Sasha Is a Monster

17,000 views and counting since Jezebel republished my Kendra Wilkinson piece a couple hours ago.

This struck a chord with people.

It’s titled “So Do I Suck or What?: Why You’re Not the Only One Terrified of Startup Failure,” but it’s really relevant to anyone beginning any type of new journey in their lives.

And, if you’re so inclined, leave a comment! Or retweet! Or share on Facebook! Or do anything at all to indicate that it’s okay for me to write about my feelings on an entrepreneurship blog. Because I have no idea what else to write about.

Hi guys. Totes in a manic phase right now. Meds got fucked up blah blah blah. You’re tired of hearing it and I’m tired of writing it.

I noticed something today, though. I was at a hotdog stand downtown, and I was buying the hotdog, and I was like “Can you put ketchup on it for me please?” and the hot dog guy was like “The ketchup is right there.” He was pointing to a bottle of Heinz that was literally 6 inches in front of my face. I hadn’t even seen it. I’d been standing there for five minutes and I hadn’t even seen it. Then I asked him if I could have a soda. He said yes. I asked him what kinds they had. He laughed and pointed to an open cooler at my feet, overflowing with soda cans.

I’ve had these incidents all my life, to the point that they define me. My friends will happily tell you that I’m the ditziest smart girl they’ve ever met. Then they’ll laugh, because they mean it lovingly. But it’s always been frustrating for me. It does make me feel dumb. I miss things that are right in front of me. I never even think to actually look at them, to process their meaning. It’s embarrassing. And it happens most often and worst when I’m manic. I really noticed it this time. I looked around me. I hadn’t really seen anything. I’d stored nothing about what I’d seen. I’m interacting with the physical world only when absolutely necessary. My brain is limiting the visual input it processes, because there’s already too much shit bouncing around in there. It’s protecting me.

Years ago, a bunch of really smart doctors linked a bunch of electrodes up to my head and did three hours of testing, flashing lights and sounds and pictures at me. I slept through most of it. I was pretty fucked up at the time. They were trying to figure out why.

The results came in: “This was exciting for us,” they said. “You have the most normal brain we’ve ever studied. It’s nearly a perfect brain. There was just one thing … ”

And then they told me that I processed visual input much, much slower than the average person. Not that, like, I saw things slower, just that I processed the input slower. Like, half a second slower, which is a pretty giant gap in brain processing time. They showed me scans of normal brains and scans of my brain during visual input processing. They explained what the colors meant. “I don’t see slow,” I thought. “Have these people ever seen me play Guitar Hero? That’s ridiculous.” Then I cried a lot and demanded Jack in the Box on the ride home.

But I get it now. I see just fine, I just don’t process that input normally. With all that visual information getting processed at such a delay, my brain has selected only the absolutely crucial pieces to process, to store with semantic meaning. It’s why I walk into walls and break my toe, it’s why I can’t see the ketchup, it’s why I can’t figure out how to organize my kitchen, it’s why I still get really confused by toasters. “Haven’t you ever seen anyone make toast?” I get asked a lot during toaster incidents. And I haven’t, really. I have probably been in a room with, or even stood next to, someone making toast, but I wasn’t even close to capable of noticing what they were doing with the toast. If it wasn’t absolutely a priority for me, I wasn’t really processing it. It would have been too overwhelming to do so.

I don’t know how on earth you fix this, but it’s kind of a breakthrough. I’m not really a ditz or a klutz, I just really honestly truly didn’t see it. Not like everyone else did.

Kinda cool, right?

First off: Here are the pics from Roxanne’s wedding to a mythical giant named Mark. Seriously, I’m five-foot-seven. Her husband is enormous. The other people in these photos are my adorable little sister, my longtime friend Marc, and his fiancee Michelle.

On Saturday, we did Trisha’s baby shower! Thank you for all your baby shower game suggestions on Twitter and Facebook. What we ended up playing: the baby-food tasting game (everyone always does worse than they expect to do, and it’s hilarious!), a game where you have to name all the songs you can think of with “Baby” in the title (that was really, really hard — probably the only one of the games that didn’t go so well), and a celebrity baby-name-matching game that I made up (typical of me, but I thought it went really well).

Natacha made two INCREDIBLE casseroles — one a French toast casserole, and the other a vegetarian breakfast casserole. I’m going to hound her for the recipes and post them here. They were positively sinful. I made pink cupcakes with white frosting and the baby-to-be’s initials in pink icing. It is HARD to write three initials on one cupcake in icing. It was cute, though. As a gift from all of us, we got a copy of the baby’s ultrasound and put it in a simple Target frame with a bunch of white canvas around it. Then we had all the girls in the shower sign the canvas, put it back in the frame, and gave it to her to hang in the baby’s room or wherever she wants to put it to be reminded how much she and the baby are loved.

It was just so wonderful to sit around with all the girls and chat about life and babies and pregnancy. NOT THAT I WILL EVER BE PREGNANT. Trisha told me to watch this Ricki Lake documentary called The Business of Being Born, about maternity care in the U.S. I watched it, and it was brilliant and amazing and everyone should see it. It’s all about the beauty and importance (and relative safety) of a natural labor, without pitocin or epidurals or hospitals. It’s very moving and insightful and wonderful, and I will recommend it to everyone I know who gets pregnant, and then maybe one day I will watch it with the children I am going to adopt, because nothing that large is coming out of my vagina — not in a hospital, not in a bath tub, not anywhere, not in a million years.

to go back to a place much simpler than this /
cause after all the partyin’ and smashin’ and crashin’ /
and all the glitz and the glam and the fashion /
and all the pandemonium and all the madness /
there comes a time where you fade to the blackness /
and when you’re staring at that phone in your lap /
and you hoping but them people never call you back /

but that’s just how the story unfolds /
you get another hand soon after you fold /
and when your plans unravel /
and they sayin’ what would you wish for /
if you had one chance /
so airplane airplane sorry i’m late /
i’m on my way so don’t close that gate /
if I don’t make that then I’ll switch my flight /
and I’ll be right back at it by the end of the night /

can we pretend that airplanes /
in the night sky /
are like shooting stars? /

i could really use a wish right now /

somebody take me back to the days /
before this was a job, before I got paid /
before it ever mattered what I had in my bank /
yeah back when I was tryin’ to get into the subway /
and back when I was rappin’ for the hell of it /
but nowadays we rappin’ to stay relevant /
i’m guessin that if we can make some wishes outta airplanes /
then maybe yo maybe I’ll go back to the days /
before the politics that we call the rap game /
and back when ain’t nobody listened to my mix tape /
and back before I tried to cover up my slang /
but this is for the Cada, what’s up Bobby Ray /
so can i get a wish to end the politics /
and get back to the music that started this shit /
so here i stand and then again i say /
i’m hopin’ we can make some wishes outta airplanes.”

- B.o.B., “Airplanes”

Loving this song right now. It captures everything I need to hear.

Rap is such a fucking blessing. I love rap. When I was in college, a boyfriend — to this day one of the smartest people I’ve ever met — told me that rap was the closest thing our world had seen to Shakespeare since Shakespeare. I didn’t understand it at the time.

Rap creates brilliant, practiced poets and then it provides them a worldwide audience. I don’t know that there’s ever been another time in history that produced poetic talent of such excellence, and in these numbers. Because there’s never been a time in history where poetry was practiced so diligently by so many people.

Every single day this enormous mass of people congregates in elementary schools, in the projects, in bedrooms and living rooms, in cars and on street corners, and practices poetry. They start young. They give each other honest, sometimes brutal, feedback. They try again. And again. And again. For hours each day, every day of their lives — relentlessly refining and reimagining the skill of poetry en masse, the way the endless swarm of boys on Wall Street pore over financial statements and market cap and futures to erect and sustain the most powerful economy in the history of the world.

And even though being a poet for a living is a long shot, they keep at it. The best and the brightest stick with it, day after day, because, in many of these cases, they don’t see a better career option. They don’t abandon poetry to become advertising copywriters or newspaper journalists or management consultants or lawyers. In their mind, in their world, the poetry is their only shot. There is no safer route. There is nobody to tell them that there is a safer route. So they never stop practicing. They never stop sharing. They never stop taking feedback.

The best and the brightest — that handful of the millions with the sharpest gleam of genius about them, the ability to deconstruct a situation, an emotion, creatively and then, impassioned, communicate the results succinctly and spot-on — don’t go to college. They don’t get MBAs or go to J-school, and they don’t get recruited to work at Goldman Sachs or CNN. They don’t stop writing poetry every day because everything about it is tinged with a rusting air of angst, of ennui, of general uncoolness. Poetry is the coolest thing going on in their communities - often, it’s the only thing.

The result is a never-ending stream of exceptionally refined poetry distributed daily to an international, unimaginably enormous audience that is listening. That is paying and caring and providing further feedback. That loves it and wants more. That is recognizing the inherent beauty of language. An audience that is learning and growing from the wisdom passed along through poetry in a way they haven’t been able to do for centuries. Or ever, really, on this scale.

It totally rocks my world.