November 2002

In Paris today. Unfortunately we got here at midnight last night and we’re leaving at 8pm tonight, so I don’t get to have dinner here. A real shame, airport food is getting pretty old.

On the back of my copy of The Big U:

…if you want to know what Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it’s back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring thirty-year-old junior Casimir Radon…

On the back of my copy of Lucky Jim:

The hilarious send-up of academic life which helped to set the style of post-war fiction…

Someday I aspire to write a hilarious send-up of my own.

The weather has been disgusting lately. Drippy nasty rain and the Fiat’s defroster is worse than useless because I’ve left the car outside with the top down so many times that the heating system is filled with water, and it just blows humid air onto the cold windshield.

Yeah, we got the Fiat running again yesterday. See, our joint insurance was cancelled becuase Alex’s license was suspended, so he retitled the car to me and I bought my own insurance. The car broke down twice yesterday; the battery was dead since we hadn’t driven it in so long, and we had to get jumps each time.

We took it to the carwash too, which was fun, because the car is such a total piece of shit that the process of cleaning it can actually do a great deal of damage. For example, vacuuming the upholstery has the undesired effect of actually ripping it out of the car, the side-view mirrors are so poorly attached that a good bump will knock them off, etc.

So the people washing the car kept running into the waiting area saying things like “Sir, we cannot be responsible if the mirrors fall off,” and “We need to put duct tape on the roof to prevent water from leaking in,” and so on. And while we were standing around waiting for them to finish, we heard the horn go off in one long loud blast, and I knew that they’d discovered that pulling the driver’s-side seat forward to get into the back will bang the headrest right into the middle of the steering wheel and sound the horn.

And when they’d finished with the interor and went to drive it into the animatronic cleaning tunnel, they discovered that it wouldn’t start and called me outside. So naturally I started yelling self-righteously about how I’d never had a single problem with this car before tonight, and suddenly they’re ripping the top and knocking the side-view mirrors off and blowing the horn for no reason and now they’d shorted the electrical system and it wouldn’t start.

Something about yelling “I’ve never had a single problem with this car before tonight!” standing in front of a 1976 Fiat with several shades of paint and obvious rust damage, I was surprised they took me so seriously.

Yesterday we went to see a free dress rehearsal of The Santaland Diaries. At one point the actor pulled me on stage along with a couple other people to play happy, fun-loving elves, which I enjoyed. Except afterwards Alex said, “You really looked like an idiot. It was terrible.”

It’s fun to watch technology go commodity.