Steverino

Her name was Becky (as always, the only real names I use here are mine and those of my family members), and we dated in the spring of 1982.  Becky was the only blonde woman I’ve ever dated; at the time she was an aspiring runway model and had landed a couple of jobs.  She was very pretty and sweet, but sometimes a bit of a pain in the ass, and she was about as sharp as a sack of wet hair.  I mean that in a good way.

My favorite story about Becky centers on tax season that year.  She had been complaining from mid-February that she hadn’t received her W2 forms from the previous year.  I told her that she needed to call her employers and ask them to resend the forms, since she was supposed to have received them by then.

A few weeks later, I asked Becky whether she’d gotten the new W2s, and she said she had forgotten to call and would do so right away.  It was getting close to mid-March, and I had already received my refund check (most of which I spent on a birthday present for her), and I suggested that she not delay any further.

Fast forward to April 10th.  I called Becky to set up a date, and she mentioned that she still hadn’t received her W2s.  I pointed out that April 15th was just around the corner, and she needed to get the W2s as quickly as possible, even if it meant driving to her employers and picking them up herself.  Then I asked whether she had called the employers the previous month.

“Well, yes, and they sent me something.  But they didn’t send the W2s.”

That statement set off all kinds of alarms in my head.  ”Wait a minute, Becky.  Just what did they send you?”

“These little white slips.”

The next sound she heard was me smacking myself in the head with the phone.  ”Sweetheart, those are your W2s.”

“How do you fill out your taxes on those little things???”

In hindsight, I really should have abandoned her at that point.  But I was young and dumb and figured my chivalry would win her over.  I carefully explained that her taxes were to be filled out on form 1040A or 1040EZ, and that the W2s simply stated how much money she made the previous year.  I could hear her brow furrowing with every word, and so I offered to come over and help her with her taxes.  It was a long evening, but I got to spend it in the company of a pretty girl.

Some weeks later, Becky got a wild idea in her head.  Becky had a younger sister named Rachel, of whom she was always jealous.  Rachel was every bit as pretty as Becky, and was very smart.  And so, Becky resented her little sister, and was constantly trying to prove she was at least as smart.  (It amazes me how much energy we devote to trying to outdo the people who impress us the most.)

Becky heard that the local Mensa chapter was offering an IQ test; please don’t ask me where she heard this, I can’t imagine Mensa scouring modelling agencies for recruits.  She wanted to take the test to prove she was smart, but was afraid of going alone, and wanted me to come along.  I didn’t blame her for not wanting to go alone; a pretty girl among a roomful of nerds who hadn’t seen a member of the opposite sex in months wouldn’t last any longer than a minnow in a shark tank.  So, I agreed to come along.

I picked her up that Saturday morning, and we drove to Costa Mesa, where the test was offered.  I hadn’t taken tests like these since the SATs in 1976, but I have always done well with standardized tests.  During breaks, I got to talking with the proctor; he was a television triva buff like me, and we started quizzing each other until we both begged for mercy.  The whole process lasted some 4 hours, and we were told as we left that we would receive the results in the mail in about a month.

A month passed, and so did a few more dates with Becky.  The test result came one fine day, and I got a call from her.  She said that her results didn’t list a score; apparently, the test was geared to measure IQs of 120 and above, and anything below 120 was too far out of range to be precise.  So her score was simply “average intelligence”.  Personally, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with having average intelligence; I’m more interested in how you make use of what you have than your starting arsenal.  Becky asked what I had scored.

I hadn’t opened the envelope yet, and did so while on the phone.  I could see my score on the sheet, they gave me a number rather than just “average”; stupidly and dutifully, I read it to her.  (No, I will not divulge my IQ; it’s completely irrelevant.)  I could almost hear the disappointment in her voice when she heard it.

Very soon after that, Becky started getting really busy.  At least she was busy on every Saturday till kingdom come when I asked for a date.  And she was busy on Fridays, too, as well as Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays.  In fact, she was busy on every day that ended in the letter “y”.  After a half-dozen or so calls (I was really dense about people in general and women in particular), I finally got the message that she no longer wished to see me.  I had been dumped.

Yes, I got dumped.  By a knucklehead.  For being too smart.  Funny, no?

I ran into Becky about 6 years ago; she was in Orange County visiting her family, and we bumped into each other at a mall.  She was no longer blonde, no longer pretty, and living with her unemployed husband in Tennessee; the years had not been kind to her.  I was there, a successful software engineer, with my wife and adorable and well-behaved children.  I wished her well, and asked her to convey my regards to her family.  I don’t want to say that I had gotten the last laugh; in fact, I felt rather sad that her life had turned out so poorly.

I used to wonder what she thought when she met up with me; whether she dreamed that her life would have turned out better if she hadn’t dumped me.  But that was just a bit too narcissistic of me, and I no longer wonder about such things.

Still, the story of How I Got Dumped For Being Too Smart makes for an unusual chapter in my life.

Spring lasted about a week this year.  Some 10 days ago, the sky was gloomy and overcast, and the high was something like 48 degrees.  That was the end of winter, but it seems summer has come much too soon.

I got used to randomly variable weather when I lived in Denver.  The first winter I was there, there was a time when it was snowing and hailing and the sun was shining, all in the same spot.  One fine day in September, 1993, the thermometer hit 95 degrees…and the next day it snowed.  So, Denver has Reno beat hands-down when it comes to goofy weather.

But I still miss spring.  I wanted 4-5 weeks of 70 degree weather, so I could get used to the season.  I wanted to sit out in my backyard and smell the fresh green grass and the aroma wafting up from my tulips and hyacinth.  I wanted all the things that spring can be.  And I had it for 10 days; that’s just not long enough.  It makes me feel like I’m the non-custodial parent of spring, and can only see it once a week on Sundays.

I don’t mind summer, I just don’t like very hot weather.  Inland Anaheim was terrible in the summer, easily hitting 100 degrees; days like that made me glad I had a swimming pool.  It sometimes gets that hot here, but not often.  Most summers, we can expect a couple of weeks of 95 degree heat, then settle back down into the high-80s and low-90s.  And the nights here are cool, so the heat doesn’t become too oppressive.

I didn’t much care for the summers in Aurora, either.  They’d routinely get above 95, and several days were above 100.  I could have tolerated that, but so many long-time Denverites kept reminding me that it was a dry heat, so it wasn’t so bad.  You know what?  An acetylene torch is dry heat, too, and I wouldn’t want to have that waved over me, either.  ”Yeah, it might be 400 degrees, but it’s so dry it only feels like 350.”  105 degrees is freaking hot, and it’s not made any less hot by a low humidity.

In any case, it’s dryer here in Reno than it was in Aurora.  I don’t have specific measurements, but I do know that the number of times I’ve almost killed myself with static discharge when flipping a light switch is orders of magnitude greater here than it was in Aurora.  But when it hit the record-high of 108 last year one day, I didn’t feel any less miserable because of the dryness.  No, summers here are more pleasant because they really are milder.

I shouldn’t complain too much; at least I am now living in a place that undergoes a change of season.  The seasons in Los Angeles are much harder to distinguish.  And, contrary to popular belief, L.A. really does have four seasons:  spring, summer, fire, and flood.

So, spring is gone and summer is upon me.  I have ahead of me a few months of lazy warm days, windy afternoons, and cool nights.  I’ll sit back and watch the fruit on my trees fatten and ripen.  And if I can chase the damned yellow jackets away from my barbeque, I’ll cook up some tasty dinners.

Come and join me some evening, the lemonade’s on me!

Last week I bought a new iPod from Apple.  I must admit, it’s a cool gizmo:  roughly the size of a deck of cards, with a 30 gigabyte hard drive and a firewire connector.  In addition to storing music, it has a calendar and address book built into it, and can serve as an external disk drive.  But the extra functions didn’t interest me, I just wanted something to hold my music.

30 gigabytes would be roughly 45 full-length CDs.  I’m guessing that in actual use, it would hold more than 50 CDs because not every CD would use all 720 megabytes of space.  And that’s without compressing the music — full AIFF digital format.  Compressed to MP3, the iPod would likely hold 200 or more CDs.  And that would be more than enough to contain my entire collection of music.

But Apple recently announced its online music store.  And with the music store, Apple has brought forth a newer sound compression format, AAC, which has a better audio quality than MP3 at the same compression ratio.  So, I wanted to convert my existing CDs into AAC format and load them onto my iPod.  I also wanted to join Apple’s music store so I could download random songs that I didn’t want on CD.

Sounds simple, right?  It sure sounded simple to me.  But, as always, I was wrong.

In order to convert CDs to AAC, I needed to run iTunes 4.  Well, I had version 2 on my iMac at home, and the iPod shipped with version 3.01.  So, I needed to download version 4.  That’s only 8.5 megabytes, which takes over 20 minutes on a 56K dial-up connection — not unreasonably long.

Ah, but that’s not all.  I needed the AAC codecs if I wanted to use the format, which meant I needed the newest version of QuickTime, 6.2.  Well, that’s only an 18.5 megabyte download — about an hour on my connection.  Sure, it was a long time, but I could set up the download and go do something else for an hour.

Yeah, I could, if AOL didn’t keep dropping the connection for me.  After 2 abortive attempts at downloading QuickTime, I sat and stared at the screen for an hour and made certain that it downloaded properly.  All was well…almost.

You see, in order to use iTunes 4 and QuickTime 6.2, I needed to upgrade my system from version 10.1.4 to 10.1.5.  That was “only” a 22 megabyte download, which took almost 90 minutes to accomplish.

I will say that AOL seems to behave better under 10.1.5, so I’m glad I took the time to download it.  But still, I’ve spent an entire evening mucking with my computer and I had yet to load a single song onto the iPod.  You remember the iPod, don’t you:  the whole point of this exercise was to listen to songs on it.

Okay, so I now have iTunes working properly, with the AAC encoder running.  And I’ve signed up for Apple’s music store; I haven’t downloaded a song yet, but my daughter has downloaded 5 already (I set her to a 5 song or 1 CD download per month limit).  And things are swell…..except that now I can’t burn CDs with iTunes anymore.  Nope, I need to upgrade my system to v10.2.4 to burn CDs again.  Going to 10.2.x isn’t free, it will cost me some $120.  I think I can hold off burning CDs for a couple of weeks, but it is a bit unnerving to lose that capability, however momentary the loss.

Thus ends my story of wrestling with my computer.  Yes, I’m happy I bought the iPod, I’ve already loaded a half dozen CDs onto it.  And I suppose I really should upgrade to the latest operating system anyway.  There is some benefit to being an early adopter, but I’d rather stay a jump or two behind the power curve.  And maybe all this downloading will give me the impetus to get a faster connection, like DSL or cable modem.

Oh, joy, something else to spend money on.

My wife noticed that he was drinking from her coffee cup (a tall platic cup that she brings to school each morning), and said, “Matt, don’t ask why, just answer this question with ‘yes’ or ‘no’:  what are you drinking?”

Matt was a bit confused.  There was a palpable silence in the room for a heartbeat or two.  Finally, I said, “He’s drinking ‘no’, sweetheart.”

We all got a good laugh out of the moment.  I guess you had to be there.