Holy HOT.

This is my fourth summer in Phoenix...................
And it feels like the hottest! OH MY GOODNESS PEOPLE! I can't handle it. I am currently sitting in the library because my house is too hot-- even with the air conditioning on. Jake and I were both sprawled out on separate couches with ice packs on our heads. We decided to come read books (or blog) at the library where it is always nice and cold. The library even has shades up on their 40 foot windows today. It is seriously hot people. I just looked up the 16 hottest cities in the world and guess where Phoenix lies?

Fifth hottest city IN THE WORLD! We beat out Death Valley and Las Vegas.
4th place: Illizi, Algeria
3rd place: Mecca, Saudi Arabia
2nd place: Ahvaz, Iran
1st place: Kuwait City, Kuwait

What are we doing here? These aren't life sustaining temperatures. Jake and I have been trying to buy a house here in Phoenix for a long while now, but why? What is wrong with us?! Everyone keeps saying, "only two more weeks and then the monsoons will be here." HELLO, these are NOT monsoons. People out here just don't know what a rain storm looks like. And the monsoons don't necessarily cool things down. We might go from 115 degrees to 100 degrees but then we're talking about sticky humidity. Every day this week and last week all had high temperatures over 110. It is seriously getting to me. My head always feels like it wants to implode. We tried to get out of the heat yesterday so we drove up to Payson to go camping. It was about ten degrees cooler which made a big difference but I still think this place is insane.

Do I still want to live here? Yes, but I am not going to say that I don't mind the heat. It is absolutely terrible. There should be a rule that for every parking lot that gets built there needs to be a tree every ten feet. There should also be a rule that the golf courses can't water their grass June through August. And the state should invoke "summer hours" so that every place of business can flip flop their hours of operation. 7pm-7am sounds great to me. I could sleep during the hottest part of the day and then have energy at night after the sun has gone down and the temperature drops to 89 degrees. Yes, this sounds like a perfect idea. How come no one else has ever made this happen?

Finally! I found MY GENERATION and life makes a lot more sense.

I read some statistics the other day that compared Generation X to Millenials and the different lifestyles they lead. I was born in 1982, and Jake in 1981. The birth years were not posted under either generation so I was trying to place myself according to the data. I couldn't figure out which generation we were because I found myself disagreeing with all of the statements about how people from these generations work, play, shop, travel, eat, socialize, make plans, etc. I brought this question to Jake: So what generation are we? We talked about it for a while without conclusion, and then went to the internet for a third opinion. According to the research and opinion of Anna Garvey, we are a pretty special group of individuals-- almost like a mini generation-- that are misunderstood by those just a few years older and a few years younger than us. I lived my first two years of college without a cell phone (like everyone else around me) and it was a blast. I spent my third and fourth year of college with a cell phone (along with everybody else) and that was a blast too. I'm really glad to have been born when I was. And I'm really glad to have found this article. It's nice to know that there is a large sum of people out there who understand me a lot better than I thought anyone did-- especially when I find myself disagreeing with so much that goes on in the world.

THE OREGON TRAIL GENERATION: LIFE BEFORE AND AFTER MAINSTREAM TECH
by Anna Garvey

We’re an enigma, those of us born at the tail end of the 70s and the start of the 80s. Some of the “generational” experts lazily glob us on to Generation X, and others just shove us over to the Millennials they love to hate – no one really gets us or knows where we belong.

We’ve been called Generation Catalano, Xennials, and The Lucky Ones, but no name has really stuck for this strange micro-generation that has both a healthy portion of Gen X grunge cynicism, and a dash of the unbridled optimism of Millennials.

A big part of what makes us the square peg in the round hole of named generations is our strange relationship with technology and the internet.  We came of age just as the very essence of communication was experiencing a seismic shift, and it’s given us a unique perspective that’s half analog old school and half digital new school.

YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY

If you can distinctly recall the excitement of walking into your weekly computer lab session and seeing a room full of Apple 2Es displaying the start screen of Oregon Trail, you’re a member of this nameless generation, my friend.

We were the first group of kids who grew up with household computers, but still novel enough to elicit confusion and wonder.  Gen X individuals were already fully-formed teens or young adults when computers became mainstream, and Millennials can’t even remember a time before computers.

But, when we first placed our sticky little fingers on a primitive Mac, we were elementary school kids whose brains were curious sponges.  We learned how to use these impressive machines at a time when average middle class families were just starting to be able to afford to buy their own massive desktops.

This made us the first children to grow up figuring it out, as opposed to having an innate understanding of new technology the way Millennials did, or feeling slightly alienated from it the way Gen X did.

AN AOL ADOLESCENCE

Did you come home from middle school and head straight to AOL, praying all the time that you’d hear those magic words, “You’ve Got Mail” after waiting for the painfully slow dial-up internet to connect?  If so, then yes, you are a member of the Oregon Trail Generation.  And you are definitelypart of this generation if you hopped in and out of sketchy chat rooms asking others their A/S/L (age/sex/location for the uninitiated).

Precisely at the time that you were becoming obsessed with celebrities, music and the opposite sex, you magically had access to “the internet,” a thing that few normal people even partially grasped the power of at the time.

We were the first group of high school kids to do research for papers both online and in an old-fashioned card catalogue, which many millennials have never even heard of by the way (I know because I asked my 21-year-old intern and he started stuttering about library cards).

Because we had one foot in the traditional ways of yore and one foot in the digital information age, we appreciate both in a way that other generations don’t.  We can quickly turn curmudgeonly in the face of teens who’ve never written a letter, but we’re glued to our smartphones just like they are.

Those born in the late 70s and early 80s were the last group to have a childhood devoid of all the technology that makes childhood and adolescence today pretty much the worst thing imaginable.  We were the last gasp of a time before sexting, Facebook shaming, and constant communication.

We used pay-phones; we showed up at each other’s houses without warning; we often spoke to our friends’ parents before we got to speak to them; and we had to wait at least an hour to see any photos we’d taken.  But for the group of kids just a little younger than us, the whole world changed, and that’s not an exaggeration.  In fact, it’s possible that you had a completely different childhood experience than a sibling just 5 years your junior, which is pretty mind-blowing.

NAPSTER U

Thanks to the evil genius of Sean Parker, most of us were in college in the heyday of Napster and spent many a night using the university’s communal Ethernet to pillage our friends’ music libraries at breakneck speeds.  With mouths agape at having downloaded the entire OAR album in under five seconds, we built our music libraries faster than any other dorm-dwelling generation in history.

We were the first to experience the beauty of sharing and downloading mass amounts of music faster than you can say, “Third Eye Blind,” which made the adoption of MP3 players and music streaming apps perfectly natural.  Yet, we still distinctly remember buying cassette singles, joining those scam-tastic CD clubs and recording songs onto tapes from the radio.  The very nature of buying and listening to music changed completely within the first 20 years of our lives.

A YOUTH UNTOUCHED BY SOCIAL MEDIA

The importance of going through some of life’s toughest years without the toxic intrusion of social media really can’t be overstated.  Myspace was born in 2003 and Facebook became available to all college students in 2004.  So if you were born in 1981-1982, for example, you were literally the last graduating class to finish college without social media being part of the experience.

When we get together with our fellow Oregon Trail Generation friends, we frequently discuss how insanely glad we are that we escaped the middle school, high school and college years before social media took over and made an already challenging life stage exponentially more hellish.

We all talked crazy amounts of shit about each other, took pictures of ourselves and our friends doing shockingly inappropriate things and spread rumors like it was our jobs, but we just never had to worry about any of it ending up in a place where everyone and their moms (literally) could see it a hot second after it happened.

But unlike our older Gen X siblings, we were still young and dumb enough to get really into MySpace and Facebook in its first few years, so we understand what it feels like to overshare on social media and stalk a new crush’s page.

Time after time, we late 70s and early 80s babies were on the cusp of changes that essentially transformed modern life and, for better or worse, it’s shaped who we are and how we relate to the world.

Anna Garvey is the Director of Content and Social Media for WebRev Marketing & Design, a boutique firm in Chicago. In past lives, she’s also been an ex-pat in Italy and a 6th grade teacher on the Southside of Chicago. When she’s not scouring the internet for social media and blog fodder, she enjoys Netflix binges, soulful music and New Orleans culture.

Mazel Tov

A few weeks ago Jake and I were invited to our first traditional Jewish wedding. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful ceremony. I learned a lot just from reading the program. I shared it below, excluding names to allow privacy, so I hope you'll enjoy it!

Birthday Celebrations

I always like to celebrate my birthday for a whole week. Why not? Right? Jake took me camping twice. The first night we went out west to Tonopah with our friends Tim & Valerie. They are my favorite people here in Phoenix. Val is such a great person to know and I'm happy she's in my life. And Tim has been a great friend to Jake. They performed a few concerts together in the past and they make some beautiful music. Anyway, the second night we went camping at Bartlett Lake (where we go about once a month) with a bunch of my friends from Whole Foods. It's always a treat to visit a large body of water and splash around in this desert. 

After our camping adventures, Jake took me to Tucson where we drove the mighty Subaru around the  back roads of Saguaro National Park. We got some delicious Ethiopian food and then walked downtown to the Open Mic Night at Hotel Congress where, unfortunately, there was not a lot of great music. LOL. We also visited all three Whole Foods that are in the Tucson area. I like the company I work for and I enjoy seeing what kind of cool stuff the other stores have happening. 

The next day we visited Biosphere 2. This place is pretty awesome. The architecture alone is crazy impressive. If you've ever seen the movie BIODOME with Polly Shore (such amazing acting...) then you have seen Biosphere 2. There are five different ecosystems inside and the story is true-- eight people lived inside the dome for two years with nobody going in or coming out. They did this to study different ecosystems in a controlled environment, without the effects of everything unnatural we are creating on this planet. I didn't take a lot of pictures but we really enjoyed it. Our tour guide, Bill, was awesome. I would definitely recommend visiting this place. We purchased and used a groupon which took the price down from $20/person to just $12 each.

Jake also got me the best yoga mat ever! It's a Manduka Black Mat Pro and it is amazing! It has a lifetime warranty and it has the power to make anybody feel like they are a super yogi. The week after my birthday my parents were able to come down to Phoenix and have lunch with Jake and I in our home. My parents are really cool and I love hanging out with them. Now that I am 33 years old, I can admit that. Overall, it was a fantastic birthday week filled with people I love and mother nature. Life doesn't get much better.