Spent the entire day helping poker buddy Jay move. Jay is moving into the apartments off of 101 and Lawrence. You know, those apartments. Apartments for the mistresses of corporate vice presidents, as opposed to regular folk like you and me. Apparently the rental market is bad enough that they’ve decided to let the riff-raff in. [Pre-emptive note to Mom: my usage of the term “mistresses” is not meant to imply that all Silicon Valley corporate vice presidents are male and heterosexual. I just couldn’t think of the male equivalent of “mistress”. Gigolo? Boy-toy?]

Anyway, Jan was there too, along with a couple of Jay’s other friends. (Jay has other friends beyond the poker circle? What the hell??) They were nice guys, though. One of them didn’t even mind when I scratched his Eclipse (while taking out some of Jay’s stuff from my adjacent car). “Don’t worry about it,” Conroy said. “It’s already pretty dinged up.” Now that’s the spirit. Live and let live, I say. It turns out Conroy had introduced Jay to his current girlfriend, and sport that he is, he offered to help me out too. “I know this really nice Korean girl…” he began. I demurred, telling him that I wanted to “marinate in my newfound singlehood” for a while. “What is that crap all about?” shouted Jay and Jan. I don’t know, really. It just kind of slipped out. “Marinate”? Sheesh.

Midway through the move, Jan asked me, “So are you going to put any of this in your journal?” I told him of course not — that there was nothing particularly interesting or funny about this particular move. However, on reflection I did learn a couple of things about moving today. And damnit, if this journal can’t be fun or interesting, it can at least be educational.

Evan’s First Postulate of Moving

A successful move requires N-1 handcarts or dollys, where N is the number of people working on the move.

Evan’s Second Postulate of Moving

The probability of the UHaul breaking down is proportional to the number of people working on the move and inversely proportional to the square of the time remaining before you have to return the vehicle and retrieve your car from the soon-to-be-locked parking lot.

Jay graciously took me out to dinner after we finished the move (everyone else went home to their wives and fiancees). We went to a Thai place on Castro Street. The place was mostly empty, so the proprietor put us at the window seat. Ordinarily I think of the “window seat” people as being the most photogenic couple in the restaurant… and sad to say, I think in this case we were it. Interestingly, midway through the meal a flower salesguy wandered by, caught our attention through the window, and proffered his wares to us. We politely and casually refused. And this in the not-particularly-hip-or-urban environment of downtown Mountain View. You’ve got to love the Bay Area.