7 Unrelated Things In a List Brought On By the Flu

I'm suffering from what can only be described as a body migraine over the last two days, so, while what I really want to write about are why lamentations about the the death of the supposed heart of blogging are misplaced and the inherent bigotry behind some people's desire for gender segregation at female dominated blogging conferences, I can't, because the first few parts of this sentence have already stripped out the few coherent word combinations I can handle right now.



Oh noes.

But fear not, reader. I will not go gentle into that good night. I am fighting this beast with mass quantities of ibuprofen and water and kitten cuddles and oh who am I kidding? I just threw up in an old popcorn bowl.

Really, I'm just asking for sympathy here. I staved this thing off all through the BlogHer '12 conference, and this is the price I have to pay for my troubles.

[From that last sentence to the one after this aside, insert TWO HOURS of writhing in pain, the loss of 24 hours worth of food and water, bloating up like I was nine months pregnant, and crying about the stabbing pains in my head. Oh, the joys!]

I am still refusing to go gently with this damn flu, but all I have the gumption for is a list, so here goes:

1. I went to BlogHer '12, and, although I know BlogHer recaps are your very favourite of things, all I can tell you right now is that it was fast and fulfilling and exhausting and bountiful and it gave me the flu.
2. Lula's new trick is to peel all the bandaids off my feet with her teeth while I succumb to fevered dreams about Bret Michaels' burial at sea. She's disgusting.
3. We delivered our letter of offer on a home we really want to be ours, which I don't need to tell you, because you can pretty much assume that if we are going to go through the work of delivering a letter of offer on a home, we probably actually want it.
4. I feel much better about that carrot cake cookie sandwich filled with cream cheese icing that I didn't eat earlier, because that would have made all the throwing up I'm doing even sadder than it already is.
5. Tomorrow afternoon, I have to make myself look like I'm not half-dead with the flu so that the bank will give us money. The bank loves self-employed ladies who look all wilty, right?
6. This point's just a thank you for reading this. You're sweet.
7. I'm listening to the Palinode crunch on Triscuits right now, and everytime I think about punching him, I just say "I love you" instead. This is my number one piece of marriage advice.

And now I'm off to bed with my puke bucket. I've named it Sweet Baby because of all the time I spend stroking it.

Good night!

While I Recover My Senses, Here Are Some Pretty Party Pictures of Sparklecorn at BlogHer

I just returned home this afternoon from a 24-hour festival of thunderstorms, plane delays, missed connections, and a hotel with lumpy bedding while the Palinode and I tried to find our way back to Canada from BlogHer '12 in New York. I am more than a touch exhausted. If the travel weren't enough of a reason to spend the next 12 hours unconscious, I think the client and board meetings, volunteering, sitting on two conference panels, and navigating a conference of 5000 women definitely contributed.

So, here is a collection of pretty party pictures I took with my iPhone at MamaPop's Sparklecorn party at BlogHer. Pretty! Party! Pictures!



That unicorn cake up there? It played little electronic cat noises out of speakers near its butt.



I don't drink anymore, so I have to invent my own entertainment sometimes when parties devolve into drunken squeeing and declarations of affection.



I wandered the edges of the party and just kept training my camera straight at the strobing lights, hoping for the best.



There were about fifty terrible images of random smears of light and tossing hair, but a few of them have interesting shapes and colours that I appreciate. I kind of like the damp blur created by my lack of a tripod and the low lighting.



Dear god, I am a tired chicken.



Until I write some kind of conference wrap-up entry, I'll let you know that BlogHer was capital-g Good, and New York was capital-h Hot, and it hasn't quite clicked yet that I can't just walk out my apartment door and run into giddy bloggers in the hallway. This makes me kind of sad.



So, I'll be back when my brain recovers and I manage to get my poop in a group.

Goodnight!

BlogHer, Voices Of The Year, and How My Switch Was Flipped

Four years ago, I stood in front of a group of BlogHer '08 attendees in a ballroom in San Francisco and took part in the conference's first Community Keynote before it became better known as Voices Of The Year. I faced the largest group of people I had ever faced, I think there were 800 of them, and I read them a blog entry I wrote just a year before that expressed the deep fear I had had about my cancer and subsequent hysterectomy.



When I stood up on that stage and read my piece, a cliched switch was metaphorically flipped. Something inside me turned over. Something inside me said I have people now and I am meant to be here and I have more to do and say in this community than anywhere else I have ever been.

And then I went home and had a nervous breakdown.

I went to the doctor and held my head to stop myself from shaking it no, no, no at the floor and the walls and my own sad life as I asked him to fill in a form for medical leave from my abusive job, because I had found out that I had that Something Big inside me that I'd always suspected was there but had not had the opportunity to realize until I'd faced that sea of people in San Francisco.

I wish there were simple words to explain how reading about my cancer up on that stage in that ballroom in California made me lose my mind and eventually quit my job, quit smoking, quit drinking, somehow find my personal, spiritual, and professional footing, and then later find myself here working full time from home as a writer and designer who is invited to speak to bloggers about what they do. There aren't simple words, though. I had a switch that needed just the right confluence of events to flip, and BlogHer's Voices Of The Year baby somehow flipped it and, in turn, my entire life.



I stood on that stage swelled with the feeling of I-have-arrivedness, which is not to say that I felt famous, although I kind of did a little bit, but which is to say that I felt that I really had my feet planted in a place that I was meant to be and was doing what I was meant to do for the time in my whole 35 years.

Later today at 4:45 p.m., the fifth BlogHer Voices Of The Year will begin, and I will be firmly planted in that audience cheering each nervous blogger on as they read their respective pieces. I will get to watch them claim their physical place in what is normally only a virtual space, and I will get to remember what that meant for my life in 2008 and what this might mean for some of them in smaller and larger ways.

This is my church, an expression of my greater drive, in a way, when I watch a new group of bloggers step to the mic one by one to clear their throats and begin out loud, in their own words.

Thank you, Elisa Camahort, Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and BlogHer staff past and present for bringing all of us, and me, here again. You gave a once fledgling, now thriving, community a space to claim, and we do.

----------------------------

PS. I am an honoree in this year's Voices Of The Year for my piece We Can Become Known.