Category — BlogHer Diaries

This is the first year since 2008 that I’m not going to BlogHer.  It feels very weird to be reading about everyone else getting ready to go and not packing myself.  I mean, I know the vast majority of people reading this blog experience that yearly.  But consider how odd you would feel if you were reading about all of your classmates returning to school, and you were staying home for some reason.  Wouldn’t you feel out-of-sorts?

The best way I can describe what it is like to be at BlogHer is to compare it to Alice’s foray into Wonderland.  You feel as if you’ve fallen through the computer screen, into a world with interesting people and good food and clean sheets (with maybe a little bit of fretting about home at the same time).  You’ll be talking to someone, and then their name tag will flip around and you’ll realize that this is the author of a blog you read, or you’ll strike up a conversation with the person behind you as you wait for an open stall in the bathroom, and you’ll end up finding a new favourite blogger.

There is an energy there, an energy that you can pocket and take with you out of the conference, which is a rarity these days.  Everything moves so quickly online that just when you think you’ve found your groove, everything shifts and you’re looking for it again.  But I walk out of that conference with blog ideas and project ideas and new things to add to my space or try out or people to partner with or book topics.  And that buzzing doesn’t die down the moment I step onto the plane; it’s a soft denouement that stays with me through the fall and into the winter.

So it’s weird to not be in San Jose this week.

I will be following along from home.  Reading the tweets and looking at pictures.  And joining the at-home Skype group (and you can too).  I’ll be celebrating some family birthdays and glad that I’m here to experience that.  And I’ll be planning to be back at BlogHer next summer.

But for everyone who is going this year, you’re so lucky.  It’s a wonderful experience.  Enjoy every second of it.

So it will probably shock no one who has read any other travel-without-my-family post (eg. the last six years of BlogHer) that I cried before it was time to leave.  I cried while leaving.  I cried on the plane (sorry about that, Mr. Businessman).  I cried when I got to my hotel.  I cried when I talked to Josh on the phone.  And then I cried a little more at night for good measure.  I woke up early the next morning to look at pictures of the kids for a half hour.  I am really terrible at leaving home at all, but I am so godawful-that-it-shouldn’t-be-allowed when it comes to leaving home without my family.  Freak show.

It will probably also not really surprise anyone that by the time the last day rolled around, I was crying at the thought of leaving everyone there.  I had gotten to hang out with these people whom I usually only get to speak to over the Internet.  And I met so many more new people, many of whom wormed their way under my skin with their stories.  It was very difficult to get in the airport shuttle and leave knowing that for many of them, it will be another year (if at all) until I see them again.

But you can’t be in two places at once.

Beyond the people — since, for me, BlogHer is always mostly about the people — I attended some of the best. panels. ever.  Literally — two of them were life changing.  One of them was the most brilliantly succinct presentation on turning blog posts into published articles by Rita Arens.  It was just a lot of good all-around writing advice.  The other was a presentation on disaster-proofing your blog by Skye Kilaen.  It really doesn’t matter if you learn how to do SEO or get sponsors if YOU LOSE YOUR DAMN BLOG.  It always shocks me how much time people spend pumping up their site and how little time they spend protecting it.  She gave the BEST presentation on quick things you can be doing to disaster-proof your blog, and that includes stopping scrapers.

[On a side note, if you want to read my Pathfinder presentations on publishing a book, you can read them here and here.]

So the community-led panels were great.  VOTY was obviously emotional.  Probably my favourite (if I could only make you read one) was “A Dislocation of Mind” by No Points for Style.  Read it, but know that hearing it read was even MORE powerful.  If that’s possible.

*******

Look, I’m just going to admit this here: I thought more people would be playing Candy Crush at BlogHer ’13.  I thought we’d all sit at the tables, playing Candy Crush while we listened.  There was a study once out of Sweden that found students who occupied their hands with knitting during class retained more than those who took notes.  So I sort of thought we’d go all Swedish and occupy our hands by playing Candy Crush while we listened, somehow memorizing everything that was said during the panels.

But no one played Candy Crush.

Isn’t that bizarre?

We all talk about playing Candy Crush, and yet no one was playing Candy Crush.  Except… I mean… me.  But only when I got to a room early and I was waiting for a panel to begin.  Or a round at night to relax (it’s like Jack Daniels… it takes the edge off).  I thought we’d all wink at each other, and yet I was only winking at myself.  Which looked a little pervy, since in order to look at myself, I had to look down.  Which meant I was winking at my own breasts.

*******

We got those new Jockey sizing cups in our conference bag.  After I held them against my breasts, I asked Josh what he thought I should do with them.

“Toss them… right?”

No, Joshua, you use them as a newfangled candy dish.

*******

I saw a mother and daughter together in the elevators.  The daughter was on her cell phone, ignoring her mother.  Her mother was watching her child tap things on the screen. (Was it Candy Crush?)  I thought to myself, one day, I am going to be at the conference with the ChickieNob.  We will eat M&Ms out of our bra sizing cup candy dishes together and share a tissue box at VOTY and take selfies of ourselves.  And if she ignored me like that, I would keep jumping in front of her and doing jazz hands.  That mother should have presented her daughter (and the rest of the elevator) with jazz hands.

*******

I have never packed anything special to wear at BlogHer (and it shows) with the exception of the time when I was part of VOTY and I wore garters and thigh-high black stockings with knee-high boots as part of my story about following Josh into the donation room at the fertility clinic.  But other than the bottom half of that get-up, I’ve never put a lot of thought into packing for BlogHer.  I tend to go for t-shirts and jeans.  Comfortable things.

This year, I felt very self-conscious of how I looked.  I sort of wish I had packed something nicer than a Batman t-shirt.

*******

So I took Ativan to get on the airplane.  I considered NOT taking it this time, but then knew that if we hit turbulence, bad things would go down for the people around me (arm biting, head banging, turning into a zombie ON THE PLANE and there wouldn’t be a Brad Pitt on board to stop me from zombie-izing everyone else).  Sure enough, we hit turbulence.  I thought I looked fairly calm.

When we landed, I turned to the man next to me and said, “I took Ativan before this flight, so when we hit that turbulence, I was totally calm on the outside, but I was screaming on the inside.” [I should add that I also like to overshare with strangers when I’m on Ativan.]

“Uh… you were also screaming on the outside,” the man commented.

“No, I was screaming to myself.  On the inside.  It was all in here.”

“No,” the man countered, “I was sitting next to you, and you were also quietly screaming on the outside.  It wasn’t that loud.  But it would definitely count as screaming.”

Who knew?

*******

Sheryl Sandburg asked us in her keynote: “what would you do if you weren’t afraid?”  And then she encouraged us to do that thing.

Mine was going to be “fly without Ativan.”  But I rethought that when I discovered that I scream even WITH Ativan.

So I’ve changed it to something better.

*******

When I got to the airport, there was a man crouching on the floor outside security.  He was hugging his child and crying as he pressed her head to his shoulder.  I tried not to stare.  I got into line with the rest of the people, inching toward the metal detectors.

When I got to the front, a twelve-year-old girl parted from her mother and grandmother who had walked her as far as they could take her.  When their fingers slipped away from each other’s hands, the girl burst into tears, her face contorted while the grandmother told the mother that the girl would be okay.  The girl nodded at those words while she cried hard, sobbing while she put her items in the handy plastic bins.

I’m not the only one who has trouble with goodbyes.  It’s nice to sometimes be surrounded by your own.  Hence why I go to BlogHer each year.

I am at a conference where people are in a constant state of trying to convince me of things, and I mean that in the most positive of ways. It is almost all good advice, and it’s floating around me, waiting for me to suck it up like a sponge. It ranges from the amorphous (speak up for yourself) to the concrete (pitch to periodicals like this).

There are two ways of presenting an idea, and I realized at the conference that only one way is palatable, at least, to me.

A person can be pro something without demeaning the other choices not taken. I can choose chocolate and simply say that it’s a flavour that works for me while still leaving room for you to choose vanilla without feeling as if I’m looking down at all other ice cream choices.

Or a person can take the weaker route and put down the competitive product or idea in order to try to grab strength for their own. I can choose chocolate while mocking vanilla as well as the people who choose vanilla. And now, if vanilla had been on your mind, you feel like shit, not focused on how maybe you should consider chocolate but rather how you feel about how I’ve spoken about vanilla.

I listened to both approaches yesterday. In one, a person gently led me towards her ideas, being respectful that in being very much pro her way of doing things that she wasn’t anti any other road not taken. And in another, a person shoved me towards ideas, carelessly alienating people who may have been open to the ideas, and they did this by being anti the roads not taken in order to be pro the single chosen option.

Just an observation that the message of the latter person was lost on me. The message of the former person not only got through but will likely be repeated to others.

It’s funny how that works.

Sometimes when you come to a big conference aloneness feels like anathema. Everywhere you turn, people are standing in groups, sitting in groups, moving in groups. But I’m not a big group person. I’m a one-on-one person. I’m a handful of people person, preferably meeting in a quiet space. Sometimes I’m a solitary person.

I chose to spend my first day at BlogHer alone. The conference hadn’t begun yet, but I was in Chicago with 10 hours of uninterrupted free time. I got coffee and sat by the river reading. Then I went up to my room to Skype with Josh and the kids. And then I took myself to dinner, reading To Kill a Mockingbird at the table. Finally, I went back to the hotel room to read and watch a movie on the iPad in my pyjamas. There was a big fireworks display that started inexplicably at 10:30 pm.

If I can’t be with Josh and the twins, being alone is the next best thing sometimes. I really love going out to dinner by myself. I like asking for a table for one and then setting my book on the table beside me.

I usually like myself, so I guess it makes sense that I like being alone with myself.

Though there have been times in my life when I haven’t liked myself very much and I needed to be around other people just to not be alone with myself.

I like now better than then.

Though, of course, there are some people who like themselves and thrive in big groups, and others who dislike themselves but still prefer their own company to everyone else’s company.

Do you like eating alone in restaurants too?

I am going back to Chicago for BlogHer.  Every time I’m in Chicago, I have this overwhelming urge to jump on a bus and go out to Madison, Wisconsin.  Isn’t that strange?  It’s almost as if Chicago only exists as a portal to take me someplace else; even though I didn’t get to Madison last time I was there in 2009, and I won’t get there this time either.

I’m doing Pathfinder Day again, which I’m super-excited about because I love talking about books and publishing.  The day also has a tendency to make a very large, very overwhelming conference feel cozy and small.  I’m also going to be conducting a one-on-one interview with Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of Health and Human Services, so stay tuned for that post.  I’m really excited to get to talk about the Affordable Care Act with her, and if you have questions you’d like to float my way, I’ll try to ask them if I have additional time.

And then there is the main conference, which is always part amusement park and part school and part reunion and part speed dating session.  I have a lot of panels that I’ve marked down to attend (and feel free to grab my notes from them). I am excited to see ALI bloggers, and I’m excited in advance to meet anyone I meet.  It’s sort of like ordering Pad Thai from your favourite restaurant (those are the ALI bloggers) and the place throws in a random extra container of Pad See-aw (those are all the random people I meet).  You weren’t expecting the extra dish, but it’s delicious, as is the Pad Thai.

This is my sixth BlogHer.  Six BlogHers!  I still get weepy before I have to leave.  I was re-reading what I wrote the last time I left for Chicago, and I could have written it today:

I felt this overwhelming roll of sadness that started behind my eyes and moved down over my heart. Stilling me. I wanted to go and I didn’t want to go. I woke up several more times in the night, each time untangling my brain by reminding myself that I would be leaving in 6 hours. I would be leaving in 3 1/2 hours. I would be leaving in 2 hours.

The twins had a hard time separating this morning and I had a hard time separating this morning and I went to the plane feeling like I should be in two places at once. And then I took Ativan so I could board the flight without flipping out and then the Ativan kicked in somewhere over Ohio, and I felt calm with the idea that I was thousands of feet above the earth and again, this overwhelming sadness to be away from the twins that felt like it was crumpling up my inner layers. As if the inner layers had pulled away, lost their adhesion to the outer wall of the body, and now were crumpling and twisting and crunching themselves down.

I sound like a flaming nut-job.

I am a flaming nut-job, but I own that.  I’m a person who doesn’t love to leave home.  Ever.  And much less so when I have to do it without Josh and the twins.  But I really love BlogHer.  I don’t go to the parties, I don’t work with sponsors, I don’t get cool swag, I don’t even use my free drink tickets.  But I have an awesome time; just being with friends and meeting interesting people.  And then I get to come home and tell my family all about it.

So I’ll talk to you from Chicago.  And let me know if you have additional questions for Secretary Sebelius.  And if you are going to be at the conference, look for me.  I’m much shorter than you think, so look low.