Thursday night, when my brother brought over Jose to help time the timing belt on the car, the mechanic also brought into tow his girlfriend.

He's in his late 20's and has also slept with his girlfriend's sister. She's in his late teens and is still in high school. Even this paragraph becomes dysfunctional by association.

I'm up late working on a really nasty bug, and I'm lucky that I can VPN into the office network to get some coding done. So instead of sitting in cubeland, I've got Bach's cello suites playing in the background and a snack resting in the foreground.

While diagnosing the situation of my car, Jose ends up saying something that just sets this girl off. She storms off into the Thousand Oaks night and Jose gives chase. My brother and I concentrate on being Paul and leaving it between y'all. They have a fight of catastrophic proportions, enough for me to be worried about a neighbor calling the police. After successfully migrating the two tusslers inside, they break up in a hailstorm of "It's over!" and "I deserve better than you!" and so on. (And so forth.)

I had the chance to sit with the girl a little while later, after she had controlled her sobbing. She expressed dismay at all the usual high school shit, of he-said she-said and stabbing one another in the back and so on. I told her that when you get older, the problems don't change. It's always going to be the same high school drama. I wish I could tell you differently, but it's the truth. The only difference is that, as an adult, you learn to deal with it better.

The car starts and Jose and I took it around the block a couple of times. No power steering and because of an exhaust leak, is less fuel efficient than a Hummer. But it runs, so now I have a vehicle in case of emergency. But I'm growing tired of all this, so I'll be hitting up Craigslist for a nice beater that I can use for a year or so until the GS450h finally hits showrooms.