From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XI

Introduction

This is the eleventh installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I 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, and Volume X is here. (The different volumes have little or nothing to do with one another.)

Before the blogosphere, I didn’t have any audience for my random ramblings except friends and family whom I emailed. Now, I can be largely ignored by five billion people at once instead of just one at a time! O brave new world!

The dispatches below are from ancient emails to my brother G—, when I was newly married and living in San Francisco. He was (and is) living in the Netherlands. Here is a photo of the two of us from around the time I wrote these.

March 4, 1995

I heard from B— about your computer woes. I’m kind of afraid to buy a computer, because the technology gets outdated so quickly. But then again, I only need a simple machine for my needs, except my hard drive is almost full and certain things run slowly. And I really think I’d rather use a different typing tutorial program for learning Dvorak; I mean, the Typing Lobster is cool and all, but the more sophisticated typing software could probably better teach the Dvorak layout. My computer is a 386 running at a scant 16 MHz, with only a single meg of RAM. But it is a 386, darn it, and I could always add RAM. For that matter, I could replace the hard drive. It’s the motherboard that’s a mother to replace. Hence the name, perhaps. Motherboard. What a cool word. I’ll bet every computer nerd gets a little rush when he has the opportunity to use “motherboard” in a sentence. He pauses momentarily for buildup, looks his pal in the eye, and says, “Goddammit, Ralph, we need to slap in a whole new motherboard. Shit.” Then he breaks into a grin, because I’m sure that for a computer geek, replacing the motherboard is like overhauling a nice road bike is for us.

Work is busy, but not too bad and something really cool just happened: our office manager quit, and I got her office! It’s a great office. Fantastic view from 22 floors up. Plus, I have a door I can close when I hold important meetings (which are rare, I admit). More importantly, once I’ve been given an office, I’ll never have to go back to that stupid half-high cubicle, and my colleagues are bound to have more professional respect for a Man with an Office than for a Guy with a Space. Our controller lauded my move, saying, “Big day for the big D … goin’ from the doghouse to the penthouse!”

April 12, 1995

Had a real scare tonight. We went out to Chinese with E— and her niece, S— who is a freshman in high school and spending spring break with us. We found a really good place, the R&G lounge (recommended highly by a Chinese woman we met in a dime store). The place had good food, and a funny fortune (“Be tactful; overlook not your own opportunity,” like who else’s are we gonna overlook?), and pretty good service. The waitress was dumbfounded, though, when S— asked for sugar for her tea. S— has a real sweet tooth: I found an empty frosting tub in our recycling, for example … but I digress. Anyhow, I did a terribly irresponsible thing: you know that beautiful multicolor umbrella that you gave us for Christmas? Well, I accidently left it behind after our meal! I didn’t realize my error until we were already all the way over in North Beach, and it was 10 PM. Needless to say I sprinted back to the R&G Lounge, running for all I was worth, but got there after the place had closed. I hammered on the door; no luck. I ran around back and hammered on the back door; still no response. But I couldn’t face the loss, so I just kept pounding. It was a glass door, so I couldn’t use my foot; just kept rapping with my knuckles, which got sorer all the time. Finally somebody appeared, and let me in. He seemed a bit disappointed that I’d returned for the umbrella, which he did go find for me. He declared, “I thought that umbrella would be my souvenir!” I’m so glad I got it back. I can go on living.

April 26, 1995

I got your e-mail bemoaning the staggering $100 price tag for Levi’s blue jeans over there in Holland, and am excited to help you out. Since you haven’t indicated whether you needed Levi’s blue jeans in particular, I went to the Gap over the weekend to see if they had any sales. No luck on discounted jeans, but I ended up blowing $85 on a few groovy linen shirts. So it wasn’t all for naught.

Well, yesterday on my lunch break I went to Banana Republican and looked around. At first it didn’t look promising, but then I found a section with some discounted jeans. The only problem was, the sizing seemed strange. They had sizes like 34R and 34L; I figured out it meant regular and long, but how regular? how long? I asked the clerk and she said regular was 32” inseam, long was 34”. The weird sizing was in fact why they were on sale: because the sizes didn’t make sense, and nobody understood them, and BR has now gone to a two-number system like everybody else, and have to blow out all the jeans under the old sizing system. So I found some that had little stickers over the “34L” that said “34/34.” I guess that was an unsuccessful solution to the problem.

I couldn’t find any in 36” length but tried on some 34s, and they fit well. I didn’t have E— there to verify that the jeans have that uncanny ability to turn even the most homely guy into a sex symbol, but the length, anyway, was fine. I asked a clerk and she said they always did run long. (Didn’t ask her about the sex symbol thing.) Anyway, I bought three pairs—two for you and one for me. I was tempted to buy more. These aren’t Levi’s, mind you, but they’re called the Ranch Hand cut, which is a relaxed jean.

I should pause here to explain some of the clothing nomenclature to you. If something is cheap and quotidian, it typically has a plural name, e.g. pants, jeans, sunglasses. However, if it is very expensive and chic, it gets a singular name, e.g. “a nice pant,” “a relaxed jean,” “a sophisticated sunglass.” I’ve actually heard sales clerks say that. “These are cheap jeans.” “That’s a nice pant.” Very sophisticated language.

So anyway, these are a relaxed jean. (Staggering grammatical implications here.) Button fly. Made in USA. 100% Cotton Denim. Inspected by #27. Preshrunk. Stonewashed. (Not acid-washed … remember that heinous 80’s teen indoor mall look?) I am told these jean will not shrink more than 1/4” unless you routinely dry them on high heat, in which case they will shrink up to 1/2” over the months. The price? Well . . . $58.00. Ouch. But cheaper than Levi’s in Holland, right? Oh, wait . . . that’s not the sale price. The sale price was a mere $39. Sure, you can get jeans for less—but not a jean! Significant savings. But you know, that apparently wasn’t enough to move these cursed improperly sized jean, for a second sale tag, overlapping the original just slightly, listed the price at an even lower $29.99! Okay, now we’re talking! That’s almost half price! So I’m certain you’ll agree that such a fine jean are well worth $30.

But you know, even with the “34/34” sticker firmly placed over the godforsaken “34L,” the second sale price still wasn’t enough to get these things off the floor and into the wardrobes of San Francisco. Nothing less than a third tag brought the price down even further, all the way down to $19.99! Now, you can’t even get Sears Toughskins for that. For that price, maybe you could do a cheesy pair of off-brand seconds at Ross Dress for Less, stamped “IMPERFECT,” with the crotch sewn in backwards or something like that. But no, we’re talking the Ranch Hand Relaxed Jean. Amazing.

So I’ll send them out. If anybody out there in Holland questions the rich American heritage of Banana Republican, or in any way insinuates that Levi’s are cooler, just say something like, “Well, yeah, sure, Levi’s are great jeans . . . but these are a pant.” (Is your Dutch good enough to communicate such subtleties?)

May 10, 1995

Well, it’s 10:00pm and I still have to ride. The weather’s been crappy so I’ve been riding my Blackburn Mag Turbo trainer. I got a flat tire on it last night. Go figure. Then, when I was hunting for a spare tube in my toolbox, I suffered a freak accident. Remember the trophy from my Burrito Eating World Championship? It had this giant wooden base with an engraved brass plaque, with my name and everything, and then a giant spring-type shock absorber with the shimmering silver burrito atop it. Well, I don’t know if you ever learned what sad fate befell that trophy, so I’ll tell you. Months after the big burrito race, throughout which time the trophy had enjoyed prominent placement on our apartment’s coffee table, I had a fit of pique (unrelated to the trophy, probably over some girl or something) and suddenly grabbed the trophy, jumped up from the sofa, ran out the front door to the railing overlooking our parking lot, and threw the trophy over the edge. The shock absorber exploded on impact, if memory serves (though this is exactly the kind of detail I’d embellish, I confess). My roommate C— cheered wildly because he’d gotten sick of looking at the trophy. Well, I regretted my recklessness immediately, but of course there was nothing to be done for the trophy. I did pry off the engraved plaque, though, and kept it as, well, a trophy I guess you could say. Anyway, last night (as I was starting to tell you before that grand diversion) I was rifling through my toolbox, on a shelf in a closet, and dislodged the trophy plaque, which fell from a height of four feet or so. It hit my bare leg just above the ankle, causing a huge gash which bled profusely. So what do you think … was this karmic retribution?

December 23, 1996

Mom’s down here for Christmas, which is nice. It’s been raining like crazy here, but today it went from cloudy to a clear blue sky in a span of like five minutes. So E—, Mom & I decided to go for a walk, and popped into various shops to poke around. We found this neat bowl at a place just down the street from our apartment, at a little shop called Jade Snow Wong. Jade Snow Wong is the name of the owner; she’s also a creator of ceramics and a writer of nonfiction, and Mom read one of her books when she was in high school! Anyway, this bowl is just the perfect shape. It’s weird, but holding it, cupping it in your palms, brings about a really soothing feeling. So we bought it; it was like $6. We walked all around Chinatown and bought some really weird stuff. Like this really fancy soap, in a colored paper wrapper with a gold seal and everything, the kind of soap that would cost like $5 a bar in our neighborhood; four for a dollar there. We also bought this really strange Ginseng chewing gum. It smells, and tastes, like over-sweetened dirt. I’d thought it might give me a buzz, but no dice. Remember that bean drink we bought once in Chinatown, that was so sickeningly cloyingly sweet, and how the cashier laughed and laughed when we drank it because we couldn’t keep from making faces?

Anyway, we eventually ended up at House of Nanking, and had a typically great meal. The owner, Peter Fang, was there, as usual, working in every capacity you can imagine from host to waiter to cook. You remember meeting him, right? He’s always got this boyish smile on his face, and doesn’t seem in the least bit intimidated by the culture gap, if there still is one, between himself and his customers. He stopped at the bar where we were eating and asked if the scallops were delicious. (Of course they were.) Then he asked, with a slight smirk, if we were going to Macy’s afterwards, and we said no. He said, feigning surprise, “You’ve already bought everything?”

 “We did buy some things,” I laughed. He looked totally interested as I dragged out the bag with the soap in it, and he watched eagerly as I unwrapped it, then laughed his ass off when he saw what we bought. “Let me guess, four for a dollar?” he asked. I said yes. Then I handed him the bowl, but he neglected to cup it properly and thus fully appreciate it. “Uh, four-fifty,” he guessed. “No, six,” I said. He giggled and either said, “You got taken” (which I actually kind of doubt) or simply had the expression that said we got taken. “But we didn’t buy this in Chinatown, we bought it in Russian Hill,” E— explained. “Oh, oh,” he nodded, understanding completely.

We also had their chow mein, which has even ropier noodles than the Gondolier in Boulder, but is great (and cheap, $3.30!). Perhaps the most exciting thing we ate was this Eggplant Szechwan Style, which had the normal green pea pods but also this brilliant, I mean absolutely electric, purple eggplant, of course in a spicy sauce with lots of garlic. It was the loudest looking Chinese dish I’ve ever ordered, and delicious. I asked if it was made from a special eggplant. It was a “young Chinese” eggplant, Mr. Fang said. When they get older they lose some of their quality, he explained, and become less tender. It dawned on me that you can eat the young eggplant without any of the guilt you may feel when eating veal.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume X

Introduction

This is the tenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I 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, and Volume IX is here. (The different volumes have little or nothing to do with one another.)

As with the last few installments, these are taken from ancient emails, back when I archived them as simple text files in the mistaken belief I’d be able to keep up with the practice. It didn’t last long, but has yielded some fun finds from a bygone era. I wrote all these when I was living in San Francisco, before moving to the burbs and becoming a parent.

December 26, 1994

[Having recently finished a 9-month bike tour] I’m still interviewing for a proper corporate-type job. In the meantime I’ve been working odd shifts at the bike shop in Berkeley, just to feel like I’m not a totally hopeless unemployed person. It’s a pretty ridiculous commute, first biking up and over California Street which has got to be at least a 15% grade, and then all the way under the bay on the Bart, for the typically paltry pay you get at a bike shop. Still, it’s diverting and often fun. For example, on Christmas Eve, a bike builder named Daniel, who has been on suspension without pay until further notice for sloppy work, brought in a 12-pack of Heineken, probably as a brown-nosing move. We threw it in the fridge, and brainstormed ways to get the owner, M—, to let us drink them on the job. M— was in a holiday mood, which was good; earlier, I’d “reminded” him of a policy of always buying lunch for members of the staff who wore staff t-shirts on Christmas Eve, and he went along with it. Well, by mid-afternoon the mad Christmas crowds were getting to me and the boys, and I proposed to M— the idea of discreet alcohol consumption to carry us through. M— said, “What, there’s beers!? Cool, gimme one.” Alas, it appeared we’d have no way to open them, lacking a bottle opener, but I grabbed a Maillard Helicomatic lock-ring tool and it worked great. In fact, it soon dawned on me that one half of the tool does the lock-ring, and the other is in fact nothing else but a bottle opener. You gotta love the French. Well, M— proceeded to walk out on the sales floor, beer in hand, and sell a bike. Needless to say it was a free-for-all after that.

January 1, 1995

I guess I forgot to give you my (kinda) new street address: it’s below. I had some fun moving in here. Our street is fairly flat, but our-cross street, Filbert, is crazy steep. They don’t call our neighborhood Russian Hill for nothing; our hills are as oppressive as Russia herself. Trucks and tour buses are prohibited on Filbert but that didn’t stop me from driving up it in the 14-foot U-Haul I rented. Its diesel engine was taxed to the limit, and I had this breathtaking, terrifying, yet oddly giddy feeling of impending doom. Halfway up—and too late to turn around—my inner ear started giving me (non-verbal) warning messages that the truck was about to pitch over backwards and tumble down the hill, end over end. It was such a fearsome feat that I almost got an erection. I held my breath and reassured myself with the fact that this time, I’d bought the full insurance. Anyhow, I made it over, down the other side on compression (the engine shrieking like it was gonna throw a rod), and then, as a final flourish, proceeded to parallel-park that baby in one of the toughest neighborhoods for parking in the entire city.

March 13, 1995

I am very gratified to get your response. The kind of honesty I indulged in via my letter to you, calling you out as I did, was admittedly dangerous—the recipient of such a letter can either take the painful, self-effacing route (which you did), or delude himself and continue to hide behind the falsity of his social veneer. This latter type, like a blindfolded tyke who has yet to learn object permanence, will assume that because he can’t see the truth, that it can’t see him. Of course such behavior is completely pathological. Right now I’m thinking of J— S—, whose insatiable desire to be cooler than me back in high school took the form of dissing me, like some kind of human sacrifice to the gods of cool. I thought to myself, “J—, can’t you do better than that? It’s not hard to be cooler than me—why don’t you try to be cooler than somebody who actually is cool? Like the Fonz? I mean, seriously … cooler than me? What kind of ambition is that?” I was originally drawn to J— as a friend, back in elementary school, because he was such a bold, unapologetic nerd. Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. Through what he probably thought was a social apotheosis from lowly dork into “happening dude” (his favorite phrase), I witnessed the slow, cancerous death of a personality.

May 2, 1995

Thanks for the warning about the virus! I’ve always wondered whether those anti-virus programs can detect viruses that come over e-mail. Fortunately, almost all my e-mail comes from trusted friends and relatives anyway. I did, however, receive a “junk mail” message at work. I guess business solicitations are frowned upon on the Internet, but on CompuServe [how I get and send e-mail], who knows, maybe anything goes. Anyway, I forwarded your warning message to everybody in my e-mail list (about 20 people).

So, yeah, e-mail sure is cool. It’s been wonderful to be able to write my brother Geoff without waiting for the normal three weeks or so it takes the postal service to carry physical mail to the Netherlands. Maybe I’ll get a sound card for my PC and record my actual voice, and send the recording as a binary file; Geoff could hear a reasonable computer facsimile of my voice on the other end! Of course that would be more of a parlor trick than anything useful. You know, the strangest thing about e-mail is that my dad, who by all means ought to be a master of this technology, has not actually joined up. And yet he has the computer, and the mind, for it. Bizarre.

August 6, 1995

You know what? Every time I make my Mexican rice, I think of the time I made it at your place in NYC, and scorched it. The horror! I am certain that you threw away the leftover rice, because it was, well, inedible. I only hope you didn’t have to throw away the pot since I’d blackened it so badly. I keep thinking about what a disaster that was. I say all this to my shame. I guess what I’m saying is, you should really come out to San Francisco so that I can try again with the rice, and show you that it really is good when the right ingredients and familiar kitchen equipment are on hand. I could send you back with a new pot, even. So if you get the chance, please come. Until then, I suppose you can just curse my name.

October 24, 1995

Using the formula f=mgh, and my stopwatch and altimeter data, I have calculated my power output for the climbs I biked up today: over a period of 16:30, I averaged 0.37 horsepower. But what does that mean? Does it mean I have a third of the strength of a horse? Well, not really; I don’t think horsepower applies to horses in the real world. But we do use horsepower to describe certain things. For example, my output was .0037 times the horsepower of a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, I happen to know. And it would be more than enough to power a Hoover Mighty Might vacuum cleaner. If that’s not interesting to you, consider that 0.37 horsepower translates into 272 watts. That tells us my output is enough to power one of our chandeliers and a desk lamp.

November 1, 1995

Why yes, I’ve been to House of Nanking many times, and thanks for asking. I guess I can’t really recall what my favorite dishes are there, as I try to mix it up each time. Until recently, my strategy was to spend my time in line asking everybody else what they usually get. But the last time, I was in the mood for chow fun and asked the waiter, who is also the owner, if they had it. (In my experience, you can ask for just about anything, including chili mac, at a Chinese restaurant and they’ll have it, even if it’s not on the menu. Not that I have ever actually asked for chili mac. I’m just sayin’.) Well, the owner looked at me as if I were some kind of uncultured rube (which I may well be). “No, chow fun is white-man food!” he laughed. “This your first time here?” I said, “Uh … no.” He nodded and said, “I’ll set you up.” What then transpired you can well imagine, as you described your own Nanking dining experience so well in your last epistle … I need say nothing more. I love that place. It’s always worth the wait. I like the strange vegetables that they use—yams, for example. Totally unique (plus I normally hate yams). As far as the place being greasy, sure, it’s greasy, as Chinese food tends to be, but compared to most places, it goes down (and stays down) pretty darn well. Man. Now I can’t get that place off my mind.

August 27, 1996

How cool, I just figured out how to hook the CD-ROM in my computer into my boom box. It works great—so it looks like I bought computer speakers for nothing. Oh well. Now I can play CDs, which I never could before. Only problem is, I only own two CDs and they were both freebies that E— got from her work. I guess I could check out CDs from the library and tape them. Or of course I could do like everyone else and just go to the record store and buy music, but E— and I are trying to save up for a house one day, which is no easy feat in this area. We looked at a 2-bedroom condo a few doors down and it’s $250,000! There are 1-bedroom condos on top of Russian Hill for $1 million … as if! Sausalito is probably only slightly cheaper than San Francisco, and we’d have to pay $3 a day to commute in over the Golden Gate Bridge (not to mention fighting the traffic … no thanks). So we have to be pretty frugal while we figure out where, one day, we might be able to afford a place.

December 2, 1996

Just had the stomach flu. As if in some awful parody of the three-squares-a-day rule, I deposited my Thanksgiving dinner, in three installments, into the toilet (out the front end). Damn!

December 23, 1996

In reply to your question:

>>You’re set in Internet EtheReal Estate, hottest property going 
>>(the new frontier). But still one question: where do you put 
>>the relatives when they come to visit?

Well, it’s really pretty BASIC. First, I should say that my family members aren’t exactly queuing up to visit me. But when one or two of these characters feels the need to offload, I’m happy to let them nest in any free partition in my home. I help download their luggage (we have a little cache to store any valuables they might have). If they stay the night, I have a strange kind of cot I fashioned out of a kind of braided fiber (a web, you might say) that I’ve stretched over a mainframe. I have a nice spreadsheet for the cot, and some other soft wares, to make guests as comfortable as possible. Usually I keep the bedding compressed, but sometimes I set it up just for CIX and floppy down on it myself.

I’d really like to keep my domain open, but I normally limit it to friends and family. I mean, entertaining is a real effort for me—I guess I’m just not a natural-born server. Multi-tasking is hard for me so I just can’t monitor everyone all the time. I struggle to be a good host sometimes, and some guests I don’t like the slightest bit. Most are basically OK, but many just don’t observe the proper protocol. I can handle it if they’re not PC, but I won’t tolerate bad language. In fact, the next time I get a cursor, he’d better be ready to run, because I swear I’ll boot him!

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