Paris Hilton made me laugh. Oh my.

(UPDATED: Looks like someone finally grew a pair at the Obama campaign. This ad launched today.)

I can't say that I'm a big Paris Hilton fan. Or a little one at that. But I just saw her response to John McCain's ad and I have to admit that when it used the Golden Girls and Larry King to say McCain's old and then she tells them "I'll see you at the debates, bitches" I actually laughed out loud. I don't know if her energy plan makes any sense because our house gets all its energy needs from rotating the kids on the treadmill, but the ad looked like the kind of spot the Barack team should be doing. Or at least it was the kind of response that his uber-high powered team of creative geniuses should have thought to create on their own.

If I follow the ads properly, the message is that a lot of people seem to like Barack, and the last thing we want is a president who people like. So therefore, vote for the other guy. (Todd rubs eyes and cries into his tumbler). If Obama loses this election, it will be for the same reason that Al Gore and John Kerry: the complete inability to swiftly and completely expose your opponents' inane ramblings for what they really are: inane ramblings. George Bush ran as the "CEO president." I can't remember Gore or Kerry ever making the obvious point that he had been a really lousy CEO (and modestly criminal Board member who dabbled in insider trading). He also ran as the "return to morality" president despite a personal resume that rivaled Kennedy for partying. For the first time since Clinton and Reagan, there's finally an articulate guy running for president, and he's been shut down and outshouted by a guy calling him a celebrity. Why can't he just run an ad that says, "John, is that really what you got? My fatal flaw is that people like me? Sorry that more people don't like you Commander McCain, but haven't we just gone through 8 years with a guy that almost no one likes? I say we give it a try the other way. I'm Barack Obama and you bet your ass I approved this ad." This is like a guy bringing a knife to a gun fight but the other guy keeps pointing the gun at himself. I wasn't a Reagan fan but he had that special Schwarzenegger quality that made the masses swoon. Now we get a guy with that same quality and it's a flaw?

I'd like to see Barack turn over his advertising to Paris's guys for a couple weeks. I bet the election would be over by Labor Day.

Perhaps some context

OK. Looking at my post this evening (which admittedly is a little heavy) and then recognizing the two year gap between posts, perhaps some context to connect the two years is appropriate. (with photo guide included).

OK. After that last post in 2006, two very big events happened. First, we finished fixing our house in Burlingame, which only took 8 months, a couple extra tons of concrete and a small section of the Brazilian rain forest to overcome.

2 days after we moved back into the house, we went to the hospital and came home with this little girl.


With Daphne, we had a new house, a new baby sister, and someone to amuse Talia and Liam. Scrolling ahead, my life has been unchanged. Still working at The Blueshirt Group, which may be news for those of you who knew me at E.piphany, which may be news for those of you who knew me at Morgen-Walke, which may be even more news for those of you who knew me at Scholastic and never knew that I left NY 13 years ago. Only difference is that I'm a little older, and missing one appendix. Michele has managed to get younger in that time, although the children certainly keep us on the short side of tired.

So since that time, the kids have grown, Talia is going into 1st grade, Liam is going into preschool, and Daphne thinks everything is cool. (Don't know where she picked that up).

Here is what they look like now.


So that's it. Two years in less than 500 words.

Sorry, I got lost

So, looks like my best intentions have been nowhere to be found for the past *cough cough* two years. For someone who can neither stop talking or writing, it's hard to believe that I haven't done a single thing with this blog since 2006. The funny thing is that I noticed I had a saved draft of a post from April of 2007 right after I lost my appendix in Mills Peninsula Hospital. The post was titled "I just donated by kidney to science" and I'm sure it was hilarious but I guess we'll never know since the muse to write about it left me about sixteen months ago. I'm feeling particularly compelled to write these days. For one thing, it's shameful that I go through these pictures of my kids and see that since my last post the kids in these pictures look nothing like the kids in my house today. Oh yes, and there's one missing because our youngest is turning 2 in two weeks. Great, another reminder of how long it has been since I wrote anything.

I'm also feeling somewhat melancholy about lost connections and what I call "disconnected friends." These aren't the people in your life who you really don't know how to find. These are the people you know, you care about, you really have an interest in their well being, but you just haven't spoken to, seen, written, or generally heard about in far too long. I lost a friend last week. He was one of those disconnected friends although I had been fortunate to reconnect with him through work in the past year. He was young. He had a loving wife and two young children and he had a tragic accident doing something he loved and now he's gone. Mind you, this wasn't someone who I was especially close to, or whom I knew his wife and kids personally, or attended a wedding or bris or birthday party with. He was a guy who I met right out of college when I was working at Scholastic and he was an analyst an Robertson Stephens. I was young, naive, and doing a job for which I had no identifiable skills and he treated me with respect. When you're 22 years old and dealing with some interesting personalities on Wall Street, getting respect from someone you respect is a pretty cool thing. And so naturally I got thinking about him, and why I looked up to him. I thought about when I moved to San Francisco and he was here and he was always willing to take my call, offer advice, be a reference. And when he left the research side of the investment world, I don't remember if he said this to me or it was just my impression but I always thought he had the right attitude: If I don't love what I'm doing, then I'll find something else to do. I've tried to mimic that philosophy. Struggled to maintain some work/life balance when the reality is that I want a life balance where work doesn't interfere too much. And then I started reading what other people had to say about Keith, and it was extraordinary. Here was someone who touched so many people from different worlds and who all said the same things. And I found common connections through Keith that I didn't know existed. It motivated me to reach out to some more of those people who meant a lot to me when I was moving to California.

I realized that I haven't reached out to some of them since before I had children six years ago. I realized that I haven't spoken in person to any of my college roommates in more than a year. I have personal e-mails in my "follow-up" file that I haven't responded to for more than two years. I have no real reason to think that this time will be any different other than I'm older and I'd like to believe I have some higher understanding of the need to connect. But having the time to post and making the effort to post are two different things. I hope I'll use this blog more effectively to stay in touch with those disconnected friends and maybe inspire them to reach out to their own disconnected friends. I couldn't really care less about someone's status on Facebook (although it's always good to know that my 20 year old cousin is chillin' because that's information I can really use) but I do want to know that their kids are growing up. I want to know when their parents are sick. I want to know that they love their jobs and where they live or that they have to get out before they go crazy. And I want to stay connected. Life is not meant to be wasted or lost. I want to love what I do or find something else I can love to do.