Introduction
This is the twenty-ninth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, and Volume XXVIII is here. If that seems like a lot of volumes, rest assured it actually isn’t. Why not? Because I say it’s not.
So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re brief bulletins I wrote to entertain family and friends when I was young and brash and just didn’t know any better. This is back when people actually wrote letters. Wait, did I say “people”? I meant me. Anyway, within each volume these are in chronological order, but the volumes jump all around through time and space. Read them in order, out of order, in alphabetical order by Roman numeral, in numerical order by word count, or according to whatever your preferred algorithm dictates. All of today’s dispatches were written when I was attending UC Santa Barbara.
January 18, 1989
There’s a girl in my French class whom I’m trying to “get to know.” Today it hit me how ridiculous the whole thing is. First, I’d arrange it so that I would sit by her, and chat her up, and then when that routine seemed to be established I’d show up early and sit somewhere else to see if she deliberately sat next to me. And then today—bonus!—we had a conversation after class that lasted all the way down the stairs and out to the bike racks. So I was basically gauging my “progress” through some kind of spatial measurement system. A real man wouldn’t bother with all this incremental BS, he’d just ask her out to coffee or drop a clever line like, “Women pay to go out with me.” At least this girl said something pretty interesting today: she said if she could buy a new car, she’d buy a Dodge Ram Charger. That seems sort of cool. In fact, I just realized she’s probably out of my league.
April 5, 1989
Today I slept throughout my first Physics lecture, then forgot about my Psychology class, and then slept through my English class. Why? Well, there are several factors. Like the weather, for example. It has been in the mid‑90’s here all week, not a cloud in the sky. You know, that dependable heat that isn’t going to leave you out in the cold all of a sudden. Even the evenings are nice and warm. So I’ve been riding more than ever, to enjoy that, and then when I’m not riding, the tropical torpor tends to induce a lackadaisical lifestyle which doesn’t involve being bright-eyed and bushy‑tailed when I get to class.
Today we got our cycling team sweatshirts –now that it’s 90 degrees in the shade. They’re way bitchin’. They’re like a grey heather, like with the white fibers running through the fabric? And with the big hood, and the white pile lining, and they weigh like 500 pounds. And the best part is, if I’m wearing it and fall asleep in class, which happens a lot because I’m so exhausted from training in the heat, it sort of holds me upright.
April 28, 1989
The cycling team meets once a week (in addition to all the rides, of course). The meetings don’t really get going until about half an hour after the scheduled time, so that’s when I show up. Meanwhile, the location of the meeting changes from week to week. It’s really hard to figure out where they’ll put it next. A veritable wild goose chase, if you’ve ever been to one of those. So anyhow (I’m not boring you, am I?) I showed up yesterday evening in front of the UCen, which is sort of a plaza, and everybody was there just sort of riding around. Naturally, I joined them. This guy M— was there on a totally rad Schwinn beach cruiser from the ‘50s. M—is pretty cool because he works at a bike shop and races pretty well, but he’s also kind of annoying everybody lately because he started one of those dreaded cycling team romances we all hate so much and has basically turned into a total sap. Every time he sees his little woman (who, incidentally, isn’t much of a looker) he drops everything, even if in mid‑sentence, to go pal around with her. But his old Schwinn is a total gem. The coolest part? It’s a two-speed. Not a back‑pedal kind, either. It’s got a brake lever sized shifter, made by . . . guess who? It ain’t Sturmey-Archer. It’s Bendix. Yes, the very same Bendix that makes the aerospace stuff. I asked Mark how often he had to adjust the shifting. He said never. And I tried it. It works flawlessly, 35 years into its life. So anyway, after about half an hour of bike combat, general socializing, et cetera, I realized that maybe the meeting wasn’t going down at all. I asked somebody, and he nonchalantly said, “Oh, yeah. It got moved to tomorrow night.” I almost asked, “Then what are we doing here?” but realized that I knew exactly what we were doing: hanging out.
Eventually we all decided we’d better study and a bunch of us headed over to the library. I never get much done there when I’m with friends, but I had to try—my Physics midterm was the next day. I have a knack for test preparation, I think. I start by going through my notes to try to guess what the teacher will put on the test. Most of my notes are written for my own amusement, because if I’m not amusing myself, the professor sure isn’t either, which means I might fall asleep and not write anything. Here’s an example from my actual notes:
4/27/89 Thurs: WAVES
Waves are characterized by speed, wavelengths.
- “Heat wave”: if ya got a heat wave, then ya got temperatures soaring into the nineties for days on end
- “The Wave”: a certain dance characterized by wobbly arm movements
- “Rad wave”: a 20‑footer or bigger that’ll take you all the way to the beach, dude
- “Permanent wave”: a hairdo characterized by tight curls that don’t require styling or setting gel
October 6, 1989
This friend of mine doesn’t have a mountain bike so I loaned him mine so we could cruise around the beach and some nearby trails. I rode my commuter death bike. Everyone calls it that because I have these bolt-on cantilever brake bosses (aka Moots Mounts) and to make them stiffer, I have a section of steel chainring spanning them (custom-cut to fit). They look really cool but everyone’s like, “What if you crashed? Couldn’t they, like, puncture you?” So we rode on the beach for a while, and then on these really sandy trails, and suddenly my tires washed out, and then the handlebar and the wheel stuck into the ground and I almost went over the bars. By “almost” I mean that I almost made it out okay, I mean I should have gone all the way over the bars, but my groin caught on the end of the handlebar that was sticking up and it impaled me. I was up there for like a couple of seconds, with all my weight concentrated on the plastic handlebar cap, right in my groin. Then the whole bike toppled on me and something raked across my leg. It was the chainring brake stiffener. It gave me this huge gash in there. It actually would’ve been funny as hell if it didn’t hurt so bad. [I still have a scar, over a quarter-century later.]
You know how you always wish you could get a crash on videotape? Well, I did. Later in the ride I spontaneously decided to ride down this big concrete driveway that goes right down to the beach, to lower boats into the water on trailers. There was a guy standing at the top making a movie with a little VHS camera, and I asked if it was cool for me to ride down. He said yeah, so I went down, taking advantage of its being sandy by doing this big gnarly zorro [where you lock up the rear wheel and do big fishtails]. What I didn’t know was that there was like a foot drop-off at the end. But hey, no problem, I had plenty of speed, so did a big jump and made a perfect landing, rear wheel first. Thing was, once the front wheel landed it bogged in the sand instantly and this time I made it all the way over the handlebars. I tucked and rolled and landed in tons of sand so it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, I rolled all the way over in a complete somersault and came up on my feet, throwing my arms up in a victory salute. Like 20 people were out there sunbathing and all cheered. I wonder how many times the guy with the camera will watch that footage, laughing his ass off.
October 10, 1989
A couple of days ago Andy, our Korean neighbor who’s in the ESL program here, came over and hung around while I made Spaghetti Francisco. He seems lonely – he often cruises right into our apartment, and starts looking around, picking objects up and inspecting them, and talking. His English is surprisingly good, considering he’s only been in the U.S. for eleven days, and (he says) he was really bad in his English classes at school. He doesn’t get along with his roommates very well –one is Japanese and barely speaks a word of English, and other guy, who’s Swiss, only bothers to speak German because he always has at least half a dozen other Swiss guys couch-surfing in the apartment and borrowing Andy’s stuff. Anyhow, earlier that day Andy’s cousin had come to visit and smashed her car into one of the pillars, shaking the building. I think she was planning to have dinner with Andy, but was so upset she left and got a motel room or something. Now Andy asked if he could use our microwave, and had this big package of meat, and I figured he needed to defrost it in a hurry or something before taking it back to his apartment and cooking it on his stove. It was in there forever, and I got the Francisco in the oven while Casey heated up some chicken noodle soup with little round noodles. Andy said, “They look like little doughnuts.” Casey said, “Yes, they do indeed look exactly like tiny miniature doughnuts.” I replied, “Yes, it’s in fact rather astonishing just how closely those noodles do resemble diminutive doughnuts.” If Tesh had been around he would surely have made a similarly astute observation employing equally precise vocabulary. Suddenly Andy pulled out the big plate of meat, set it on the table, and said, “Dig in.” Wow! I’d had no idea it was for us!
Man, it was so good. I guess it was a cross section of the cow where all the ribs stick through, all sliced up so that there were three little discs of bone in each slice. I don’t know how meat can turn out so well in the microwave. It wasn’t just plain , but prepared with some Korean recipe, swimming in a spicy, fatty sauce. Once we started eating nobody was talking, just grabbing the meat with our fingers, picking the little round bones clean, smacking our lips, and grabbing another piece. I was worried Casey wasn’t moving fast enough to get his share, but he hardly eats anything anyway and I end up finishing off his last piece. Then we dug into the Spaghetti Francisco. Poor Tesh never showed up—too busy studying, I guess—so he missed out.
November 13, 1989
The stupidest trend has caught on here. All these students buy mountain bikes, and all these bikes have quick-release seat posts [the idea being that you should lower your seat before gnarly descent]. As if any of these people ever rode off-road! Since the QR post means your seat can be stolen in five seconds, these students take their seats/seatposts off and take them to class for safekeeping, down on the floor under the desk. So their bikes out in the racks have this exposed frame tube so rain can fall in there, and I occasionally see trash stuffed in the hole by some mischievous passerby. Worse yet, the students look like idiots carrying around these seats, with the post getting grease on their clothes. I was in the library with a friend and we just had to laugh, watching all these students milling around with their bike seats.
February 19, 1990
Last Thursday there was a lab due in my socioeconomic geography class, based on a research article we had to borrow from the reserve book room of the library. (I guess that’s what makes it a “lab” instead of just another paper.) I kept putting off the assignment and then Wednesday rolled around and I forgot to do it because it was Valentine’s Day and for the first time, I actually had a date. The next day, the reserve room opened at 8:00 a.m., and the lab was due at 9:00. So I showed up there just after 8:00, got the article, ran over to the microcomputer lab to use their word processor, pulled out the article, and started really stressing because it was super fricking long. I couldn’t even read it in an hour, much less write a paper on it. But some student before me had left all these notes in the margin and totally outlined it! This guy knew what he was doing, too. So I wrote the damn thing without even reading the article and finished by about 9:10. Then I ran to my class, and the T.A. hadn’t even shown up yet. He walked in two minutes later and I turned it in like I’d done it in advance. Sometimes I think I lead a charmed life.
March 1, 1990
I’m completely broke. Go figure. S— always sent me my monthly support check, but now that she left my dad, I haven’t been getting it. I guess he figures since his wife left him and he’s all full of woe, he shouldn’t have to support his son anymore. My mom’s on vacation in Hawaii and forgot to send a check before she left. [My parents’ divorce settlement decreed that my dad would pay 5/8 of whatever I got, and my mom 3/8, but no actual total amount was specified; I was generally pretty strapped even when they didn’t forget.] So I’ve been eating nothing but pasta (with Ragu Old World sauce from a gallon can), and burritos that are just beans and tortillas—I can’t even afford cheese. And I just got my tuition bill: $550. Plus I need to get glasses because I’ve finally admitted to myself I’m totally nearsighted. I was sitting in the front row in a lecture and asked the prof to focus the overhead projector, and everyone around me was like, “Dude, it’s totally in focus.” But I guess I’ll have to keep squinting until I start working this summer. Man, how did I get here? And how will I get out?
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