baby caribou

Two hours of training in the morning, how to create and save a file in the complicated document management system. I wrote notes in my pad only because everyone else wrote in theirs, but notes were social scientific rather than functional, more "Procedure appears important to this firm; why?" than how-to. Then there was an entire day of unstructured time. I sat through a two-hour sexual harassment web training comprising video clips of actors reenacting harassment scenarios, including a woman recalling the details of a date to a female colleague ("Oh, his body was just gorgeous, and after dinner, we went back to my apartment, and he started kissing me - oh wait, where are you going? - and then he took my clothes off -- " "No, stop. That's just TMI. God, some people. They don't know when to stop!"') and a man classically harassing his female subordinate ("Hey Sarah! We have to stop bumping into each other like this. Or we could bump into each other some more and go into an empty office"; I was somewhat horrified to discover that this sleaziness kind of turned me on; a sexual harassment video!). Around 2 p.m., the sun came straight through the windows and into my eyes, so I asked my officemate to adjust the Venetian blinds. He broke off the adjuster rod immediately, and then took his shoes off and got on his desk and manually flipped all the Venetian blinds up; the sun came in through the two slats he could not reach and went straight for my retinas. I wrote S to ask why the circus follows me, but she declined to respond. Later in the day there was an ice cream social; I met some nice people, but I also described my bar experience as "me being half-naked in the backyard eating chicken on a trampoline." I think the person I was speaking to thought I was coming on to him, and he said, "I studied for the bar in Chicago to be near my wife." Whoops. After work I drove to Mountain View to buy a third-hand folding bicycle off a nice Silicon Valley professional named Jedd. I texted Olympia that I had bought a bike, and she wrote back: "I just bet Karen that it was a folding!!! She says our new band name should be 'freaks on the same wavelength.'" Richard and Aimee called to ask if I was game for dinner at Chevy's, but I refused secondarily because I had to go to San Francisco to see an apartment, and primarily because I had butter-sauteed butter for lunch, then three chocolate chip cookies, then a bowl of strawberry ice cream with whipped cream, and I am afraid that a few more heavy meals and the witch will be ready to push me into the oven as I peer into it saying, "Wait a minute, I don't see any malomars -- wha...? - NOOOOOOOOO!!!" [cracklings]. At home, they ordered pizza and we ate it at our little kitchen table in our little kitchen. The table is shoved into the corner so there were five of us sitting around two sides of it; we had Round Table and drank lager from tiny, shot-sized Dixie cups. I gobbled a slice, then drove up to the city to see an apartment in the Mission. Later I described to Kathy why I didn't think I would want to live in the apartment; I'd met girls like this before, girls who were perky and tended to work in marketing, girls whose bathrooms had a haze of vanilla-scented candle smoke badly obscuring the cloying sweetness of recent, delicately-delivered shit, and I didn't think I could thrive in such an environment. Also the place was a trainwreck of disorganized crap, poorly lit, and carpeted: yuck. Could not imagine bringing my Brooklyn bride back to this. Kathy's apartment, four blocks away, was infinitely cooler, as it included a spice closet and a fireplace that Davey used for storing two skateboards. Kathy told me that her firm had worked her so hard earlier in the year that she literally thought she would die. She said, "One morning, at 6 a.m. after I had stayed working the entire night, I was washing my hands in the sink and thinking to myself, 'So cold, so cold,' and I had to run my hands under hot water to keep my body warm, and I looked up at the mirror and I looked so bad I thought that I was just going to die." She said this while laughing, of course, and peeling apples with a knife against a thumb. We had Coronitas and talked about death by law firm and what clothes failed as business casual attire. Then it was late, and I had to go home. The volume knob in the car is broken so music can only be played at a low hum, and my howling of "Sweet Child O' Mine" drowned out Axl Rose's in the stretch between Burlingame and Redwood City. I came back to find Dad watching Planet Earth on the new Bluray player that Richard spent lots of time price comparing to find. A wolf was chasing a baby caribou; for a while it looked like the baby caribou might outrun its hunter; but it stumbled, and the wolf caught it by the leg, and then both sat down, and the wolf took a second to catch its breath before biting down in earnest. Dad shook his head, saying, "It's so cruel." Why has nobody told me about Planet Earth before?!?! It is as beautiful as the day is long.