Snacks | Another Wordpress Blog

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.

Here is a news story about it

Here is the video that Will, Adam, and Judd made

Now let’s talk about ME. I had a birthday party for myself a few weeks ago, got lots of luscious gifts like 2 pounds of See’s candy, a huge hunk of Callebaut milk chocolate, countless bottles of champagne, and a super gorgeous necklace that you can see in this picture:

Along with “my bosoms” as my mom kept referring to them, in a dramatic shocked voice.

I’ve started trying to drive the speed limit on the way to work, which is really hard because I am a total leadfoot. I drive 280 south where the regular flow of traffic is going 80 mph, and I’m always running late. Most days I am glad I’m driving at the glacial speed of 65 mph because I usually do see a cop or two on the way to work, and considering I’m driving 90 miles round trip I am way too exposed to be going my normal 90. But damn, the time DRAGS SO SLOWLY.

I am looking forward to winter. It rained a few days ago and I really liked it. It feels like it hasn’t been winter in forever. I saw that movie Endless Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the other day and there are those scenes in the snow, it made me nostalgic for the East Coast and that low level pain of the freezing cold.

I went to Austin for 5 days to visit Peggy Dunn and I had a great time. The first two or three days were spent daydreaming about how to move there, then my real personality came back and the slow pace and small-townness made me itchy. It was nice to have nothing to do, though, and both my mom and my sister were out there too (and Peggy’s mom and sister) and we basically ate out three meals a day and every lunch was a three margarita lunch. I wouldn’t have gone out there if it hadn’t been Peggy’s birthday, and I’m soooo glad I did. The Hotel San Jose in Austin would be such a great place to disappear for weeks and weeks…it has a cute little courtyard with wine and a pool, indian paisley blankets and pillows on all the beds, and that warm muggy night air. And a whole menu of old movies that they bring to your room so you can watch on the television. Wouldn’t that be a nice two week stretch of time?

I’m following the mortgage crisis rabidly in the news. I still think the mortgage insanity was good for Ivan and me; we wouldn’t have been able to buy a house at all if we’d had to put 10% or 20% down. And I don’t think we overpaid for our house, so if we HAD to sell it, we wouldn’t lose money (but we wouldn’t make any, either). So many houses that we looked at were actually pretty shitty and I feel soooo glad that we got a nice, solid house NOT in the east bay. Life is turning out okay in that regard. And I don’t have plans any night for like the next ten days and it feels fantastic.
PS. I saw that Mark Ruffalo has a new movie out and those of you who are familiar with my diary know that I LOVE MARK RUFFALO.

My male friend: Something happened to me recently that hadn’t happened in a long time.

Me: Someone put their penis in your mouth?

My friend: WHAT?

Phone goes dead. I call him twice, he doesn’t pick up. He tells me later that he didn’t realize the phone had gone dead and had spent about a half an hour discussing his sexual orientation with many denials about being gay. Hahahah, whoops!

Celebrities I’ve seen since I started working at Funny or Die: Woody Harrelson. Rumer Willis. Rachael Evan Wood (or one of those young starlets who all sort of look the same to me). Scary Spice (Melanie Brown) and her little Eddy Murphy baby.

Ex utero: For those of you who don’t care to know any details at all about my lady innards, please skip to the next paragraph. Okay, is it just us chickens now? Good. So what do you all think about the uterus, anyways? Like, if I’m not going to have kids do I really need it? I know removing a big organ seems rather drastic. But what if the uterus in question is just a big fibroid farm? Do I really need to keep it around just because in some cases western medicine likes to just remove whatever the problem is and that makes us  automatically distrust them? Discuss.

I’m getting the inside of my house painted and I cannot wait. It’s a transsexual painter named Thalia who is doing the work. I wonder if I have to move all the furniture to the middle of the rooms and stuff? That sounds hard, and I’m not sure if the painters normally do that or if the client is supposed to do that. She is a 6′2″ muscular woman, after all, and probably stronger than me.  In the living room it will be a creamy white on the walls and the ceiling will be pale blue. LIKE THE SKY. I can’t wait!

Today there was an announcement that Technorati had some layoffs, most of them engineers that I really liked, and also Linda, the executive assistant who was always so funny and smart and pleasant even when the crap was knee-deep. And the crap was often knee-deep.
I think most of the engineers are pretty private and probably don’t want me naming names and telling cute personal stories about them–but I really think they all have great opportunities in front of them right now. I have always had an incredibly fond feeling about EVERYONE I worked with at Technorati — I’d like to name-check Scamper — and the three people that are now in charge are all very smart, very capable people. I have no idea what Technorati’s future is but DJ, Dorion, and Teresa are the right people to steer it.

I can’t say enough good things about Dorion in particular, and watching his ascent at Technorati has been so satisfying because it’s so well-deserved. The thing (or rather ONE thing) I love about Dorion is that he’s Spock AND Kirk: 100% rational and at the same time, 100% emotion. He’s that much man: 200%. Also, he’s a FOX. All good things in a leader!

Sitting on my couch this morning at 7am, real hungover and one hand petting a whining Pilot, the internet gave me this, via my IM window:

volhs1: hey

Liz Dunn: hey  whos this

volhs1: got ur sn off the aim pages

Liz Dunn: ehn

volhs1: 20 m ny

Liz Dunn: i’m 40
Liz Dunn: so
Liz Dunn: probably you should chat with someone younger and cuter

volhs1: i saw ur pic i thought u were hot as hell
volhs1: u got a bf?
volhs1: u there?
volhs1: ?

Liz Dunn: ya i got a bf
Liz Dunn: and i gotta get ready for work
Liz Dunn: have a nice day out there in the east coast

IMG_8762.JPG

Originally uploaded by tantek.

We will look very much like this in Las Vegas this weekend.

Man it’s so funny working back down in the Valley. It’s basically exactly like the old days! I ate lunch at Palo Alto Sol, the aggressively mediocre Mexican place that has been on California Ave since the late nineties. I see the most expensive cars on a regular basis–did you know that Ferraris come in a navy blue? I’d never seen that color before. Maybe it was custom. There’s a guy that goes to the gym across the street from my office that has the BMW Z8, which I think was like $250,000 when it came out a few years ago. MAN that’s a nice car. Also, the new Astin Martin is quite beautiful. I see a lot of different kinds of Mercedes that look incredibly expensive, but I’m not that into Mercedes so I don’t know if I’m looking at a $75,000 car or a $300,000 car.
The commute is the same. I bought some new CDs to bond with, because the 55-minute drive is a good time to really listen to new music. I got Silversun Pickups and Interpol. I want to get the new Tegan and Sara. Buying music is very easy now that I work about 20 yards from Fry’s Electronics.

I’m going to Vegas this weekend, and I decided that I’m going to try and pack everything for the weekend into one backpack. I’m thinking 2 dresses and a pair of heels and some underwear. Right? I mean all you really need in Vegas is a gold fanny pack, everything else is almost superfluous. Note to self: buy gold fanny pack.

Currently, these are my very favorite Funny or Die videos:

What’s it gonna be? 

Cars 

Look it’s me and Heidi at a Laughing Squid party!