While the mushrooms are sautéeing, sauté a quarter-pound of slivered almonds in butter until lightly toasted. Set aside.

In the same pan that the almonds were sautéed in, sauté diced turkey giblets, well seasoned with salt and pepper, until fully cooked. Set aside.

When everything is ready — stock, mushrooms, almonds, giblets — mix it with:

4 cups bread crumbs
1/2 cup finely diced dried apricots

Include the butter that’s left over in both sauté pans. If there isn’t enough butter, including the butter coating the mushrooms, almonds and giblets, to lightly moisten the bread crumb mixture, melt a bit more in one of the sauté pans and stir it in. (But it’s hard to imagine you’d need more than a few additional tablespoons.)

Filter the stock through a fine strainer, and start adding it slowly, one-quarter cup at a time, to the bread crumb mixture. A half-cup of the stock is probably enough — you don’t want wet, gummy stuffing. The purpose of the stock is to bind the bread crumb mixture so that it hangs together well enough to be rounded into handfuls and stuck into the bird, but is not the consistency of grout or slurry. As with the addition of butter, the quantity of stock needed will vary with the consistency and dryness of the bread crumbs.

Season the bird well internally with salt and pepper before inserting the stuffing. Any leftover stuffing can be placed in a buttered ramekin and baked alongside the bird.

The bread got its start — as most, though not all, things in my life have — because of a guy. As part of my squalid (no, make that adventurous) adolescence, I used to slink around the dorms at Cal Tech. One year, one of my playmates from that esteemed institution took me home to meet his parents. I dumped him and kept them — the surrogate parents I thought I had always deserved. For 25 years, if I needed to run home to mommy and daddy, it was to these folks I scampered. Anyway, one summer, they had the problem of too much zucchini — so as a small gesture in compensation for their many kindnesses, I devised what came to be known as the Famous Chocolate Zucchini Bread.

The bread really became famous — this is where the guy angle shines through — when it became one of the few things I cooked that my (now ex-) husband would actually deign to eat. He was a man of many and considerable charms — lefty labor lawyer, former hippie cabinetmaker, great dancer, sharp dresser, animal lover, humorous, warm, landed and desirous of offspring. And in my small circle of Berkeley-in-the-’70s hell, he was regarded as the most eligible bachelor in town.

Reader, I married him, as I knew I would when I laid eyes on him at a dance/benefit put on for the antinuclear power Abalone Alliance in my mime/waitressing friends’ West Berkeley converted industrial space/studio. (OK, so I was definitely participating in the culture of my time, OK?)

I was so besotted that I didn’t remark or object to the fact that he was also a person to whom control was more important than life itself. And as he was also a gourmand and good cook (I knew he liked me when, early on in our courtship, he gave me a bottle of Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup, then unavailable on the West Coast), he had very definite ideas about food.

Part of his slay-me allure was his Old World Yiddishkeit charisma. A native speaker of what he called the “King’s Yiddish,” he was born in a refugee camp in Bavaria, the only child of concentration camp survivors. Though my low opinion of the work of Marc Chagall has never changed, it was through my ex that I really got what the painter was doing at the emotional level. In the realm of cuisine, his love of the mother country translated into an appreciation of ethnic specialties such as fried noodles and onions. Nevertheless, my yellow warning lights should have gone off that night, early in our relationship, when he stomped out of my flat wordlessly after I served him beef stroganoff, one of my company dishes of the time. How was I supposed to know that the unkosher union of sour cream and marinated steak was anathema — especially after I had observed him eating BBQ pork ribs at Chinese restaurants?

So it came as no surprise that one of the tipping points that pitched our relationship into the slough of despond came when I baked a fish. Because of my assimilated Southern California extraction and my work experience in Northern California gourmet ghetto cuisine, an experiment with a vaguely Mexican/Asian greenish sauce of tomatillo, garlic, lime and chives seemed to have possibilities.

My husband took one bite and shoved the plate away in disgust. The fish hadn’t been prepared in the sweet-and-sour tomatoey/onion mode that he expected, given his Galician heritage, so of course it wasn’t edible. That was about the point I just gave up.

Our food fights made the zucchini bread especially precious. It became the one item from my existence previous to our joint existence that met with his approval. He liked it! He liked it! He really, really liked it!

But even the zucchini bread was not enough to save our marriage: Our love — constituted from equal parts nostril-flaring passion, high drama/high conflict and dark nights during which our two souls each encountered a spirit of equal contradiction and morbid hypersensitivity — was too exhausting to last for the long haul.

Our doomed love match was as anguished as our bittersweet, Northern California-style divorce was civilized. We didn’t squabble over money or property; we acknowledged our love, though we knew we had to part. For several years after we broke up, we had fond phone conversations each week.

But this is where the revenge and remediation part of the story begins: not during the divorce, but when our lives diverged afterwards.

He and I got together when I was in my mid-20s and he in his mid-30s; we split up when I was around 30. In my five-year timeout from the dating wars, the great demographic shift had occurred.

In leaving my marriage, I had become that surplus societal commodity: a single woman over the age of 30. When he and I had hooked up, I had left behind 10 years or so of frolicking fairly freely about; now, reentering the mating marketplace, I found to my horror that every guy was gay, taken, aggressively not interested or aggressively icky. Every social event I went to had at least three semi-interesting single females for every one unattached male. I was entering the next phase of my life, the one that would be characterized by long periods of romantic starvation and high, high, high opportunity costs. Post-divorce, I would end up paying more for my pleasures than I had ever dreamed possible as a boy-crazy teenager, in terms of coping with the elusiveness, unavailability, duplicities and sexual weirditudes/bad manners of my sexual partners.

The narrative arc of the story of our sexual inequality started playing out the day I left Berkeley for Manhattan. On that day, the day that our marriage was officially over, three different women who had been impatiently waiting for me to get out of town asked my ex out. Whereas the first blind date I had when I got to New York took one look at me and walked out the door. From that day on, it only got worse.

It turned out that New York and I were to have a great unrequited love affair: I had always thought the city was fabulous, but the city did not return the favor. Suffice it to say that psychosexual insecurities I hadn’t had since junior high school re-erupted with cause.

My new life in the Big City closely resembled Marine Corps boot camp: character-forming, but not much fun. Although I recognized that my ex-husband was not to blame for my post-divorce desuetude, I found this to be very cold comfort on the Saturday nights I spent doing nothing but listening to WNYC-FM and reading Edmund Wilson’s fiction and memoirs about his glam, cosmopolitan life in New York.

By the time my ex met his current wife — six months after we had broken up — he had had a couple of steady girlfriends. Worse, he met her through friends of mine. Needless to say, there was no such happy symmetry in my life.

I also didn’t realize then that the domesticity I so desperately pined for — the nesting coziness Sam Shepard captured so well in “True West” (coming home in the dusk to the happy shared house, golden lamplight dimly glimpsed through lowered shades, dinner preparations steaming the kitchen windows) — was not to be my fate. The end of my marriage spelled the end of my third, and most serious, domestic partnership, and I had not yet begun to understand that I was someone who, like it or not, needed to live alone. Dramatic phase shifts such as these are often painful, and accompanied by breakthrough bleeding.

But I hadn’t sussed all this at the time, of course. Driven by projection, histrionics, fatal attraction and karma, he and I were symbiotically wedded to each other, whether stormily married or newly divorced. We identified with each other’s business in a sibling rivalry kinda way, which was pretty weird, given that we had been lousy at making a family (though we had showed a great talent for recapitulating all kinds of primal scenes from our respective families of origin.)

It irked me to no end that after our breakup, he had it so easy, and I had it so hard. He wasn’t forced to do the hard work of post-breakup introspection, not with members of the appropriate sex zooming in at him from all points on the compass to tell him how darling and desirable he was, just the way he was. Meanwhile, I was fuming and desolate, blaming myself and reassessing everything.

So when he told me that, due to his upcoming cohabitation, we would have to stop our comforting post-divorce habit of offering one another emotional aid and assistance and our infrequent (though mutually rewarding) adventures with recreational sex, I became furious. My replacement had definite doormat/biddable girl qualities I could never have. I wasn’t likely to be able to find an analog for her of my own — docile, submissive males are relatively hard to come by, and anyway, I was looking for a companion, not a junior partner or a male equivalent of a broodmare.

In retaliation, I performed the most vindictive, petty, passive-aggressive act I could think of. I baked my ex-husband a batch of his beloved zucchini bread and told him I was mailing it to him as a present for his birthday. What I didn’t tell him is that I wrapped it steaming hot out of the oven, with malicious intent. The goal was for the bread to either arrive as an overtly malodorous moldy mess; or as a covertly moldy mess (that is, it would look fine, but the damp, warm, borderline-anaerobic conditions of its cross-country transit would ensure glorious mold cultivation throughout). I sent the bread off with malignant glee.

To folks who are not foodies, this may seem like no big deal. But for the two of us — who prided ourselves in our craft; to whom friends had said more than once, “Gee, you ought to open a restaurant”; to whom food was love, seduction, currency, power and the highest good — this was a gesture of poltroonish perfidy. It was the equivalent of spiking a toddler’s applesauce with warfarin or adding PCP to the hot apple cider given out at the neighborhood trick-or-treater’s way station. I was not so much like the Unabomber as the Lockerbie defendant accused of booby-trapping his pregnant fiancie’s luggage: I had defiled our covenant.

Sending the letter food bomb was childish. It was undignified. It marred our track record of generally good post-divorce behavior. He never said anything about it. But I knew what I had done. And since he and I haven’t talked to each other in years, I’ve never had a chance to apologize for such bad form. It’s an apology that has been a long time coming.

So.

Sorry, Charlie.

2) I only wish I had the power of punditocracy. The closest I have ever come to being part of the old-media elite was back in the 1980s when I was on staff at the now-defunct technical trade, “Data Communications,” which routinely contained a level of technical detail about on a par with an IEEE publication and had about as much glamour as another McGraw-Hill publication, “Modern Plastics.” You would have no way of knowing this, but I actually also ghostwrote the first chapter of a reference book on Apache last year. I am quite aware of the importance of open-source software in geek culture.

3) I think there is also something of a reversal of causality in your documentation of political blinders and free markets. It’s precisely because I see the political blinders in the technology culture that surrounds us (Quiz: Where would you rather create a start-up, in Chechnya/Sierra Leone or in Northern California where the roads are good and the food and pharmaceutical supply is untainted and bandits don’t lurk around corners on Skyline Boulevard and houses mostly won’t fall down after they are built and work-study exists and libraries are free and the Arpanet/Internet had 20 years of slow, commercial-free development? All due to the fine invisible hand of government …) that I ask the questions I do and take the positions I hold.

4) Some of my best friends are technolibertarian. How many of yours are bookish lefty feminists who hold the heretical notion that not all of what matters in life should be monetized and marketized? It’s always a risky proposition to assume that only one kind of person with one kind of worldview and one kind of skill set has an exclusive purchase on virtue, value and human worth.

The guys wearing polo shirts who make the cover of Business 2.0 may be enjoying the pop-star eroticization of their image — but the fact is, the engineers who actually build technology are mostly not singing the body electric. At least not in the way Whitman intended. Ignore the high-profile sexual bad behavior of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison or former Starwave CTO/Infoseek exec Patrick “hotseattle” Naughton — their antics could have showed up in any industry sector, at any time. The Internet gold rush is not creating a new Barbary Coast in its stampede to the Bay Area.

#endif
// warning: works best without a girlfriend

do
{
work();
eat();
sleep();
}
while (alive);

#ifndef BORN_IN_THE_USA

Forget H-1B visas. In Silicon Valley the biggest immigration problem may be sex. People come from all over to work in the valley — from other states and other countries. It’s =hard= to make connections. Foreign nationals may have been schooled in the universal language of mathematics, but they may also be caught in a neuterland. That is, the rules of attraction and courtship they grew up with in Pakistan and Turkey don’t apply here; dating, West Coast style, can be confounding even for the natives.

Maybe it’s better to stay home with some much-loved Web sites.

#endif

/***********************************************************/

/***********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT**********/

/***********************************************************/

At dinner with with several mid-to-late 20s engineers, both men and women, whose countries of origin were all over the Eurasian landmass, I was taken aback when they all shrugged and rolled their eyes at the notion of dating. They were fluent in English, presentably dressed, perfectly poised, all of them decent creatures — if you had been forced into a blind date with any one of them, you would not have been repulsed and you would at least have had a convivial evening. It didn’t make sense, on the face of it, that they had written off the prime recreational activity of most other members of their age group. When I spoke with a young man employed by a major computer company, whom I encountered in a short-term therapy group designed to help males figure out how to score better with females (unlock the key to female hardware and software!), he explained that he had done fine as a teenager in his Indian subcontinent homeland, but when he arrived in the United States to attend university he found there was so much culture shock that it was just too hard to also figure out the mating dance. And, he added, there was something about computer science that leads you away from learning/understanding/valuing the squishy irrational cues that are so necessary to doing well in the realm of spotting and sequestering a desirable mate.

/***********************************************************/

/***********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT***********/

/***********************************************************/

#ifdef (BABE_QUOTIENT < PAM_ALEXANDER)

Regardless of where you come from, in the valley you are confronted with the specter of Kelli the surfer-girl/marketing manager: Her “exotic other” favors are so much more compelling than those of the less buffed and gleaming traditional women of one’s homeland. Images from American pop culture have turned out to be globally addictive and appealing in every imaginable circumstance. But geeks, never known for intuiting the moves in the best of circumstances, are at an even bigger disadvantage if they come from elsewhere. How can you be culturally competent in two alien cultures simultaneously: that of Northern California, and that of Dating the Appropriate Sex? Whether the object of your desire is heterosex/homosex/ both/neither, it’s just all so difficult.

But there’s a model to dream toward, along with the =business porn= desires of appearing in the Kleiner Perkins portfolio and being profiled in Red Herring. Many Silicon Valley execs =marry= their good-looking, modern career-gal publicists — what could be better than to have your woman be part of the family business? Or maybe you’re just so glad to be here, to have the opportunity to work in the Golden Land, that you can’t be bothered with psyche or eros. Maybe you’ve left your family behind in India or China. Techno-coolies — newly-arrived immigrant technologists performing long hours of unglamorous geek grunt work — contribute much to make SilVal’s engines of commerce rev.

Work Will Make You Free.

#endif

/***********************************************************/

/**********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT************/

/***********************************************************/

It’s been said that guest workers on temporary visas can be blackmailed into working ungodly hours for fear of being sent home — it makes sex lower down on life’s priorities.

/***********************************************************/

/**********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT************/

/***********************************************************/

#if (SEXRATIO != 0.5)

In Silicon Valley, males outnumber females and money comes easier
than time, but the valley is not like its closest analogues (Wall Street
in the ’80s, Hollywood any time) where conspicuous consumption as marked
by high-class call girls is comme il faut. SUVs and teardowns and other
signs of crass materialism have arrived in the valley, but showing off by
buying females has not. Though the evidence is purely anecdotal and the
data sketchy and hard to come by, sex workers say

#endif

/***********************************************************/

/*********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT*************/

/***********************************************************/

I talked to a fantasy-maker from the East Bay, an outcall worker from the South Bay

/***********************************************************/

/**********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT************/

/***********************************************************/

their clients from the valley tend to be =less= in high tech than other walks of life — and that their geek clients tend to be so much nicer, smarter, richer, shyer — and more thankful. As the vice cops who work on the Peninsula say, nah, you gotta go to San Francisco for that, we’re mostly the suburbs here.

#ifdef CUBE_FARM

Which is sort of true and sort of not. Yes the valley is hectare after hectare of creepy sprawl with no redeeming urban center anywhere, filled with strip malls and cul de sacs that would do the San Fernando Valley proud. But so many of those yucko-stucco ranchers are =geek= houses, where a pet iguana may get placed in the refrigerator for safe hibernation when her owner goes on vacation, and a DSL line is shared by all housemates. The bedroom communities of San Mateo, Mountain View and Los Altos are not necessarily home to those cohabiting with mates and offspring.

horny>
horny>
horny> make -t love < money
Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop.
horny>

The “Sex in high tech? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Weltanschauung seems to show up in the way law enforcement in San Jose, the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a city center, has made a =point= of busting sex workers — even if they were outside San Jose when answering outcalls, and not walking the streets of the city’s newly-revived downtown core. The SJPD doesn’t want that sort of thing in their city. San Francisco’s own historically sex-positive/sex-worker-tolerant culture hasn’t percolated out to the valley, even though theoretically San Francisco sets the tone for the entire Bay Area.

#endif

/***********************************************************/

/**********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT************/

/***********************************************************/

When I kept on asking a very nice police officer working vice in San Jose, “But why?” he came back with the standard answers that make sense but don’t answer the question. It’s not good for the city. It’s not good for the women. It’s the law. All true, but still no answer for the importance of the hooker crackdown, so different from what goes on in the City. What I think is that when a belief system is embedded in you, you don’t even see it. Something about San Jose’s sense of self (An ambitious D.A.? A zealous police chief? Something in the aquifers contaminated by the byproducts of microprocessor manufacture?) makes this moral crusade unremarkable within its own context, but slightly loopy in the context of the greater Bay Area.

/***********************************************************/

/**********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT************/

/***********************************************************/

#ifndef CYPHERPUNK_PORN_MOVIE

And just as sexuality reflects the larger society in which it is embedded, the libertarianism and union-loathing rife throughout the valley seem to have been reflected in the fact that sex workers in the valley aren’t =organized=, as they are in San Francisco through COYOTE (Cast Out Your Old Tired Ethic), the long-standing sex workers’ political organization, and the Cyprian Guild — a support group/professional cadre for sex workers. So close, yet so far away.

#endif

#ifdefPERV/MUNCH

But what of Silicon Valley’s infamous romance with the BDSM community,

#endif

class girl_with_secret
{
public:
char upstanding;
long dresses;
friend bend_over_boy;
private:
char *safeword;
double strap_on;
}

/***********************************************************/

/**********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT************/

/***********************************************************/

Security smartypants Dan Farmer is just as well known for being a sadist/top as for his SATAN Net security hole detection program. Dominant Robin Roberts, a computer scientist whose career began with the Univac in 1957, says there’s always been an overlap between geeks and weird sex: “The elaborate negotiations of S+M courtship are like network protocols and handshaking.” And just to give one more =personal= example, when I was at a dinner in Palo Alto with many fine and friendly computerists, one of my companions knew without prompting who wrote the three-part alt.sex.bondage FAQ — a guy with a stellar Silicon Valley engineering risumi. An entire segment of “Beyond Computing,” a weekly public radio show produced in San Francisco, was devoted to what host John Rieger called “geek whacking.”

/***********************************************************/

/**********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT************/

/***********************************************************/

#ifdef SPANKING_PADDLE_BIRTHDAY_PRESENT

fetishwear and role-playing and fantasy and polyamory and
play parties in the Santa Cruz mountains and in dungeons in the
Haight?

#endif

/***********************************************************/

/**********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT************/

/***********************************************************/

enough to keep former theatrical costumers very busy and solvent

/***********************************************************/

/**********COMMENT********COMMENT********COMMENT************/

/***********************************************************/

#ifdef IF_I_HOLD_HER_THIS_WAY_HOW_WILL_SHE_RESPOND

But only true believers blaspheme; all the get-up and foofarah don’t demonstrate a basic comfort with sex, but instead a comfort with observing rules and following them — gaming as it were: a programmer’s, rather than a sensualist’s, delight. Object-oriented sex-play. It’s a case of the most important sexual organ being between the ears — but not in a good way. if (this rule applies) then {do that} else {do this} repeat until (1=0).

#enddef

/* call repeatedly between puberty and death */

short findlover(char * bplace, int accent, float networth)

{
if ( !strcmp(bplace,”usa”) && (networth > 100,000))
return TRUE;
if ( (!accent) && (networth > 250,000))
return TRUE;
if ( networth > 2,000,000)
vreturn TRUE;

/* bzzzt, but thanks for playing! */

return FALSE;

}

#ifdef SPECIAL_CASE

Of course it’s not all sexual repression and lack of fulfillment in the valley: As anywhere, there are tons of happy couples. Historically there have been the organizations High-Tech Gays and Digital Queers (now subsumed into GLAAD). As well, Trekkies, Sci-Fi fans, Society for Creative Anachronism members and, more recently, techno-pagans have always found ways to pair off.

#endif

/********WARNING**********/
/* there be dragons here */
/********WARNING**********/

struct daemon_state {

int wizardflag;
short magic_cookie;
char * attend_midsummer_group_goddess_celebration;

}

#ifdef FROM_SERVER_ROOM_TO_BOOM_BOOM_ROOM

Possible changes in the sex life of the valley are afoot with the recent overlay of many sleek frat-boy venture capitalists and their ilk. It’s not for nothing that last year San Francisco, and not Manhattan, was the place graduating MBAs indicated they most wanted to work. At least in a certain strata in the valley, mating habits will look more and more like those of New York during its “Liar’s Poker” Wall Street boom years. What will happen to the disembodiment of high-tech (online gaming! shopping! virtual everything!) as Silicon Valley, with its
dot-com fever, ever more resembles a swarm of arbitrageurs and currency traders attempting to spoof global markets, rather than a nest of technologists trying to engineer something they believe in?

And the rise of the Web/South Park/SOMA enclave spurred by Wired has meant media types and liberal-arts flakes have infiltrated the valley to some degree. It’s interesting to contemplate what might happen when a comely female sysadmin, originally trained in international relations, ends up talking at a party to a well-meaning male Unix wizard about which windows managers they prefer. Will she =still= just want to be friends? Or will love of open-source software conquer all?

#endif

These lines have never needed to be Y2K compliant.

/* end of file */