Comfort Levels

Darin had some soup and declared he couldn't eat any more.

Ceej had a few grains of rice and enjoyed the texture.

Darin told her a story about a documentary producer we had met, and how he found a tribe in the Amazon that subsisted almost entirely on this bland paste. The producer had brought some rice with him and he made the rice for the tribe. One little boy cried continuously as he ate the rice, and the producer asked his mother why. "Because he's never tasted anything so good."

Mitch and I did all the eating.

It was good to see Ceej again. We discussed Diablo.

Today for breakfast we went to the Original Pancake House, a breakfast place we have not yet been able to equal in LA.

During breakfast we got on the topic of my needing a new car, which I will at some point in the next year or two. My car is 9 years old and has 125K on it. The car itself is in great shape, but I don't know how long Integra engines last.

We also discussed, while on the subject of buying things, a new PCS phone that Mitch wanted to get, a Motorola Star-Tac. He was debating whether or not to get it because a)he already has a cell phone and b)it was a lot of money.

I told him one of the main differences in my spending habits since getting together was that before Darin, I made a lot of money at Apple and wouldn't spend it on anything, and after Darin, I felt more comfortable that I could spend the money safely, but I still wouldn't spend it on anything.

In the afternoon we went to my parents' house to celebrate Christmas.

Darin had lost his voice, and if you know about Darin and talking, you know that this was a difficult spot for him. I stuck him on a chair by the fire and kept putting mugs of tea in front of him.

For dinner my mother had gone all out (on my suggestion) and made lobster tails and steak as kind of a home-grown surf-and-turf thing, only better. We ate like pigs. It was good.

I spent a long time talking to my sister and her fiance--yes, I mentioned you, don't have a cow--about what they were going to do in Boston for Christmas; "Freeze" was the main answer, I think.

Darin had brought two presents for me, and as we drove up to my parents' house he said that his presents might be a little embarrassing for me. "So long as they're not salacious," I said, and he said no, they weren't. How embarrassing could they be?

I opened the first present: a copy of Time-Life's True Crime series, Serial Killers. I laughed. My parents discovered that I'm a little weird.

I began opening the second present and realized that I feared an IOU for the rest of the True Crime series was in it. (He told me later he was hoping I'd think that.)

It wasn't. It was a brochure for a new car.

Either my heart stopped or it sped up so fast that I couldn't make out the individual beats.

"I only put a deposit down on it," Darin said. "It'll be here in 3 to 6 months, so nothing's definite yet. Do you like it?"

I think I drooled on the brochure.

It turned out that when Darin went shopping with his Mom on Monday it really was dangerous. He asked his Mom what he should get me, and she told him, "Something big."

I won't say what kind of car it is, but as a hint to Darin's family who may remember this conversation from Thanksgiving time: Scott and Lauren will never come visit us in LA.

Part of me is incredibly excited about this, and part of me isn't, because I know how to rain on any parade. This second part of me wants us to go back to the dealership, get the deposit, and get me something practical like a Saturn.

I don't know whether it's because of my upbringing--daughter of an accountant, daughter of parents who grew up during the Depression and remembered what it was like to have no money. I'm always worried about not having money, despite that in my lifetime it's never been an issue and if anything ever happened to Darin's career--like that's going to happen--I could always get a pretty good job as a tech writer again (especially now that I've heard what the going rate is...it's gone up a little in the past few years).

Sigh. I wish I could just relax and say, Hey, nice car. If we couldn't afford it, Darin wouldn't have put down a deposit on it.