diane visits the near and far.
"Would it be egotistical of me to say that he stopped to talk to us because of me?" -- me
"No." -- Mitch
Today I decided I was going to get as many impossible things done before lunch as I could. I ended up with one: I went by Toys R Us and bought my sister's baby shower presents. (Yes, I'm going to be an aunt. Can you imagine? I know this may not be any big deal for you, but I'm having a damnable time wrapping my mind around it.)
(In case she reads this however, I won't say what I got.)
Then I went to Redwood City, where I hit the office of Redwood Travel and screeched at the first available travel agent to work harder, dammit. Acually, I did nothing of the kind; I waited patiently as Lucy finished with a few customers on the phone, and we went to have lunch. The last x times I've been in the Bay Area I haven't seen Lucy, and this does not bode well for my socializing skills, something I am trying to remedy, along with my wardrobe.
We went to a nearby cafe--she had soup, I had quiche--and discussed all manner of things, from arranging travel to the Australian WorldCon for people she's met through her journal to why I didn't bring her along on my shopping expedition (because she only gets an hour for lunch, dammit, even if she is a shopping goddess) and the secret life of Sei Shonagon, Girl Detective. Actually, all I learned is that Sei is trying to get Lucy to go to a karaoke bar, and Lucy is resisting.
After dropping Lucy back into the world of corporate travel and weekend get-aways, I went up to the City, where I visited my old high school (quite a lot about that in a minute) and then took my mother to tea at the St. Francis. We ate bowls of strawberries and cream and a couple of petit fours and of course those little tiny sandwiches. My mom loves cucumber sandwiches; I think this must be a side effect of her being Irish or something. (It's like Fernando ordering cucumber sushi rolls--why?)
I then drove back down to Cupertino to pick up Mitch at the office and take the both of us to San Jose, where we planned to meet up with Darin for the Don't Miss Movie Night at the WWDC. Not surprisingly, when you title something the Don't Miss Movie Night at an event hosted by Apple Computer (not known for its frugal ways) and there's only one movie everyone's talking about, there are going to be rumors about what movie it's going to be. Darin scrounged around for badges to get us into the movie, which was held right after the "Stump The Experts" panel, which Darin was on (as one of the experts).
Mitch and I hung out in the lobby of the Convention Center, waiting for Darin to come get us. We played with our Palm Vs--Mitch just got his. We beamed our favorite games back and forth.
The movie, we found out, was Starship Troopers. Oh please, we said, when we could go watch Buffy? A guy came up right as we said that and got in on our conversation. When he left I asked Mitch if he had any idea who that was, and Mitch said no. I then said the Quote of the Day.
Darin came out, surrounded by groupies. I'm so glad Darin's a star in the computer programmer world, where the adoring fans are guys pretty much like himself, and not, say, in Hollywood, where the groupies look like Lara Flynn Boyle. Bryan Stearns and Scott Knaster were with them, so I chatted with them for a while, figuring I wouldn't get anywhere near Darin for a bit (I was right).
After Darin was finally forcibly removed from the group, Scott K. left us and Darin, Mitch, Scott, Bryan, and me headed over to Pagoda at the Fairmont for dinner. I didn't eat anything except sizzling rice soup, having had enough food at tea.
In the middle of dinner (which I am told was good by the gourmands who did partake), the fire alarm went off. We all looked at one another and said, "We should leave." We were the only ones in the restaurant--waiters and patrons alike--who did. In fact, we were the only ones on our side of the hotel who did.
As Darin said, "It's probably nothing, but I don't want it written on my tombstone 'He thought the fire alarm was probably nothing.'" We stood out in the cold for a while, until finally the alarm was turned off.
After dinner Darin, of all people, was ready to crash (it goes without saying that I was), so we went upstairs and went to sleep.
As I mentioned, I went by my high school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart in San Francisco, CA. Yes, I attended school in that building (and the brick mansion next door to it) for seven years. All-girls Catholic school, with roughly 40-50 girls per year. When my sister and I first attended they were begging for students; now there's a huge waiting list and it's $10,000 a year to attend. Ha.
I've been thinking a lot about high school recently (as you might have guessed), and there's a particular question that I've been wondering about, so I figured, What the hell, I'm not getting any younger, I want to find out the answer to this.
When I was in senior year of high school, they ("they" being the powers that be) handed us slips of paper with our names (to make sure each person got the right one) and our class rankings on them, so that we could tell the colleges where we were applying what our class ranking was. I'll save you the suspense; I was ranked number one.
I was not, however, named valedictorian.
I did not know that that was a particularly strange state of affairs until I mentioned it to people now and again over the years and always got the same response: You weren't?
In the past year I discovered that this really bothered me. And I wanted to know why.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com