What if you were smaller than “normal”? Had trouble conceiving? Stuttered? Were covered in freckles? Cried too much?

Would it be acceptable to remind you of it every time you looked at the weather report?

Why is is okay to constantly run ads to make overweight people aware of their bodily status (and that it should be “remedied”) every single hour of the day, all day and night?

And how outlandish do the claims have to be (i.e. acai barries do anything) before consumer advocates and regulators wake the hell up and do something?

My Democratic friends are all slapping their knees about Ben Quayle. They won’t be laughing as hard when the RNCC sprays him with a firehouse of money and all-you-can-buy TV ads. They especially won’t enjoy the things he says on behalf of Arizona to the national media.

Lesson 2: Learn from the County Attorney race. The GOP had a candidate who was in trouble (Andrew Thomas). Did they present him as a victim of the liberal media and push forward? No. They quietly elected someone else and moved on strong.

When a Dem frontrunner gets questioned, they all start crying about the circular firing squad.

Lesson 3: Traditional issue buttons aren’t working this time around. I thought Cathy Eden was going to perform more strongly given that her platform was jobs, jobs, jobs. I was also genuinely surprised that Randy Parraz was in the mid-teens — perhaps being against 1070 is not as galvanizing as Dems would like.

Rodney Glassman confirmed that Arizonans still prefer centrist Dems with lots of money (who are willing to listen to Tea Party members, good god.) You can’t be too conservative in Arizona, but apparently you can still be too progressive.

On the other side, I get the feeling that illegal immigration is losing traction with Republicans and they’ll all follow Quayle in making Obama issue one.

Thoughts?

What if you had just given a little more, even $5, and that was all the difference in this race?

What if you had asked five friends to give to my campaign?

And so on.

It made me so angry.

Because Congresswoman, what if you and 200 of your friends changed the law so that you can just focus on being lawmakers and not high-dollar fundraisers?

What if it didn’t cost a million dollars to run for the House and untold millions to run for the Senate?

What if people with pretty good ideas had just as much of a chance to win elections as trust fund babies who could afford to buy up every TV commercial slot on key prime time nights?

What if you stopped pretending that you’re deeply vulnerable to create a false sense of urgency while the system protects 97% of incumbents, including you?

What if we called you on it?

Most aren’t political.

Most don’t read their news, they watch it.

Most do not believe that you can be moral if you don’t believe in God.

Yet for things like electing people, or selling a product to the masses, you need them.

Are you only talking to them when you need something? Are you pressing the right buttons? Are they listening?

People my age grew up listening to adults say that government can’t solve problems, government IS the problem. As a result, we now have a younger generation of adults trying to fix the world through startups, nonprofits, Twitter and blogging. Government is the missing piece, yet one that affects everyone.

This is very convenient to the older generation of Arizona politicians. They’d like you to keep thinking of piecemeal solutions to wide-scale problems so they can continue to pass expensive, unconstitutional, out-of-touch laws that have nothing at all to do with improving Arizona for anyone but themselves, their cronies and occasionally their fellow church members.

I propose building a non-partisan coalition for the 2012 election that will make Arizona competitive with the other 49 states in education, wages, jobs and quality of life. That means diversifying the economy, investing in public education (from preschool to university) and improving services for all. We need leaders who don’t blame the young, the poor and the foreign for every single problem we face. And we need leaders who will make Arizona an uncomfortable place for those who are backwards-thinking, hateful and selfish.

So how do we start?

Reality check: Most successful small businesses have more to do with meeting a gaping demand in a particular market (air conditioner repair in Phoenix) than the hard work and passion of the seller (baseball cards, hand-made necklaces).

The Passion Industry doesn’t say much about this, because telling people to have a passion for 24-hour air conditioning repair doesn’t sell books at stores with coffee bars. Instead, they talk about how you can accomplish anything if you just use the right niche marketing or sales techniques. You’re not selling baseball cards — you’re selling your expertise on baseball cards, giving the buyer a much better experience than if they went to your competitor!

Here’s what I’ve noticed about 95% of people who base their day-to-day work on their passion, and let me make the prerequisite Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That qualification:

They are indefinitely financially supported, in whole or in part, by someone else

Again, this is America and if that’s what you wanna do, you do it and everyone else can shut up. But the Passion Industry rarely mentions this, does it? They’ll tell you about the woman who successfully sells beautiful handmade hats on Etsy and gets all kind of buzz online, but not about her husband’s office job. Or the popular online guy who sells social media consulting — did you hear about his wife, the teacher? Or the people who have rockstar blogs and enviable lives, but fail to mention that home base is Casa de Mom and Dad?

Life without passion would be a mistake. But dive into it with eyes open, and be wary of the big industry that feeds on your dreams.

I like you. I really do. I enjoy your crisp air conditioning, your clangy bells, the way you zip through that University-Stadium intersection like you own it.

I just don’t want to take you to work anymore, because I am a Wuss.

You are running one-car trains all summer to save money. You’ve got the taxpayer’s back. I respect that. Still, I don’t want to stand nostril-to-armpit with my fellow sweaty passengers when it’s 118 outside. Paying more for trains that run less frequently.

I don’t blame your business decision; it’s necessary. It’s proper. You’re keeping the train affordable for those who need it to be.

It’s just that at the end of the day, Tokyo Subway conditions are really taxing in the heat. Sorry. See you this fall?

1. I need a wonderful, hard-working, honest, philanthropy-oriented web designer. Someone who believes in the cause and will work as hard as I do for it. Someone who isn’t there just for a paycheck, but for a passion. I promise to nurture and protect this web designer and be a great boss. Also, there will be regular trips to Pita Jungle for hummus involved, unless the designer hates hummus, like my weird husband.
2. I need an intern, a hard-working, smart ASU student who will give me 100% because this is the very first, very important step in his or her career. S/he is a maturing young adult, very serious about the job, doesn’t need micromanaging, takes initiative, wants to absorb the Internet world like a sponge. I will also feed this wonderful intern hummus.
3. I need my muse back. She has been battered very badly in a recent storm of anxiety, stress and poor sleep. Make her strong again. Help me feed her. Not hummus. Whatever muses eat.
4. I need to help a political candidate win an important election, or at least give it his or her best shot. I did not realize this until today, but it is a need.
5. I need to find my place. If this house is it, the bar behind my house needs to stop playing live butt rock on Sunday nights. Please, universe. This would help a lot.
6. I need my friend Moira to have a speedy recovery from her surgery tomorrow. Please send her good books and movies.
7. My brother is running an ad in a national magazine on Tuesday. Will you send lots of people his way?
8. I need to make music.

I am becoming aware that with as much creative energy as I have, I cannot be “on” at all times. I have a battery. It drains, goes dead. It must recharge.

Things that charge my creative battery: Travel, time off to knock around, introspection, yoga, exercise, breaking out of my comfort zone, nature, alone time, reading, watching TED videos, getting to help someone solve a problem in a new way

Things that drain my creative battery: Taking on too much work, stress, not meeting clients’ expectations and feeling bad about it, endless routine, fear that I will never “find my place”

What charges and depletes you?

I often think back on how easily attainable that goal could’ve been… and why I didn’t do it.

1. Step One: Decide to become a bio-engineer. Pore through books that tell you that there are only two universities in the entire West that have bio-engineering programs: University of California at Berkeley, and Arizona State University. ASU? Wow, that’s in your back yard, and you can go there for free because your grades are high enough!

2. Step Two: Keep being told over and over by trusted adults that if you want to be a scientist, you’re going to need to take a lot of math. You hate math because your trig teacher believes that students should “teach themselves” and reads a novel at her desk while the other students sit on the tops of their desks, throw things at each other and loudly goof off. You are Serious, though. You have taken four years of math — more than necessary — because you hold on to this dream. You are getting an A despite having no real teacher. But so are a lot of people, because the district decided that math is Hard, so they dropped the minimum level for an A to 85%. Good thing you weren’t planning to leave the state, right?

3. Step Three: Go to a summer program before your senior year in high school. You have decided to study bio-engineering at ASU. Be told by a very well-meaning program counselor that bio-engineers design prosthetic limbs for people who have lost arms and legs. Ask the counselor what you should study if you want to do genetic engineering. The counselor will shrug and say “I don’t know, zoology?”

4. Step Four: Be told by well-meaning adults that genetic engineering is a very competitive and low-paying field, one in which you will never feel satisfaction in your work.

5. Step Five: Give  up. Major in journalism. Work in marketing. See how you went from wanting to work in a traditionally-male field to actually working in a traditionally-female field? Join a wonderful nonprofit that supports an *amazing* biodesign center and chafe at not sticking to your guns.

I’m far from distraught at how my life turned out — I work hard, put my heart into everything that I do, and invest myself in every organization that I work for. I’ve been rewarded for that, richly. But there are still nagging thoughts that I could’ve become a scientist, my childhood dream, if people hadn’t kept tacitly steering me away from it.

How to encourage more girls to become scientists:

1. Don’t tell them they’ll be paid badly. Few men stay away from math or science because of paychecks — they want to be the next Einstein — but I’d be willing to bet that most aren’t told they’ll end up poor.

2. Stop using The Threat of Endless Math Classes as a scary disincentive. Yes, you’ll probably end up using math at your sciencey job. Know what? I use it in my marketing job all the time, a lot. Math is life. It’s nothing you won’t be able to handle.

3. Don’t be all super-enthusiastic for girls who want to pursure math and science, then sit back and do nothing. We got a lot of cheerleading in high school to boost our self-esteem, but no real nuts-and-bolts tactics for becoming actual scientists. Take a girl to a lab and show her real live women working in science. I can’t think of anything more motivating than that.