A few days of road trips

I woke up on Saturday after about five hours of sleep. Had to get up early in order to do all the stuff I had scheduled.

Downstairs I discovered my mother and sisters putting together a genuine sit-down breakfast in the sunny little dining room. English muffins, eggs, bacon, juice. A rare treat these days, since one sister lives in Santa Barbara and the other goes to a university in New York. We ate and chatted, then cleaned up, and since we were having such a good time we continued by taking a walk together around the block.

Then we drove two cars to the mall, so I could take off on my own afterwards. I bought some yogurt and some $20 sneakers for my feet, to substitute for the clunky hiking boots that I've had to wear since I nearly destroyed my old regular shoes a few months ago. When all the shopping was done I parted ways with my family and headed to Santa Cruz for a brief lunch meeting with some friends visiting the area. Yay, more food!

I lounged around in Taqueria Vallarta reading a newspaper, not hungry enough to order anything yet. Eventually Andy, Brad, Sarah, and Andrea filed in. We greeted warmly and ordered food. Andy looked the same as ever, except his hair was blacker than I remembered. I soon learned his new girlfriend was a hairstylist. Brad's hair was much much shorter than usual. I hoped he'd changed it because he felt like it, not because someone had harassed him - stranger or parent. Even in our liberal home town, a young guy with long hair needed a certain amount of bravery.

I'd never met Andrea before. My first impressions were that she was very, very thin and very, very edgy. She had close-cropped blond hair and a downcast expression. She volunteered nothing in the conversation and pushed her plate away halfway through her 'Super Taco', which I picked at for the rest of the meal. When she did eventually talk, she came across with a polite and fragile-seeming calm, as if she kept her angst quietly to herself but might breathe fire at you if you crossed a mysterious line.

Sarah was, by contrast, very outgoing and boisterous. Wavy shoulder-length black hair, shorts and sandals, a T-shirt that looked like it had been silkscreened by hand in an art shop, just a little too tight so her breasts were part of the scene, a necklace and some rings; she was all about filling the canvas edge-to-edge. She had a sardonic sense of humor, and her go-to was the 'yo mama' joke. At the same time she would throw in borderline incoherent pop-culture references as often as possible. My cynical description of her would probably use a phrase I heard my older sister throw around after her first few years of college: 'Erudite white trash'. I could easily imagine Sarah planted in front of a television back in Michigan, with a beer in one hand and a joint in the other, watching an A&E special on the Dadaist movement in post-war Germany, and enjoying it not so much because it's foreign to her, but because it's something that she thinks is foreign to her peers, and therefore makes her more clever for taking an interest.

But I knew I should take my first impressions with a boulder of salt. I have a bad habit of prejudging things, and I needed to remember that my impressions often change a lot as I get to know a person.

Anyhow, we drove around Santa Cruz for a bit in Brad's parent's jeep, touring the place for Sarah and Andrea's benefit. We stopped at Natural Bridges and walked around for a while, trading stories about Michigan versus California. After a few hours they dropped me back at the taqueria, and I hopped into my van.

The next thing on my schedule was a date. Well, a sort-of date. More like a hang-out with the potential to turn into a date if things went well. I drove as fast as I could up to Davis, worrying about traffic jams, and found Yamara's apartment complex easily, which I hadn't expected to do. I knocked on the door a full hour early.

I was relieved to that she didn't seem upset by my early appearance. This was the first time we'd met face-to-face. I saw a young woman, about 20 years old, with a pale face textured by acne scars, framed by long limp brown hair. She wore corduroy jeans and a soft looking long sleeved shirt, and her feet were bare. Her smile was warm but slightly disengaged, like she was only ever halfway untangled from her own inner thoughts. We shook hands.

Yam took me on a brief tour of her apartment. I spent a long time marveling at the electronic paraphernalia littering her room. She had five loaded 386 motherboards lined up like books on a shelf, and a Mac SE with 8 megabytes of RAM which she used as a nightstand. A fileserver hummed from a corner under the bed. Abstract art was tacked on the walls. Three computers were lined up on a desk made from a door resting on filing cabinets. Each monitor had stickers all over the front panel. Her aesthetic was a combination of regular student living space, computer museum, and busy server room for a medium-size corporation. One poor little plant sat glumly in a red pot, resting in an upside-down lid browned by water stains. Several CDs were scattered on a low table, layered with dried cup rings. Face down, of course, so the shiny data side was visible. The plastic on the data side is actually thicker than the plastic on the cover side -- every geek knows that. The window was fully open, but since this was Davis, there was no breeze. The air had that mild tang of slowly aging electronics that I remembered from the computer lab at my old high school.

We chit-chatted for a bit but then settled into a comfortable subject: software design. She asked me a stylistic question about a project she was doing for an upper-division computer science class, and we busted out some books and papers on her coffee table. I gave her a few tips on organizing bitmaps within a resource - stuff I'd learned from my job - and we debugged some code together. Since I was sitting in front of an internet-enabled computer, I checked my email and poked around on IRC, in the #UCD channel. That was where Yam and I had gotten to know each other, and it felt comfortable.

Soon we decided to get food and videos. We hit Blockbuster and picked up Dark City and The Edge. Next we infiltrated Murder Burger and I got a veggie burger and a soda, and we drove through the In-n-Out directly across the street to add a few more things to the feast. We chatted amicably, describing our pasts and how we'd both ended up getting into computers, and telling stories about our geeky exploits. Fun, but not very direct.

Back at her apartment, Yamara and I quipped and joked through both movies, but sat quite apart from each other. In the meta-conversation of signals that I was slowly learning to read, I sensed that her sexual interest in me was totally flat. I might as well have been present as a camera and a keyboard, logged onto an IRC session. I thought for a while that perhaps she was just waiting for me to make some kind of move, but the plausible deniability was so thorough that I couldn't bring myself to do it. Eventually I just decided that Yam was not a very physical person.

Had I been watching these movies with my regular friends, we would be sitting all over each other, sharing drinks and trading backscratches. That was really more my style. But with them, there was nothing at stake. To Yamara's credit, or perhaps at least her geek-cred, she got and made obscure jokes about Monty Python, Akira, engineering, and UNIX. I had a pretty good time, regardless of my expectations for romance.

You can't argue with reality. Well, you can, but you'll only end up pissing it off.

Afterwards we agreed that we were tired and it was time to go to bed. I walked to the van to get my cooler full of clothes, and noticed a jacuzzi and pool on the way back. I asked Yamara if it was open, and she said it probably was, but she never went to it. I asked why and got a vague reply about how mostly drug dealers and nasty people hung out there. "But it's empty now..." I said, but then quickly cut the conversation when I realized she had concealed motives. "Not to bug you or anything" I said. She went into her room and I changed into my suit.

So I sat in the jacuzzi thinking and musing to myself, then jumped around in the pool, getting some energy out. The full moon leered down at me, reminding me of the drum circle at UCSC that I was missing for pursuing this weird stretch of socialization. It wasn't like I was interested in driving to Davis on a regular basis. I guess I had been hoping that Yamara and I would be intensely attracted to each other and since that hadn't panned out I felt foolish. Maybe I had been foolish from the beginning.

I walked back to Yam's apartment and took a shower. It took a lot of effort to get the chlorine slime off my body. Later on I felt a dull burning sensation around my shoulders and had to rinse off a slick patch of chlorine that I'd missed. Yuck.

Sleep was cramped and disjointed. I woke up at 2pm and heard Yamara in the other room, busily coding a graphics routine for her little Windows program. We shot the bull for a while, then she helped me bring my luggage to the van. I shook her hand goodbye and was on my way. That had been a decent time, but I didn't think I'd see her again.

Since I had exactly enough money left for an In-n-Out meal, I decided to get one. The wait at the drive-thru was an eternity, and the meal was terrible except for the drink, which I suppose they couldn't think of any way to cheapen further. I ate a couple of the fries and then shoved them in the trash bag. Too fast even for fast food.

Air conditioner on low, I drove down to Scotts Valley via the full 680 route. There goes another three hours! Brad wasn't home, so to occupy myself I helped his brother Stephen diagnose a PCI Pentium motherboard he was installing. He had all the cables in right and the board was getting power, but the monitor remained obstinately blank. In retrospect I suppose we should have verified that the monitor worked. Oops. Always one more thing to try...

I wandered outside and climbed up the big sand hill next to the house, carrying my little bongo drums in my backpack. No sooner had I begun playing than Brad and friends drove up in Brad's jeep. Everyone piled out of the car and went inside except Andy, who climbed up to greet me. Brad's brother joined us shortly.

We chatted and I played the drums, and then I tried to throw them into a sandy patch below me but they hit the hard cliff instead. The large drum crunched into many bits, and the smaller one rolled out into the road. The stunt was rewarded with much laugher and some applause, but I was sort of unhappy that the big drum was lost, even if it had sounded flat and dull.

I slid down and went into house, and ate dinner with Brad's family. Hamburgers. Hah! Third meal in a row. Brad's father bored the crap out of us all with a political story about the Chinese and dam building, but we were all too stunned by boredom to think of anything to interrupt him with.

Afterwards, Andrea and Sarah stayed inside and read books. Brad and Andy and Stephen and I sat outside around the van chatting in our random, lurching, relaxed way. One at a time we wandered inside and I said goodbye to Andrea, Sarah, and Brad's family. Andy and I took our seats in the van, waved bye, and we were off to Davis.

Andy and I laughed and sang and told stories and cursed a lot in the car. I don't think I've used the word 'damn!' so many times in an evening since the days when I sat around bullshitting with Steve and Skot almost a decade ago. It was very cathartic. I felt like I could say anything at all, flippant or serious or incoherent, and frequently did, and we'd just roll with it.

I parked the van at Andy's grandparent's place and he showed me his Saturn. The repair job he'd rendered with the Bondo adhesive was impressively subtle. The noise attracted Bob, Andy's grandfather, a man who looks remarkably like Santa Claus. He stood around and chatted with us, one hand gripping a suspender, the other hand combing back his big white beard. He struck me as too quaint and charming to be a Sacramento resident, but he had been for some 30 years.

Bob excused himself back into the house to prepare for bed. Andy showed me the Subgenius sticker on the back of the Saturn: "With Bob on my side, who can stand in my way?" His grandmother had asked him one day if the sticker referred to his grandfather. He'd said yes, of course, amusing her to no end.

Next he introduced me to the car he was currently driving, his grandparent's old Ford Bronco. A big boat was joined more or less permanently to the top, giving the truck an aerodynamic appearance. The back camper-shell was filled up past the windows with car parts and tools for fixing the vehicle and setting up a campsite.

We sprawled out on the cleanest patch of asphalt we could find between our two cars, enjoying the sun, and Andy fished a roadmap out of the Bronco and unfolded it onto the road. I stretched and rolled over to it. There were many details missing from the map, which by the serial number we estimated was made in 1972. We haggled agreeably over the best route to my Dad's apartment, and I decided just to take the freeway as usual. We said goodbye and hopped in our respective cars. I followed him to Sunrise, where we pulled up to same stoplight, made silly faces at each other, and then split. He was on his way back to his house to enjoy a four hour nap before he got up and went to work.

I sang along to some Sting and drove to Dad's, glad to be finished with driving for the day. I snuck my things in and ate some toast and orange juice, chatted with Dad, showered, and bedded down in the living room. Earplugs in to muffle Dad's snoring, I tried to sleep, but could only manage a few hours. My body just wasn't tired. I woke up early in the dark, uncomfortable, wishing I was somewhere else.

I remembered sitting in the dining hall, a week or two before the finals crunch. Four of us were having a quiet chat and I was wasting time before going to the labs. Phaedra was sitting back from her meal, telling someone a story. On impulse I scooted my chair over to hers, drew another one up parallel to mine, and laid down with my head in her lap. Her arms automatically encircled my head and she ran her fingers through my hair and petted me like a cat while she continued talking. I closed my eyes and drifted. It had been exquisite while I was there, but thinking back on it was painful, because part of me ached to go back there. I remembered Phaedra's words in an email, describing herself as an obsessive-compulsive type of person. Well I guess that makes two of us, I thought.

I laid awake for hours, and finally hauled myself up and to the bathroom. I toasted some more home-made bread and had another glass of orange juice, and read the paper. Soon my sisters woke up and I waved hello as they went out to jog.

Later Petrea came up with the idea of going to a waterslide park, and chatted each of us up individually to build a consensus before suggesting it to the whole group. We convinced Dad and Margaret to come with us, and I drove with my sisters to get discount tickets at a local grocery store. Then we packed a small picnic and took off in the Barge (a large blue van). We met my half-sister-in-law, and my niece and nephew at the entrance to the park, and entered as a group. It took a while to find a suitable open spot of grass to set up our picnic.

My sisters and I did the most dangerous looking slide first, a contraption called the Cliffhanger. A narrow ramp with one very steep drop. Our relatives watched us come down. Lindsey and I enjoyed it so much that we decided to do it again. The kids on the stairs were divided into two lines, and as I stood on the steps waiting, slyly ogling some of the women, a cute little wet kid covered with freckles grinned up at me and asked which ride I was in line for. His hair was plastered to his face and he had a little line of snot creeping out of one nostril, and I got a weird feeling of deja vu. I remembered being at the waterslides, being just as small, grinning just as wide, and having just as much snot constantly leaking out of my nose. The memory was hallucinatory; I could practically taste it. I tried to shoo the image from my mind but it lingered annoyingly. Even the ride down the Cliffhanger couldn't blast it out.

Next we hit the wave tank and took some photographs. The waves weren't as big as I remembered them, of course. Petrea hopped and splashed around, making funny noises and expressions like a lunatic. I hadn't seen her acting that crazy in a while, and was reminded that my particular brand of happy looniness may actually be a general family brand.

After the wave tank, Petrea and I went from slide to slide with my nephew Matthew. In one line, Petrea shared her observation that all the little girls "trotted" from one place to the next, most of them with their arms bent at their elbows and their hands folder down, which she thought was cute. I turned my head just in time to see a little herd of them go by, hands flat, feet pointed, knees and chin way up. Trotting. She was right. I wondered if she had memories of doing the same thing with her friends, like my memory of the literally snot-nosed kid.

The three of us did an inner-tube slide in a tube with three holes, and tried a twisty speed-slide that hurt our backs. We tried the circular lagoon ride with Dad but he complained that the water was too shallow and his feet dragged. The water tasted like chlorine, with a subtle hint of salt, which made my stomach turn if I thought about it too much. I wondered how much chlorine a park like this had to dispense every day just to keep from turning into a festering disease pit.

Eventually we made our way back to the picnic spot and snacked on chips and fruit. I wore a towel over my head to give my neck and shoulders a break from the sun, and watched as Petrea smeared herself with copious amounts of suntan lotion. I can't stand the stuff. I told her about how I'd read that most suntan lotion blocks the rays that cause tanning, but not the rays that promote cancer. Some scientists had actually published public apologies for not realizing this earlier. She was rather shocked, and asked for more detailed information, but I confessed that I didn't have it. Maybe it's all a big rumor.

Petrea rented an inner-tube for Dad and we all got back into the lagoon and coasted in circles for a while. Dad sat happily in the tube and we took turns steering him. Once in a while he became a battering ram for us kids to knock each other over. We went from the lagoon to the wave tank and took some memorable pictures, then wandered back to the lawn.

After another picnic congregation, Dad did the Cliffhanger ride, and for the first time ever, I thought of an activity he was doing as something he was uncharacteristically old for. He shot down it and stood at the end, but the hand he held his hat in slipped and he caught himself with his arm over the edge of the slide. He fell from almost his entire height, and was in obvious pain as we led him back to his seat. Lindsey excused herself from his side for a minute and came back with a rubber glove filled with icewater -- the only thing the park attendants could provide. Dad's pride was injured more than his body, but the incident was enough to bring to mind all the ways in which I was unprepared for his aging. I still have plans, stuff to do and talk about with him.

After that bit of excitement I took nap, hidden under two towels. I had been tired all day and the activity was really catching up with me. I got up when my shorts had dried out, and changed into my street clothes.

We parted ways with the relatives in parking lot, and I drove back to Dad's place with my sisters and Margaret. I did a little more napping there, listening to the creepy but meditative Quake soundtrack on the boombox, and was jolted awake by my Dad announcing that dinner was ready.

It was great. Turkey with vegetables and curry, prepared by Margaret. ("Is it soup yet? No! What's it need? Curry! What kinda curry? Tim Curry! Is it soup yet? No!...")

After dinner we sat around watching a movie while Petrea and Lindsey packed their belongings. Petrea left to drive to my cousin's place near San Francisco. I read a book and packed some of my own stuff, and moved my bike to the van. Soon it was time to take Lindsey to the airport. I hugged her and carried her baggage. It wasn't a tearful goodbye as the last one had been, perhaps because we were all so tired.

Margaret, my father, and I watched the plane depart from a fenced observation deck. It crept out to the runway and vanished behind a building, then went zooming by in the other direction with the engines at full blast. The jets were much louder than I'd expected them to be, and I could only assume they were coming from the plane, since the sound was coming from everywhere.

Then we drove back to the apartment and I slept for twelve hours. It was a better sleep than the previous day, but still pretty uncomfortable. My circulation was cramped.

In the morning I prepared and ate a turkey sandwich, packed up the van, and drove down to Watsonville via 101 and 129, with the air conditioner on the whole way. The cat was happy to see me when I arrived home. She sat on my lap and purred while I cleaned her, and then I chased her around the house as I unloaded my luggage. Now I'm back online in my comfortable room, ready to chisel at all my old projects again. It's good to be back.