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There was some confusion about the starting time for the drive down to Santa Barbara, whence we were to sail the next morning. I'd been told that people were meeting at 4:30pm, but it turns out that not everyone had been told this. There was time to fill while we waited for people to get free from work and gather. I'd filled a lot of time playing Quake. But I had to stop. My hands were a mass of snarls. The center would not hold.
I tagged along with Piaw and Christina as they searched for a mailbox where she could mail a bunch of announcements.
This search was of course conducted by car. We were in Cupertino, after all. You don't just walk down to the nearest mailbox in Cupertino; you have to drive. Actually, we didn't use the nearest mailbox (which was maybe half a mile from Mpath), because its pickup time had passed. We ended up driving on to a post office. This post office had a special drive-through lane next to one of its mailboxen. This lane had a line of cars in it. I marvelled at this sight: all these people had hopped in their cars and driven from miles around to use this mailbox. I wondered what it was like here at midnight April 15. We returned to the Mpath parking lot.
Someone had rented a van, and we were going to drive down to Santa Barbara in it, our luggage lashed to the top. Mike started to tie stuff down. I hung back with him, taking the rope which he'd passed over the top of the luggage to me. I didn't really know what to do with the rope. "I don't know how to tie those knots," I said. Usually when I admit ignorance of something to a computer programmer, they tell me what I need to know. In fact I use, "I don't know..." as a sort of code phrase for, "Please tell me..." when dealing with programmers. And it works. But it didn't work with Mike. He gently took the rope from my hands and started tying the proper knots. I didn't help much with the luggage. I was trying to figure this guy out. He didn't tend to meet my gaze, his eyes kept slipping off to the side. Yet he smiled. Maybe he was just shy after being introduced as "The Legendary...". Ah well.
I'm not really sure when Tim showed up. 'Rayne showed up in a car whose bright green color immediately drew comment. She emerged from her car and leapt to its defense. At first I thought she was being argumentative, but it soon became obvious that she was kidding. She implied that the car's color may have made it more of a bargain.
Have you got the whole barcada straight?
So it's just as well that we went out to dinner then.
Over dinner, we talked about Japan, where I'd toured, 'Rayne had taught, and Christina had business-travelled. One of 'Rayne's students had told her that 'Rayne had the biggest nose she'd ever seen. 'Rayne had told her Japanese contact at the school about this, and had been told that Oh yes indeed you do! I talked about hearing "Sono gaijin wa... Sei ga takai des ne!" (The gaijin over there... he's so tall!) every day. We talked about how 'Rayne's visitors had noted that Japanese women tended to throw themselves at Western tourist men, and how I hadn't noticed that happening to me. "Maybe think they thought I was a gangster," I said. Maybe I didn't spend a lot of time at haunts of bored housewives, I thought to myself.
We talked about sleeping arrangements on the boat. There were four beds, eight people; people would have to share. Who would share with whom? I didn't know--I figured my choice of bed would have more to do with geometry than sociology. Jessica and Hil would share--or maybe they wouldn't. Maybe, Jessica pointed out, Hil would end up shacking up with someone by the end of the trip. We laughed. Jessica said something else I didn't hear. There was more laughter, but now Hil wasn't laughing. I guess Jessica's the sillier sister between the two, I thought. Hil said something about how something wasn't likely, turned towards me and said, "No offense." Huh? When had people started talking about me? I thought we were making fun of Hil. Suddenly I was curious to find out what Jessica's quieter statement had been. I paused a bit. Maybe someone would say something to fill the silence, give me a clue as to what was going on? No. I spoke up. "Uhm, I didn't actually hear what she said." I summed up my unoffendedness and cluelessness with a shrug. But there was still some awkwardness there. Conversation stumbled. Hil still felt uncomfortable about something. Someone changed the subject.
We discussed Mike's planned invention: the high-safety toothpick. This toothpick would consist of a wide handle and a little bit of toothpick. The toothpick would retract into the handle in response to pressure, and would ease back out thanks to a weak spring. It might be more expensive than the toothpicks we have nowadays, Mike pointed out, but restaurants might go for it to reduce their liability insurance rates. I snorted, said that this sort of gadgetry was a typically overengineered solution to the liability problem. I envisioned a gang that could provide untraceable toothpicks, with sweatshops full of children busily filing all identifying marks off of existing toothpicks. Other people had even more useful ideas.
The conversation continued as we piled into the van, headed back to the office to pick up some silly putty (to keep Monopoly pieces from skittering across the board in the event of a shipboard game), and headed down Highway 101 to Santa Barbara. It's difficult for me to piece together much of the conversation.
I remembered that Tim gave us an uproarious recounting of the plot of Waterworld. I might not have if it hadn't been for his description of some of the unlikely ambushes from that movie. The ones where villains, submerged, held themselves below the surface of the water, breathing through pipes while holding their jetskis below them, laying in wait? I was reminded of this on the boat when our depth meter stopped saying that there were 600+ feet between our keel and the bottom, and started saying that there were 2 feet. Anyhow, when I saw this image of our boat passing over a barely submerged jetski, I knew where it came from, and was reminded about how the conversation had meandered afterwards--why did MST3K insist on only making fun of old movies? Why couldn't they make fun of Waterworld? It sounded like it richly deserved it.
We talked about why someone who had been signed up for this trip hadn't been able to make it (Hil was taking her place)--she'd been hit by a car. On a related note, a couple of someone's relatives had been run down by a poorly driven golf cart. Would I have remembered this if we hadn't seen a truck hauling a load of golf carts later?
'Rayne talked about the unreasonable MIS demands of the lawyers she was consulting for. I started to get a negative impression of her. Jeez, why had she gone into MIS if she didn't want to deal with stupid people making unreasonable demands? She'd made a big mistake. Actually, I soon discovered that I'd made the mistake. 'Rayne wasn't in MIS--she was supposed to be teaching people at this legal firm how to use their new computer system. (They were switching over from Vaxen to PCs.) But the MIS department was clueless, so everyone was coming to her to get her to fix things. Which was a bit outside the scope of her contract. But she kept going ahead and fixing things anyhow.
We talked about Hil's situation. She was fresh out of NYC, looking to see if she could get ensconced in a new life in sunny California. Ohmygawd, I thought to myself, you're form New York City and now you're down in fuckin' Cupertino? I figure San Francisco is going to be a bit on the dull side for a New Yorker. Cupertino must be like a, like meadow or something. She talked about trying to lead a life without a car. She didn't have a car and she was living in Silicon Valley? She wanted to buy a cheap used car, but neither of her jobs was paying much. I mentioned that in San Francisco, one can generally get by without a car. But where she was, she could stay with her sister and had a job. Ohhh yeah. Still, I hoped for her sake that she ended up in a better place for her soon.
We heard a bit about 'Rayne's experiences with SCUBA diving. She talked about how certain men-type divers would try to impress her and her woman-type diving partner with bragging of deep dives, and how good it felt to be able to dive deeper faster than they could. It's always good to put braggarts in their place.
We talked a bit about manic depressive relatives and suicidal depression. I looked out at the offshore oil platforms, ugly clumps of light against the night-dark sea.
We arrived in Santa Barbara.