OK. I talked to some more folks — and considered all your suggestions here on SIAM, on Facebook and via email — and maybe starting a bar is not such a great idea. Maybe I need a new plan.

That said, I’ve been invited to sit on a panel at UCLA’s E-Week, otherwise known as Entrepreneur Week, at the end of February. I’ll be on a panel about Entrepreneurship in Entertainment. It’s an honor to have been asked, and I think it will be an awesome opportunity to share what I’ve learned with the students at my former business school, but mostly it’s a chance for me to hear other ideas, to get to know new people, to see what’s being built and thought and developed out there, to figure out how I fit in. That’s where I’m lost right now. I’m not clear on what the next step is for me, career-wise. I need to continue to plod along with the footwork and trust that God will take care of the outcome. It is not my job to create the path; it is my job to walk it. I can choose whether or not to bring fear into that journey.

I’m happy right now. I’m at peace. I’m doing a lot of writing, wading through my past and being brutally honest about my past and beginning to see the patterns of me and the beginnings of those patterns and the extent of those patterns and the faultiness of those patterns. I’m getting to see how I am a problem that I carry from relationship to relationship. I am a faulty pattern that travels with my body, that engages in relationship games, developing game strategy with a faulty set of rules. A lost-in-translation playbook. Of course the outcome will never feel fair.

I can see that, now.

I have amazing friends and an amazing life and I sleep well at night and exist smoothly throughout the day. Life’s a sweet gig right now. We went out for my neighbor’s birthday last night. It rocked. So blessed to have friends. I’m in love with all of them.

Dude you guys there’s this space for lease underneath my apartment complex. It’s been for lease forever. It’s really an amazing space, very cool and open. It’s been used as office space in the past, but I want to open a bar there. I called the leasing guy today and he said they’re not super psyched on the idea of leasing it as something other than office space, but, fuck, right now they can’t lease it as anything. It’s been on the market for months. I told him that our neighborhood is very up-and-coming and really needs an awesome locals bar and that I thought it would do really well. He was like, “I actually think you’re right. Well. Let me know if you want me to come give you a tour of the space.” (The website for the property is here. It says it’s been leased, but that’s a lie. I just talked to the guy today.)

OK, so I have absolutely no experience in any of this. I wouldn’t know the first thing about opening and/or managing a bar. But I love the idea of a project I can touch and feel! I really really really need a new business and I really really really do not want it to involve the Internet. A bar!!! It doesn’t get any more non-tech than that!

The only catch is that the space is a block off either of the main streets, so it wouldn’t be very visible. Plus it’s kind of an industrial neighborhood right now — there’s not a ton of other commercial properties, but there’s a ton of residential and even more coming. It’s a rapidly changing neighborhood. And all the people who live here are younger yuppie types. And there really aren’t any yuppie bars. You guys. I need to open a yuppie bar. With a lot of couches and trivia nights and free WiFi. I just need to do it. If I can’t be CEO of RealNetworks (I’ve asked a bunch of people and it isn’t looking good for me) then I need to open a yuppie bar.

Someone please explain how you do this.

I am definitely in a happy place. Happy but not manic. And I have so little to say at those times. Everything’s just good. I’m peaceful. It’s fine.

I went to a professional networking event tonight — the Social Media Club of Seattle was celebrating its 1-year anniversary. The place was packed and loud. Chelsia and I took one look around and decided we were going to get a bunch of the free food and eat it at a table as far away from everyone else as possible. Mission accomplished. Except we were lucky enough to be joined later by two of our other favorite women, Heather and Heidi. Pics all around:

And, yeah, that’s me, eating a beet salad. Heather insisted on photographing the meta moment. I always have a wonderful time when I hang out with these girls. You know, when you first move to Seattle, people tell you that all social activity dies in the winter, that no one goes out, and if you don’t have a boyfriend by winter you’re going to be all alone until summer. SO NOT TRUE. My social calendar has never been more busy than it is now. I’m just plain old happy.

Oh hai.

I had a really fantastic weekend. I got to spend Thursday evening and Friday afternoon with my friend Candice and her daughter Audrey. I used to call her Baby Audrey, but she’s a full year old now — I hadn’t seen her in about 5 months — and she’s now officially Toddler Audrey. She’s like a real person now, but smaller. She toddles around and points and waves and laughs. We took her to the aquarium on Friday. Aquariums are WAY more fun when you have a toddler with you, because you get to see everything through their eyes. I just love that little girl so, so much, and she’s an absolute joy to be around. It was also heart-warming to catch up with Candice, who lives in California now, and I miss her so much, and I forget how much I miss her until I see her again, and then I remember.

Friday night my friend Emily was visiting from Arizona, so I drove all the way across the bridge to Bellevue for the first time in probably six months (seriously it’s like a 10-minute drive but there’s never any reason to do it), and hung out with Emily and her old high-school friends in the dive-iest bar in one of the wealthiest parts of the Pacific Northwest. I ate dive bar dinner, too. It was awesome.

On Saturday, I hung out with Trish and Jesse and some of their friends at a club downtown, where they were hosting New Orleans-style bands. (Trish and Jesse lived in New Orleans for a couple years before moving to Seattle.) Trish ordered a King Cake for the occasion, and I don’t have the words to describe how much I love a good King Cake. I probably ate 5000 calories worth of King Cake that night.

The remainder of the weekend was basically just trouble. After the show with Trish, I met up with my friend Chelsia, and we went and we found trouble, because that is what we do. Sunday was also trouble. And I wish I could tell you guys more, but it turns out that some people in this world still care about their privacy, so I’ll do them the favor of not putting details on the Internet. But this pic sums it up:

Suffice it to say that I had a LOT of fun, and it’s nice to start the week in a happy mood for once.

Tonight my friend Will and I went to see our friend Jesse’s band play at the High Dive, a fun little bar in Fremont that always has live bands. Jesse had given me their CDs a couple weeks ago, so I had some time to get familiar with the music. (You can check out their band, Look Closer, on MySpace.) The show was fantastic, and my neighbors showed up to hang out too, so it was just an all-around good night. I swear I never used to go watch local bands when I was living in Los Angeles, but it’s just such a huge part of the culture in Seattle, and I constantly find myself at these very loud shows that I never would have bothered to attend when I was, like, 21 in LA, because how was anyone going to properly hit on me with the music blasting like that?

As we were walking out, Will — who’s just a couple years older than I am — was like, “I don’t mean to sound like a grumpy old man, but don’t you think that if you went to shows like this all the time you’d do permanent damage to your eardrums?” I almost fell over laughing. It was 11 pm and we were both sleepy. I like being a grown-up, though. I’ve embraced it. I don’t like looking older, but I do like being older. Thank God for plastic surgery. I plan to get lots and lots and lots. Anyway. Tonight was a great night — I feel like I was smiling or laughing the whole time. I absolutely adore the people I have in my life today.

I’ve found that after this last bout with craziness, I’m suddenly open to looking at a lot of issues that I was unwilling to look at before. Things that I’d blocked out and been entirely unwilling and unable to face, I’m all of a sudden like, “Let’s talk about this constantly with everyone who will listen. Let’s get it sorted out. Let’s go through it bit by bit, let’s look at all the shit that happened that I was never willing to think about or talk about or treat as the truth; let’s talk about it and face it and let’s try to get past it so I can get out of this holding pattern.”

It’s funny — people are always like, “Isn’t it weird having your whole life out there on the Internet?” It isn’t, really. It isn’t weird because it isn’t my whole life. It’s not even close. I keep a lot about my life private, strangely enough. There’s a lot of shit about my life today that I don’t talk about on the Internet — anyone who’s close to me can vouch for that — and there’s a lot of shit that probably defined me and continues to define me that I don’t talk about with anyone. I refuse to look at my certain aspects of my past as consequential. I just want it all to be gone and done and over. But I’m learning that that’s not the way things work, and that I probably have to sit there and sift through all that shit, to look it in the eye, to actually talk to people about these things and be like, “Yeah, this happened, and I can’t continue to ignore that it happened, and I can’t just mention it offhand and be like ‘OK now I talked about it and I’m done’ and expect it to really be done, so let’s fucking discuss it further.” I have to take the initiative to say to people “I need to talk about this and I need your help sorting through it.” That part has been extremely difficult for me, but, once I started asking, people started lining up to help in the most loving ways. Just really reaching out and coming up with ideas and making time for me. I have so many people who love me so dearly, and who want nothing more than for me to be healthy and happy. I’m not looking forward to this process, and I wish I didn’t have to do it at all, but I’m not especially scared, either; I’m suddenly really really willing to do it, whereas before I absolutely refused. So, ya know, fingers crossed for emotional growth! Hooray!

I am bummed about the results of today’s Massachusetts election, but, ya know, I like our whole democracy thing and so I will respect its results. But my former writer Wendie pointed out that this newly elected Scott Brown — the guy that destroyed the dem’s super-majority in the Senate and possibly derailed Obama’s plans for the rest of his term — is the father of one Ayla Brown, a former American Idol contestant.

Months after she was booted from Idol, Ayla released an album, and a single from that album came to my attention. I wrote this piece about it, just generally mocking the whole damn endeavor. Back then, Evil Beet was a relatively small blog. I can’t remember our exact numbers, but I’d guess it was somewhere around … oh … 500 readers a day?

Her father sent me an email. I didn’t reprint it back then, and I don’t remember why. This is what he said:

From: ”Brown, Scott \(SEN\)” <Scott.P.Brown@state.ma.us>
To: <theevilt@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 16:37:42 -0500
Subject: Ayla

Evil:  Read your review of Ayla’s CD.  It would be nice to listen to the whole thing before making a judgment.  It has been getting great reviews.  The sales have been low, but distribution with the 15000 that Walmart purchased got delayed.  The I-tunes sales and indy sales have been very positive.  We were very pleased with the results, especially because she did it in 6 days.  That’s all.  This is Ayla’s dad.  Privileged?  My wife wife and I have 4 jobs.  We call it hard work.  Scott Brown

So, you know, whatever. He wasn’t especially rude, nor was he especially helpful. He was just emailing the first two-bit blogger who so much as mentioned his daughter’s name.

I emailed a lawyer friend of mine, like, “Do I need to be nice to this douchebag since he holds political office?” My friend was like, “Nah, dude, he’s a state senator, that’s like a joke position.”

And now. And now ….

The world, it changes, in strange and beautiful and tragical ways. I love that about the world.