Sasha Is a Monster

I was chatting with a client the other day about her blog. She has an enormous Twitter following that loves her and her brand, but not a lot of content on her blog.

“I need to get the blog in shape, right?” she asked. “I mean, the blog should be the center of everything.”

I thought about it. “Not really,” I told her. “It’s shifting. The hub of a brand, more often than not, is its Twitter account or its Facebook page. Those can point to the blog when there’s important content there, but it’s perfectly fine to have your Twitter account be the center of everything if it’s working well for you.”

And I realized that was true. I blog less and less often now. I’m less and less interested in blogging. And part of it is just that I’m changing, things are changing for me and around me, and I’m less and less interested in publicizing my private life. In some ways, it’s been terrible, because writing is my outlet, and I haven’t felt much desire to do it lately. That’s bad for me.

I bought a piano. Not a real piano, but those keyboards they sell at Best Buy feel and sound damn near like the real thing. There’s something imperfect about it, though — something so different about sitting down at a keyboard versus sitting down at an actual piano that stretches out before and around you with strings that vibrate as you touch the keys, a way to connect with a way of making music — through the vibrating of strings — that stretches out before and around our lifetimes.

But you can’t plug a Bosendorfer into Garage Band on your Mac. (Acutally, at this point, you probably can.)

As a teenager, I played piano for hours and hours a day. I could read music — just barely — but mostly I’d just sit there and play, just play through my day, puzzle it out there at those keys, the ones that made a sound rather than a letter. I’m making a conscious effort to do that again, because I always, desperately, need an activity that focuses my brain and extracts the insanity. Writing has not been that activity lately. I don’t know why. It’s not that I have writer’s block — there’s plenty to write about — I just, well, I don’t want to.

I’m also ridiculously busy. Whenever my life feels slow, feels stagnant, my father says “Your life will get big again. Just give it time. It will get big again.” My life is big again. This is a blessing.

I built the piano myself. Well, not the piano, but its stand and its backboard and its bench. This sounds laughably simple, I know, but for me it was not. I wish someone could have been there to videotape the whole thing. Actually, if someone, anyone, had been there, it probably would not have been so laughable. They’d have had to interfere, to help. I’d liken their experience to that of a documentarian, videotaping a suicide. Do you interfere? Is that your role? Is it unethical not to? Is it unethical to? In these cases, the documentarian will almost always interfere — it’s just too absurdly painful not to do so. Likewise, any outside observer would have had to stop me. Would have had to say, three hours in, “Sasha, the screw goes in from the other side. That’s why you’ve been trying to screw it in, trying to hammer it in, trying to ply it in for two hours without any success. It’s because the screw goes in from the other side. Sasha.”

It’s starting to get cold and gray again in Seattle. I turned my heat on yesterday for the first time since summer. I’m delighted. Perhaps a bit manic, admittedly, but delighted nonetheless.

My life, if you want to see it, is on Twitter.

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 haven’t posted on here in awhile, I know. The past two weeks have been packed. I’m currently at one of those life viewpoints where you take a look around you, you survey the land, and you realize very little looks the same as it did the last time you visited, and you wonder what on earth happened, how, and when?

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 haven’t felt at all compelled to write lately, but I feel like I need to check in.

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.