After driving almost 200 miles in the past two days, I have shown my parents Los Angeles. We saw almost all of it. From the downtown area to the coastline, we saw it all. And I reunited them with my father's old medical school study partner who they hadn't seen in 27 years. I sometimes really wish I had a better relationship with my father, but it seems that every time he has something to say to me, it's about how horribly I'm running my life and how I need to make all these sweeping changes to do things better. But there's sometimes when I find things out that really surprise me about him. Like the fact that one night while he was working at the Emergency Room in the late '80s (Dad was an ER doctor for over a decade), a guy who was in a motorcycle accident came in, bleeding all over the place. His blood got all over the operating room, all over Dad, all over the ambulance that brought him in, all over the nurses. Then about two hours after he was operated on, news came into the ER that the guy was not only HIV-positive, but he also had full-blown AIDS. And my father, due to his work, had to wash his hands a lot, so due to the dry winter, cracks had formed in his fingertips around his nails. As he said tonight, there was a six-month period where he was terrified that he was going to die. But this is the first I've ever heard about it, and I wish I'd known about these kinds of things earlier. It's the kind of stories that make a son really respect his father and worship the work he's done. I'm going to sleep soon. Tomorrow, I have to get up early and take my Powerbook in for some service, so my online time will be limited over the next few days. Feel free to still send me e-mails, though. I love e-mail.