I spent the day hanging out with my mom at her house in North Scottsdale. Now, look, Scottsdale is a pretty fancy-schmancy city, but North Scottsdale — aka “NoSco” — is like its own planet made of money. My grandparents built the house from the ground up in the early ’80s for probably the price of a mid-range car today. At that time, nobody called that part of the city “North Scottsdale” because nobody knew it existed, which is exactly what my grandparents wanted. It was an enormous expanse of rocks and cacti punctuated at some point by my grandparents’ house and a magical mock Old West amusement park called Rawhide (it’s since closed, and I think they’re building condos there). You had to drive on a dirt road for several miles to get there, and the closest grocery shopping was at a General Store ten minutes away. When my family moved into that house, fifteen years ago, there were paved roads and a couple of stoplights and a Safeway, and it was certainly a nice area, but my friends called it “BFE” and no one would ever pick me up to come do anything because I lived so far away from society. Today, this is what the North Scottsdale Jack in the Box looks like:
It is a fancy Jack in the Box. They even made the logo special for the rich people. “See? It’s rich people Jack in the Box. It’s different than the other chain where the lower upper class dines.” They pull this kind of shit with everything. Fancy Subway. Fancy Safeway. Fancy gas station. Everything is just sooo god-awfully ritzy. The pizza places are fancy pizza places with names like “zpizza” and you can’t throw a stone without hitting a home accents store where you could maybe — maybe — buy a cloth napkin for just under $50. The waitresses at the restaurants are — like the clientele — improbably beautiful and thin and well-dressed. North Scottsdale has successfully created an isolated little realm where really, really rich people can live totally functional lives without having to see or interact with anything that might feel remotely un-beautiful or tarnished or — gasp! — bourgeoisie.
It totally cracks me up.
What’s not cracking me up? My enormous weight gain in the week since I left Seattle. There is just so much good food around at my parents’ houses — it’s hard not to eat the eighteen cakes in the fridge that the nurses at the hospital baked for my dad’s birthday. (The nurses love my dad because he is consistent in his practice of treating them like human beings.) Seriously I’ve been gone A WEEK and my jeans don’t fit. Soooo upsetting. Plus my mom and I were looking at old photos — Thanksgiving 2006, specifically — where I weighed a good solid twenty pounds less than I do now, and I looked fucking incredible. In fairness, I was going through one of my famous “I don’t eat now” phases, but still. There has to be a way to get my body to look like that, but in a healthy way. Less cake would be a good start. I need to have my mom print out those photos so I can stick them on the fridge and look at them every time I want to eat a slice of cake (or three). Must. Exercise. Tomorrow.
