Category: RealPlayer SP

Down Vests

Posted by Sasha – November 21, 2009

Normally on Fridays I’m home on my couch, never to be moved until Monday, by 6:30 pm. I honestly cannot remember the last time I went out on a Friday night in Seattle. The answer may be never. But today was a completely awesome day.

It started out at the office, where we’ve been celebrating 100 million RealPlayer SP video downloads all week. It’s a big deal around these parts. Here’s my friend Lacy and I posing at one of quite a few celebrations from this week:

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Do you guys see what I am wearing? Mismatched denim and plaid. I look just like Lacy, who has lived in Seattle forever. With the onset of winter, my fashion sense is rapidly taking its cues from Seattleites. More on that later.

Today Lacy released the video I told you about. I think she did such an amazing job with it. It’s uber-cute. Chelsia and her gangsta chin-jut are at 0:30 and my head-banging is at 0:37:

After work I did some grocery shopping and some tanning (I know, I know, it’s terrible for my skin, but I swear to you it keeps me sane in this weather) and then went to meet my friend Kat for restorative yoga. I’ve blogged about it before, although this class was only 75 minutes as opposed to the three-hour ones I love. I was so excited for restorative yoga — where you find comfortable, “delicious” poses and hold them for 10-15 minutes while you breathe deeply and meditate. It’s just pure relaxation. I was looking forward to it because my legs muscles and my shoulder muscles are ON FIRE from the gym workouts I’ve done this week and then from dodgeball. I just needed to re-center my body without adding stress to my muscles. Unfortunately, our usual teacher was sick and we had a sub, who was like, “Yes, I know this is a restorative yoga class, but I think some light hatha flow work is also restorative.” So instead of spending an hour and fifteen minutes on my back, breathing and meditating, I was doing squats and down-dogs and basically all the exercises that would be most excruciating to my already excruciating muscles.

While I was disappointed, it’s good that the situation forced me to take a class with another yoga instructor. Normally I will not take anything if Lisa’s not teaching it, because Lisa is amazing and a yoga goddess and probably also my guru, but it’s nice to hear about yoga from someone completely different. I learned a lot from our substitute teacher, who clearly knew his yoga shit, and I was able to approach the practice from a new angle.

Afterward, I had dinner with Kat, and she’s one of those amazing girlfriends with whom I always just feel at ease. I can tell her things honestly — I can be vulnerable. I can tell her thoughts and feelings I have that I’m ashamed of, because they’re so silly and yet they consume so much of my thought space, and she puts it all in perspective for me. It’s so important to have friends in your life where you can do that, where you can say “These are the things that are wrong with me, this is the totally stupid and unwarranted resentment I’ve been carrying around toward some person I haven’t seen in two years, and here is a list of my insecurities,” and then they respond and you don’t feel judged. You don’t feel like they’re trying to act superior or prove that they’re smarter. You don’t feel that they will use your trust to betray you later. You just feel like you have a friend, a confidante, someone who can help you carry these things so it’s not all your burden, someone who can help you see the irrationality in your thought process, and someone who can just keep listening until you’re through it. I guess I’ve always had those friends. I’ve just been unwilling to open up to them, to show weakness. I had so much ego around the whole thing. But it’s something I’ve learned how to do just in the past three or four years, and I wish I’d learned it earlier. It makes life so much easier when you allow yourself to trust your friends.

After dinner, I did something I never ever do on a Friday night — I went out in Belltown. I put on makeup and brushed my hair and decided I was going to be a scenester. Starting with some amazing peeps I met at the Twitter conference, I’ve kind of been introduced to a whole different crew out here in Seattle, and I’m really impressed with them. They’re social media superstars, and all of them have a third-standard-deviation mastery of writing and web technology and marketing and just generally being a freakin’ blast to hang out with. Hanging out with them is also a really good way to keep my ego in check, and to practice humility. Their accomplishments and their skill sets are remarkable. I ended up meeting so many impressive people tonight, and having so many fantastic conversations, and my ass stayed out until nearly 1 am. On a Friday! I never do that. Anyway, see how much fun:

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And look what I’m wearing here: a down vest. Let me tell you, that shit works. It was freezing and I kept my ass warm in this thing. I’m officially a Seattleite. I love my down vest, and I love Seattle.

Novel Ideas

Posted by Sasha – November 18, 2009

My rain disappeared. :( It is supposed to be back in the morning, but we’ll see about that.

But today was a pretty decent day, all things considered. I got up and took Leo to doggie daycare. Ever since I’ve been feeling better, I’ve been taking him to doggie daycare every day for at least a half-day, because it’s hard in a Seattle winter to give your dog the exercise he deserves. It’s just too cold and rainy and gross to go to the dog park with any regularity, and when I was sick he never got to go outside for more than a couple minutes at a time. So now it’s daycare every day. He gets to spend the day playing with his friends and I get to watch him on the webcam. I was talking to my best friend, explaining to her that I call the daycare to complain when my dog is not in the camera’s field of vision, and she almost peed herself laughing. She was like, “You are going to be such a nightmare when you have human children.” Indeed. I CANNOT WAIT.

I made it into the office for a little while, which is always exciting, but it was super fun today because my friend Lacy, who runs the RealNetworks corporate blog, is doing a cute promo thing for our new RealPlayer where she had RealPlayer fans submit videos of themselves saying “I’m a RealPlayer,” and she’s going to compile it all into one montage. She got a bunch of hilarious videos, but she also wanted to get some footage around the office to intersperse with the fan vids. She and our other coworker Oona stopped by my office, and we tried a bunch of really wacky ideas out. I’m pretty sure we eventually settled on using a clip of me head-banging. I can’t wait for you guys to see it, it’s pretty hilarious. Then we grabbed Chelsia and she did about the funniest gangsta chin-jut I’ve ever seen while exclaiming that she was a RealPlayer.

I also had a fantastic conversation with my boss, who somehow understands me better than damn near anyone else in my life. He’s been like that since almost the first time I talked to him. He just kind of saw through me, and he’s so brilliant at pointing things out to me that I didn’t even notice about myself. I get frustrated with him a lot, and I throw hissy fits at him semi-regularly — it’s a goddamn miracle I haven’t been fired yet — but that’s probably just because he’s always right, and he’s my favorite sounding board in the world.

I’m just having a really hard time writing this novel. I haven’t written fiction in a long-ass time — I was a different person the last time I wrote fiction, just an operationally different human being — and it’s very hard to get back into it. There’s a lot of fear. I realized a while back that I can’t write a non-fiction book; I am in no way emotionally ready. Not even close. Perhaps I never will be. I’ve started a non-fiction book about 100 times and after writing a chapter or two I always wind up a sobbing, hysterical mess of a thing, and I’m like, “Sasha, this is not worth it.” Which is true, and I respect that. It’s one thing to come on here and talk about my day, but it’s another entirely to backtrack through my life and relive how and why I am who I am today. There’s a lot of strength in that story, but there’s also a lot of hurt, and I’m just not equipped to revisit it honestly right now.

But I think that a lot of the message I want to carry can be told via fiction, and so I’m really excited about doing NaNoWriMo, and I’m 15,000 words in so far. I don’t have the emotional break-downs I had trying to write non-fiction. It’s quite the opposite: I cannot get emotionally invested in the book or in the characters. I’m not writing from the heart; I’m writing as an outside observer, so it’s dry and boring and it’s cheesy. There is so much fear in my way. I can’t get through the fear to hear my voice. And that’s always been what makes my writing strong — not the incredible plotlines I devise, but the voice. Without that, any fiction I write is utterly mediocre at best. Maybe I just have to finish the book — so that the fear of creating the plot is gone — and then I can go back and write in the good parts? That doesn’t seem reasonable, either. But finishing this stupid book is a goal I set for myself, and I’m really big on achieving goals when you set them, so I’m praying for God to please remove the fear so that the rest of this process does not have to be as painful as the start of it has been. I have to trust that God is guiding this process. I know I have it in me to do this. I just have to start talking about it, and start approaching the problem from different angles, and — sigh — writing about writing, which I fucking hate. But anyway. Today I started talking about it with my boss, and it made me feel a little better, like I had a little more insight into it. Which is why I’m now blogging about it, and why I’ll be talking about it a lot more.

And suggestions about the writing process are welcome in the comments. :)