Filthy Rich, Filthy Minds, Filthy Behavior
After one and a half years of working in Palo Alto near Stanford University and the hills of Los Altos, I cleaned out my desk and transferred to downtown Burlingame further up north on the Bay Area peninsula. What used to be a 5 minute drive to work is now anywhere between ten to forty five minutes on the freeway depending on traffic. I am now part of the Bay Area commuters' rush cutting people off to be at work on time while complaining more about paying $2.75 per gallon of gas.
It was a difficult move; Palo Alto is like my home and over the past years I've established a huge clientele. It's kind of nice to go about my own personal business and unsuprisingly bump into someone I've helped through work. The past few weeks have been funny. Just going out to lunch, buying groceries, or renting a movie, I will always, without fail, bump into one of my clients, and in some ways it makes the place smaller and makes a regular middle class citizen like myself feel closer to the seemingly unattainable wealthy.
But the wealthy in Los Altos and Palo Alto are different from what I see in Burlingame. In Palo Alto the people are thrifty and stingy rich, thinking everything can be bargained for even if they own a million dollar house in the hills and drive a Range Rover. Then again, these people are the overnight stock market rich, the ones that became wealthy from the booming dotcom days of Silicon Valley but now fear the possibility of being laid off.
Dealing with the people of Burlingame is no different. But they have money they can throw around without care. These people are the filthy, trendy, rich. Everyday, Burlingame Avenue is dotted with artificially tanned, botox injected, Shiseido caked housewives parading in velour tracksuits and rimless sunglasses with shopping bags from Banana Republic hooked on their arms, holding their triple shot Venti Caramel Macchiatos from Starbucks in one hand while yapping away on their Blackberries as they get into their BMW 325s, the Burlingame common car equivalent to San Jose's Honda Civic. Whores of consumerism, and decorations trying to stay pretty for their hard working husbands so they can show off. I, and millions of other average people have Blackberries too, and I buy my coffee at Peet's. Starbucks is the McDonald's of coffee. So why do they make it such a big deal?
After one week in Burlingame, I have seen more Bentleys and more black, invitation only, Centurion American Express credit cards than before. A buddy of mine, Elf, said it best when he wrote, "Money that you never have allows you to consume production that you don't even need.".
Filthy when you use money to buy your image.
A filthy mind is a terrible thing to waste... especially when it brings laughs with the most innocent of ideas. I'm sure everyone has twisted the most innocent statements, situations or images (sort of like Maxim's Found Porn section) into dirty jokes. Everyone I know has probably played with the word Pho (Vietnamese soup pronounced "fuh", just short one letter of saying the mother of all swear words). While watching a rerun of Pimp My Ride on MTV tonight, there was a Vietnamese girl wearing a shirt that said "What the Pho?". Anyway...
Today during lunch at a crowded Vietnamese restaurant with a co-worker, I wrote my name and the number of guests with me at the front desk so we could be called as soon as a table was available. A few minutes after being seated, I heard a waiter yell out, "Last call, Pho for the Wang threesome". It sounds juvenile, but we couldn't help but start cracking up while everyone else looked at us like there was nothing wrong with what the old waiter said. I guess a Mr. Wang and his party of two others ordered Pho for take out (who takes out Pho by the way?). But the combination of the name "Wang" and the words "threesome" and "Pho" sound all too perverse for any ear.
Last night I watched "Birth" with Nicole Kidman. It did poorly at the box office but I decided to watch it on DVD. I was actually pleasantly surprised. The plot revolved around a woman, who after announcing her plans to get married again, is visited by a ten year old boy who claims is the reincarnation of her husband that died ten years prior. Cool presentation, and if you're a big fan of Kubrick films, then you should find this movie washed over with his influence and style. Some of the character behavior and activites even seem to be directly taken from The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
One thing though, turn the tables around... if the movie was about a man who is visited by a 10-year-old girl claiming to be his dead wife reincarnated, it would never hit the movie screens because society would be against it. It would be like watching a filthy R. Kelly and Michael Jackson fantasy.
Totally unrelated, check out these shots of terrorists from Antarctica walking through metal detectors at Denver International Airport.
