Microserfs

Myabe thinking you're supposed to "have a life" is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be.

How do we know that all of these people with "no lives" aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and perceptions?

I only need 2 hours of people a day. I can; get by on that amount. 2 hours of FaceTime.

I replied:

2 hours of FaceTime is not good enough Abe.

YOU are not a productmanager, and life is not a product . . . though wouldn't it be SO MUCH CLEANER AND EASIER were that so.

Nonetheless, this line of thinking reminds me of the URBAN LEGEND of a Japanese exchange student who thought he was saving money by eating nothing but Top Ramen noodles every day for a year, but he died of malnutrition before he graduatd.

* * *

After sundown, Karla and I went out to the garage to see Dad's model train world. Mom says he hasn't been in there at all since he began working with Michael - after returning from "his episode" up in Redmond. I guess this is a good sign - that he's stopped obsessing and is out in the world and doing new things.

Todd and Michael had plonked down two monitors right in the middle of the landscape directly atop a farm. They had arranged the small animals in small herds atop the monitors, which are coaxial'ed into the Habitrail. The monitors were displaying some Gouraud-shaded Oop! bricks, rotating them in 3D space. Oop! is looking really good, by the way. It looks fresh and modern, as if the future is being squeezed out of the monitor screens like meat from a hamburger grinder. Todd taped a note to one monitor saying,

PLEASE GOD, LET RENDERING TIME GET CHEAPER AND FASTER.

Karla had brought along a feather duster and she dusted off the mountains and the village and the little white house Dad built where Jed is supposed to live. I turned on the trains, and we watched them drive around, through the towns, over the mountains, past the rotating building blocks, and then we turned the trains off, and turned the lights out and left. Dad doesn't seem to mind "us kids" stealing his world.

* * *

We call the two systems in the garage "Cabernet" and "Chardonnay."

Three other system units (two Quadras and a Pentium) are called "Ogre," "Hobgoblin," and "Kestrel." Two file servers are called "Tootie" and "Blair."

Our two printers are called "Siegfried" and "Roy," because they're all shiny and plastic.

Our SGI Iris workstation running an old version of Vertigo software is named, of course, "HAL."

I'm trying to end this day on an up note, but it's hard.

THURSDAY

Mom was cleaning out the spice rack in the kitchen. I watered her philodendron plant. She was really funny. She said she eats ripple chips for breakfast now. She says it's a bad habit and she's trying to break it and she blames "us kids"! She always says, "You kids." We like it, even though I think I slopped thinking of myself as a kid about four years ago. I don't mind responsibility. I guess that's why I don't mind the repetitive nature of computer work.

* * *

Boy did I get a response to my Net question about the organisms that lurk inside the human body. My Pig Pen theory was indeed confirmed: the average human body contains 1 x 10^13 cells, yet hosts 1 x 10^14 bacterial cells. Long, scary names:

Escherichia coli

Candida albicans

S. aureus

Klebsiella

Actinomyces

Staphylococcus

It really makes you take seriously all these articles in the news about old diseases becoming new diseases. I took so many antibiotics and sulfas for zits in my teens that I'm going to be felled by the first postmodern virus to walk down Camino Real. Doomed.

I mentioned all these microbes to Susan and I think she's going to become germ phobic. I could see it in her eyes. Fear.

* * *

Karla asked me what I thought of modern yuppie parents who smother their kids with attention and affection - those households where the kid rules and everything in the universe revolves around making sure they get touched enough by their parents.

I paused and tried to be honest and the answer blurted out: "Jealous." Susan overheard and started singing "Cars," by Gary Numan, and we all

started singing it. Here in my car, I can only receive, I can lock up my doors . . .

And then the moment passed. I e-mailed Abe on the subject, and he was online, so the response came back immediately:

I come from one of those "zero-kidney" families . . . we all made this agreement once . . . that if anybody else in the family needed a kidney it was going to be, "Well, sorry . . . Been nice knowing you."

I think that's why it's so hard for me to understand my body. Becauze our family was so zero-touch.

As I type, I'm bouncing my 11 pound ball of rubber bands contructed form my daily Wall Street Journal. It grows.

* * *

I learned a great new word today: "deletia." When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write:

[deletia]

It stands for everything that's been lost.

* * *