Reminiscing, Chapter 2

This weekend I saw my friend Gina get married down in LA. Keiko came out for it, so that makes 5 weddings we've been to in 7 months. Fortunately, I'm down to just a few single friends left, and none of them seem particularly close to getting married, so I might have a break for a while. Keiko's friends are all in that mid-20's stage where at best a few of them will get married, and most of those will regret doing so, so there should be calm on that front as well.

When I was in college, Laszlo, his brother Steve, his friend John, and I all would hang out sometimes. Those 3 all grew up in Claremont, where Pomona College is, so this was their home turf, and when we hung out together we'd go to their favorite HS haunts and mostly talk about nothing.

One night, we went to one of the local parks and had fun being an acapella singing group. Ed, were he here to comment on this right now, would say "Dude, that's extremely gay", to which I would give my standard response, which is: "I have no problem with people being gay, but gay people:

1) Do not get all the fun music
2) Do not get all the nice clothes
3) Do not get all the yummy drinks, and
4) Do not get all the fun activities."

I really don't care if every other guy on earth who likes ABBA, soft sweaters, amaretto sours, and ballroom dancing, and uses the word "yummy" to describe anything, is gay- I'm not, and if you have a hard time believing that, you can, to quote Ed one more time, "lick my balls".

Anyway, so we sang songs for hours, in a manly, platonic, thoroughly fun way. After a bit, we somehow got onto the subject of marriage, and who might get married first. Naturally, this brought out the competitive posturing, and it all resulted in the 4 of us making a solemn oath/bet: each of us would throw $500 in a pot. The last person to get married would win the pot.

I vividly remember that night, and vividly remember attempting to talk the others out of it, out of a (in retrospect economically irrational) attempt to prevent them from losing money. Because, I knew they had absolutely zero chance of winning. At the tender age of 20, I already knew I would be very, very late to the marriage party. I could just feel it.

But the others insisted. After all, I was in a relationship with Tasha for over 2 years at that point, and they all teased me that I would in fact get married first. But as I responded I realized for the first time ever that I knew in my gut Tasha and I would never be married, and I tried to warn them. They didn't listen.

I won the bet years ago. Laszlo, Steve, and John have all been married for years and have among them 2, 3, and 2 kids respectively. But they all went on strike and said I don't get to collect my winnings until I get married. Which is a bit of a cop-out, but I don't have the leverage to force the issue. Anyway, I won and they know it, and most of the utility (in an economic sense) comes from that. But I do wish now that I'd gotten other people in on the bet; enough other people and it might've paid for a wedding someday.

Since it's a pain in the ass to drive down to LA, especially if you have a big honkin' SUV like I do and gas is 6 trillion dollars a gallon, I decided to fly down to LA. By using southwest, and having Keiko come in on JetBlue, I was able to time our arrivals at Burbank airport to within 1 minute of each other. Of course, that meant getting to the airport, which is all too often something of an adventure with me.

I managed to finish tutoring at 615pm Friday night, and took my stuff for the long walk down to the CalTrain station to catch the 712pm train. Catching that train was important because the next one wouldn't get me to the airport in time to make the 9pm flight. I reached Darbar, which is an Indian restaurant right across the street from the train station, at 630. As I passed Darbar, I decided to duck in and get some food. I made this decision based on the following factors:

1) There were still 42 minutes before the train was due
2) I only needed to cross the street and go through the tunnel under the tracks to the southbound side and buy a $4 ticket at the machine, and
3) Darbar has historically been pretty speedy about serving your food

I knew I'd be rushed, but I hadn't had a meal yet and we had an hour drive to Claremont coming after we landed and got a rental car, so I didn't want to have to stop us for food once we were in LA.

By 642, I was seated, with yummy chicken vindaloo in front of me, reading my book (The Great Influenza, by John Barry- quite good), and I set about eating quickly as I read. At 657, I told the waiter I needed my check because I had to catch a train across the street. He proceeded to go to the counter, pick up a check, and deliver it to another table, then greet a family coming into the restaurant, then seat said family, at which point I got up and walked up to the counter myself, trailing my suitcase. Then he ran up and gave me my check.

By this point, it was 705. I paid cash to save time, and at 707 was out the door, now feeling a bit nervous. I half walked, half ran across the street to the tunnel that goes under the tracks, now able to hear the train's horn blowing in the distance.

And that's when I discovered the construction.

Apparently, for the last year they've been building a new southbound platform. Of course, I haven't been here a year so I never noticed a change, but since the last time I took the train down to the airport, which is the only reason I ever take the train, the new platform apparently got finished. And so the old platform, and the tunnel leading to it, were fenced off and blocked by light construction machinery. There was, however, a sign telling me that I could find the new platform that-a-way, to the left.

Somewhere.

It's now 710, and I have no idea where the new tunnel/platform are, I can't just run across the tracks because everything's fenced off, and even if I did, I would probably get greased by the CalTrain, which is now beginning to pull into the station.

I run down the street in the direction the sign points. I can hear the train braking. I find the new tunnel, and race down it trailing the suitcase. I run up the stairs on the other side. The train is parked, and people are starting to stream off. Shit! Where is the ticket machine?? I find it, and start the process of getting a ticket. People are starting to board. I need to pay $4. I start feeding it $1 bills. The only other thing I have is a $20, and I don't have time to wait for all that change. The first 3 bills go in just fine. The last one gets spit back out. The last people are getting on the train. I swap the $1 bill for a different one. It's even older, and keeps bunching up in the feeder. I finally get it in, and a ticket drops out. I run for the train.

Too late.

The doors close as I'm running at the train, and it starts to pull away.

Fuck. Fuckshitdamnpissfuckitall.

So, now I'm in possession of a $4 ticket I'll never use, since the next train is useless to me. So I turn around and speedwalk back all the way to the office, reflecting as I go that maybe my decision to forgo getting gas on the way to work was unwise. As I left home, I looked at my gas gauge and thought, "Just enough to get me to the office, plus a small fraction of margin, so I can deal with this when I get back from LA."

Now I have to hope that the gas margin is big enough to get me all the way down to San Jose airport, because it's not at all clear that I have time to stop at a gas station. I get back in the office, jump in the GMC, and head off to the airport. It's now 730.

Fortunately, it's just past rush hour, so although traffic is heavy, it's moving. I employ all my most aggressive driving techniques, and arrive at the airport complex at 750. Now I've got to get into long-term parking, and get a shuttle to the terminal.

It's important, if you're someone like me, to know certain things about the airports you frequent, particularly things that help you move through it faster. For the record, you may wish to know that in San Jose's long-term parking lot, the shuttle stops go from A to S, and they form a giant wavy loop. The lot is designed to encourage traffic to flow from A to S, and the shuttle hits the stops in that order. But, if you ignore the way traffic is intended to flow, and make a couple of clever turns, you can immediately end up by stop S, which, because of the loop effect, is actually pretty close to stop A. And, stop S is the last stop the shuttle makes before heading back to the terminals.

So, I whip into the long-term parking lot, bail off the main path, and come flying into the aisle that has shuttle stop S, at which point 2 things happen:

1) The idiot light/sound effect comes on, which means I've got maybe 10-12 more miles of city driving left before I will run out of gas, and
2) The shuttle turns into the aisle.

By the grace of God, there is an empty spot just 15 feet from the shuttle stop, so I zoom into the spot, jump out of the car, grab my suitcase, and run for the shuttle stop, where I'm just in time to jump on. Time: 8pm.

The shuttle drops me off at the terminal at 810, and I check in and get through security by 825, so I am actually able to walk to my gate, where the boarding process is just beginning, at 830. Hence, I congratulate myself for arriving early, because after all, in Gus's world, if you were able to actually walk to your gate, and people haven't even started filing onto the plane yet, you have definitely arrived early.

The flight was a blissfully short 46 minutes, and we had no trouble getting the rental, or getting to Claremont. Both my dance partners lived in Claremont, so I used to drive out there 4-6 times a week for 3 years. I can do it in my sleep, and on some occasions actually have.

Saturday we got up and went for a walk around Pomona's campus. I always try to visit the old alma mater when I'm in town, and I like showing it to people because then it's easier for them to have a picture of what's going on when I tell Pomona stories.


Keiko on Walker Beach at Pomona.












You can't see the mountains in the background, because it was a pretty hazy day. I arrived at Pomona not knowing almost anything about it, since it was originally my 4th choice out of the 4 schools I applied to. In fact, I didn't know there were mountains nearby, and toward the end of August the air quality there can get bad enough that the haze completely obscures the mountains. So, I went through days 1 and 2 not knowing the mountains were there. No one told me about them. So imagine my surprise on day 3 when I woke up, went outside, and looked up to see mountains where there hadn't been any the previous day. It's psychologically jarring in a way that's extremely difficult to explain.

I only applied to Pomona at all because my guidance counselor Bonnie had a rule that you had to apply to at least 4 schools. (If I should ever run into her again, I will thank her for making me apply.) My algorithm for selecting schools was this: I needed a school in or near a big city, relatively small in size, with strong physics, psychology, dance, and russian departments, plus a strong commitment to foreign exchange, and to diversity in the student body. After spending 4 years in a school that was 100% male, 99% Catholic, and 98% white, I was pretty desperate for diversity. Turns out, not so many schools fit that category. I submitted my list as Rice, Oberlin, and University of Chicago. Bonnie made me pick a 4th school, and I ruled out the following alternatives:

1) Duke, because they'd only ever taken valedictorians
2) Swarthmore, because why on earth would you ever want to be in rural PA (sorry, JJM)
3) Reed, because it's in the middle of nowhere and a lot of people there seem to kill themselves

In the end, I picked Pomona because, quite literally, it was in LA, which meant it couldn't be too far from the beach, and I figured if for some reason I ended up going there and hating it, I could always just spend 4 years on the beach, and then figure something else out.

Rice was my first choice because I was in the midst of my first long-distance relationship, with Kate, whom I met in the Soviet Union on the train to Leningrad. [Literally every long-term relationship I've ever had has involved some component of long distance. My therapist keeps bugging me to think about why that might be...] She lived in Houston and was a year behind me in school. They also had a nice partnership with NASA, so I was pretty dead set on going there.

I never took applying to Pomona that seriously, so I decided to have a little fun with the application. My personal essay was a comparison and contrast between myself and Jesus Christ. Sadly, unless it's locked away in a dusty vault at Pomona, the only copy of that essay was on a 5.25" disk from our old Apple IIC, and is lost to history. But I do remember Jesus came out of it looking pretty good.

In the end, Rice wait-listed me, and I got accepted to the other 3 schools. I went and visited Chicago first, and thought it was, in a word, joyless. The students I stayed with said to me: "Don't come here if you want a social life." That's all I needed to hear.

Oberlin remains the site of the best college party I have ever been to. It stretched across 4 or 5 houses along a street, with what most have been hundreds of people drunk off their asses, including, pretty quickly, me. I lost track of the students I was staying with, and at 4am some kind other students helped me find my way back to the room I was staying in. I liked the people I met, but Oberlin is in the middle of a cornfield. So although I had a great time, it seemed to me like that party encapsulated pretty much all there was to do.

Plus, Oberlin was close to some of my mom's wackiest relatives, the ones who would provoke you into an argument about something over dinner and then whip out a pocket book of Bible verses to augment their case. Even though we hadn't told them I was going to be in the area, I think my grandma squealed, and they called up all excited that I might be nearby, and could come over for dinner sometimes. All in all, not a great case for Oberlin.

Pomona was too far away for us to go visit, and that plus my never really taking the application there seriously meant I knew nothing about it. The big determinant was going to be financial aid, since my parents couldn't afford very much at all. Oberlin gave us a relatively crappy deal, so that was the final nail in that coffin (sorry J-Rob, we would've made great classmates!).

Pomona and U Chicago gave essentially identical offers, and since I knew Chicago was joyless, I opted for Pomona, sight unseen. And I've always been glad I did. One of the best decisions I ever made. But I would definitely have gone to Rice if I'd been let in, so it's just another example of the universe having a better idea of what's good for me than I do.

Anyway, Keiko and I wandered around Pomona for a while, and then went for lunch to my favorite Thai restaurant on earth: Sinamluang. I used to go there at least 3 times a week in college. Entrees were $3.50 (Keiko, eyeing $5.50 entrees, "The food is so cheap!" Me, eyeing the $5.50 entrees, "It's so expensive now!"), the place was open until 3 a.m., and the cute Thai waitresses would teach us Thai words. They've really cleaned the place up now- no more animal carcasses hanging next to the cash register, and the bathrooms aren't horrifying, but I'm pleased to report that the food is still outstanding.

From there, we drove down to Temecula for Gina's wedding that afternoon. They had an outdoor ceremony at the Temecula Creek Inn, which was very nice...


Gina and Gabe














My friend Sarah was the Maid of Honor, and I'm proud to say I brought the two of them together; I introduced Sarah to Gina after Sarah and I started dating.

Gina and I worked at Katz together. She was in a different division, and I'd seen her around but never spoken with her. Then, late in 1995 we were asked to fly to NYC and learn the new computer system our company would be going on, and then come back and teach the other 70 people in the LA office how to use it. That was one of my formative tutoring experiences, BTW, and although the LA office was the 2nd biggest in the company, we ended up generating the 2nd fewest calls to the help desk in the first few weeks after we went live on the new system. Only Portland generated fewer calls, and they only had 4 total people, one of whom had gone to NYC for the training (every office sent either 1 or 2 people, depending on size). I don't remember much about the training except that Portland was cute, and the two girls from Atlanta were cute, and we went out drinking every night until 4a.m., and it made me wonder how anyone could possibly live in NYC and not rapidly become broke, alcoholic, and dead from sleep deprivation.

Another thing I remember about the trip was that Gina was scared of flying, and she spent the entire 6 hour flight clutching my arm in ways varying from a vice-grip to a death-grip, depending on whether the plane had just jostled a little or not. Numerous alcoholic drinks did nothing to lessen this. She swears she's better about that now, and I hope for Gabe's sake that that's true.

The wedding was very sweet, and the reception was fun. A few pics from that:


Me and Keiko



















Me and Gina. And a lightning bug on my shirt.












Keiko continues to maintain that the lightning bug is not, in fact, a lightning bug, but rather is some kind of giant mutant flesh-eating bug monster from outer space. Or so I gather- I'm paraphrasing a bit. But I'm sure it's just a garden variety lightning bug, despite all her protestations to the contrary. Of course, her people did come up with Godzilla, so it may be natural to see monsters all over the place. [Hopefully this joke is funny enough not to get me into an assload of trouble...]


Me, Gabe, Gina, and Sarah














Hmm, placing 5'7" Keiko in 5" heels next to 5'1" Gina in 2" heels is maybe not the wisest compositional choice...










At the afterparty...










Eventually, Keiko and I bailed the afterparty because we wanted to be able to get up early enough to go to the beach the next day. This was partially successful; we did get to Will Rogers State beach late in the afternoon. But it took forever to get there and then another forever for us to find a place with beach towels, since neither of us remembered to bring one and there's not much in the way of services in Pacific Palisades. Plus, we had to leave to go meet one of Keiko's LA friends. We ate at a place called Buddha's Belly, near the 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica:

Me, Keiko, Viv. And Buddha's Belly, which you can see hanging over my shoulder. Keiko kept patting my belly and saying it was good luck... that's her subtle way of calling me fat.



I was happy to hang around Santa Monica more, but Keiko, like most people, seems not to react well to my style of arriving at airports, so we left early and got to the airport at 745 for our 9pm flights. And in the process, I realized that it was actually a good thing that I missed the train, because by the time I would've landed in San Jose and caught the shuttle to the CalTrain station, I would've missed the last northbound train and been stuck in the middle of nowhere where there aren't any taxis. One small thing I do miss about Manhattan is the 24 availability of trains, and the copious supply of taxis (except, of course, when it's raining).

So I made it back OK, and found a gas station about 9 miles from the airport, so that was a little nerve-racking, but all in all a good trip. It was good to see Gina finally find someone; she's always been a sweetheart and deserved to find (and did find) a good guy.

I totally should've made her join the bet.