2000 - 2008 : Marriage without Children

2000 : The First Year with Susan

I stopped smoking weed to avoid problems with Susan. She made a few more trips to California. For me, these were largely opportunities to have sex. Immediately, Susan got pregnant. She certainly knew that I didn't want children, and she also knew that we were not in a stable situation to provide for their care - neither in our relationship nor financially.

To be honest, I think I always looked at pregnancy as the woman's responsibility, as she will carry the child and generally have primary responsibility. Therefore, it seems logical that she should take birth control, unless she actually wants to raise that child alone. I have since realized my responsibility to at least wear condoms, and I have had the vasectomy that I should have had as early as lebally permitted, (or earlier, actually - if you know you don't want children, you shouldn't take the chance of having children).

From having had at least one abortion with Shannon without any argument, I didn't take pregnancy very seriously - it was just a mistake that needed to be corrected. I either gave or shipped a teddy bear to her, apparently thinking that this would somehow have address some of the emotions she might feel for what I considered to be a fetus, not a person.

I was quite surprised and extremely concerned when Susan said that she wasn't sure that she would get an abortion. I realized how easily I could be trapped into commitments that I never wanted, not just financially, but because I would have felt a responsibility to marry the woman and raise the child. I felt tricked and manipulated.

Susan had the abortion without me in Colorado.

I lived with my maternal grandfather Ben in the Castro area of San Francisco for a couple of months. He was actually a computer technician that had run an early Bulletin Board System (BBS), a sort of public dial-in network from around the time that the Internet emerged. He had old Altairs and Osbornes holding up tabletops in his appartment. He was also making videos.

My only customer was Tri Valley Growers in San Ramon, which is basically a vegetable cannery - a very different industry and culture than silicon chips. Driving from the city wasn't great, nor was parking in the city. I remember taking some kind of group van from the city to the office, which was nice because it enforced limitted working hours.

Eventually I rented a two-bedroom cottage behind the owner's house at the edge of Briones Park in Martinez, and Susan moved in shortly afterwards. I did quite a bit to prepare for her arrival. For one thing, I bought a used Honda Accord. Because I knew that I would have to work, I also packed a backpack full of things for her, including a note and the keys to the car.

She didn't find the backpack. She took the bus to get lunch with me at work. I was upset that my romantic plan had failed, but more upset that she made it clear that she would never give me any credit for the effort that I had made. In fact, she drove the car off the road once, and complained that it was not as nice as the Acura that her friend Dan in Colorad had let her use sometimes.

I would occasionally ride a mountain bike in Briones Park. I started to realize that Susan had no interest in exercise or the outdoors. I think by this time I had already committed too much - Susan had left Colorado and shipped all of her things to California to live with me. For basically the entire time that I was with Susan, my health deteriorated due to bad diet, lack of exercise, and stress.

My friend Brooke camed to stay with us once. He slept on the futon, even during the day. Susan thought he was a bum.

Within a few months, my brother Tim moved in with us, partly because he was basically homeless at the time. Tim was working as a painter for a friend in San Ramon. He had an old beater car that we called the Silver Bullet, but later upgraded to a white van.

There were good things and bad things about Tim living with us, but there was no way that I was going to turn my back on my brother in preference for this woman. I tend to drink beer and smoke weed with Tim, who also smokes cigarettes. I think Tim brought at least one sketchy frind to the house.

Susan was definitely a slob and basically never cleaned anything other than laundry and dishes. I tend to clean as I go, but I couldn't keep up with the messes she made. One day, Susan got very upset when Tim and I did a thourough house cleaning. I think she realized that this was somewhat her responsibility, although she did get a job as a bank teller.

I worked on a Gentran EDI system that interfaced with SAP, but after about six months there, I felt like I hadn't gotten anything done - not because of technology, but because some consultancies just take advantage of wasteful clients, and this customer had no idea how to manage their systems or consultancies. We hired another young guy named Rob that was even less experienced than me and came all the way from Visalia (tech talent was pretty hard to find at the time). We both knew that it was a sham; we used to sing "Everything is Beautiful" sarcastically when it was too obvious. He ended up working for a different client that grew and sold plants.

Martinez was a pretty awesome situation for all of us, but Susan had wanted to live in San Francisco, so she was unhappy there and wanted to move.

It was probably only about six months before I started looking for work, but I think I didn't actually take my next job until November. Somehow, I moved from EDI to Content Management using Interwoven, which was a set of technologies that helped non-technical people maintain the content of websites. This involved a lot of Perl, which I had started to use at Xilinx (where I also used csh C-Shell, SQL Loader, PL/SQL, C, C++, JavaScript, HTML, Java, and probably a few other things).

When we eventually moved out from Martinez, Tim put one of the mattresses in the back of the van.

The company was named Xerago. I think the salary was significant, but I also remember that they offered me 15,000 stock options, which seemed like a ton. There were also good benefits. The company was in San Diego, so Susan and I rented a two-bedroom house in the Hillcrest, which was awseome. The office was literally walking distance from both home and the airport. They gave me a Toshiba laptop, which I kept when the company went bankrupt a few months later without paying the last few weeks of salary. At that time, I was teaching a class aobut Interwoven, which I kept teaching even after I learned that other employees had come to work one day to find the doors chained shut and that there had never been any contributions to the retirement program.

Nowadays, I feel like Susan tricked or pressured me into marriage. She was always talking about her former boyfriends. One time, we were on our way to sail with my brother and she said that she had had been dreaming about one of them. She knew I was uncomfortable with her past and this really upset me.

Speaking of Susan's past, she also lied to me about it. She told me about the first person with whom she had sex, which was some older Chinese guy with a car. It was somewhat depressing to hear about. Other than that, she told me about a few boyfriends. There is a phrase something like "a woman wants to be a man's last love; a man wants to be a woman's first". I probably knew that by this age I wouldn't be anyone's first but I ccertainly didn't want to be with someone that I would consider a slut. I absolutely see the hipocrisy in my thinking. It seems that this was somehow ingrained in me.

At some point, I had specifically made the statement that I would find it unacceptable if she had been with another guy named John. Over time, more and more details emerged. I didn't realize it then, but clearly she was intentionally deceptive from the start about her past, which was important to me.

Anyway, she told me that her favorite boyfriend has asked her to marry him. This was obviously meaningless, as they had never married, but it still upset me that she had been so close to someone. I also felt bad for having lived with Shannon unmarried for so long - I felt that it was disrespectul to her. I honestly cannot justify why I asked Susan to marry me while we were together that first year. By that time, we had had numerous arguments and I didn't like her nearly as much as I would have needed to.

We got married at the San Diego courthouse. I had some time off from work and I asked Susan if she wanted to get it done. We barely dressed up. The photos were terrible, especially after one of her friends tried to PhotoShop them.

Within days of getting married, in a dispute that was probably about something meningless or at least very minor, Susan told me that she hated me.

Around that time, I found out that she was still using a variation of her ex-boyfriend's name as her email password.