A little about SHR on her birthday:-)

This turned out to be a much more difficult post to write than I thought it would. Not that it was hard to think of things to write, but it was hard to organize them, and it was hard to keep it to a manageable volume. As it is, I feel like it is a little bit scattered, but I think it gets the point across.

Through some IM discussions, it became clear to me that I haven’t really done SHR justice so far. I did write about her at length early on in my blogging, but I am not sure that really gets the message across, so I will elaborate. Actually, in re-reading that, I really didn’t tell you anything about her at all.

Start with the obvious…she is, in fact, ridiculously good looking. Tall, blond, lean, big boobs, great smile, athletic, so on and so forth. She also has a very palpable confidence about her that is incredibly sexy. In most social situations, she is the center of attention, just because.

The less obvious is that she is brilliant. Not just smart, not really smart, I mean downright brilliant. She is super young because she skipped 7th grade (or 6th…I forget). She graduated with a 3.9-something in college, and did so without actually spending that much time studying and by taking all kinds of chemistry, biology and graduate-level business classes (she was an economics major). In other words; it was a really hard 3.9-something (made to look really easy).

She started working for a Venture Capital firm after her sophomore year, and the firm found her valuable enough to continue to pay her $60 an hour to work for them during the school year. Her boss has told me that he has never, in 30 years of working, met someone who understands new technology as fast as she does. That is very high praise.

And they have no problem letting her handle major events for them. On one of our trips to Vegas (she got sent there for a lot of conferences) she was instructed to find a specific executive and sell him on the merits of acquiring a company that her firm had invested in. It took her about 20 minutes over breakfast to get the deal moving. [Ok, that is kind of an oversimplification…obviously the bankers and the partners at her firm ended up getting the deal done, but they sent her to make the initial contact.] Oh, she was 20 at the time.

She works incredibly hard, and always has. She probably worked a solid 40 hours a week during college, and considerably more than that now (Big Sis is the same way…works like a mad-woman). She spends an enormous amount of time and energy of philanthropic pursuits as well (more on that in a second.)

This brings me to a sort of awkward topic, and one which she may be a little mad at me for talking about, but which I feel is necessary to really understand her (and is not a secret to the people who already know her.) By any standard, both she and her sister qualify as “heiresses”. The actual amount of money is unimportant, other than to know that neither of them has to work at all. In fact, whatever money they earn is unlikely to have any effect on their lifestyle at all. The fact is that they are both really driven by a desire to simply be the best they can be at what they want to do.

I don’t think that Smoking Hot Roommate has always been completely comfortable with what she has been given, although she has certainly grown into it (she NEVER talked about it when she was younger, but can do so a little more freely now.) However, even when I first met her (she was 17), she had a clear vision of the good that she could do, and the way she wanted to use her resources to help others.

The family, not surprisingly, has been extremely involved and generous towards various Cancer causes over the years. They give large amounts of money, time, and fundraising assistance to national and local organizations. There is one thing, in particular, that I would like to mention because I think it is so neat, and so well sums up SHR’s commitment to doing good.

A couple of years ago, she heard a teenage cancer patient on the radio talking about how hard it is to have cancer when you are her age. The hardest thing, this girl said, was that you missed out on all of the fun things that go with being a teenager: school dances, clothes shopping, hanging out with friends. She spent so much time in hospitals, and being basically worn down, that she felt left out and felt like she missed her teenage years.

Hearing this, SHR decided that she could help. So, she got in touch with a doctor that she had met previously at a benefit function about organizing a “Girls Night Out” for teenage girls being treated at a local hospital for cancer. The doctor said it was a great idea and identified a handful of girls that could really use it. SHR made some phone calls and got some people to donate stuff, and what they wouldn’t donate, she simply paid for herself.

She lined up a couple of limos to pick the girls up, took them to a spa to get facials, mani’s and pedi’s (and to get their hair done, but many don’t have any hair:-( ) Then they went shopping, and finally went to dinner at a really neat restaurant way up near the top of one of the skyscrapers in town. Basically, she just arranged a way for them to be silly girls for a night. Now, she does this about once a month, and is trying to find a way to do it more often.

Anyway, I am rambling now, and this post is getting long;-) Looks like I am going to have to write a “Part II” tomorrow.

For today, though, I will close with this: she has at least one weird quirk…she doesn’t sleep. Not much at least, probably 4 hours a night. Her father and sister say that she never slept more than six or seven hours a night, even when she was a baby. And never took naps as a kid. So, most days she goes to bed about 1:00, gets up at 5:00, runs 7 miles, showers, makes breakfast, reads the paper and gets to work by about 7:00. I feel like I would get more done if I didn’t waste time sleeping, too;-)

Anyway, Happy Birthday to my mostest favoritest person in the world (except for maybe munchkin:-)) You are a great person, a great role model, a great friend, and a great sister!