by
Carrie Sun
meh/style
Adelle Waldman,
Sarah Rose Etter,
Lydia Kiesling,
Tahmima Anam,
Ellen Pao,
Jenny Zhang,
Carrie Sun,
Claire Stanford,
Gabriela Garcia
ALL I WANTED when I was a child was for my parents to pay attention to me. They did not have time to play with me, certainly never during the week, so I spent my time playing by myself, flipping through my mom’s GRE books, doing logic puzzles, reading, planning, and waiting for Saturdays. I would beg my parents to take me out. Anywhere. I did not care—laundry, groceries, post office, though something preferably not errands. I loved our local zoo and children’s garden. “Saturday I’ll take you,” Mom would sometimes reply at night after an extra-long day, during which she cooked, cleaned, worked, studied, and often sewed new clothes for me from fabrics she had bought on sale. Saturday morning would come. I’d jump out of bed.
“Mommy! What time are we going to the zoo?”
Silence.
“Mommy?”
Silence.
“Mom? You said you would take me to the zoo today—”
“We’re not going.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
“But why don’t you want to?”
“No reason!” I could not understand why she was getting mad and shouting at me when she was the one who broke her word. “Stop bothering me!”
im sorry but this is so boring
Not a day went by at Carbon when I wouldn’t have a fleeting thought about how I had achieved a childhood dream of mine. Mom’s and Dad’s tongues were sharper than knives, and often I felt like their honing steel, but their hearts were—and have always been—softer than tofu: they put everything into giving me a shot at the American dream, the one and only way I saw and felt their love. Even when I did not have the time or appetite to eat lunch, which was most days, and even during the period in which I was bingeing, I needed the psychic comfort of having the dumplings there at my desk, just in case. My orders expanded to include shumai and hargow and jiaozi but no wontons. Hated wontons. I kept ordering and ordering and wasted a lot of food. I had gone from free to reduced to regular to overindulgent lunch. I would think of my mom, whose father’s rule at mealtime was never to leave a grain of rice uneaten on the plate; and of my dad, who would stay out past midnight delivering Domino’s pizzas during icy, snowy Midwest winters, in hopes of more quarters in tips; and of myself, again, my thoughts returning as guilt and self-loathing, so nauseating were the emotions they would only make me want to binge more.
girl u dont need to do this
[...] Spending time with open, optimistic people reminded me that it might be possible to fix some of what was broken in our country - particularly the deep divisions between the rich and poor and between those at the center at those at the margins. I felt renewed and excited. I remembered why I loved tech. When I got home I felt, more than ever, committed to making a difference through my work.
what the fuck lmao
The train took forever. I couldn’t wait to get to the hotel to shower. At last, we were off the train and walking to the hotel. Hotel shower, here I come, I thought.
who writes like this
During our courtship, I was traveling to China for Kleiner all the time. So we could spend time together, Buddy joined me. We were so in love. One night after dinner, just six weeks after we’d met, he took me to the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel in Shanghai. A band was playing Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” How funny, I thought. That’s one of our favorite songs. And then Buddy was getting down on one knee and opening a ring box.
SHOW DONT TELL jesus h christ
For years, I’d tried to believe in the story of Kleiner as a place where we were really trying to help entrepreneurs to build awesome companies and products. I’d believed that we were this team of people working together and that we were trying to be missionaries, not mercenaries. But eventually I’d come to see all that talk as a big lie. My parents raised me to believe that the world was a meritocracy, that if you worked hard enough you could get ahead. But that wasn’t true at Kleiner. It just wasn’t fair.
im sorry but this made me laugh out loud
In the wake of the verdict, I just wanted to hide, but in the months after the trial, I knew it would be good for reddit if I did a little bit of press. In April, Katie Couric sat down in our offices to interview me, even though I’d turned her down at first. Initially I didn’t want to do any video, but Katie was visiting her daughter at Stanford and asked to meet with me, and we got along well. She seemed so nice and genuinely empathetic, and she even shared some of her personal experiences with bias in journalism across her entire career. She was warm and professional, so I agreed to my first on-camera interview. I was very tightly wound and found it hard to relax, but she was fair and professional. I respected her and thought the interview went well.
why does she include all this unnecessary detail??? where was her editor
And so we left town on our first trip for fun in ages. For the first time in years, there were no calls scheduled, no emails to return, and no emergencies to handle. We went to Maui to see Lori, my old friend from Google. Our daughter loved Hawaii so much—from her first taste of shave ice to sunset hikes on the beach—and Buddy and I loved being on the beach, watching her frolic in the surf. The stress of the trial, the miscarriage, and all the other crises of the past few years had taken a toll on our marriage. I didn’t know what would happen with us. But I did know that, whatever happened, sitting together on the sand watching our little girl laughing in the sun would give us a wonderful memory.
i just???? what???
Upstairs in my tiny apartment, I pull a small bag of cocaine from the freezer and cut out a line, then suck the powder up my nostrils. The drugs lace into my blood. I lean back on my cheap blue sofa and stare at the white ceiling. For a moment, just a moment, the man on fire is gone and there is nothing in my mind at all. For a moment, I am cold, still, a cadaver on a silver autopsy table.
god i hate this
But out here, out west, there are endless hours of commuting, constant emails and notifications, top secret projects, impossible deadlines. Whether you’re a Believer or not, the very pressure of the atmosphere in San Francisco changes you, molds you, shapes you into a new breed of worker. It has changed me.
sooo preachy im bored