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<strong>Homeland</strong><br />
Liam's friend Nate joined us for lunch, taking BART down from his mom's place downtown.<br />
He, too, gave me a crushing hug, and then he and Liam exchanged one of the same.<br />
These guys were as Californian as they came, and they loved their physical contact. I'd<br />
been born and raised in San Francisco, but my mom was British, and so I just hadn't gotten<br />
into the whole super-huggy scene ever.<br />
We ended up at my favorite burrito joint, and I got tongue, which Ange had convinced me<br />
to try and which turned out to be amazingly tasty, provided you didn't think too hard about<br />
the fact that you were, you know, eating a tongue. Liam ordered one, too, and raved about<br />
how good it tasted and how he wished he'd tried it sooner.<br />
“I still can't believe you're our webmaster,” Liam said. “That's like, I don't know, Bruce Lee<br />
being your bouncer or something.”<br />
“Or Jack Daniels being your bartender,” Nate said. He had the same beard as Liam.<br />
“I think Jack Daniels is dead, or made up,” Liam said.<br />
“Okay, it's like Steve Wozniak fixing your PC,” Nate said.<br />
“Dude, old school,” Liam said. “Woz is the guy who built the first Apple computers,” he<br />
said to me.<br />
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”<br />
“Oh,” Liam said. “Yeah! Of course you do! Listen to me, huh?”<br />
I wanted to find some way to politely say, “Hey, Liam, don't worry about impressing me,<br />
okay? I already like you, and all this stuff is just making you sound kind of desperate.”<br />
But every way I could think of saying that would make Liam feel like a loser and make me<br />
sound like a dick.<br />
“What are you up to, Nate?” I said, pointedly changing the subject.<br />
He shrugged. “Being unemployed. Polishing my nonexistent resume.” Another shrug.<br />
“I know how that feels,” I said. “I was unemployed until this morning.”<br />
They both boggled at me.<br />
“No way,” Liam said. “How could you be out of work? I assumed they'd poached you from<br />
some rad start-up or Google or something.”<br />
Now it was my turn to shrug. It seemed like unemployment talk always involved a fair bit<br />
of shrugging and looking away. “Dunno,” I said. “I dropped out of school months ago,<br />
couldn't afford it anymore, and I've been looking ever since.”<br />
“Man,” Nate said. “That's crazy. If you couldn't find work, what hope do I have?”<br />
<strong>SiSU</strong> www.sisudoc.org/ 74
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