Hello! It’s been a few days since I’ve written on here — I keep meaning to and then life piles up on me! I’ve been having an amazing time in Scottsdale, but I’ve also had sooooo much work to do. The joy of running your own business is that you make your own schedule, but it also means you never really get a vacation. Lately I’ve been out with my friends until 10 or 11 at night, and then I come home and I have four hours of work to do, and then I get up and do more work, then spend time with my family, then go out again with my friends. It’s amazing and I’m loving being here, but every time I try to come write here on SIAM I remember that there’s something else I absolutely have to get done tonight.
So this post is going to be long, but you don’t have to read it. You can just look at the pictures.
TUESDAY:
I had dinner with my beautiful and brilliant and amazing friends Becky and Naima. The three of us were all engineering students together at ASU, and we spent one summer interning together at a large aerospace company here in the Valley. We were probably the most productive and useful interns that company has ever had, but, ya know, you still tend to have a lot of free time on your hands as a summer intern. Becky and I shared a cubicle, and Naima would come over from hers and we’d just talk for hours about everything in our lives. I always thought it was so interesting — I’m Jewish, Becky’s Christian and Naima’s Muslim, and our religions are all defining factors in our lives and identities, but the three of us were just the best of friends, and it was like those religious and cultural differences didn’t exist when we hung out. I wish they could take our relationship and bottle it and sprinkle it over the roof of every major government building, and then we wouldn’t have any wars.
We keep in touch via Facebook and email, but it was the first time I’d seen either of them in years. They look exactly the same! I swear I’m the only one who’s aged physically. Naima works for another large software company now, and Becky got married, had a baby, and got a law degree. But it was like no time had passed at all. We still remembered so many tiny details about each other’s lives. It was just heart-warming to be around them and to see what happy and successful and self-possessed women they’ve grown into.
WEDNESDAY:
Dinner with some of my old high-school friends. I never laugh harder than when I’m with these people. I was seriously sore all night from my body convulsing with laughter for three hours. I don’t know what it is about us. I really think it’s that high school is hell, and our hyper-competitive, unrealistic-expectation-y, Harvard-or-Bust high school was hell on wheels. In retrospect, we spent those years in an insane little bubble — or, more appropriately, an insane little pressure cooker. So much pressure to be brilliant and beautiful and thin and athletic and well-dressed and popular, and today I methodically avoid social circles and professional situations with cultures like that. I want no part of it. But the upside to that hell is that I am bonded with these people in a way I doubt I will ever again bond with any large group of people. It’s as though we’re all survivors of the same extremely long plane crash. We can sit down to dinner, years later, and finish one another’s sentences. We talk about the high-school days and we laugh hysterically, because it’s hysterical in retrospect. I think we laughed about it back then, too, but it was more as a symptom of genuine hysterics at the time. Today I love and cherish these people so dearly — I consider them family more than friends — and as much resentment as I have toward my high-school years, I’m glad that these friendships came out of it. And, to be fair, today we all speak a lot of languages (including Latin — so useful!!) and we have an unnecessarily solid grasp of mathematics (You will not survive in this world if you can’t cross-multiply two matrices) and we’re good at a lot of sports (badminton, ‘natch!) and most of us did, eventually, recover from our raging eating disorders and learn to love ourselves for the people we are and not the perfect people that we absolutely must be or the world will end. Mostly. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, HIGH SCHOOL? Okay. Rant over. Lingering resentments? No so over.
THURSDAY:
Leo and I went to spend time with Grandpa Sam and his wife Ellie and to light the menorah for Hannukah. I think it was Leo’s first experience with a menorah. He didn’t really care. I tried to explain to him the significance of the holiday and teach him the prayers, but he can’t even speak English yet, so I don’t know why I expected he’d do better with Hebrew. My grandpa is so sweet — he reads all my blogs, every single day, including all the comments, and it’s useful because then he knows exactly what I like and he buys it for me. I got a bunch of Crystal Light (in all my favorite flavors, which he knew about from my blog), and Cutie oranges, and sugar-free cookies and jello (because he knows about my blood sugar issues from reading my blog). And he knows to give me my Hannukah money in cash rather than in check because I never get to the bank. Also adorable: Grandpa Sam’s not exactly a computer expert, so Ellie’s son set up an icon on the desktop of his computer that says “SAM CLICK HERE FOR INTERNET” and when you click it, it brings up an Internet page with all my blogs, and only my blogs, bookmarked across the top of the screen. Every day for his entire life my grandpa has read the newspaper cover to cover. Now he reads the newspaper and all my blogs. He’s like the most broadly read octogenarian on the planet. “Your commenters are so hilarious,” he says, referring to Evil Beet. “The way they bicker about everything. They just don’t know when to quit.” Wise, wise words from my grandpa. :)
FRIDAY:
ASU CREW! Our old gang of Sun Devils got together at our old favorite haunt, Four Peaks. It hasn’t changed a bit since I was in college. What has changed? Everything else about the area surrounding ASU. All the mom-and-pop shops on Mill Avenue have shut down and been taken over by American Apparel and Starbucks and overpriced restaurants with overpriced names. There’s a Starbucks in the student bookstore now. Tempe has a freakin’ Center for the Arts. “The bars used to be the Center for the Arts,” I lamented. Don’t worry, though — all the money has gone directly into ASU and the immediately surrounding area. Once you get more than half a mile from the ASU campus, nothing at all has changed. If anything, it just seems even more ghetto because it’s so close to all that fanciness. Two out of the three of our favorite old bars (Four Peaks and Casey Moore’s) were still the same, but our other fave, Dos Gringos, was very very sad. I guess it has new management now or something, and this is what it looked like on a Friday night:
Like ten people. In this giant building that used to be packed shoulder-to-shoulder. It was so sad. The end of an era, I suppose. I think Dos was the first bar I went to on a fake ID. When I got to Casey Moore’s later, I handed the bouncer my ID, and he was like, “Are you sure this is you?” and I was like, “Honey, I haven’t been to this bar on a fake ID in six years.” He didn’t think that was funny. Luckily, I did.
Casey Moore’s is in the “still ghetto” area about 3/4 of a mile from the end of ASU. You can tell it’s still ghetto because we parked next to this:
Yeah. I don’t even know. But this is the Tempe I remember and this is the Tempe I love: the Tempe, Arizona with a large animal spine inexplicably roped to the roof of a graffitied automobile. Thank you, large animal spine inexplicably roped to the roof of a graffitied automobile. You are the Tempe I will keep in my heart.
