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Issei in San Diego... The current movie scene... Pork: the Other Tamale Filling... Gross things you can do with underwear...
Hans and Noriko were living in Powai, a suburb of San Diego. I said one of my cousins had lived in Powai. Hans said that lots of people had lived there. He said that they tended to move on, looking for some place more interesting. I reflected that my cousin had moved to Fremont. This was perhaps cruel of me to mention.
Noriko talked about her attempts to fit in. Two ladies in her neighborhood were Japanese--they were both Navy wives, though, and perhaps not so much fun to talk to. She was also taking a baking class once a week at the local community college, and there were many Japanese ladies there. However, these ladies were upper-class, and while not snotty were perhaps "too polite."
Hans and Noriko took advantage of their student IDs to see movies cheaply. There was a local second-run theater where, with a student discount, they could see movies for a buck fifty. There were a lot of movies that came out this summer, Hans said, where one could feel good about seeing them as long as one had only paid a buck fifty. Oh yeah. We talked about movies--"In and Out" had got all too serious, various action movies had failed to satisfy. Hans chuckled and said that he'd seen a movie that probably no-one else had--Jan Svankmejer's, uhm, this movie called like Conspirators of something. I completed the title and we excitedly jabbered away about the movie for a while.
We talked about the fun of patent law. We talked about people and companies who didn't necessarily want useful patents, they just wanted to have patents. Stockholders liked patents. A stable of patents is useful when a company sues you for patent infringement. As a lawyer, it was always useful whether to know whether the client wanted their patent to be useful on its own, or whether they just wanted a patent, period. Alex talked about how Oracle, where he works, had started ramping up their patent production over the last few years, preparing to go head to head with MicroSoft.
Alex talked about the time he'd spent in Shanghai. He described China as still "pretty third world," but said that the amount of construction going on in Shanghai right now was incredible.
Alex talked about Oracle's Lake Tahoe design center. A couple of big wheels had bought cabins up there, so they'd run a T1 line up there. Visiting Oracle types could stay in one of the cabins to work, or else could dial in to an annex box there. Alex said that there were a couple of winters where he went skiing every weekend. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, the big wheels gave up their cabins, and then the T1 line went away.
We talked about the rumored connections between In & Out Burger and the Mormon church. Legend has it that if you unroll the lip of one of the coffee cups, you'll find some spooky scripture. I mentioned the time when I'd ordered a Happy Meal with coffee at a Carl's Jr. drive-through, confusing the clerk, who didn't think of coffee as a children's beverage.
Dave tried to take a nap. Soon after he had settled in to bed, the phone started ringing--people were trying to figure out where to meet for dinner. The phone was next to the bed, so Dave ended up arranging instead of relaxing. I reflected that I was having it pretty easy on this trip.
Too soon, it was time for Hans and Noriko to be gone. I wished them well. Soon it was time to get ready for dinner. We were to meet at a parking garage in Santa Fe, and go from there to the Blue Corn cafe.
It was getting on dark as we navigated the curves of Bishop's Lodge Road. Soon we were sitting on a bench across the street from a public parking garage which was desperately architecturally alluding to a culture on the wane. Bryan, Brendan, and Alex snuck off to souvenir shops in search of silver baubles with which to enchant wives and girlfriends. We flagged down passing vehicles full of friends, and soon started ambling over to the Blue Corn Cafe. I walked next to Mason, and we were that close to getting caught up, but then he was the only person who knew where the place was, and he had to rush to take the lead and make sure the group didn't wander down a dark alley.
The Blue Corn Cafe was able to handle a group our size (11+) on short notice, I'll say that for them. I really, really wish that they hadn't slipped that pork tamale in with my other tamales, though, because when I discovered it, it was pretty gross--I discovered the pork in the process of chewing it. And they might have mixed up some of the beer orders, too. Plus, their tables looked like the tables of that Mexican restaurant back in the Denver airport. I can't recommend the place.
Sandia talked about how she wanted to start working to live, not living to work. I asked her if she picked that up from Chung. She said that Chung was one of the first people she'd known to live in such a way. I wondered what kind of a weirdo decides that the fun way to live is to get in to genetics. Then again, two of my co-workers are taking biology classes in their spare time, so maybe I'm the strange one. I talked about living in a building full of medical researchers, of looking in the mail area and finding Anaesthesiology Journal and catalogs offering the latest advances in catheters.
We talked about the difference between Bruce Mah and Craig Mah. Bruce Mah was the serious student, the coding stud. Craig was a nexus of deviation. I talked about the time Craig had kept some kind of game hen under its bed until it was re-animated, slowly shifting with the new life it was supporting. Brendan told a story about Craig's underwear that sounded almost familiar, yet wrong. Rob cleared it up--Rob and Craig had taken a pair of Bryan's underwear, poured in a bit of powder Sanka, and then slipped the undies over a spherical light fixture. It had looked like the underwear was... displaying tracks, as it were. I nodded. That was the story as I remembered it.
Brendan remembered the time when Dave had stolen his (Brendan's) underwear. Dave told Brendan that he'd given the underwear to their neighbor. Brendan knocked on her door to demand his underwear back. After the knock, but before the answer, Dave stuck his head out to say that in fact he, Dave, still had the underwear--he'd been lying about handing it over to the neighbor. Brendan didn't recount what he said to his neighbor at this juncture. He did say that he stole Dave's underwear, put it in a large bowl full of water, and put the whole mess in the freezer.
This bowl (long since sans undies) would later meet its demise at Brendan's hands. Desperate for a place to piss, he would use the bowl. Later, he crushed it--he didn't want anyone to use the bowl anymore, as it was unclean. I think I might have gaped. I never dreamed that Brendan had contained such hidden depths all these years.
Over dessert, there was a tense moment. A bunch of sopapillas were on the table. I wasn't having any--I was still pretty grossed out by the unexpected pork tamale noumenon. "You're not having any sopapillas?" Mason asked me. "I'm full. You want mine?" "You don't like them?" "I'm full." Mason addressed the table, "He doesn't like them." "Fuck you. I said I was just full." He smiled. I briefly considered squirting honey at his head, but then I figured that I was pretty sure that one of us was acting like a six-year-old, and if I started squirting honey around, the six-year-old was going to be me. This situation called for all the characteristics of a Roman statesman: veritas, dignitas, and dontsweattheweirdshitas.
Rob mused that most guys his age seemed to be going hog wild on activities. Canoeing, biking, whatever. He, Rob, was not into any activities, and he didn't know why. I could have said that I thought it was because he had a deep inner life, but the truth is I didn't know what it meant. Maybe it meant he was spending a lot of evenings over at Dave's playing WaveRacer or something.
We talked about the fate of the "Death Star," a certain home-made electrically-assisted hydraulic device. The purpose of this device would be familiar to many people in Berkeley or, say, Humboldt county. The electro-mechanical aspects would not. I'm not sure who, if anyone, owns the Death Star; I've never had a chance to see it and wouldn't have a chance now; no-one had wanted to risk bringing it through airport security.
Plans were discussed for a second-generation Death Star, one whose electrical assistance was electronically controlled. While I'm unclear on the details, it sounds like users of the current Death Star have to hold a button down for a certain duration, and it's possible to get this duration wrong. Perhaps a microcontroller would help. After all, computers could control hydraulic systems--they were used to control car engines, right? Bryan suggested that the electronic controller could play Pong. I agreed with this idea--if this thing could play pong, one would sure have an easier time explaining it to the security guards at airports. Rob had a simpler solution: "Hell yeah. You could just slap a tamagotchi on there. If they stop you, you can just, like, feed the chicken."
Eventually, it was time to go. We walked back to the garage, goodbyes and congratulations were said. Soon our foursome was speeding through the night back to the Rancho Incontinento.