My friend Erin sent this to me today. I wrote this in fifth grade. 1992. Frankly, I would have expected something a little more impressive from a 10-year-old me. If I could go back in time, I’d tell her she disappoints me. I’d also tell her I’ve left $50,000 under the bed and she should invest it in a little tech company in the Pacific Northwest called Microsoft. Then I’d plan to go back to the current time and live in my giant mansion with my mini-ponies that I have decorated so that they look like unicorns, but my mansion and my mini-ponicorns probably won’t be there because that dumb 10-year-old can’t do shit. I mean, really, who can’t play a flute? Or was that your idea of a joke, Little Sasha? (You’ll get better at making jokes, dear, but most people won’t find them funny. That’s okay. You’ll know.)

It’s interesting, though, to read this rudimentary autobiography, penned fifteen years before I would build a company, a brand, and a primary source of income around a far more revealing and arguably over-stylized autobiography that I would write, in installments, over the course of four years using a medium that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist then.

She never would have guessed.

Let’s try to keep today free of any Donna Martin-related domestic violence, mmmkay?

(I swear the acting on this show didn’t seem so bad when I was growing up.)

I gave Josie a bath tonight. If you think this is bad, you should see the bathtub.

One of my clients for my new social media consulting gig is a high-end pet store. They’re gonna be all like “What should we do for social media?” and I’m gonna be all like “Post pictures of my adorable pets all the time” and they’re gonna be all like “That’s not an effective social media strategy” and I’m gonna be all like “Uhhhh I have an entire career that says otherwise.”

I’m too exhausted to get into all of it right now, but in the past two weeks I have traveled to Canada with two of my best friends; lost and traveled home to bury my grandfather’s wife, who was the closest thing I had to a grandmother as an adult; prepared and presented the first big demo presentation for CrowdMap, one of the tech projects I’ve been working for; wound up on CNN talking about Bristol Palin; attended and wrote about the privacy identity innovation conference, but not before instigating an international discussion on whether men should have to get rich; was approached with, interviewed for and accepted a new job; and hosted my father in Seattle for a week.

So, yeah, the second one. I was approached about a part-time job as a social media consultant with a social media firm based in San Fran (no, I’m not moving). They wanted someone quick, and so I actually went through the entire interview process while on vacation, and, by the time I returned, there was an offer in my inbox. That was very cool. I love the twists and turns my career takes. I mean, sometimes I hate them, and I’m envious of my friends who have clear career paths, clear goals, a metric of success. Meanwhile, I chose a “career path” that we, as a society, are still very much defining.

When blogging first picked up speed, everyone assumed the next step for successful bloggers would be for to write a book or to go get a “real” journalism job with a “real” media outlet. I wasn’t especially keen on either idea — and neither, it turns out, were most bloggers. We’ve moved in giant waves to a career title that I swear to God didn’t exist two years ago: “social media strategist.” It’s a fun way to take what I know about the social web, what I know about business, and what I know about technology and work with companies to use the social web to advance their business goals. I’m also very, very excited about the team I’ll be working with. I’m hopeful that we’ll get along well and I’ll learn a lot from them. Life looks very different now than it did two weeks ago.

I’m in Arizona, suddenly, because my Grandpa Sam’s wife, Ellie, passed away this morning. She was one of the brightest spirits I ever knew. Ellie refused to be anything she was expected to be. She had strong opinions and she wasn’t afraid to share them. When she sat next to me at family events, she’d occasionally turn to me with a dirty quip about the conversation at the dinner. Up until the past few months, when she became ill, Ellie always had a crystal clear read on any situation. She never had a “senior moment.” She knew what everyone in the room was doing, what they were thinking, how they were feeling, and what was likely to happen next. Nothing got past that woman, and she was never afraid to weigh in. I always hoped I could be that fearless when I grew old.

Encompassing the outspokenness, though, was a woman full of love and kindness. A woman who was always on my side, an unerring support system. She loved her children and her grandchildren dearly, and she died peacefully, surrounded by a family she created and nurtured.

I want to write a more thorough account of her life and its impact on me at a later point. Right now I still feel very numb. I think I’m still in shock. I loved and respected Ellie deeply, and I know the full force of the loss of her hasn’t hit me yet.

It was a strange day. I got home late last night from a whirlwind vacation with two of my best friends (I’ll write about this later). My mom called to say Ellie wasn’t doing well and they weren’t sure if she’d live through the night. There was nothing I could do at that point, so I went to bed.

The same night, my ex-boyfriend texted to say he was in Seattle for some meetings and he’d love to meet up. He is the last real boyfriend I had, and his unceremonious dumping of me four years ago kicked off the series of events that would result in every reason I cherish my life today. There was a lot of hard work and pain during the intervening years, though, and I like to think I’m approaching the point in my life where I am no longer making relationship decisions using the trauma of that breakup as a basis. (This is probably not true.) But I no longer have hard feelings toward him, and we’ve grown close as friends in the past couple of years, so I decided to meet him for lunch. It was the first time I’d seen him in nearly four years.

He was standing outside the restaurant, wearing a business suit, chatting animatedly on his cell phone while smoking a Parliament. I would recognize this man anywhere. Nothing has changed.

Half an hour into lunch, my sister called to tell me Ellie had passed. I needed to book a plane ticket, I needed to find someone to take Leo, and I still had two conference calls to be on that afternoon. So he came back to my apartment with me and helped me pack and clean. He had calls of his own to make, so I’m finishing up my packing, running around the apartment like a crazy lady, and Sean is in my living room, still wearing a full suit from his business meeting earlier in the day, following up on sales calls while smoking cigarettes and drinking Gatorade. We move around each other seamlessly. We predict where the other will be and what the other will need. The cats remember him. I can tell what type of call he’s on by the way his tone, his inflection, shifts. These tiny details about his salesman voice had just been sitting in my memory all these years, waiting to be accessed. It’s like no time has passed. It’s like no time has passed at all. It’s like he belongs in that living room. It’s like he has always been in that living room.

He runs me through a packing checklist. He stays calm and I do too.

He drives me to run some errands and drop off Leo, and then he drives me to the airport. We spend the time in the car talking, about his failed relationships and my own. About why. “You’re in your element right now,” he comments, referring to the professional success I’ve found in Seattle, since starting Evil Beet and leaving aerospace. “You would never have found this if you’d stayed with me. You never would have been happy.”

He’s right, of course.

“If we’d met when you were at this place in your life,” he says, “it might have been different. But now we’re both such different people.”

I laugh. Today, we’re both people terrified of commitment. We’re both people who have had our hearts broken after we trusted them with someone completely. We are both people unwilling to become truly intimate with anyone. We are both people who go through entire romantic relationships with one foot clear out the door. Neither of us was that type of person before we happened to each other.

We arrive at the airport. He carries my bag for me.

“I’m glad I got to help you today,” he says. And it doesn’t feel like my ex-boyfriend — the man I had every intention of marrying until he left, the man who turned my life upside down and shook it until it vomited — has reappeared in my life today after being gone for four years. It just feels like Sean is back, like Sean is taking care of me like Sean took care of me every day for years until we both made that impossible. It feels natural, and I don’t know why God set our paths to cross on this particular day, but I needed him there today. And I think he needed me there today too.

And he’ll go back home and we’ll both go on with our lives and neither of us is young enough to think that a second go-round at this relationship would actually produce better results. It wasn’t about that, really. It was never about rekindling an old flame, not for either of us. It was about remembering that an intimacy like that never fades. When two people spend years of their life operating as a single unit, the neural pathways they built around one another don’t decompose. Love like that doesn’t fade. The “in love” fades, but the love does not.

And so I guess that gives me some comfort in the loss of Ellie. She will never again appear in my living room. She will not help me pack and she will not drive me to the airport. She will not make phone calls. She will not watch her favorite reality TV shows and gossip with me about the characters. I will never again recognize her voice or her smile or her laugh as she sits next to me. But I will not lose the ability to do this. The person who is Ellie, everything about her that I recognized as unique, is stored at all levels of minutiae in my brain. She is in there and she’s not leaving any time soon. I would recognize her anywhere.

I wrote about Seafair last year. It’s a giant annual summer celebration in Seattle, and last year I had the most AMAZING time there, and I couldn’t wait to go back this year. Last year, my friends and I bought tickets to watch the Blue Angels and the hydroplane races from the land. It was perfect, but I remember hoping at the time that next year maybe I’d know someone with a boat so I could be on the water for it. I was envisioning a little ski boat or a small sailboat, and even that felt relatively out of reach.

So. Through a series of utterly unpredictable, sudden, and perfectly choreographed events, I watched the Blue Angels and the hydroplane races from a giant yacht this year. Like, even bigger than the one the pirates attacked. Three decks of total luxury, with bathrooms nicer and bigger than the ones in my freakin’ apartment, a fully-stocked kitchen, and a full-time crew (who were awesome).

It was pouring rain most of the day, but Seattleites still swarmed the lake, many of them spending the day soaking wet on boats without much shelter. One boat had a full band playing from it, and another had a giant blow-up penis at its bow. Every boat had its own energy, and the cumulative effect was palpable. People at the mansions on the water catapulted water balloons at the boaters. The boaters catapulted water balloons back. (Seriously, LOTS of water balloon catapults around here. Who knew?)

I got to jump off the deck of a three-story yacht into the water, through the rain, over and over again. I was the only girl to do it, but I watched the boys do it again and again and thought “When am I ever again in my life going to have the chance to do something like this?” So I just went for it, and I felt so connected and liberated in the process, and my heart raced for like twenty minutes after we finished.

The Blue Angels were incredible. At several points, you could actually see the sonic boom surrounding the planes as they approached the sound barrier. I’ve heard of that and I’ve seen still photos, but I’d never witnessed it. It’s fluid and explosive and lustrous, a wormhole opening up in the middle of the damp sky. With mach speed also comes the very strange sensation of knowing that you see something in one location while simultaneously being very sure that you hear it somewhere else, and then the striking realization that neither of these senses can be trusted especially.

The precision and sheer guts with which the pilots maneuver these planes is super-human, incomprehensible. The entire experience of watching them is humbling and awe-inspiring.

I just felt so fucking blessed all day. I kept thanking people. I kept thinking about myself at Seafair last year, and my seemingly unrealizable dream of being on a sailboat this year. If the universe had settled for what I’d asked for, I would have been cheated out of an experience that was so much bigger and more exciting than what I originally thought I wanted. It was a much-needed reminder that I’m always better off trusting the universe than struggling to engineer life to my demands. God always seems to send these reminders when they’re most needed.

I know I’ve been remiss in my blog-updating duties lately. My poor little hard drive died and had to go in to be replaced. Luckily I have been very responsible about backing up (go me!), so everything was fine and the Apple store helped me reinstall everything. It was weird not having a computer, even though now I have both my iPhone and my iPad to keep me company. But nothing’s quite like my precious baby laptop. I’m so happy to have it back!

I feel like crap today for some reason, and I’m not inspired to write much, so there’s a video above that I think anyone from my generation will find highly amusing.

Also: a federal court overturned Prop 8 today. That’s fucking awesome. The long arc of history curves toward justice, y’know?

Part 1 of the piece I wrote ran today. Part II runs next week, and it includes more insight into Monica’s life as well as more insight into marketing.

Per usual, I think it’s a good read for anyone, regardless of your industry or profession. You can read it here and, if you like it, give it a little Facebook “like” love.

To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style isnot; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’

I don’t encourage you to read the entire lecture, although you can do so here. Quiller-Couch, frankly, would have done well to murder one or two of his darlings.

The message is this: As a writer, you fall in love with certain passages, certain words, certain turns of phrase, or even certain characters that come about it your own writing. These are your darlings. They mean something, deeply, to you; for whatever reason, you just think they’re awesome. When you’re editing a piece, these are the passages that stay no matter what. You can find yourself building and rebuilding an entire piece around them. These are usually the parts that need to be deleted entirely. It’s just emotionally impossible to do so.

As a blogger, I don’t have to do a lot of darling-killing. I don’t have time to do a lot of darling-killing. Pieces get written, the “Publish” button gets hit, and life goes on. Blogging — especially around news subjects — is a fascinating form of writing, because it happens so quickly, with so little editing, and with essentially no word limit. As I’ve taken on different types of writing jobs lately, jobs where I have weeks to edit articles, to get them down to a max word count, to make sure all angles of a story are addressed, I find that the writing process for me is very different than in blogging. I find I have darlings. I find I don’t want to kill them. Sometimes I don’t when I probably should. Sometimes I think “This is my darling, and I won’t kill it,” when the voice in my head says “Kill your darlings.”

My career as a professional writer has been almost entirely as a news blogger. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written longer-form articles and stories for public consumption. I’d forgotten how much I still have to learn, how much I have yet to internalize, about the process, how hard it is to create darlings and then have to murder them.

This is what happened yesterday:

12:30 pm: Arrive to Trisha’s for her birthday party. Her baby is less than a week old. She was born in Trisha’s living room in a birthing tub after 32 hours of intense labor. Had she gone to a hospital, they definitely would have performed a C-section. It was important to Trisha to have a natural birth, so she stayed at home, endured the labor, and had the baby, surrounded by midwives (who kept a close eye on the health of both her and the baby) and her incredibly supportive husband. I have an immense amount of respect for the inner strength something like that takes. I can’t even imagine. I cry at pap smears.

Sunday, however, was Trisha’s own birthday. We came over and brought pie, vegan ice cream, vegan whip cream, and we all got to hold baby Aster, who is beyond precious, even if she doesn’t do much right now (sleeps, poops, eats). She can definitely hear you, though, and she can look in the direction of a sound. I am convinced she is a super-genius who will be President one day.

2 pm: Leave Trisha’s. I’m heading to Carillon Point with my friend Sara to go out on a ski boat with some friends. We went wakeboarding earlier in the week, and I’m excited to do it again.

3 pm: We leave Carillon Point on the ski boat. We’ve got about 10 people on board, five girls and five guys. We head out into Juanita Bay, but it’s too choppy to do much wakeboarding. We hang out on the boat and swim a bit.

6 pm: A giant yacht pulls into the bay and next to our ski boat. There are two men and a woman on it. The owner (we’ll call him The Baron from now on) starts waving at Sara. (This is pretty standard for when you go anywhere with her.) He motions to her “Two of you can come on board.” She looks at me, but neither of us is about to get out and swim over to a random yacht on our own. So the guys pull our ski boat over to the yacht, tie it up, and everyone boards the yacht.

The people on the yacht could not have possibly been kinder to us. The girl, Leanna, invites us all to come inside and raid the fridge. We do. The owner chats up Sara for awhile, and it turns out the other guy on board, John, knows a bunch of the guys from our ski boat through a mutual friend. Everyone gets along famously.

Leanna tells us she just separated from her husband of nine years after finding out he’d been cheating on her. “He’s out here in the bay,” she tells us. “He’s on a ski boat. We saw him earlier.”

8 pm: Our friends (from our ski boat) decide it’s time to leave. Sara is going to stay on the yacht to have dinner with The Baron, Leanna and John later. She was my ride, and the yacht is going to dock at Lake Union, which is a quick cab ride to my place. I decide to stay on the yacht with her. The rest of our crew piles onto the ski boat and pulls away.

8:02 pm: I’m hanging out on the bow of the ship with Leanna, Sara and John. I hear Leanna screaming something at a nearby ski boat. I figure it’s our ski boat and she’s yelling goodbye or something. She sounds angry, but I figure she’s just joking around. It takes me about 15 seconds to realize that she’s actually yelling a ski boat full of dudes, and I put together that her soon-to-be ex-husband is on that ski boat.

The two of them get really, really heated. She’s furious and so is he. He’s calling her a cunt and a slut and she’s hurling insults back at him. Sara gets involved and so do I, calling him an asshole and telling him to shut the fuck up and go away. (In retrospect, this was very bad judgment.) The guys on the yacht are not involved yet. I see Sara go around to the side of the yacht clutching her glass of champagne purposefully.

I suddenly know exactly how the next thirty seconds are going to play out, and I can’t do anything to stop it.

I run around to the side of the yacht just in time to see Sara throw her drink at the guy on the boat. Furious, he literally jumps from the ski boat onto the back of the yacht, where The Baron is standing. He starts trying to beat up The Baron. “I’ve got nothing to do with this,” he says calmly, which is true. Sara and I try to pull the ex off The Baron, without much success. Leanna comes to the back of the boat and gets involved in the struggle, and another guy from the ex’s ski boat is on board now, involved in the fight. John is still on the bow.

I see the ex head around the side of the yacht toward the bow. I know John is there alone, and he’s smaller than the ex, and I know this won’t be good. I run up to the top deck of the boat and slide down its glass panel to the bow just in time to see the ex punch John, put him in a neck hold and slam his head onto the rail of the bow. I push myself in between them. I don’t even remember who, but someone else winds up on the bow and helps me separate them. The ex runs back to the back deck.

I see heads bobbing in the water nearby. Our friends from our ski boat had seen what happened, turned their boat around, and now they’ve all jumped off their boat and are swimming over to help. They climb up the swim ladder, and suddenly there’s a 15-person brawl on this yacht, everyone punching and kicking, the women included. Sara is perched against the rail of the back deck, kicking the shit out of one of these dudes, and Leanna and the chicks from our boat are throwing punches. I try to pull Sara out of the struggle, screaming at the guy to stop hurting my friend. “Hold me up!” she says. I realize she doesn’t want to be saved from the fight; she wants leverage so she can kick harder. Ha. So I do what any good friend would do — I hold her up so she can kick harder. Meanwhile, Leanna’s managed to get a good hard punch to the side of her ex’s head while the rest of the guys are fighting him. In the space of two minutes, the yacht has turned into a pirate ship.

The Baron is on the top deck calling the cops, and the ex’s buddies realize they’re vastly outnumbered (and that what they’ve done is illegal) and start trying to convince the ex to calm down. They finally get him back on his ski boat and pull away. Everyone just stands there stunned — our friends soaking wet — trying to figure out what just happened.

“Are you okay?” I ask Leanna.

“Would you be?”

The Baron thanks our friends for their help, and they leave in their ski boat again. Another ski boat pulls up and helps us with our anchor, which has been caught in seaweed. “We watched that whole thing go down,” they say. “We pulled up in case you needed anything. We were ready to beat some fuckers up, but we’ll help with the anchor too.” The Baron gives them an bottle of wine for their trouble.

10 pm: We dock at Lake Union. It’s not the dock I expected it to be — it’s an industrial dock, one I’ve never seen before — and I realize I’m miles away from anywhere I can catch a cab. I call my neighbor Tim to come pick me up. Leanna tries to give him directions over the phone, but she’s too drunk to make much sense. I have no idea where we are, really.

“Just come to dinner,” says The Baron. I tell him my friend is on his way to pick me up. “Bring him too.” I give Tim the name of the restaurant, which is only a couple miles from our apartment building.

10:15 pm: Arrive at a fancy seafood restaurant that overlooks the Ship Canal. Tim’s waiting out front. He raises his eyebrows at me. “I can’t stay. I don’t think I can afford anything here. Do you want a ride home or what?”

“I have a feeling we won’t be paying. Stay.”

“I should really go.”

I grab his arm. “Trust me. Stay.”

The Baron orders a pricey bottle of wine, but it’s clearly not pricey enough — he’s also brought his own champagne from his private stash on the yacht. We tell Tim the story of the giant fight and he and The Baron hit it off. Leanna and I slip outside and smoke cigarettes perched on the back of The Baron’s Mercedes AMG, which the valet has parked right in front of the restaurant.

“I can’t believe we’re sitting on it,” I comment.

“I do it all the time,” says Leanna. “It just feels really badass.”

“Yeah. It does.”

11:50 pm: We finish an incredible dinner, and The Baron picks up the tab while the rest of us aren’t paying attention. We all say goodbye and part ways. The restaurant locks its doors behind us, and I realize we’d been the only ones there most of the time. They’d clearly stayed open late for The Baron.

Tim and I meet up with some of our friends at the D&H, a neighborhood dive bar. It’s literally one mile away from where we’ve just had dinner, but it couldn’t feel farther. “You must feel so weird being here right now,” says Tim, referring to the fact that I’ve spent most of the day on a yacht with a gazillionaire and am now in a dark bar with plastic furniture and $3 beers.

“Nah, I finally feel normal,” I tell him, and it’s true.