Category — BlogHer Diaries

By the second session of BlogHer10, I was exhausted.  My nervous system felt inflamed from the constant stream of people, the constant stream of information, the constant stream of opportunities rushing by you at any given moment.  You could turn in this direction and speak to this person who just may write the blog that will change your whole life, or you may turn in that direction and meet a food blogger who will pass along her pie crust recipe.  You just don’t know.

And the choices, the endless choices of which sessions to attend and where to sit and how long to talk and what to do with your day is the best and worst part of the conference.  Because you can’t really go wrong–all the roads take you somewhere–but it is easy to start walking down one path and wonder what is on all the roads not taken, and somehow miss the path you are on entirely because your focus is elsewhere.

It is an ongoing process of reminding myself to stick to the road I’m on.  To take what I need.  To enjoy myself rather than trying to do everything.

New York is a strange city for me.  It was one of my retreats during graduate school, but I can’t really say that I love the city.  I’m not a New York person.  Plus, I find my figurative battery draining the second I get through the Holland Tunnel.  By the time I hit midtown, I’m a puddle on the floor of the bus.  I literally can’t comprehend how I’m going to do anything beyond lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling.  No other city drains me like this one.

And, at the same time, I am having a lot of fun.  I spent Thursday night at two parties.  The first was one for BlogHer editors.

Devra at Parentopia

Devra from Parentopia and Sarah from Sarah and the Goon Squad

Laurie from LaurieWrites

Minnie, Deb, and Genie

Liz and Me

Suzanne and Paula

Sarah talking to Erin’s Head

Talking to Erin’s Head

Honeybeast and Devra

Devra’s weird shoes…

AV and the butt plug shoes

AV Flox

After dinner, I went over to Alexa’s hotel room to celebrate the release of her book, Half Baked.  The book looks incredible and I can’t wait to read it.  We stood out on the wrap around balcony and admired the city below, and I felt awfully small amongst the enormous buildings and endless lights.  We ate cupcakes.  We met up with friends.

City lights

Look at those lovely books.

Alexa!

With Heather

Kate talking with Amy

Heather

We returned to the hotel and met up with Lori and her sister, sharing a single cupcake well into the night that I completely missed photographing for the Cake Extravaganza (and an enormous thank you to the people who participated so far).  All in all, a lovely evening.  Next post–onto the sessions, the ALI lunch, and beyond.

Kicking off my pre-travel day to BlogHer with a post about unplugging. Which is sort of strange because I am not only shlepping a laptop, camera, and Flip video with me so I can document my experience at the conference, but I am bringing a USB modem so I can have Internet every second of the day.

Sometimes when I travel, I bring my own coffee and that seems to be a tip-off that there is an addiction.  The inability to trust that coffee will be obtainable at the travel location, the need for the caffeine level that comes from my beans.  And bringing a USB modem reveals that Internet addiction.  There will be WiFi at the hotel.  And yet I still bring my own Internet access with me.  Addiction.

Which is why I was drawn to Gwen Bell’s July experiment.  She partially unplugged for the month; only partially because her work is online and this wasn’t a desire to leave work behind, but instead, to find that balance between the online world and the offline world.  So she shut off Twitter, she set limits to checking email, she stopped writing blog posts.

The link will take you to her first dispatch after the end of her digital sabbatical.  It’s a fascinating read.  She starts out writing Tweets on paper so she can still feel that documentation high, and she ends with seeing the beauty of life slowed down and the pressure of immediacy removed.  Which I assume is a lot like a self-hosted blog vs. a free Blogger blog.  They may not look all that different to the outsider or reader, but for the blog owner, it is a completely different process and emotion.

It is a very interesting read.

I would think the largest benefit that can come from filtering out all the noise of the Internet is creating a space where you can find your own comfort zone. I say this as someone who has only unplugged for about a week at a time.  Which isn’t really long enough to learn the lessons Gwen did during her digital sabbatical, but I’m also probably not online as often as Gwen.

There is so much we do because we think we should: emails we send, Tweets we make, sites we join, conferences we attend (hey!)…and sort of most important–stuff we write that we post without knowing how comfortable we are with sending it out there.  I don’t have a lot of regrets, but I do have some.  There have been times that people have trespassed into my comfort zone simply because either I didn’t state the boundaries clearly or I didn’t even know them myself.

I have always been fairly circumspect online and try not to post things I think will bite me in the ass later.  I try not to hurt people’s feelings online; sometimes I’m successful with that and sometimes I’m not, and sometimes, I frankly can’t own the hurt feelings because I will never be able to please everyone else while remaining true to myself and my own thoughts.  There are things that are true now, which I may reconsider in the future and don’t want this Google-able opinion documented for years to come.

But even knowing these things–feeling grounded in these beliefs–it is too easy to ignore what you know you should do for what you think you should do.  Because one part of that addiction is that the pressure is so great.  It’s not even a true pressure of dealers offering you a free taste so you’ll buy the whole bag; it’s a self-created pressure that we believe with our whole heart even if we know that it’s not based in rational facts.  After all, as much as we may be jealous about Twitter relationships we perceive between people or how much traffic we think another blog has, we rarely know the full picture.  Our pressure is based in assumptions.

Raise your hand if you signed up with Twitter or Facebook because you were interested in Twitter or Facebook.

Now raise your hand if you signed up for Twitter or Facebook because you saw that a lot of other people were on there who you admired and you didn’t want to get left behind.  Or you signed up because you heard it was a great way to promote your blog posts and you’re frustrated by the lack of traffic it has brought.  Or you signed up and hate it because you can see that thousands of people are following so-and-so, and 10 are following you and YOU ARE 20 TIMES MORE AMUSING THAN SO-AND-SO, but you also can’t leave Twitter because 10 followers are better than the “no followers” you would have if you closed your account.

Do you see what I mean about Internet addiction?  I liked Gwen’s first update and look forward to reading the rest because as she says, doing the experiment sort of only matters if you take lessons learned and keep using them.  I’m dragging her thoughts as well as my own into the conference, and trying to spend a lot of time thinking and listening as I meet up with old friends and new.

Where would you rate your Internet addiction and how much does it inform your choices on how you spend your time on the Web (as well as what feelings–jealousy, anger, sadness, love, gratitude–remain with you after you’ve logged off)?

I did this last year, and since there will be many more ALI bloggers at this conference and in New York, I thought I’d write up a new version since, you know, people change.  So if you meet me in New York this week/weekend…

I am nervous too. I know, it’s sort of crazy to admit that because I have (1) been to three BlogHer conferences by now and (2) know about fifty people or so who are going semi-well, and (3) talk to a lot of you via email. But I am pretty shy in large crowds or small.

I am shorter than you think. Even people who have seen me in pictures next to other people always seem a little surprised by my height.

Though I photoshop it out before posting pictures of me on my blog, I have an eye patch and a parrot surgically implanted onto my shoulder (actually, his feet are implanted into my shoulder and the rest of his body hovers slightly above me). It’s my right shoulder, which is why I lean heavily to the left.

When I am nervous, I write things like that because I can’t think of another way to describe myself.

And then I keep them on the list the next year running even though it wasn’t really funny the first time around.

I will try to hug you. I may even try to kiss you. I will most likely cry. If any of these things make you uncomfortable and you still want to talk to me, you may want to approach me with hands raised. This is a good indicator to me that you do not like to be hugged, smooched, or cried upon.

I have no clue what I’m wearing, but it probably won’t be remarkable.  Other people are writing about their shoes and clothes and accessories, and while I would love to have some sort of style, I tend to lean more towards boring, comfortable outfits.  So I probably won’t impress you with my unremarkable wardrobe and lack of make-up.  But hopefully, my personality will be a large enough accessory.

I am going to a few of the parties this year.  In the past, I’ve sort of avoided the parties, but this year, I am going to them at least for a short period of time.  I am also not grabbing the same amount of swag I grabbed last year.  There is a lot of swag to be found, but we’re sort of in a mental space where we’re reducing rather than adding.  Unless it’s an iPad.  Ooooh, I want an iPad so badly.

BlogHer is massively overwhelming — it’s a lot of people and a lot of sound and a lot of things to remember and a lot of information.  I love meeting people there, but more so, I love keeping in touch afterward. So please give me your card. Or follow me on Twitter. Or let me know that you subscribed to the blog’s rss feed so I can return the favour.  If we already know each other, this obviously doesn’t apply to you because I will already be hugging and kissing you.  But I love meeting new people and then going through the cards when I get home and adding new blogs to my Reader.

I don’t use the kid’s names. I call them the ChickieNob and Wolvog at BlogHer too. I will miss them a lot and will probably cry if you ask me about them.  Which is not to say that you can’t ask me about them, but it’s just an explanation for why snot will be dripping out of my nose a few minutes later.

The easiest way to reach me during the conference is email.  I tend not to hear my phone when I’m at home in our quiet house, so it’s even less likely that I’ll hear it during the conference.  I also do not have text messaging on my phone.  But I generally have the computer open the whole time so I can get emails quickly.

You will probably quickly understand when you see me at the conference that the way I get so much done during the day is coffee, coffee, and coffee.

Um…those are probably the main things you need to know.  Anything else you’d like to know that I haven’t covered?  If you have done one of these posts because you’ll be at the conference or NY, please leave a link to it in the comment section below so I can read yours too.

Oh…and this is me:

And don’t forget (and yes, I am posting this daily): Friday is the 200th/300th Friday Blog Roundup cake extravaganza.  On Friday, upload a picture of a piece of cake (and don’t get hung up on the words “a piece of cake” — if you want to bake a whole cake or celebrate with an oreo or simply walk by the bakery and take a picture and not put anything in your piehole, it’s all good) and then link to your blog post using the linky function that will be in the Friday Blog Roundup.  It would be lovely if you wrote something about what community means to you.  Why you love being part of the ALI community, and how you feel when you read a particularly satisfying blog post.

Photo credit: Mary Gardella at Love Life Images.

The one thing the Fords do very well — I would even say, exceptionally well — is travel.  We are a traveling machine, able to visit places we’ve never been to efficiently, diverging easily from our daily schedule, and generally sucking the marrow out of every experience. Our specialty is beaches — we have all beaches down to a science — but we are equally impressive with amusement parks.

Whereas other families get bogged down in the noise and crowds of the amusement park, get stuck with that deer-in-headlights sensation surveying the enormity of choices, have kids fall apart because they are being fueled by cotton candy and ice cream, the Fords sail through the park with a strategy for attacking rides and meals.  We get there when the park opens and we stay until the last ride shuts down and along the way, we take that park for everything its worth while spending very little money or parts of ourselves in the process.  We call this process “Jiffy Lubing” and refer to ourselves as the well-oiled machine.  We can withstand high temperatures and lack of sleep and poor food choices all in the name of chasing fun.  And by G-d, my family catches Fun and throttles her in a big bear hug.

But somehow, our figurative roller coaster went off the tracks this summer.

Disney was perfect — Disney, with its high humidity and above 100 degree temperatures was fine.  The kids rolled with midnight bedtimes in order to see the parades and stood in long lines for short rides with patience usually unseen in five-year-olds.  When we came home from Disney, life somewhat imploded and the kids rolled with that too, helping me keep this insane pace of work and swim lessons and packing.  Our reward was going to be a small amusement park in Pennsylvania; an old-school, Amish-themed, please-dress-modestly, amusement park.

We’ve been before and the kids love it, so this should have been a cake-walk.  Our first day went well, and I even conquered my fear of the Sky Ride with the help of the Wolvog, who stroked my arm and whispered how proud he was of me while I pretended I was anywhere but over the park (he also told me he would buy me an iPad as a bravery prize, which I am totally holding him to).  But the second day can only be described as a goat rodeo, the sort of day that required several family meetings and had me calling Lori outside the park in tears.  Instead of sucking the marrow out of the park, the park sucked the marrow out of us.

That night, I had a dream that Kymberli and I rented a house on the beach, a single-room glass-walled house a few meters from the ocean.  In my dream, I was pointing out why I wanted to keep visiting this house for the rest of my life.  It was beautiful, the location was perfect, it came with blogging friends.

I think this summer has kicked the collective Ford ass, and the tantrums at the amusement park were simply the embodiment of all the stress we’ve been under as well as looking forward to stress-to-come.  I think we have all lost our Mojo — that necessary energy that turns us into travel machines or leaping blogging buildings in a single bound.  I know I have felt wilted as I crawl towards BlogHer, this event I look forward to all year.  And the kids certainly showed how wilted they are at the amusement park.

I may not have shown it by slowing down on posts, but I have certainly not felt my usual energy.  I have felt quiet, discombobulated, isolated all summer.  I have not felt a part of things.  I’ve felt like I’m here and not here at the same time.  I think the dream was about BlogHer, about finding my friends within perfect surroundings and recharging.  I always associate the beach with letting go and plugging back into necessary energy — perhaps I was a mermaid in a past life.  And while it’s a lot to put on a little conference, I am looking to use this time in New York to find new people to read, and find my mojo and new projects in the process, but more, to plug back into community and reconnect with friends.

If you’ll have me.

I will be blogging about the conference (as well as posting pictures and video) under the BlogHer Diaries tag.  If you want to follow along from home, please use that category heading from the dropdown menu on the left sidebar since other, non-BlogHer posts will probably be scattered in between.

And don’t forget: Friday is the 200th/300th Friday Blog Roundup cake extravaganza.  On Friday, upload a picture of a piece of cake (and don’t get hung up on the words “a piece of cake” — if you want to bake a whole cake or celebrate with an oreo or simply walk by the bakery and take a picture and not put anything in your piehole, it’s all good) and then link to your blog post using the linky function that will be in the Friday Blog Roundup.  It would be lovely if you wrote something about what community means to you.  Why you love being part of the ALI community, and how you feel when you read a particularly satisfying blog post.

Blogging about blogging is about as interesting as getting stuck at a bed & breakfast meal table with a couple in matching vacation outfits who have over 300 stories saved up about their poodle back home (complete with blurry pictures captured on their iPhone). But here I am, still discussing why we blog/comment because people keep bringing up great points that scream out for further conversation.

Apologies.

When I asked on Friday whether desiring comments was Wicked, I left it as an open question. With Gentle vs. Wicked blogging, we’re looking entirely at the intention behind the act–it’s not the act itself (writing or commenting or acknowledging comments or reading) but why you do it. So is desiring that someone leave you comments Wicked?

My feelings is that it’s not wrong to desire response, to crave response, to need response–I think it feeds into who we are as human beings. When we write in a journal that we keep in a drawer next to the bed, we don’t expect people to give us feedback on our thoughts. When we send them out there into the blogosphere–publicly–knowing full well that they could be read by anyone, we do indirectly state that we are looking for feedback, advice, comfort, accolades. After all, if you didn’t want that, you could disable the commenting feature on your blog (and some do). You could make your blog private and give no one access (simply an online version of your private journal). But when you don’t, there is a basic understanding in the online world that this person wants thoughtful feedback.

And by thoughtful, I mean that most of us don’t leave that comment box open because we’re hoping that someone will say something cruel or thoughtless to us. We expect that if we took the time to earnestly state something important to us, that others will treat our words with enough respect to use the comment box thoughtfully.

N from Two Hot Mamas made a fantastic point about craving comments on Friday’s post: “I don’t think it’s wicked to want that, or hope for it. It’s when people expect it that you run into trouble – or worse, in a far different way, when people base their own value on it.”

You know exactly what she’s talking about with that last part, don’t you? The comparisons, the jealousy, the frustration. You see two bloggers, both equally gifted with writing, both with a similar situation, and one blogger receives 50 comments and one blogger receives 5. When we see ourselves doing the exact same thing and receiving a very different response, we get jealous. We wonder if our writing isn’t good enough, our pain isn’t real enough, our celebratory moments aren’t exciting enough. And this is what I decided in the car during our eleven-and-a-half hour drive from the Cape to D.C.:

Blogging brings out jealousy because the effects are quantifiable and qualitative.

I had a friend a long time ago that I thought had the friendships I wanted. It appeared that she had a large circle of close friends, the sort who would drop by for an hour before dinner or go on vacation with you. The sort that would be considered fictive kin–chosen family–and they all lived in close distance to one another so there was flow between their houses or apartments. She was in a knitting club that met once a month with these women and the one time I was invited to attend, I went home and cried because I knew that I was on the outside of the group; only invited for this single visit to see how great their lives were in comparison to mine. My understanding was that they had barbecues together, went shopping together, raised their children together.

One day, I bumped into a woman from the knitting club at the library. I asked about our mutual friend and she sort of shrugged and said that she hadn’t seen her in months. What about the barbecues? She didn’t know what I was talking about it and mentioned that a few of them had done that once years earlier. What about the dropping by each other’s houses and hanging out? Not really–everyone was too busy. Even knitting club was sort of a tenuous thing, happening some months and not others and our mutual friend hadn’t attended since the one time she brought me.

Her friendships were quantifiable–I could count how many people she seemed to be socializing with. But the quality or nature of those friendships weren’t accessible on the surface. I was jealous of something that didn’t even exist and after going through enough friend’s divorces, enough playdates, reading enough blogs, you could to realize that in most things in life, you can keep your jealousy in check by reminding yourself that you don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. The person may appear happily married, but all of the divorces I’ve witnessed have taken me by surprise. The person may seem to have children with perfect behaviour, but spend the day at the mall with them and you’ll see that no one’s life is as rosy as you assume it to be.

But the elements of blogging that bring out jealousy are all quantifiable and qualitative. We can see the numbers–count page views, comments, readers–but we can also see the quality of that support; the retweets and the lengthy comments and the blog posts written asking people to give good thoughts to the person. There is almost nothing that is hidden; nothing that can appear one way on the surface and with some deeper digging reveal and entirely different reality. 50 comments are 50 comments. 50 long, heartfelt comments are 50 long, heartfelt comments. A retweet is a retweet. And it’s daily–it’s not spread out over a long period of time where you can see that everyone has an ebb and flow of celebratory moments. You can literally measure the response to your words on a daily basis.

Unless we are speaking about a strange, deep-seated deception (a person making 50 blogs in order to seemingly leave 50 comments as 50 separate people on one of their blogs…well…that is a level of deception that I would have to stand in awe of and give them props just for creating that much work for themselves).

But in the end, all information (number and quality) is gather-able, removing the rationality the mind provides in other forms of jealousy.

So, back to N’s comment, I think we’ve all done this at one point or another–and if it’s not with blogging, it’s with something else. It’s taking your self-worth from something entirely out of your control (hmmm…sounding familiar? Infertility anyone?). It may sound silly to get jealous within blogging, but what are comments other than a currency that values your words and thoughts? Comments are literally support, care, and attention in word-form.

Have you ever been to the Middle East? Perhaps this isn’t true in all areas of the Middle East, but in Israel, we have open-air markets called shuks. Vendors bring what they want to sell and set a loose price and then buyers come and can either pay the set price or they can engage in the art of haggling.

Readership and commenting is almost like haggling. Proper haggling isn’t just about getting a good deal–it’s about setting worth. It would be rude to approach a vendor and offer them a penny if you know full well that what they’re selling is worth over ten dollars. Haggling is about setting the worth–the customer states that it means X to them and the seller states that it means Y to them and they need Y to part with said object.

Well
, what are we saying when we read something and don’t comment? Or when someone writes something and no one comes to read it even though they have reached out to other bloggers by leaving comments and forging friendships (by which I mean leaving a real comment meant to engage and not a “hey, this was a good post. Come check out my new blog” type comment).

It’s like two sellers, standing in a shuk with their wares and they can see that you offered a reasonable price to the first seller and offered nothing to the second one, but took objects from both tables. The first seller got respect and the second one didn’t, and they are doing nothing different from one another–they are both simply selling objects. The first seller probably would tell you that haggling is a great hobby–they get a lot of self-esteem from the fact that people value what they bring to sell. And the second seller would probably tell you that working in the shuk is frustrating and they’re considering packing up their table and doing something else with their time.

Reality is that all these thoughts are also negated by time constraints. People simply cannot comment on everything they read, cannot respond to every comment, and cannot read every blog post. We have lives. I went away to BlogHer and then away on holiday and I’m behind. I am very very behind and I feel terrible that people are waiting for a response from me and people gave me these great thoughts but I haven’t told them yet and my Google Reader is groaning under the weight of unread posts. But what can I do? Blogging is a place where I derive a lot of support and happiness and ideas and energy (my G-d, I used to spend all my time with one book, getting one or two ideas. Now my brain is constantly working and challenged, reading such a diverse set of view points–sometimes on the same topic, sometimes on different ones). But it is still a small element of a very large life. It cannot be the sole thing I do and certainly, if we let it, blogging could become the sole thing we do timewise.

An interesting idea that came up in a panel at BlogHer (and now I can’t remember if it was said or if I simply thought this and wrote it down, not speaking it aloud–so you’re not crazy if you were at panels with me and don’t remember this): at a dinner party, you would not eat a meal silently, wipe your mouth and walk away from the table. You would tell the person what you liked or didn’t like. How you experienced their meal. If it was a birthday party, you’d sing happy birthday to them. If it were a wake, you would give them a shoulder to cry on. But regardless, we all know that we comment on the food because without those comments, the cook would probably stop inviting us; stop cooking.

In fact, blog posts are a lot like a dinner party. Everyone is invited in, and how you behave dictates whether you (1) still have a relationship with the person or (2) whether the host wants to throw more parties in the future. There is etiquette involved–giving feedback and also not shitting on the carpet.

Commenting is feedback; it gives the writer both confirmation of their point-of-view (you’re not alone in noticing that or I’ve felt that too), challenge them (that is a good point but have you considered…), or general support (that’s great news or I am so sorry).

But next time you read a blog post (hey, like this one?), pretend the person is sitting across from you, reading it aloud to you. And then gauge what your reaction would be if you were given these thoughts. Would you walk away without confirming that you heard the words and processed them? Would you give them a nod that says, “I heard you and I’m thinking about these ideas.” Would you engage them in deeper discussion?

Again, I am all too aware of life’s time constraints, this is a discussion, not a finger pointing session of good blogger vs. bad blogger. Because honestly, I am so freakin’ behind on things and read so much without commenting, that I would fall firmly in the bad blogging camp. Good intentions are the only thing keeping me on the Gentle side. All behaviour points towards some definite short-comings.

But I do like to keep these thoughts in mind; the image of the two shuk vendors, the two bloggers, and make sure that I spread love and attention. That the Roundup features different writers each week, the Kirtsy’d posts feature a different blog. Keeping the image in mind helps keep my failings in check–that I do my best, even if my best doesn’t look very good when you write out the details on a page (hmmm…read 200 posts, left 8 comments… Fail). But still, my best is better than my worst?

A while back, I wrote about jealousy, admitting that I am a jealous person by nature. It’s interesting to read the post now, because it is about publishing and obviously, the book has been sold and is now out. I was responding to something I read in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and I still think it’s a must-read for every writer (and I know Battynurse is going to kick my ass for calling her a writer again–I tease–but if you put words together into coherent thoughts, you are a writer. Greeting card makers are writers and bloggers are writers and authors are writers–it’s all just different forms of the same act. Just as a home cook may not fancy themselves a chef, but they’re doing the exact same thing just on a different scale and place).

I was responding specifically to her musings on jealousy and the excellent advice her friend gave her about embracing her jealousy rather than sweeping it under the rug. I wrote then: “It feels like something constructive should come out of jealousy–that there should be a greater purpose.”

And perhaps that constructive thing should be how we treat another person by helping them through their jealousy.

Since it is–for better or worse–a fact of life that most of us (though not all as the comments on that post state) feel jealous from time to time. And why not feel jealous with blogging too? If it’s important to you, it is understandable that you’ll feel something akin to jealousy sometimes. What is that saying? The opposite of love isn’t hate–it’s indifference. I think when you care about something deeply (and how can you not care about your thoughts, point-of-view and emotions?), you will experience the full range of expression tied to passion–happiness, excitement, contentment, but also the darker side, jealousy, anger, rage.

A blog is simply a receptacle for those elements of your life that you feel deeply about (thoughts, p.o.v., emotions). It is an empty screen and you fill it with your self. Hence why each blog is so important, why no two are alike unless we’re talking about content theft. Why it actually does make a difference when someone starts a blog and why it actually does make a difference when someone stops writing their blog.

Chickenpig, I’m talking to you. Start writing again.

I’m not going to bother saying these are my last thoughts that came out of BlogHer ’09 since I’m sure there is another post or two up my sleeve based on the additional thoughts that come from you. It’s like a word crochet with each idea linking to the next one–thank you for adding the additional stitches.