Quote of the Day: "I had no idea you were so anti-Microsoft"- - Mom

Journal of a Sabbatical

December 15, 1998

pumpkin tortellini at the end of the 20th century under late capitalism

Some days nothing I hear is quotable, other days every other sentence I hear is quotable. Today was one of those quotable days.

Ned was just leaving Starbucks with a friend named Andy when I arrived. He said "I left the Wall Street Journal so you can piss off the radicals". I think he meant Tom who's definitely left of center, and Julie who is practically a socialist.

Tom came in before I even picked up the Wall Street Journal and we had a long and satisfying talk about word origins and other stuff. We were joined by Dan & Geri on their lunch hour, well on Geri's lunch hour - Dan was skipping a faculty meeting. Geri is from Paris and is trying to get me to practice my French. Everybody tells me that it will all come back to me if I just practice a bit.

I dashed home to call Mom to find out what the plans were for the impromptu gathering in honor of Bobby of Bosnia. Mom wasn't home but Bobby was so I got the plan from him. I mobilized to leave my house early even though dinner wasn't until 6:30 because I hate to drive on 128 in rush hour traffic, and there's really no other decent way to get to La Madre's house besides the moving parking lot that is 128. I left here at 3:15 and was sort of on the front edge of the wave of traffic. It was heavy but mainly kept moving at slow speeds.

We fooled around with La Madre's PC for various reasons when I wasn't being pedantic about the prevailing winds and ocean currents and how we don't get our weather directly from Bosnia - guess you had to be there to follow this. Anyway, in the course of messing with the PC, I revealed that I don't have Word or Outlook or you name it on my computer because I try to have as little Microsoft software as possible. "Well how do you do word processing then?" "I have ClarisWorks". This lead into a discussion of Bill Gates and restraint of trade and anticompetitive practices. "But don't you like Bill Gates?" " I hate Bill Gates." "We don't hate anybody" "Well, I don't hate him personally I just think he has monopolistic practices" or some such. Then it was time to go to dinner.

We met Thomas and Billy at Giacomo's and had a wonderful dinner over conversation ranging from details of staging a Hootie and the Blowfish Concert (runner up for quote of the day today was "why would anybody want to assassinate Hootie and the Blowfish?" "For musical reasons") to land mines to cat poop and ringworm and the weather in Kosovo. Bosnia looks like Vermont according to Bobby. The roasted vegetable antipasto was delicious and big enough to serve a much larger family than our truncated version (no Kevin and kids and no Donald). The pumpkin tortellini was in a cream sauce made with actual cream. Bobby loved the sea bass. And so on.

On the way home in my car, my mother says "I had no idea you were so anti-Microsoft".

I never did get to read the Wall Street Journal.