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.