Snacks | Another Wordpress Blog

So I got super extra fuming mad yesterday. Looking in my purse, my Sidekick demanded that I twitter my emotions! And twitter them I did! And today people are wondering, what the fuck happened out there in New York City to make you tweet such angry tweets?

If you have never watched Arrested Development then you will not understand the full nuances of my references to the Bluths. Please go rent it and watch it, not for me, but because after you watch it you’ll stop thinking that you’ve wasted your life on nothing, and realize you’ve wasted your life dealing with the craziness of the people you are related to, and it was unavoidable so you might as well just accept it.

Like Lucille Bluth, my mother is relentlessly critical, and hypersensitive to any criticism toward her. She took us (me, my sister, my sister’s stepdaughter) to see August: Osage County which is all about a horrible, selfish, critical mother and her daughters. My sister and mom were jokingly referring to me in the name of one of the daughters in the play who is bossy and impossible. An hour or two later we were at a restaurant when I point out some similarities between my mom and the mom in the play, in what I thought was the same joking vein. Wow. I got my head bitten off so hard, I can’t even really describe it–my mom became super angry and defensive, saying over and over “well I’m sorry I’m not perfect” and “you certainly weren’t perfect either you know” and when I tried to explain, hey, I just thought we were poking each other with little humorous truths but in a loving way, and BTW you were doing it to me just an hour ago, she barked at me “Just don’t say another thing. Don’t say another thing. Don’t say another thing!”

My friend JB showed up right at that minute, so I acted as normal as I could for the next 20 minutes or so, finished my drink, ate my food. My sister’s stepdaughter said something about how her stepmother (my sister) was cooler (to travel to NYC with) than her mother and my mother said “well a stepmother doesn’t have to deal with how ungrateful daughters are.” At that point I pulled a bunch of twenty dollar bills out of my purse and handed them to my sister and said my goodbyes.

Being super mad at your mom reduces you back to when you were 16 years old. Like Michael Bluth! You do immature things and act in an entirely reactive way. For me, just as if I were 16, I went out with JB and stayed out as late as I could and drank as many drinks as I could. And came home and *almost* booked a ticket back to SF early. Credit cards should have breathalyzers on them. But I’ve been in this rage sinkhole enough times to know: just go to sleep and you can always book that ticket in the morning.

The most Arrested Development moment was when my mom called me in the morning to fight with me some more. We have adjoining rooms and I’d locked my door to her room, but we still shared a wall; so as we were yelling at each other, I could hear her voice in the next room in addition to her voice in the phone. Infuriating and ridiculous all at once. And when I got off the phone I wanted to call Ivan and complain about her but I couldn’t because she could hear every word! So I just took a long shower instead. Basically I am trapped just like in highschool all over again and it still sucks.

We patched it up enough today to see another play and have dinner. I’m still mad and yet also cognizant that this is my life; this is my parent, what kind of stand can I possibly take regarding her total narcissistic, thin-skinned, Queen Baby disposition? I think I just have to live with it.

I realize that reading this doesn’t in any way convey how horrifying it was when she got total Crazy Eyes and yelled at me, with 40 years of fury all built up, in a public place with people staring and trying to look away. I think any one of you could have said the same things and it would have been not nearly as upsetting. But as Evany Thomas always says, your parents know exactly how to push your buttons because they CREATED your buttons. So if this all seems dumb to you think of a thing your parent says to you that just drives you over the edge and then mentally copy and paste it over this blog entry.

1. leave work early

2. go to Serpentine and drink delicious margaritas made with fresh sqeezed lemons and limes and huerredero tequila

3. get home and mix vodka with Kombucha gingerade, for a total wellness fail

4. eat salad because i’m still fucking vegan

5. rolaids

6. halcyon

7. asprin

8. old school with will ferrell is on tv!

I was on a panel for the first time ever, at PSFK! I will now link to some of the coverage of my teensy weensy panel in case you have any interest:

Core77’s blog

DesignCentre’s blog

A picture from a conference-goer where you can see my cute shoes better

One thing I said got some gasps and “ooh”s from the audience, when we were discussing web 1.0 and everyone working constantly. I said that in web 2.0, there wasn’t this cult of “who can work the most” martyrdom (which Miette, my old bakery, totally subscribed to and it sucked). And really, if you are spending 14 hours a day at your job, you probably aren’t very good at it. Like Megan at Miette, she’d spend two hours frosting cakes when it was really a 30-minute project, or she’d bake a huge batch of 14 cakes from a recipe she’d never tried before, and then when they didn’t turn out, she’d throw them all away. At Excite everyone made a point to be online until like 1am and then back online at 7am and send around business articles so it would look like they were constantly working. And those articles weren’t even that interesting. Why not just get some sleep and do actual work that helps the company succeed?

In fact 37 signals has been trying this experiment where people only work 4 days a week. It’s pretty intriguing–not sure it would work at my job, where you have phone calls and stuff with external partners who expect you to be there on Mondays and Fridays. But I definitely agree with the assertion that no one is actually putting in 8 hours of focused, productive work each day, every day. Like right now I’m at work, yet blogging to you lovely people!

What else happened last week? I had all these topics queued up in my head to write about but the only one that I can recall now is the most spectacular bird shit ever, which pummeled my car last weekend. I was driving with Heidi, and she was talking, and there was this huge THWACK! and a big patch of British-racing-green birdpoo splayed out across my windshield. Naturally Heidi kept talking but I made her stop and observe this crazy dark green poop. I said, “Didn’t you hear that sound it made when it hit the windshield?” and she said, “I just thought you hit the dashboard really hard or something.”

liz and our new friend at liz’s post panel gawker drinks

Originally uploaded by evanyevany.

The guy behind me was a creepy pervert, topics he chose to discuss with me included how could he get his girlfriend to talk dirty to him, will anal stimulation during heterosexual intercourse turn him gay, and some other banal stuff I can’t remember. We would have moved away but a) the party was super packed and b) we had seats and c) he kept wading through the crowd to the bar bringing us drinks which had the desired effect, ie, prolonging his audience by exactly one drink length.

liz and our new friend at liz’s post panel gawker drinks

Originally uploaded by evanyevany.

She is an awesome lesbian! HEARTS!

OMG. It was a comedy wonderland. I flew down to LA to go to the premiere of the new Will Ferrell and John C Reilly film, Stepbrothers. The movie was awesome, I was laughing and clapping almost the whole time (there is a dark story arc in the middle with less laughing). Here are the people I saw at the premiere after-party (at which PABLO CRUISE played!?) in the order that I saw them:
David Hasselhoff
Ron Jeremy
Jane Lynch
Jemain from Flight of the Conchords
Andy Samberg
David Koechner (from Anchorman)
Ed Helms (from The Office)
Will Ferrell
John C Reilly
Adam McKay
Judd Apatow
Rob Huebel (from Human Giant)
Aziz Ansari (from Human Giant)
Paul Scheer (from Human Giant)
Martin Starr (from Freaks & Geeks and Knocked Up)
Charlyne Yi (from Knocked Up)
Eric Wareheim (from Tim & Eric and those Absolut commercials with Zach Galifinakas)

And best of all: DR. KEN!

Because stories and telling stories is really all human civilization is, and has ever been. It’s what we all want–TV shows and novels and even celebrity magazines, they all just tell us stories. We’re just big children wanting to hear a story.

I really do like it when someone tells me a good story. I started reading The Dirt (autobiography of Motley Crue) on vacation and it has me enthralled. As does “Notes on a Scandal” the movie with Judi Densch and Cate Blanchette, a first person narrative.

06072008465.jpg

Originally uploaded by Brett Butterfield.

So Evany Thomas has been updating her blog a LOT lately. And with really good posts, about thoughts about life, and by the way *I* think about life too, I just don’t blog about my thoughts and when I see this damn wordpress entry box they all escape me. ALSO Evany is doing a really smart and interesting and fascinating thing on her Flickr stream where she shows you what she is wearing each day and gives you each item’s provenence.

All of this, which I am enjoying very much, makes me feel like I have lost my creativity! Do you ever feel like that? Where you see someone’s artwork or hear someone’s song or read something awesome and think wow, where is the me that used to actually do stuff like that? I mean, am I just an office lady now? These thoughts propelled me to want to finish my novel, which is good…but that also makes me wonder why DON’T I finish my novel? How can I be a writer if I just spend every day not writing?

Well, I do have a cool manual that I am writing for work that I am hoping will become the basis of a conference-speaking career, which tells non-internet, entertainment-biz people about building a website. I feel like I have a unique view into pretty high echelons of Hollywood now, and I know what they think and fear, and also what they don’t know. So that project is pretty satisfying because I’m writing it in a conversational style, sort of like my blogging style or novelling style.

Also sometimes I think I just don’t care about fiction anymore? I also have realized that any fame (if I were to finish my novel, obviously I would become very very famous) is toxic and not so awesome, at least for my personality.

One thing that will propel my midlife crisis is that when I am gone, I really won’t have added up to much. Just an office lady with some really nice purses and a half-written novel.

BUT NOT EVANY THOMAS! She’ll have *everything* to leave the world.

Dior Ultra Addict Plastic Gloss. It’s sooooo shiny but not in a crazy hooker way, in a “wow, something amazing is happening where now your mouth looks like a picture in a magazine it’s so appealing and sexy” way.

It occurred to me to tell you, my readers, this while I was driving to work today at 90mph all freaked out on fair trade coffee, racing the other yuppies in our European sports cars. Life is weird, isn’t it?

I saw an old friend, Victor Krummenacher, the other day, and we were commiserating re: having the 80-hour workweeks and trying to go to the goddamn gym and trying to do motherfucking errands and all that crap, and I was like, “Pound me dude! We made it!” (Pound meaning the thing where you touch a person’s fist with your own fist in a sign of “right on” solidarity.) Because we both have good jobs and yet…here we are all harried and dashing around and feeling worn out.

I think midlife crises have to do with a number of factors, one of which is just tiredness from the job you worked 20 years to claw your way into, and another factor is maybe our brains just aren’t making enough happy serums to keep us feeling fresh and content. I’m not admitting to a midlife crisis. Yet.

It’s already got 1300 miles on it. And I *finally* let Pilot ride in it, but only for two blocks, in the very back–he seemed okay with it, but later the car smelled like dog. Sigh. Ivan’s car is a truck so it’s hard to fit two adults and the dog in it, so my car is just going to have to take the hit.

I have been dreaming about a vacation, and it’s hard because I am not flush these days, and everything in the world is expensive. Buenos Aires sounds good, Miami sounds good, Vegas sounds good, Paris sounds good. And the spring is the best time to visit pretty much anywhere! But from a fiscal responsibility perspective, I should really just stay home.

Me and Big Bill Clinton

Originally uploaded by Liz Dunn.

I told you I met him! Don’t we look happy? And we kind of match, too.

So I have two awesome pictures of me with President Bill Clinton, and I keep meaning to scan them and post them up here so that you all will be WOWED by my star studded life! So just pretend the picture is here and be impressed. (How did I get pictures with him? At a Hillary Clinton fundraiser. That’s right, I’m down with the sisterhood, if you disagree with this that’s fine but I don’t really want to hear about it.)

Also I got a new car!  Holy shit! An Audi A3, in Ocean Blue (a dark dark blue). That’s the super mini-wagon they have. If I would only take a picture of that, I could post it here, to share with you. But I have not taken a picture of it yet. Today I took it up to 104mph on the way to work and it was fantastic. Going fast in that car is so effortless. It’s still new enough that I’ve only put gas in it twice, and before going to bed for the night and upon waking in the morning, I go to the front window and look down at it parked on the street to make sure it’s okay. Also no one is allowed to eat or drink coffee in it. Ivan left an empty water bottle in it and I died a little.
What else? Those are the big events lately. Work is fantastic but we are launching new sites plus a redesign and that is so stressful. So many people to please! So many cooks in the kitchen! In late April I think I’m going to take a day or two off and just stare at the wall and nap. Also, I went crazy at Anthropologie and got a bunch of bohemian type embroidered tops and I think I may look bonkers. Of course people around me are too polite to say so, which I appreciate very much.

So I joined a new gym in Palo Alto and it is flocked to by cougars as if it were the only water source in the savannah that is the Peninsula. It makes sense, Palo Alto is a wealthy suburb and so you would expect to see older, well-maintained ladies who are hell bent on staying fit.
The other day I took a hip hop dance class at the gym. As I walked in, there was a lady approximately 45 or so, who was planted about four feet away from the mirror, staring at herself, swaying her hips from side to side with her hands on the front of her hips, basically framing her vagina. She had long dark hair with heavy bangs, a lot of eyeliner, fingerless gloves that went up to her elbows, a huge scarf, skintight workout pants and a tshirt and cardigan. As the hip hop class got going (I discovered liking hip hop music is not quite enough preparation for doing hip hop dance moves, and also why do I always stand in front so that everyone else can see my fail?) she eventually took off the enormous scarf but the gloves stayed put. She was fascinating to me because being sexy was clearly her whole schtick, and it seems really hard to keep pulling that off year after year. She’s barely pulling it off now because she looks more bonkers than sexy.
Also, do you guys remember when I had that dream where I was about to marry Lenny Kravitz, but I was worried because we hadn’t had sex yet? And it seemed weird that he would want to marry me without ever having had sex with me? Well he just said that he’s not having sex till he gets married. I am a visionary.

I just pulled down the Snacks site. Sad! But I’m too busy to sell underwear right now. I still have some Snacks at home and I have a case of the cupcake holders. They’ll be back someday.

I hate this wordpress template and right now I am trying to figure out how to change it. One of the things I hate the most is the justified text. That’s for PRINT! Not le web!

Man I’m cranky. Probably it’s actual depression but let’s face it, depression is really boring and does not incite sympathy.

Things I’m cranky about:

• 1. My hair. It was getting really long which made my little baby-princess-leia buns look dumb and floppy, so I was holding it all up in a high bun with this cool clip I got. Then I got it cut and even though the mini-buns look good now my cool clip doesn’t work. NOTHING GOES MY WAY.
• 2. Money. I finally added things up and I am super broke. Being poor makes me soooooo grumpy. And why are all the good Pinot Noirs $35? Rememer when they were $15? I do.
• 3. My relationship. I can’t really blog about it because Ivan reads my blog once or twice a year and he gets mad if I say stuff about him that’s at all negative. But I am cranky about it.
• 4. Being home for Christmas and getting well meaning advice about my life. Like when I say I’m broke, and then mom says well what do you spend all your money on? and I start listing it and then one of the things is dying my hair and she’s all well why do you need to dye your hair and I say because I’ve got grey hairs and then she comes over and inspects my scalp and says ooooh…you really do have a lot of grey don’t you? Other advice included revolutionary diet tips like “Well you should eat less food” and “walking is good exercise, you know.” The best part about Christmas was Ivan’s mom’s crazy presents: really old used DVDs including Whoopi Goldberg’s “Burglar” and Excalibur, and a radio shaped like a PURSE. Hahahah, comedy gold!
• 5. I’m not creative anymore. I’m old and I don’t write or finish my book and I’m old. And I’ll die and there will be nothing at all of note left, none of my insights or thoughts. All I do is watch television instead of creating any kind of art. I don’t even read books anymore.

In fact the main reason I am writing this long blog post is because I’m procrastinating writing something for work. Although I must say, the document I’m writing is pretty awesome. It’s explaining the web to people who don’t understand the web and want it to work just like a magazine.

One bonus of the subprime mortgage crisis is that a lot of houses in my neighborhood are up for sale at low, low prices! This house is only $440,000! Cute hardwood floors, cute yard, but unfortunately it says it has 4 bedrooms which means they converted valuable garage space into crappy, cold bedrooms. An afternoon with a sledgehammer and your car has much-coveted parking!

And this one is not in the BEST part of my neighborhood but for $389,000 who cares?

This blog is sort of awesome, it tracks which houses have dropped in price. Browse my neighborhood and pick up a house for under half a mil! And then you can come over whenever you want and we’ll watch CSI together!

So, I twitter all the time (http://twitter.com/LizDunn) but I feel like I never blog anymore, and twitter doesn’t give me enough room to say much about whatever it is I twitted about. I twat? Hm.

So other people who have tmobile are always thinking they have my email: liz@tmail.com. Probably because they can’t remember and they assume that they must just have their name, which is liz, right? Anyhoo that never caused me too many problems, just a lot of mail from people I don’t know for someone I don’t know. BUT TODAY! Suddenly I got this screen on my sidekick telling me to log in, even though I was just talking on it a minute before that. So I do, but it doesn’t accept my password. After a thousand hours on the phone with a guy named Bob at Tmobile that I HATED (lots of corny jokes and having to make every sentence into a jokey sentence even though WHAT THE FUCK MY PHONE ME NO GET INTO MY PHONE!), we reset my password. As the different items in my account started loading, suddenly mixed in with my regular address book names are a bunch of names that I do not know! I have someone else’s data! Does that mean they have MY data? WHAT IS HAPPENING!

Crappy Bob kept me on my landline so long with his Hee Haw routine that the battery in my landline phone died. So I wrote tmobile a panicky email support request. We’ll see if they can figure this out. They are not geniuses.

Also this afternoon I had donut burps at the gym. That’s like a perfect circle of virtuous/fail.

So exciting things happen to me but I am not encouraged/allowed to write about them. (Just work things, I obviously can always blog about my own personal menstrual blood and poo, don’t worry.) (Were you worried?)

But here’s an exciting work thing that I’m pretty sure I *can* blog about! We got Guitar Hero and a Wii at the office, but right now everyone is so into Guitar Hero that I think the Wii only got turned on for one boxing match. I played once or twice at our LA office, and I like that game. I move my fingers on the fretboard like a total spaz but I have a good time anyways. My favorite song to play in GH 2 is “Mother.” It’s just creepy and threatening and awesome.

So now I work against the faint background of “Heart Shaped Box” or “Message in a Bottle” with lots of the beeps you get when you miss a note. It’s nice!

My car is getting close to needing to be replaced. One window doesn’t go down, one of the seats is broken, and the other day it wouldn’t start for about two minutes, and then did start. Scary! Also I’m averaging about 20mpg, that’s a combination of city and highway, and I now drive 100 miles a day, and I spend about $100 a week on gas. Obviously one thing I could do is take Caltrain more; that’s $11 round trip. Another thing I could do is get a more fuel efficient car…but the fuel efficient cars just don’t THRILL me. I mean, I’m in it for over an hour and a half a day…I want to LIKE it!

BMWs aren’t that fuel efficient, and I’ve been feeling very broke, so I’m not actively pursuing another BMW. Even though I *love* my 95 525i and it has been such a workhorse, a lovely, sporty, european performance workhorse. Sigh.

I test drove the 2008 VW GTI and it was *nice*. It’s cheaper than a BMW, smaller than a BMW, and gets slightly better gas mileage. It was fun to drive! However if, IF gas mileage is a deciding factor for me, then I’d have to rule it out.

Other cars I’ve looked at are the Honda Fit (cheap, boring, ugly, great mileage), the Scion (kind of cute, I’d have to drive it though) and the Mini (same as the GTI: cute, fun, but the gas mileage is not significantly better than what I have now).

I guess I’m doing all this so that the day my car dies, if it dies, at least I have a head start in terms of what I like./ Brett mentioned today that I should get a VW diesel and use biodiesel; I love that idea, now I just need to figure out which VW is diesel and where the biodiesel outlets are in San Francisco.

Today I went to the gym for the first time in a hundred years. I’ve decided to give up white sugar/processed sugar until I’m 123 pounds. I don’t know how much I weigh now but it’s definitely not 123 pounds. Is vodka “processed sugar”?
Right this minute, I’ve done that thing where I’ve totally mis-judged the prep time on a recipe, so I told Ivan and his friend Barry that Penne al Sugo Carne would be done by 7, and really, it’s not actually going to be done till 8:30. What do I do? It’s a long-simmering pasta sauce, and if we put it on pasta too early, it’ll just be runny meat soup. Maybe I can make the salad course last a long, long time? And wine.