Five Other People Who Are Me

Never dropped out of aerospace engineering; finished the degree. Worked briefly at NASA, but became disillusioned early on by the bureaucracy and by the absence of Big Goals. Eventually switched to the private sector, where he specializes in inverse method low-drag airfoil design. He unsuccessfully tries to convince himself that his work will have useful non-military applications. Never married, because women in engineering are few and far between, and he’s far too shy for the bar scene. Lives in a studio apartment, with lots of glass-and-chrome furniture. Right now, he’s stuck in traffic on the Mercer Island bridge, eastbound. When he gets home, he’ll look at some porn on the internet and masturbate before washing his hands and cooking dinner. Later he will spend several hours reading online personals ads, but will not respond to any of them.

After film school, gritted his teeth and decided to stay in LA and make a go of it. After a couple of increasingly desperate years trying to break into the industry, eventually settled into what he still refers to as his “day job,” cutting video at a small firm that handles some major studio second-unit work for prestige, but makes most of its cash on industrial and training films. He also runs an unofficial but very profitable side business borrowing equipment from the studio to make softcore porn, which he sells on the internet. For the last three years, he’s been dating a girl with a faint (and fake) european accent and a creatively spelled name, who was never quite as famous a model as she pretends. She looks the part, though, and her breasts are real, which is a novelty. They met on the set of one of his side jobs. Right now, he’s in his customary seat in the coffeehouse around the corner from the studio, pretending to work on his screenplay while he waits for Niomé to meet him after her audition. They’ll have dinner (which he will cook), followed by kinky sex (which he will surreptitiously film), followed by a foreign film on DVD (which they will watch without subtitles, because it’s a more pure filmic experience that way.)

On his way back to the US after his slacker year in Europe, was busted by customs for the ten grams of hash hidden in his left sock. Spent eighteen months on probation, during which he rapidly progressed through several layers of increasingly radical left-wing political opinion, and at the earliest opportunity returned to Europe, by which I of course mean Amsterdam. For the first few years he earns a tenuous living shilling guesthouse leaflets to newly-arrived American backpackers, smokes truly astounding quantities of dope, and spends many enjoyable hours strolling along the canals pointing out the sights to his new traveling friends. Eventually, with the help of a substantial loan from his parents, he opens a small guesthouse of his own within walking distance of the Rijksmuseum, which he happily and quite profitably maintains to the present day. He’s even starting to learn how to speak Dutch, and has fallen in with a crowd of local graphic designers, who teach him how to make pretty but impenetrably obscure art websites. Right now he’s hanging out with a couple of 19-year-old Canadian hippies and a Norwegian of indeterminate age, who has been quietly playing the tablas with his eyes closed for over two hours.

Stayed in Brooklyn, kept working for Prentice Hall in a low-level managerial position. After the Viacom sale, made a lateral move to McGraw-Hill — shorter commute — where he developed a new software product line that was eventually adopted company-wide. This achievement earned him a dozen more direct reports, a lucite corporate achievement award, and no increase in pay, title, or benefits. As his responsibilities grew, he became more and more dissatisfied with the corporate politics necessary to maintain his position; an early mid-life crisis hits hard, in the form of an ill-advised interdepartmental love affair, which costs him his marriage and very nearly his job. In any case, he’s effectively killed any chance of advancement at that company, so quits two years later to be the gray-hair component of a tiny, marginally successful internet startup (which competes indirectly with the product he developed at MH.) Right now he’s at the office, working late on a buyout proposal he knows won’t go through, putting off as long as possible the return to his empty uptown apartment. There he will allow himself at most two cocktails before bed. They will be very strong.

Remembered to cash in his Tripod stock options before they expired, then sold out when the market was near its peak. Other than an extra two digits in his bank account, his life is precisely identical to mine. Right now he’s blogging while wearing a bathrobe and sweatpants, because he never got dressed once he found out his afternoon meeting was cancelled. He hasn’t yet decided what he’s going to cook for dinner.