like perspiration, except airier and better smelling
The quote of the day:
Independent counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation into the behavior of Bill Clinton suffered a major setback Monday, when the embattled president escaped through an air vent minutes before he was to testify before a federal grand jury.
Running news:
10.6 miles. I did pretty well too, except that today was the first day with my new heart rate monitor and I set it wrong. I put the high end of my training zone at 160 and spent most of the run at about 165-168. So out of a 104 minute run, the monitor thought I spent 20 minutes in the zone. I've since reset the upper limit to 170.
One of the great joys in my life is hearing that I've inspired someone else. I love getting mail like that; it totally makes my day.
What's even better is seeing the results of such inspiration, such as Life at the Other CIA, a journal documenting Tom Dowdy's journey to the Culinary Institute of America for a 3 month course. As if he'll be able to stop doing an online journal after 3 months. Ha! (And yes, he used a variation on my journal design with permission.)
I've told Tom that next July 4th I'm crashing the party at his house.
I used to know Tom waaaaaay back at Apple Computer. He was an engineer on the QuickDraw GX project, I was a writer. He wasn't one of my engineers, though: Tom worked on Printing, I did Typography. (You know: fonts and stuff.) Our most memorable interaction occurred on the night that the most memorable interaction occurred for all the writers and engineers on the QuickDraw GX project.
Unfortunately, it's the kind of memorable occasion notable mainly for how hard it is for me to remember anything about it.
The GX project had reached some major milestone -- Alpha? Beta? -- so to celebrate Apple had a party where we had cake. I remember the party room quite well: all the engineers stood on one side, all the writers on the other, the project leads kind of milled about, the tech support guys were yukking it up (because that's what the tech support guys always did). It was a bad scene and indicative of how things had been going. The engineers and writers had not been getting along very well, if at all, and the tech support guys were barely surviving as intermediaries.
So someone -- the engineering manager? -- thought a raucous dinner for 30 at a Mexican restaurant (Carlos Murphy's? I can't remember the name, only the type) was just the thing we all needed.
Apple, remember, was picking up the tab. So everyone proceeded to order margaritas. Then we started ordering tequila shots. Things got noisier and noisier.
Then someone -- I'd love to memorialize the culprit, but I doubt anyone remembers who it was -- suggested we go to the British pub next door and continue the evening's festivities.
How many of us went? I have no idea. I do know that the 10 or so of us out of the original 30 drank everything in sight. I had my first (and last) taste of Jagermeister -- there's a college boy drink if there ever was one. Things were said that probably shouldn't have been. I know a few things were done that shouldn't have been (not by me, I do know that -- even when falling-down drunk I don't allow myself the excuse of "I was only drunk"). This vast quantity of alcohol got everyone talking to one another, which was the whole point of the exercise.
I don't know if anyone got lucky or not that night -- I didn't, and I was one of the few women there. The reason I didn't (and to be honest, the way things were going, the only reason I didn't -- I was informed later of another participant's infatuation with me) was that I'd just moved in with Darin and was in that deeply in love stage that really annoys the shit out of everyone else.
Darin was at work that night and I knew I was in no condition to get home, so Tom drove me home. He asked me if I was wearing Opium perfume and I was surprised because I was. I wondered vaguely -- extremely vaguely, I hadn't been this drunk since college, if ever -- if I should be nervous that Tom could tell what perfume I was wearing before I was on to the next, non-connected thought. I should have been more worried about whether or not Tom was able to drive, since he was clearly not the Designated Driver: he had drunk at least as much, if not more, than I had. He got me back home in one piece just fine, despite my incessant babbling about what a wonderful guy Darin was.
Tom must have known Darin from when Darin had been in charge of the Blue Meanies and was not everyone's favorite humanoid. I wonder if Tom was sceptical of Darin's wonderfulness or whether he just found it odd to hear someone babbling about Darin the way I was. I seem to recall Tom just nodding and saying, "That's great. That's so great," but you know: I was pretty darn drunk at the time, so I'm not sure about that.
Once in the house I called Darin -- this was probably at 12 or 1am -- and asked him to come home. He said he would soon. He didn't. I called him again and when he answered I hung up on him. Given that I think hanging up on someone is pretty darn obnoxious, I can't believe I did that, particularly to someone about whom I was so crazy, but I did. I was pretty darn drunk. He came home to find me moaning. I didn't feel well. He went out to Safeway at 2am to get me Alka-Seltzer, which made my stomach feel a lot better and got me to sleep.
I woke up some time the next afternoon, at which point I crawled into the office and reported successful bonding with the GX engineers. My boss reported that Apple was picking up the bar tab for the second half of the evening, which evidently reached into the several hundred dollar category, simply because it was worth it to the company to have us be one big happy drunken family.
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The GX project eventually ended up going nowhere, of course. It never caught on with developers, and several of the cool things it did third-party applications absorbed into their code without using GX. It was a neat project to work on, though.
Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com