Bleeding Edge

The jocks may not know a stochastic crossover if it bites them on the ass, but they have that drive to thrive, they’re synced in to them deep market rhythms, and that’ll always beat out nerditude no matter how smart it gets.

No, he’s a dickhead, but one of the early ones. A pioneer dickhead.

But that’ll never occur to her, because it makes too much sense.”
“You’re saying…”
“She’s crazy, Mom.”

Same old classic dotcom dilemma, be rich forever or make a tarball out of it and post it around for free, and keep their cred and maybe self-esteem as geeks but stay more or less middle income.

Fiona, whose parents actually should consider heartbreaker insurance, bats eyelashes possibly enhanced by a raid on her mom’s makeup supplies.

Californian, the-Universe-is-a-joke-but-you-don’t-get-it smile

Think about it—all it takes is, like, a idle thumb on a space bar to turn ‘Islam’ into ‘I slam.’”
“Thought-provoking, Shawn.”

all the mutually disconnected lives going on in parallel

Later on, deep in the first romantic onset, Maxine was to hear a certain amount of wild—for Horst—talk about converting to Judaism. How ironic that “Jew” also rhymes with “clue.” Eventually Horst became aware of prerequisites such as learning Hebrew and getting circumcised, which triggered the sort of rethink you’d expect.

Though this discussion did go on, for a school night, quite late, Heidi’s escapade doesn’t rank as high as some offenses Maxine in fact still finds herself brooding about from back in high school—clothes borrowed but never returned, invitations to nonexistent parties, Heidi-arranged hookups with guys Heidi knew were clinically psychopathic. Sort of thing. By the time they adjourned for exhaustion, it may have disappointed Heidi a little that her mad fling had somehow only found its natural place among other episodes of a continuing domestic series, begun long ago in Chicago, which is where Horst and Maxine originally met.