Visiting John and Greg
| When I arrived in San Jose, my old college buddy (damn I'm old) John came to pick me up in his sporty Silicon Valley Porsche along with the only woman in all of the Valley, Susan. Here's John with his new hair do getting all dressed up for a night out on the town. |
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| The couch on the left was my bed, the laptop with its cable modem was my connection to the outside world, the TV and its Law and Order provided infinite nightly entertainment. The lamp was from Ikea, and was the focus of both a trip to the light bulb store to buy a special $10 Scandinavian light bulb and also the many sarcastic remarks I made about their Yuppie obsession with Ikea. |
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| I had never heard of Ikea, by the way, until Greg showed me his "beautiful" TV stand 15 minutes after I got off the train. John's goal has been to get away from his home of Naperville, IL -- yuppie capital of the Chicago suburbs -- and its associated attitudes. With he and his friends' fixation on sport bikes and Ikea, I'm afraid he's living the yuppie dream. When I got back to school, I saw Fight Club for the first time. The whole movie is one big bash on the Ikea lifestyle, and I couldn't help boasting to Seth that this was exactly what I was making fun of John for a week earlier. |
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| At the time, John worked for a now-defunct software company called Zadu. He lived and worked a five minute walk from the Hayward Park train station, which was my outlet out of his Ikea furnished yuppie heaven into the Silicon Valley yuppie factory of Stanford. |
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| Every morning for a week, I'd get up to catch the 9:05 train and hope that the Palo Alto stop came before the conductor got a chance to ask me for my ticket. |
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| What is this out the train window, John? A Barnes & Noble? Is this not one of the symbols of the Naperthrill hell you couldn't wait to get away from? :-) |
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