Start up 2.0

Summer is the smaller of San Francisco’s two seasons of winter, and for the umpteenth Sunday in a row I bought a mocha to battle the fog. There are caffeine ATM’s every few stores – starbuck interludes between overpriced furniture shops, double malt liquor stores, and remainder bookstores.

Usually the fog doesn’t make it down the peninsula to San Mateo where I work – in summers my father as a child used to travel there to escape the cold city. As a kid I would go to Cape Cod and visit my cousins on my mom’s side, but this summer with a new job in yet another start-up means no summer trip.

The job itself has a strange sense of stability. In my previous three jobs after four months my first boss would be on the verge of quitting as the company would be about to make (or was recovering from) a near fatal business mistake. In such places you only see the rocks in the road instead of routes around them.

I carry the employment at will caution with me. Thrice scorned, I don’t think that any job can be the one, but I don’t mind traveling with less angst. The side effects are that I don’t write as much but exercise more. I enjoy taking a class on Java, but don’t have anecdotes explaining messed up deals with the Peoples Liberation Army or missing time sheets from Brazil.

Now there are little nits of the place: “Build your own desk” day seemed neat in concept, until it was pointed out that the prisoners in Gulag Archipelago did the same thing. 24-hour service means that I carry a luggable cell phone on Sundays. Some weeks I must scrub through scarcely commented code in Access 2.0 to support some cranky legacy client and start to think that it is bad in the same way as running into an ex while slightly drunk is. But in comparison to worrying about career pivots and resume objective statements, these are small.

Small like the fact that the new air conditioning unit at work hasn’t been set up properly. There is a constant trade wind blowing down my cubicle that grows stronger as it gets hotter. I wind up wearing the same North Face wardrobe I use during the weekends and evenings in the city. At first my boss did not quite get my wander-from-the-north fashion, but after a few visits to check up on me and the code he realizes that “yes it is really cold here.” I smile and nod happily knowing that my current difficulty can be solved merely by a sweater and a touch of understanding.

Aussie Rules

The night before and for most of the morning it rained. I hadn’t set up my dome tent correctly, and I woke up to find most of clothes floating in a puddle. I was sleeping on top of an air mattress, and hadn’t noticed the rain seeping in. I soon went to huddle underneath the large tarp our guides had set up. The rest of our sea kayak campers joined us - a pair of bay area travel agents, a volleyball couple from Boston, a woman on her seventieth birthday with her daughter-in-law, and the three guides from the Adventure Company.

We waited for the rain to stop. We had camped for two nights on an uninhabited island four miles off of the shore of Northern Australia. It was a small island with a sharp coral beach and a large hill that had vines, golden spiders and the graves of a lighthouse operator and his family, the last residents of the island. Ours was the last trip of the season before the rainy season and jellyfish arrived in mid December. When the rain stopped for a lunch break we quickly packed our gear and headed to the mainland in the post storm swells. We had to paddle single file through the first channel and then turn at an angle to the three to four feet waves. That size wave isn’t really that dangerous – leaning into the waves would prevent tipping. The breeze was pushing us to shore.

But soon our boat was last, a kilometer behind everyone else - the boat the guides moan about afterwards in the pub when they are sucking their XXXX beer and reminiscing about Australia versus England cricket or the time they chucked a spear into their neighbor’s yard. My right shoulder had cramped and my kayak partner was busy throwing up into the sea. No, this wasn’t real danger. That came earlier.

A month before I had a career hiccup and decided to go on a break after a good dinner and a Johnny Cash album failed to cheer me up. Normally I listen to alternative rock but I had had too much of thirty-one flavors and then some. I needed a change.

After using the Internet as a way of spinning the globe and sticking a pin in it (search = English speaking, warm, end of November) Australia bubbled to the surface. It is a country that mixes summer and Santa. Two weeks of looking at nature.

It is a fierce place - a home of sharks, 30 proof sun block, pythons, strangler fig, and drivers on the other side of the road. And then there were the stickers and blood suckers: the lawyer cane vine, the elephant ear plant, the stinging jelly fish, and, of course, the leeches. The trip was broken up into five parts - canoeing, biking, backpacking, scuba, and the sea kayak. When the pamphlet came for what to bring for the 8-mile backpack into the rainforest (the politically correct for jungle - no one is for jungle) it mentioned insect repellent somewhere between a water bottle, a good pair of socks, and a good hat. It didn’t say that the spray was for leeches.

These leeches are smaller than the Hollywood variety - a half inch long and pencil lead thin, but quicker. They move like inchworms, head to toe, always creeping towards heat. They avoid the zones of toxic levels, and quickly find the barren sections of skin. We flicked them off (no salt, cigarette, or Humphrey Bogart needed) but we had to be careful not to bombard our fellow hikers. Two of them clung to my hands after a miss-flick and nibbled gently at my palms. By the end of the trip I had had about twenty of these on me with about a half a dozen successfully drip drying me of A positive blood. This year I not only tried to save the rainforest, I also fed it.

It did take a day to get over the leach search breaks - you get strange dreams at night after spending a day with these worms. Eventually I came to the conclusion that leeches are like mosquitoes that apologize with
anaesthetic before the bite. All things considered I would much rather have blood-letting leeches than skin crunching mosquitoes (but this is the type of decision I am not really looking for in my little career search).

Now there was also beauty on the trip: sleeping in a hammock next to a waterfall, watching the sun set over a coral beach, hovering above a sea turtle or a giant clam in the Great Barrier Reef, discovering what looked like a branch of a tree was really a bird, stopping at a strangler fig that floated down from the rainforest canopy like a curtain, and eating fresh pineapple that had been carved into a boat or the fresh fruits (tucker) that our guide picked for us in the rain forest.

There was the shame of the feral things that had been brought to the island - the gigantic raging cane toad, the root digging pigs, and the TV show, South Park. The times away from nature when we were in a hotel or walking down the street, the place felt like America through a looking glass. Seinfeld cruises a TV that hasn’t got fifty channels. Take out fast food is called take away. The fanny refers to the other side of a woman. Don’t mix these up in a pub. And be very careful whom you root for.

There were the storms. On the second day of the trip (the first day of biking, the day after the canoe) after we biked around what felt like a mostly uphill Atherton tablelands, we stopped at Lake Eachem for a quick swim. As we got out of the crater lake the meteorologist cicada began to chirp. A cool breeze hit us as we got on the bikes. It started to rain.

It was a machine gun downpour. The rain hit like an over caffeinated masseuse. In California this weather would cause land slides, national guard movement, and a long afternoon for a marketing department spin control ("I think we should call it something like el tiburon"); in Australia it was an afternoon. My shoulders were protected by my backpack but my windbreaker was of little use for my front. We had to bike through a forest, which would have been already dark, and the clouds blocked whatever other light. I took off my sunglasses and squinted unsuccessfully to avoid the rain.

We rode on. The rain slapped into the forest causing the leaves and dust to fall onto the road. Pretty soon there were small branches coming down and we were forced to zig zag around the mounting debris. The rain kept pounding. Up ahead the cars had stopped and were starting to back up the street. A tree had fallen across the road. We flung our bikes over the tree and continued into the storm.

More branches. Bigger branches. And then the realization that a tree is a fairly large object. This was not an automated Disney Land ride when the hydraulic trees pop once the ride is over to scare the batch of E-ticket holders. This was not an Indiana Jones flick in which you know that the guy with the good hat can’t get hurt. This is what I believed was a real issue. We rode on carefully listening for an early warning crackle a tree makes as it is about to fall. Another tree across the road. This one blocked a car that was stuck between it and the earlier one. We hopped off of our bikes and began to push the trunk. We kept looking around to make sure nothing else was falling as we cleared some branches so that the car could make it through. We once again hopped on the bikes and rode on.

The third tree that fell was the smallest. Our guide motioned us out of the forest - he would take care of the last tree and we were close to the exit and the main road. Only a few minutes latter we were out of the forest. The rain still pounded the rest of the way home, and it was impossible to see much of the traffic on the road. But we knew that the
tough part was done and a pub was within reach.

Most of the time, we deal with small problems - the hobgoblins of daily commutes, status reports, and under-budgeted projects. I believe the great vacations are the ones that the at-home issues get flung away - that you really do only take the four tee shirts, water bottle, a good pair of socks, a wide brim hat and, of course, insect repellent; and leave the did-I-turn-that-report-in worries behind. If you have to clean out a backpack because you have spilt meat sauce all over it and are worried about the marsupial equivalent of big city rat will perforate most of your remaining underwear as a snack when it is dark out and the leeches are still moving, you will forget about how you babble too much at interviews and the general career angst that awaits you back home. Cherish these moments as you scrub. In the rain pedal forward squinting and listen for the crackling on the sides of the roads.

My partner in the sea kayak righted herself and cleaned her mouth out with the last of the water in her water bottle. My right shoulder started to feel better and I was able to do the deeper paddles and catch up to the group. Shortly we turned to our right so that the rest of the trip was with the surf and wind. We pulled the boats back up on shore,
and I smiled at the troubled sea.

EdGinny

It was a little strange actually seeing the rock. Carefully chosen to be impressive but not too large and then shipped out of state to avoid sales tax, the diamond engagement ring clung to my youngest brother's fiancée finger and sparkled through out our family dinner like blissful punctuation marks in a cheery and slightly bewildered conversation. He was actually going to get married.

It wasn't really a surprise - they have been dating for four years and have just moved into together (probably to find out whether they were compatible in the deepest sense - hygiene). She is the metronome in my brother's crashing about world; a steady beat of reason and patience; the one who returns voicemail messages and sends thank you notes (I have long since eliminated the middle man and have phoned her directly when I want to schedule my brother's time).

And there we were the six of us in a French restaurant that was still recovering from the World Cup and Bastille Day complete with a waitress who muttered to herself about getting hazard pay for the last week "worse than New Year's. Much worse than New Year's." Six (mom, dad, George, me, and the couple) trying to get used to the concept of a family and going about it in our usual way - making fun of other family members and long monologues about one's own career.

George's video empire is doing well. I am breaking in a new boss - the getting up to speed is never easy since I think we have developed our own little language with words like GSM, ISD, ITD, Gary, and BVI which can be strung together in any arbitrary combination.

Outside of work for the most part, I keep rummaging through hobbies - piano, pottery, swing dancing, jogging, and tomato plant growing (well technically killing). I know that my random piano music (politely called experimental) and large banana slug model (complete with two smaller slugs) are not going to make it into a museum, but they bring me unconditional joy. It is the pride that I actually built something; it is the amazement that I can created something new; that I have created a new noun.

Perhaps that is what the rock is about. That Edward and Ginny will build something special together. That they have formed the new noun: EdGinny - two names never really to be separated. And as the six of us sat there eating the ahi with leeks or chicken in a mushroom sauce, and sipping Anchor Steam or Irish Whiskey, we knew that this new creation was good.

Time Going Bye

There is a bar in Hangzhou where the ex patriots hang out called Casablanca. Most of the ex pats have left the scalding heat of an Asian summer and on Friday night the bar was filled with almost entirely of locals sipping pints of Guinness that were far too thin to have been brewed in England. A pretty good band was playing and it was quite a site watching this crowd sing "Country Road, West Virginia."

The next day after a morning meeting to discuss our company wide MRP system, I went to airport to catch a flight back to Hong Kong. This trip is moving into its third week, and though still fascinating it is a bit like watching some one do the same magic trick a second time.

No one was manning the quarantine at the airport and I slipped by and went into the customs waiting area. There was tall brunette woman reading a pink book which I would later found out was titled "The Psychology of Stress Management". She wore a pair of white slacks and a wrap-around blouse that left her belly button exposed as if to make an anti "I Dream of Jeanie" statement.

The military officers motioned us through the assorted luggage zappers into the main terminal. I went through first and took a seat in the large terminal. A few minutes later the brunette came in and took a seat directly across from me. After an awkward half an hour of eyeing one another we finally started to talk. She was British and was working with some of the silk factories as a fashion designer. After a while we discovered that we did have a few things in common such as a preference for using forks and agreement that the real growth industries in China were bicycle repair shops and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

They started the boarding process which broke up our conversation. We were headed up the mobile stairs to the plane, when a military man came rushing after us telling us to stop boarding. We asked why and he informed us that there was a typhoon coming and that we would have to spend a night in a hotel in Hangzhou.

I was convinced that this could have been the best natural disaster ever.

Now the rest of the story isn't about candle light evening with rain pounding at the windows. The only heat that night came from the long Asian summer; the only ones who knew magic were two road show engineers specializing in projecting lasers using a combination of smoke and mirrors and who joined us at the dinner table. Life unfortunately isn't fiction. Sometimes a conversation is just a conversation - a sigh is just a sigh.

Wish List

I have already made up my mind what I really want for Christmas. I know it’s a little early and I have not seen the claymation specials telling me the true meaning of the holiday with snappy tunes from the fifties. Cold Miser has hit the Bay Area; the rain finally scrubbed away the last warmth of El Nino. I leave work in darkness and meander my way home through streets still not reconstructed from the earthquake.

My work is also being cleansed. At the start of October I was working a multi -gazillion dollar deal in Hong Kong. I am now hibernating in a cubicle - my chances of future travel are dripping away and I am left with the paperwork of consequences. My company is going through seasonal changes, a reshuffling of the corporate deck. In the end I feel that I have the job security of Sherazade - along as I can keep spinning the tales of financial intrigue, the king will not kill me today. A couple of people so far have not been so lucky. I know that this down phase will pass in six months until the next king arrives and just maybe I get to repeat some of my greatest hits.

Still those deal making moments, chatting up with merger specialists - the corporate anesthesiologists, dim sum at two in the morning, the long looks and head shakes, the winks and hand shakes - all of them were brief highs of capitalism adrenaline. It is a little tough to go cold turkey.

So my Christmas wish is for smaller victories - for the patience to keep trying to use my norditrack, for the parking spot close to the door but not under the tree, for warm laughter at meetings, a smile from girl behind the counter when I order a mocha grande decaf, for a long kiss during a slow dance that says just once after the music stops there will still be remnants of possibilities. These brief flickers of hope, fleeting moments of triumph are ultimately what lets us survive storms.

Yesterday as I drove to work the rain behind me had stopped and I could see a rainbow in my rearview mirror right above "some objects larger than they appear." It was a splendid Kermit's monument for the faithful - the lovers, the dreamers and me. Later that day, I did not get the good parking spot nor even a small peck from a nice date who I think enjoyed her butter fish entree a little more than the conversation. But I still have few shopping days left.

Themes and Variations

My improv class ended a few weeks ago, and I am now attending a Saturday afternoon workshop perhaps mostly because that there is a very cute blond women that I have a inkling for (I am not the world's most passionate guy - I think I am too old for crushes, but too young for total apathy). Forty or so people show up for these things, and there is a break in the middle in which we mingle and chat about pennant races and quality burritos.

Unfortunately on this Saturday Tara, the funny blond Cornell graduate in the aforementioned inkling, was already surrounded by a pack of testosterone vultures. I always feel stupid in these situations - it is as if I am playing bachelor number three and the other two guys have picked the cool ice creams answers to the question and all I am left with is "vanilla."

With shoelaces in the usual somewhat untied fashion I stumbled towards Tara but as I get closer I overheard her mention something about her boyfriend. I figured that this was a good time to come up with another strategy. I have 11 months until I smack into that 30's barrier and I think it is time to lower my standards.

I noticed that there was a guy talking to this somewhat-but-not-really-very attractive women. I decide to sneak into this conversation. The three of us get to talking. Her name was Berta not Roberta and she had only tried doing improv for a few months. The guy, a future Hollywood star but now a waiter at Chevy's, was rapping quite well with her about coffee shops in San Francisco and the importance of the San Francisco Chronicle's little man theater reviews. About three minutes into the discussion she turns to him and says "Of course you realize that I am a transvestite."

This is what I call a conversation stopper.

I really don't know if my life has some weird built up karma - that it is supposed to have a soundtrack by the Kinks (the flip side is that he might not have told and I would have wound up in the Crying Game). For the second time in four months I have run across a trans something or other. The first being my sophomore neighbor from boarding school at our reunion. I think twice in a summer time is a fairly bizarre theme.

I mean what ever happened to the WYSIWYG interface? Shouldn't Microsoft release a product like Dating 97? Aren't there protocols out there? Is it really supposed to be this tough? (There is also a strange disappointment about the transvestite liking the other guy more.)

Anyway next week I am going back being one of the many vultures around Tara, the blond with the main feature of not being a trans-something. And when that ice cream question of love gets to my turn I am saying "Rocky Road."

Reflections in August

Every August my family (the extended one that includes cousins, aunts, uncles - the people who Christmas cards are grouped together on the mantle) returns to Woods Hole, a town at the base of Cape Cod known for oceanography and ferry rides to Martha's Vineyard. For my first 23 years I would always make the trek whether it be a long weekend from Dartmouth's summer session to an entire month break right before the back to school deals started appearing and hastily read book reports needed to be completed. But for the last six years I haven't been able to make it. My summers have been causalities to grad school, weddings, and the perpetual hobgoblins of work. Last weekend I returned.

It seemed … well uh … smaller. The driveway whose cracks we used as starting points for our "big wheel" races wasn't the steep terror of doom. The paths through the bushes around the tennis court weren't the complex labyrinths for "Kick the Can" or "Capture the Flag". The porch that clings to the side of the house wasn't the endless boardwalk of my memories. Raiding the cookie cabinet did not require getting a chair and having two brothers posted for look out duty.

Not to say that the place was small. The Lower House (there are two) was built in three sections and is covered in Cape Cod gray shingles. It was originally an inn for mariners, but the many years of New England salt air have warped the hallways that link the small rooms. The place creeks and moans when foot steps scamper through its halls back from the journey across two sections to the lone shower for the "boys" (male cousins out number female 8 to 3). It sits atop a grassy hill that cascades to the sea. Hurricanes have eaten into the coast and devoured the rocky pier, but there is still plenty of space for my cousins to hit golf balls into a hula-hoop.

There is always competition. Tennis games of my youth were not settled by score, but by who would fling their racket at their partner first. There were intense matches of card games from "Down the tubes", and "Oh Hell", to the back breaking "Hearts". This year a couple of cousins decided that we would have an Olympics by dividing us into three teams and having us compete in running, swimming, basketball free throws, shooting at coke cans, golf using a tennis ball, round the world version of tennis, and a concluding water balloon toss which disintegrated into an all out war. Although my team, the Lobsters, did not fare as well as the others I was sure that Ginny was well armed with balloons to go after her fiancé, my brother.

Sunday was the Falmouth Foot race, which goes past our driveway and continues seven miles along the coast and winds up near a Dairy Cream (which undoes whatever calories the race burned of). Each of the cousins wore a bright yellow team Gunny jersey (perhaps some sort of Tour de France thing) and sneaked in the race after the Kenyan blur had passed, but before too many people wearing "I love Budweiser" shirts had stumbled through. I finished towards the end but ahead of my two 6'4'' teenage cousins who have not yet figured out how to run at that height.

I have been running more recently. I am now up to doing 7.7 miles four times a week. Granted these are nine and half-minute miles, which is like being a Zen master of second gear. But I have gotten to the point past being out of breath where I can arrive to work in a sea of endorphins.

It is a long way from my seven-minute miles that I could run forever in high school. I feel that I have become the guy on the side of the road who the younger me briefly glances at before he strides on by. I know that I run not only in part to catch him (another part is that I got a little too successful at stealing cookies), but to keep an honest pace. Because further back the road there is an older me trying to catch up.

Side Routes

There is no non stop between Hangzhou and San Francisco - you either go to Hong Kong or the Shanghai to Tokyo and then SF. Twelve hours of flying, but only two movies not including the animated fasten your seat-belt videos which I think had the same cast as Gobots (I kept waiting for Ultra Man to jump out when the overhead oxygen supply fell). I did the Shanghai route which meant I spent the night in Shanghai and then flew out the next morning. The hotel which was booked here in California was across the street from the baggage claim. I made my way there despite a Chinese roper who was determined to get me to his hotel at a much better price.

As I checked in and went to my room on the third floor, I noticed that there was a bar at the end of the hall. A little tired from my trip I went to the bar for a good night drink. The staff quickly sat me down in a booth. A waitress came into the booth lit a candle and looked up at me from waist level"

"Do you want something to drink?"

I quickly looked at the drink menu and feeling a little patriotic ( or possible to get rid of the smelly tofu, a food that violates some primal taboo) I said "I will have a Budweiser".

The waitress smiled and then asked the second question "Do you want a girl?"

Now this was a little tougher question. I know my company has a lousy 401k program, but I did not think this was part of the overall compensation plan. I was not really in a hurry to join the viral frequent flyer club. I said "no."

I did finish my beer in the place and was impressed with its mood. I could see a little into other booths where business men had two girls a piece. Cigarette smoke poured over the top of the paper walled booths and sank into the carpet. A Mandarin version of "House of the Rising Sun." played on the stereo. It was hypnotic. After settling up for my beer I went down the hall smiling, and wondering about the house in New Orleans.

When I told a few people after I got back to San Francisco, they mentioned that I should have at least gotten a price check. Asked about group rates. Dollars to RMB currency conversion. Perhaps it was a moment that I will look back to and pause. But that was the point of the following weekend.

After getting back to San Francisco and spending just enough time to mess with my body clock, I got on a plane to Philadelphia for the wedding of a girl who got away. Equal parts plump and perky, she was a fellow intern at Bellcore specializing in the psychology of user interfaces. At her heart she is a conversational babbler (a property I also hold) which follows the principle that if you say enough eventual you will stumble into the truth.

I blew it.

That hot New Jersey summer she was dating a cartoonist who she left behind at Carleton. I didn't feel that I should have made my "move" which usually comes across as slightly less subtle than the inflated male frigate bird. There is a point when looking back at the horizon where nobility collides with stupidity.

Halfway through that summer, she struck a conversation with some one waiting for the bus. A graduate student a Rutgers specializing in molecular biology. He was on the periphery - only occasionally joining the intern pack for important discussions on whether "Batman" was a better movie than "Dick Tracy" - nowhere to be seen into our trips to Harlem and the Jersey shore.

The summer eventually ended. She went back to the cartoonist. I went to New Hampshire. The cartoonist wanted to draw someone else. The grad student didn't like grad school and went to Minnesota (where she was) to probably get as far as away from mitochondria as he could. It was their wedding.

There were five interns in our mini group, but she was the only one with whom I have kept in touch. As a group we all tried to guess where we would be in ten years - the cotton candy dreams of youth. So many possibilities. I was going to be a work-a-holic computer programmer. She was not going to get married until she was 35.

The wedding lasted an hour. The reception had a good music battle between her mom's music (see Chill, Big) and the Greatest Hits of the Eighties. And even though I loved dancing once again to "Come on Aileen", the whole thing stung just a little.

Perhaps both things (the hotel and the wedding) feel like the missed exit signs that in the rear view mirror - slightly larger than they appear. Frost's little side routes. I too will wonder.