Arizona Goodness

Posted by – December 19, 2009

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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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.

So, So True

Posted by – December 16, 2009

funny graphs and charts

Thanks GraphJam!

“Buzzed Driving Is Drunk Driving” aka “My Friends Rock So Hard”

Posted by – December 15, 2009

I am soooo insanely proud of my dear friend Emily — my Scottsdale BFF — who shares a difficult story of drinking and driving in this new public service ad for the Ad Council. Emily was on the cover of People magazine a couple months ago to bravely talk about being a young mother suffering from alcoholism. She said a lot of things that I’m sure were extremely difficult to admit publicly, but Emily’s been sober for several years now, and her main goal in life is to educate and help other women who are suffering from alcoholism, so that they can recover from the shame of the disease and live healthy, happy, sober lives. People was overwhelmed with grateful and loving letters from readers after they ran her story, and she’s been mentioned on Oprah, Rachael Ray and like a billion other TV shows since. She started a blog about alcoholism and recovery to help others called Emilyism.com, and now she spends hours and hours responding to an influx of emails from people around the world who find hope in her story and want her advice on how to change their lives.

I can’t even imagine how much courage it takes to go on camera and talk in such detail about her past. But I also know that there are lots of other young mothers out there listening, saying to themselves, “I did that, too. I didn’t know anyone else did that. Maybe there is hope for me.” Emily’s a total inspiration to me — she’s full of wise words every time I talk to her, and she was always on the phone with me offering compassion and support and non-judgment when I was going through difficult emotional times of my own. I’m so proud of her, I love her so much, and I’m so happy to share this with all of you.

NoSco

Posted by – December 14, 2009

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:

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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.

Possibly the Most Awesome Website I’ve Seen This Year

Posted by – December 14, 2009

http://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/

Thanks Anna for the heads-up.

The $13,000 Puppy

Posted by – December 14, 2009

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I had an absolutely AMAZING time at the charity ball I went to on Saturday night. To give you guys some background, it’s the annual Christmas charity ball for the Foundation for Burns and Trauma, a fantastic charity that raises money to help burn survivors and their families. The work they do — particularly with young, underprivileged children who have been severely burned — is courageous and life-changing. It’s a cause I’m proud to donate to each year (and you can too!).

My friend Kevin — one of my closest friends since high school — is very involved with the charity, as is his family and their company, Forever Living Products. Forever Living — chaired by the generous and charming Rex Maughan, who, despite being arguably the most powerful man in the state, always takes time to chat with me and ask me about my life — has donated over a million dollars to the Foundation in the past ten years. Kevin chaired this event last year, and he’s been on the organizing committee for years, including this year. It’s the second year I’ve had the honor of going as his date. I got to get all dolled up (yay!) and wear my hair extensions (double yay!) and watch as they auctioned off beautifully decorated donated trees for ridiculous sums of money (all for the Foundation). The trees usually come with add-on gifts — vacations, jewelry, etc — to raise their value, but this year they auctioned off the final tree along with a nine-week-old yellow lab. I WANTED THAT FUCKING PUPPY. I told Kevin specifically to buy it for me. He had specific instructions and he had agreed to buy me the puppy. Then when it came time to auction off the puppy tree, Kevin mysteriously got up from the table to “conduct business.” He assured me that it was “important business,” but I’m not sure how anything could be more important than me getting that puppy. It went to someone else. :( But it went to someone else for $13,000. So, ya know, I guess I’m okay with not having a $13,000 puppy. I think Leo would auction for something in the range of thirteen million. No, more like thirty million. Or thirty hundred million. So I’m okay not having the cheap yellow lab. I have my Leo. Kevin still got a talking-to, although most of my admonishments took place off-camera. I did capture his escape and the rest of the puppy auction to share with you guys. I also have like 1000 pictures of all the beautiful trees in the gallery below.

I want to say thank you to Kevin and his family for including me in this event, and for welcoming me into their family and their lives year after year since I was a teenager. I had the time of my life hanging out with them, just like I always do. I continue to be awed and humbled by the enormous amount of time, financial resources and energy they put toward helping their community. They set an inspiring example with their actions.

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