time served, penance paid, redemption
I haven’t posted properly in three months about anything, most notably my holiday adventures and my new job. For this I apologize, but only tepidly, since last I checked none of you had a paying subscription to this blog anyway. A few weeks ago I mentioned my tardiness to Superstar, who only answered me with a huffy, “Yeah,” over the phone. Since most of these stories include him, my question is, where’s his blog? Now that anyone can blog, he has as little excuse as I do for not writing about our trips.
I’m not sure if I should start most recently and write backwards, or begin with the old and end with the new. Since I can’t seem to ignore my current afflictions, like this cry-for-Advil body pain after two days of skiboarding, drunkness, and debauchery at my new company’s annual ski party, I guess I’ll start with that. My first day of work was Monday, and the last day of my first week ended on Wednesday, since Thursday and Friday were spent at Tahoe bonding with people I’d only met three days earlier and existing in a general state of shock about how I managed to survive the past year of my life at Oracle in a sterile cube with no windows and a non-flowering plant for company.
I tried my new skiboards on Thursday, and for anyone who thinks they can’t ski or snowboard or are just totally impatient, these are for you. Without sounding like a marketing campaign, I was reborn as a snow rider in just a few hours, after many years of mediocrity on the slopes and many more years of struggling with pants wetting at the top of runs and other accident-induced emotional sports dysfunctionalities. I still never do what’s good for me. But if I someday die in a blaze of flaming wreckage and twisted metal, clutching a slice of chocolate cheesecake in one hand and an appletini in the other, well then dammit, at least it was worth it.
Thursday evening I ventured from my cozy hotel to the tents they had set up for the night’s celebrations, only to discover a five room pimped out dance club, complete with themes (techno, 80s, country, caribbean, piano bar), girls dancing in cages, neon, disco balls, light effects, buffets, outdoor bar counters carved from ice, and bonfires. An 80s cover band completed the evening, drawing such a huge crowd in the main tent that we jumped and screamed in the middle of a virtual mosh pit that went from virtual to real when people started diving from the stage and crowd surfing over crazed employees. Like a scene from a movie, one minute I’m sitting at a gray desk in the middle of a carpeted walkway, typing “Please send me the component number for your product so I can enter it into the bug database,” and the next minute I’m crushed in the middle of a sweltering crowd of engineers, product managers, sales people and all else, jumping in time to the Cure and pop culture and rainbow lights and mouthing the words to “Just Like Heaven.” “Did you know you were dancing with Orkut?” one of the designers shouted in my ear over the din of the crowd. I looked over to see the small, wild man I had been gyrating with slip back into the crowd. I wasn’t sure if that little fact was weirder than the fact that my totally intolerant metabolism had just handled a vodka shot and I had not yet keeled over in the middle of the floor.
Today I rode the bus home to Mountain View, fading in and out of consciousness while trying to read a book about Big Bang Theory and the history of the universe. I’m in horrendous pain, the kind of pain you can only experience after releasing a year’s worth of pent up frustration, bad traffic, and Visio templates. It feels fantastic.
