I’m tired, my feet are swollen and I’m about to lose my voice because I’ve spoken today more than I usually speak in a week. (Around my house, Tink does all the talking and all I can squeeze in is a steady stream of “Uh huh!”s said with feigned interest and the occasional “Yes, sweetie. I heard you. I‘m right here,” when her record needle gets stuck on “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”) But when Jen tells me to make sure not to miss Friday Quick Takes, I simply ask, “How high?” Therefore: 7 items of interest from the first day of BlogHer ‘09.
1. The big announcement during the opening remarks is that BlogHer ‘10 will be held in New York City. And that registration is already open! (Should the fact that registration – for a conference 13 months away – is already open irk me as it so clearly does? Does that strike you as somewhat self-important? Should I overlook this small fact, given what BlogHer has done for women bloggers and blogging in general?)
2. I’m remarkably less socially awkward than I feared when faced with bloggers I admire … as long as it’s a one-on-one situation. When I have to walk into a crowded room, sit down at a nearly full table and introduce myself to more than one person at a time, my interpersonal skills run off the rails and I don’t know whom to look at and I babble to no one in particular. That’s me – unintentionally entertaining the masses since 1969.
3. I’ve been worried I might not have time to get out of the hotel and do a bit of shopping to find something cute to bring home to Tink, but the sponsors have got me covered, yo. I got the kind of swag that will make a 4-year-old freak: tiny notebooks, crayons, markers, book lights, this cool scoopy-spoon gizmo with which to eat kiwi halves. Little tubs of Play-Doh! Mandarin-mint Bliss soaps from my bathroom! I think she’ll dig the little stuff way more than the Mr. Potato Head. I’ll give that to Chuck.
4. Who have I met, you ask?! Well, not Nancy W. Kappes, because I was in my hotel room last night recovering from an episode in the cab where my blood pressure plummeted and I felt as if I’d pass out and wondered what to do, should I tell the driver, but what was he going to do and would he even care? I’m talking cold clammy sweat and the feeling that I needed to sit down, immediately, except I already was. Perhaps I should have eating something other than pure white cottony carbs yesterday and dialed down the debilitating anxiety about leaving my family. And I most certainly did NOT need to make a quadruple batch of meatballs yesterday morning before leaving for the airport, but the meatballs were meant for the freezer, and I couldn’t just throw the ground beef and ground veal into the freezer and then make the meatballs sometime next week, because that would have been way more meatballs than we could ever eat at once and I couldn’t put the prepared meatballs back into the freezer because you can’t freeze meat twice.
5. On the heels of yesterday’s white-knuckle cab ride, I came up with a new word tonight: Thairrhea. Yes, it does mean what you think it means.
6. Neil Kramer is taller than I would have guessed. He writes like a much shorter man.
7. Oh sweet boxes of Kleenex, the Community Keynote event, where 21 bloggers read posts chosen by committee. I laughed, I cried. If some of the posts were chosen for maximum tear-jerking effect, then the selection panel knocked it out of the park. Of course, different posts will speak to different readers, but I have to give special notice to Danielle Henderson’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” (laughed) and Melissa Ford’s “Updating the Donation Room Porn” (cried). And Black Hockey Jesus’ 5, written to his daughter on her birthday? I think I fell in love a little bit.
Oh, and Carson Kressley had on a pair of Lilly Pulitzer (or Lilly-inspired) pants printed with citrus fruit, and when I saw him I exclaimed, “Carson, I love your fruity pants!”
Do you think he’s heard that one before?
As always, 7 Quick Takes is hosted by Jen of Conversion Diary. And don’t you worry – there’s more behind-the-scenes BlogHer to come.
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Kacie 07.27.09 at 11:54 am
So interesting. I just created a blog-her account a few weeks ago and am struggling to get the hang of how to actually USE the site.
Kacie´s last blog ..Watcing my brother with Downs Syndrome enter adolesence
eliz 07.27.09 at 1:59 pm
Hey, Kacie. I find BlogHer’s site extremely difficult to navigate. I think it’s very hard to search their list of member bloggers. BlogHer’s most useful benefit is their ad network, and that’s sort of easily found on their site. They were closed to new blogs for a while, and still are closed for certain bloggers (they have been adding some blogs to their advertising network, but it depends on what you blog about). But as far as using the site to discover new bloggers or to see what the contributing writers have posted about, I do not enjoy prowling about there.