winding their ways through the most rugged, inhospitable land of the temperate latitudes. It's clear from the map that any peace in this region is just a manifestation of national exhaustion on the parts of the parties involved: China, India and Pakistan. They're proxies, of course, for the underlying cultures of the East: Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. There would be no wars here if there weren't vast populations driving the politics from off in the uncontested fertile lowlands. In Kashmir, the mountainous fringe of the respective cultures' ranges, slight changes in realities on the ground are seen as indications of the health of the various cultures involved. How strange yet expected it is that all this takes place despite the fact that none of this can really matter in a time when all the parties involved have nuclear weapons.
The cultural differences between these people aren't necessarily as large as those between, say, the cultures of the United States and Mexico. The future is so open to possibility that one day there could be wars again across that border. Hopefully I won't be in San Diego any more when that happens.
Aside from the excellent food, the sushi dinner was pretty much a disaster. Towards the end Kim and I had a huge fight about the same old things we always fight about, and yet again it seemed as though we were pushing the boundaries on ugliness. Kim suddenly jumped up at the end and said she couldn't stay anymore. She was crying during most of the drive home, saying I had no right to do what I'd done when she was paying for the meal. I'd said some admittedly insensitive things in an effort to better articulate the rules of our relationship and my freedom within it. I'd like to be able to go out in the desert by myself, you see, and in a thought experiment earlier today I'd realized it was impossible within the current unwritten rules that govern most of my activity.
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