Microserfs

I inwardly agreed with this. "Tech chicks" all seem so much wiser and mature than the guys (the Karla Attraction Factor) that I think they must get fed up. I overheard Susan and Karla complaining about tech guys at a geek party last month, and I started to feel a little insecure. Up at Microsoft, geeks looked exactly like what they were - nerds, misfits, Dungeons & Dragons players out on day pass. Down here in the Valley, these tech guys are good-looking - they can pass in the "normal" world without revealing their math team past. Whenever Susan and Karla started gushing over some cute guy, I started saying, "He's probably in MARKETING." It made me feel better.

Susan, nonetheless, wanted to know why she was having such a dating problem. Dusty said, "I think your problem is that you think everyone else is a freak except you, but everybody's a freak - you included - and once you learn that, the World of Dating is yours."

I thought Susan would go ballistic, but instead she agreed.

THURSDAY

Dad was out today - job hunting. Anywhere else on earth except here in the Valley he wouldn't have a chance, but here he might find something.

* * *

Bug is freaked out because Magic Eye stereograms, the black light posters of the 1990s, don't work with him. He's worried it's color-blindness linked, and he called the Garage Museum down in San Jose to see if it means something bad. He remembers those genetics charts they had there. "I'm stereo-gramatically blind!"

* * *

Ethan and I went out for a drink again. He was really swigging down the drinks, and so I asked him if it was smart to drink while taking antidepressants. He said, "Technically no, it's a pretty fuck-witted thing to do, but drinking allows me to take an identity holiday."

I asked him what this meant. He said that since the new isomers of anti-depressants are rewiring his brain, and since he's becoming a new person because of it, every day he forgets more and more what the old person was who used to be.

"On the stuff I'm taking, booze never really makes you smashed," he said, "but it does allow me to remember the sensation of what I used to be and feel like. Just briefly. Life wasn't all bad back then. I'd never go back to it full time, but I do get nostalgic for my old personality. I imagine in a parallel-forked road universe there's a sad, fucked-up Ethan, achieving nothing, feeling cramped, and going nowhere. I don't know. Once you've experienced the turbo-charged version of yourself, there's no going backward."

He had another Wallbanger - "You know, pal - maybe I should de-wire myself. De-wiring would reconnect me to the world of natural time - sunsets and rainbows and crashing waves and Smurfs." He took a final sip. "Nahhhh..."

* * *

Susan caught a cold, "From having my panties systematically saturated with fruit pulp at the Tonga Room."

* * *

Tomorrow we move into our house-sitting house.

* * *

Before bed I told Karla about Ethan's identity holiday - of drinking to recapture the feeling of what your real personality used to feel like.

"It's all about identity," she said.

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.

* * *

Oh . . . I found a big stack of old Sunset magazines for sale in a secondhand shop. I bought them for Mom. She's a Sunset freak. Mom picked them up like they were feathers. She's strong now. She's all for Dusty developing her body. She and Dusty have been comparing notes. It's such a relief when your friends date cool people.

FRIDAY

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