Susan added, "It's like every girl I know did all this incredibly sick sex shit with their Barbies, and in the end the head and/or limbs would fall off and you'd have to hide her but your Mom always found the dismembered Barbie and would say, 'Gee, honey-what happened to Barbie?'"

"Oh God-you'd just be dying of shame, remembering the debauch that landed her in the degraded state." (More cackling.)

"I remember when my Barbie discovered my brother's G.I. Joe's," said Karla. "Talk about a spree. She was in fragments within an hour." "Oh my God-me too!" said Susan. "Hair gone, too?"

"Yup."

I was feeling a bit excluded and cut out discreetly, leaving more cackles in my wake. How can the two of them both have done the exact same things?

My body no longer kills me when I come back from the gym. However, I had a moment of total humiliation today: theoretically my ideal body weight is 172 pounds and I weigh 153 Ibs. The woman at the gym calibrated my fat/water/meat/bone ratios, made an inward gasp and I asked her what was wrong. She said (after a tentative, you-have-cancer pause), "You're what's technically known as a 'thin fat person.'"

It was so degrading. Not only am I skinny, but what meat I do possess isn't meat at all, but lard. I have to burn that off before I can even begin beefing up. I don't even deserve the honor of calling myself carbon-based, let alone silicon-based- maybe I'm based on one of those useless elements like boron that don't do anything.

I'm not telling Karla about this one.

THURSDAY

Word leaked out at the office that I'm a thin fat person (the gym lady blabbed to Todd) and I had to endure a barrage of crude jokes at my expense for 14 hours. Todd pulled me aside and gave me a canister of amino acids and a pep talk.

Dad started work today at Delta. He popped into the Oop! office to show his face on the way back. Susan, Bug, and Michael pleaded for some access into the Delta system or at least something they could start to hack with. Michael wanted to add ten million frequent flyer points to his account: "I want to fly to the South Pole, first class, Saudi Airlines, with a sleeper seat, and Reuben Kincaid sleep goggles made of passenger pigeon breast feathers."

Across the street from our house, these little kids were having a tiny garage sale: a single, spine-worn copy of Cosmopolitan, two filthy Big Bird toys, a paperback of Future Shock, and a cowboy boot remover. It was so depressing-and eerily similar to Susan's joke about Russian garage sales. Karla said, "Susan's right. The Russians'll never catch up."

Ethan, over for a visit, said, "Au contraire, pal, they'll probably outlap us shortly."

Dusty was barfing all over the office sink when I came in this morning. She said she'd been working out too hard at the gym.

Abe:

My magnetic card keys fucked upa nd I couldn't get into the building and I gfelt like I'd stopped enlisting

FRIDAY

Todd burst in this morning: "I'm a Maoist now!"

The rest of us are so numb from politics now we couldn't even muster up the will to shoot him a yawn.

"You do know the three forms of Communism, don't you?"

"No, Todd. But I'm sure you'll let us know."

"Oh good . . .

"First, there's Marxist Leninism.

"Second, there's Stalinism-well, actually, Stalinism is an application, not an operating system. I mean, if you want to wipe out 40 million people, you install Stalinism on your hard drive. It's like a political ebola virus."

Susan likened the Stalinist purges to those at IBM.

"Finally, there's Maoism. Maoism is about the total elimination of all culture. Anything that smacks of culture is bad. Everything from cocktail umbrellas up to Mozart. It all has to go."

I said, "That's dreadful, Todd- culture is everything. Without culture we're nothing. You're telling me you'd have all existing Bob Newhart reruns destroyed!"

"Bob Newhart romanticizes decadent, self-absorbed bourgeois liberal therapeutic culture. It is redeemable only in that therapy repudiates the Church."

"Sounds like a pretty chuckle-free universe to me," said Karla.

"More to life than chuckles, Kar," said Todd, frappeing a can of Del Monte pineapple and some form of protein powder in the office blender. "It's obvious-culture must perish."

"Why?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. Just that it must. I'm working on that one. Oh look- there's Dusty down on the street- we're off to our posing seminar. Gold's just had new daises delivered. Ciao, comrades."

Glurp. Guzzle. Chug. Slam.

"Be sure and flex one for me."

"Can't those two just code?" moaned Michael in a rare show of feeling. So now the Gang of Two (Boris and Natasha no more) are onto their next political kick.

Abe:

Went into Microsoft. Spent most of the morning entering my old vynyl records into a database Iv'e built. Filemaker Prod by Claris gets to Track my CHS tape collection..

Questions: Can you gusess what this is by the ingeredients?

SD Alcohol

LVater

Tween 20

Glycerine

Flavor

Sodium Sacchharine

FD&CBlueNQI

"Made in USA"

Keep guessing. I'll give you the answer later. [Answer: ice

Drops icy-mint breath freshener.]

Dusty was telling us later on all of this cool body stuff: about an aerobic drug, RPO, that enhances the body's ability to metabolize oxygen. Rumor has it a French bicycling team all died of heart attacks using it. And she discussed how too many steroids make women grow hair and can make users "acromegliac"-their craniums distort.

Oh-Dusty barfed up whole Lake Superiors of muck all morning. I wonder what's up with that.

Some new diet regime, doubtless.

Ethan says Type-A personalities have a whole subset of diseases that they, and only they, share, and the transmission vector for these diseases is the door close button on elevators that only get pushed by impatient, Type-A people. Ethan pushes these buttons with his elbow, now. I'm starting lo worry about all of us.

In the spirit of Ethan's neurosis, we made a dry wall list of keyboard bill tons we would like to see:

PLEASE

THANK YOU

FUCK OFF

DIE

OOPS.. .MYMISTAKE

DO SOMETHING COOL AND SURPRISE ME

Later, everyone got in a debate over whether or not Fisher Price's minifigs were cooler than Lego's. The debate went onto the drywall:

FISHER PRICE minifigs versus LEGO minifigs

Fisher Price Minifigs:

Plus: limbless figures give children a feeling of helplessness

Minus: faces resemble those of beloved but unfunny cartoon characters in Family Circus

Plus: generic, Gap-like outfits

Minus: height/weight-disproportionate bodies imply eating disorders: bad role model for millennial youth yearning to be functional

Lego Minifigs:

Plus: interchangeable, unisex hairdos

Minus: clawlike hands are scary and potentially traumatizing

Plus: bodies can be incorporated into architecture

Minus: bad fashions

Dad hates his boss, "the 32-year-old prick."

"He's a humorless Total Quality Management freak who uses Anthony Robbins pep talks to motivate me into learning humiliatingly simple input codes. Hell, I'm younger than him in everything but body."

Dad's only one-third the way up the food chain in his division at Delta, and it must be really degrading for him. Mom said, "I know your father wanted a job badly, but maybe this isn't his cup of tea. Can't you people teach him C++ a bit faster?" We had to tell her that learning doesn't scale. But the idea of Dad being a hip and with-it coder is one that appeals to all of us in the office. Who knows where this will lead.

FRIDAY (one week later)

Dad quit his job. He showed up at the office around two in the afternoon to tell me. Michael promptly gave him some C++ manuals and put him in an empty chair in the corner and said, "Time to learn for real, Mr. Underhill."