Microserfs

I asked Dusty if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said, "No, but indeed I rilly, rilly lusted after them in my heart. Hippie parents, you know. Rill crunchy. I had a Raggedy Ann doll made in, like, Sierra Leone. And all I rilly desired was a Barbie Corvette - more than life itself."

*sigh*

"So instead I played with numbers and equations. Some trade-off. The only store-bought toy I was ever allowed was a Spirograph, and I had to beg to receive it as a May Day present. And I had to pretend I wanted it because it was mathematical - so clean and solvable. But my parents were suspicious of mathematics because math isn't political. They're like, freaks."

Dusty's forearms resemble Popeye's. And they have pulsing veins that look like a meandering river. Ethan and I were talking, when he shouted across the room, "Jesus Christ, Dusty - I can take your pulse from over here."

* * *

I asked Karla if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said (not looking up from her keyboard), "This is so embarrassing, but not only did I play with Barbies, but I played with them up until an embarrassingly late age - ninth grade." She then looked over at me, expecting reproach.

This did come as some surprise; I suppose it revealed itself on my face. She began typing again, and speaking over the clack of her fingers on the keyboard.

"But before you go and think I'm a lost cause, you should know that I gave my Barbie admirable pursuits - I took apart my brother's Hot Wheels and made a Barbie Toyota Assembly Plant, giving Barbie white overalls, a clipboard, and I provided jobs for many otherwise unemployed Americans." She paused and looked up from her keyboard. "God, no wonder my parents refused to believe I was intelligent."

MONDAY

This afternoon while visiting Todd and Dusty's cottage in Redwood City, I tried to find a snack in their fridge.

Bad idea.

Pills, lotions, capsules, powders . . . anything except what normal human beings might call "food." There was a Rubbermaid container of popcorn. There was Turbo Tea, Amino mass, pure Creatine, Mus-L-Blast 2000+, raw chickens, Super Infiniti 3000, and chromium supplements as well as small bottles I thought it more polite not to inquire about.

I really have to wonder if Todd's doing steroids. I mean, he's just not physically normal. We're all going to have to face this.

Dusty was out at the Lucky Mart buying bananas and kelp. I asked Todd, "Shit, Todd - what is it exactly you want your body to do for you? What is it your body's not doing for you now that it's going to do for you at some future date?" Not really Todd's sort of question.

"I think I want to have sex using a new body which allows me to not have to remember my ultrareligious family." Todd mulled this over. We looked around the apartment, strewn with hex dumbbells and rubber flooring mats. "My body was just something I could believe in because there was nothing else around."

* * *

Susan was sulking about her dating architecture here in the Valley. Her fling with Mr. Intel ended long ago - she says Intel's culture is too macho to accept macho women. Phil the PDA was history eons ago. She kept talking about that Mary Tyler Moore episode where Mary tabulates the number of dates she's had over the span of her dating career and gets depressed. And then there was a big debate as we tried to remember if that was the episode where she began dating Lou.

Susan only seems to meet techies. ("Well, Sooz," says Karla, "you do spend almost all of your time in the Valley . . .")

"It's not just the techiness, Kar - it's that the number of flings I've had in my life now outnumbers the number of relationships. I've crossed a line."

Tonight she has a date with a Marina District tattoo artist, so we're all expecting her to show up tomorrow with a Pentium chip etched into her shoulder.

The thing about Susan is that she's making the leap into self-reconstruction so late in life. Her new dominant attitude comes from a genuine need, but it's so twisted by years of - I don't know exactly what. I don't know as much about Susan as I ought, I suppose. Her IBM upbringing and all of that. But the subject. . . how to broach it?

* * *

Ethan seems to have forgotten his partially completed freeway. We've nicknamed it the "Information Superhighway."

* * *

Susan reformatted and zinged-up Dad's resume on Quark. He used a (oh God . . .) dot-matrix printer to do his old resume. Mom's Selectric would have even been cooler.

* * *

This afternoon I mistakenly said Palo Alto was in the "Silicone Valley," and Ethan snapped at me, "Silicone is what they put inside of tits, Dan-O. It's Silikawn . . ."