BlogHer '10, Day One: We Came

On Thursday, August 5, we left our cozy little abode in Regina, Saskatchewan for New York. We had a BlogHer '10 conference to attend.



I couldn't believe that I had nearly 2500 friends to meet in the Hilton that night, so I kept turning to the Palinode and saying I'm so excited! and then wiggling in my seat, because my excitement exhibits itself like five-year-old who has to pee. Between that and my constant re-declaration I designed a book cover!, I'm really surprised that I didn't get jambed down an airplane toilet.

And when I saw my hometown fall away below the plane, I heaved a sigh and said We're going to New York! and What time do we get there again? and Do you think people will like me there? Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.



Yeah, well, the excitement of heading to New York was tempered not long afterwards by Chicago's O'Hare airport.



The flight attendants had no customs forms for us to fill out ahead of time on the airplane, so we were delayed filling them out in the airport, which meant that we ended up getting stuck behind a hundred people entering the U.S. to go to an Indian wedding, which meant that it took over an hour-and-a-half to get through customs, which meant that we missed our connecting flight, which meant that we had to wait another two hours to catch the next flight, which lead to us taxi-ing out to the tarmac, where we were then told we still couldn't take off, and then they powered down the engines and fed us ice water that tasted like old milk while we patiently sweat out our time packed into a tiny tube of a plane for a while longer.

This is starting to sound like those parts of the Bible when everyone is begat-ing everyone. I apologize.

At any rate, we did finally land in Newark, New Jersey where we took a shuttle to the Hilton in New York, and our hearts and minds were set aright first by Angella D's friendly face and then by Bossy's late night cleavage.



There is nothing wrong with Bossy's cleavage.



Then, we lucked into some face time with Goon Squad Sarah, Greeblemonkey's husband, and Lauriewrites – pictured above – and Greeblemonkey and Mammaloves – pictured below.



And then we stumbled to our rooms after the bar made it clear that we should do so by refusing to sell us more alcohol and taking away the little electric candles and looking at us like we were really irritating. Luckily, it only takes us astute bloggers several pokes with cattle prods to figure out that it is time to go to bed.

And then we collapsed in our room, because that's what happens after flight delays and pints of beer and the kindness of other bloggers.

And, scene.

Too Much To Do And Not Enough Time

I must be busier than I thought. I haven't blogged since Saturday, and it's now Tuesday. This blogging thing is usually a daily occurrence.


The Palinode and another iteration of the Drunken Lime

I am pretty much racing headlong into BlogHer '10 with little time to pay attention to much beyond completing a couple of projects and selling shoes and doing laundry.

Oh, the laundry. If you only knew you would heap gratitude upon me for cleaning myself up before the conference.


I pretended that I was lying beneath God's glass coffee table, and he was a coke head.

Hello, August! August does not feel august. It feels hot and ridiculously sweaty in a decidedly unsexy way. I've started getting boob zits from sweltering inside hot brassieres. Now that I'm saddled with these stupid borderline D-cups, I miss the A-cups of my youth. They were sweet. When it was too hot out, I'd go without underwear and just put mini-bandaids over my nipples to keep the gawkers at bay. Freedom was adhesive strips.


The Palinode and I used to go to this restaurant when we dated ten years ago. Now, it's closed for good.

I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY. It's obvious. The only thing going on in my head is a running tally of all the things I am not doing at any given moment.

eating
doing laundry
cleaning the house
packing
finishing up this project
finishing up that project
working on the GiST newsletter
showering
writing an article
getting back to that guy from that magazine
clearing out the 200 e-mails in my inbox
fighting with WordPress for a new project
breathing
learning the Hustle
practicing my swan dive

I'm just kidding. I don't dive. I hate diving, in fact. When I was a kid, I would stand on the one-meter diving board and freeze solid while my entire swim class treaded water and rolled their eyes at me, except the fat nerd, because he was always trying to get in good with me for when we had to practice mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. His lips were always blue, and it was worrisome.


Wonder Katie

I'm going to make like Wonder Woman and get shit done. I know I have it in me. I just have to figure out where I put it.

The Blues Hobo

I met a man at a party once back in the early 1990s. He was at least thirty years older than I, if not forty. Everyone was at least a little drunk. I was drunker than he, although it was hard to tell if it was just the alcohol or if he held his face like that all the time.



We'd met in a blues club earlier that night, and later we were all outside in a stranger's yard, burning a fire and smoking weed. He asked me if I'd ever heard proper slide. I said "I think so." He said, "Then you haven't."

He grabbed an empty beer bottle, poured a bit of water into it, and made to hit the open lip of the bottle with the heel of his hand. "Oh! I've seen this before," I said. "This is how my ex made funnels to smoke hash." I had an ex who used to do that so we could funnel hash smoke from a pair knives off a stove element turned on high.

"No," he said. "I bet he broke the bottle off lower down. I'm breaking it off at the neck. That's a lot harder," and he clapped the palm of his hand against the bottle's lip. The lower bulb of the beer bottle popped off and rolled back into the bushes behind him, hitting a girl in the heel. She jumped and squealed.

"That's how you break a slide bottle," he said. He chuckled at me. I could tell he had sympathy for me, or pity. It was hard to tell. I felt like a child.

I asked him his name, but he wouldn't tell me what it was. He told me that, if you were smart, you never gave your real name to anyone but your parents, unless someone was going to stick with you throughout your life, and no one ever did that but yourself. He said your real name gave other people power over you. He sounded wise, but I figured he was a shyster. Most people I'd met who sounded wise were shysters.

He slid the disenfranchised bottle neck up over his finger and dragged it along the strings. They sang a little.

"This guitar's broke a bit. It's only got five strings. See? One, two, three, four, and five," he said, tapping each one as he counted them on the neck, "but I played a three string guitar and ate all winter one year, so I can do this," and then he played those five strings, and I felt a deep embarrassment about how I'd judged his class all night.

He'd been sitting quietly by the fire with rough teeth and an uneven scrub of hair around his mouth. I'd equated ugliness and poverty with a general lack of value, and he knew that. I wanted to flee from the shame of my judgement, but I remained planted in the soft, grey ash at the outskirts of the fire. There was nowhere to go.

I might have been affected by the weed and the beer, but I wept while he played, holding myself with my own arms. I was outside myself and covered in music while he ran that glass up and down those five strings. It was so exquisite, I almost felt I could murder him to make the pain of it end.

I imagined myself tackling him down off his aluminum lawn chair, throwing him back into the dirt, and maybe squeezing his neck. It looked thick, but I figured that my hands could still be effective if I pushed on him with my body weight. He looked rough enough that his heart might stop before I had to work too hard at killing him.

I saw myself for what I was then, or at least what I had been when I'd watched him from across the fire pit earlier that night. I was a drunk, entitled fuck who'd unjustly pitied a man with the power to beat my heart black and blue with a broken guitar. He smiled at my face while I cried mutely, and the party moved around us, back and forth, unaware of our mutual cruelty.