LaurieWrites

Middle of Somewhere So Far

I'll be honest, this whole living my way into my future thing is a little taxing. I am overwhelmed at least once a day, and I wonder what I'm doing. There may be tears. And then I tell myself that the pioneers didn't have iPods for their CRVs, or Sonic limeade, and I'm probably going to be okay. 

Yesterday I bought a rosary for $1.99 in a gas station convenience store on the edge of Fort Stockton, Texas. The Catholic belief in talismans is embedded that deep for me. I babbled to the clerk that it seemed the thing to do, that I needed all of the help I could get, I guessed. She smiled at me in a manner that indicated exactly how crazy she thought I was, because I'm sure she was way more aware than I was in that moment that if I was relying on that cheapo thing, I had best turn around. 

I have made it through West Texas to the very edge. It was hypnotic, and beautiful, and long. I liked it way more than I thought I would, and although I'm content not to drive that stretch of road again for awhile, I'm happy to have it imprinted on my brain. I also appreciate the 80 mph speed limit. Thanks, Texas. You get me. 

I've been taking notes on the trip so far, and I thought I'd dump them here just because there's really nowhere else, and it's obviously impossible to keep up a Twitter stream while going 80. (You're welcome.) Some of it is funny, some of it is stupid, and some of it is just my observations on the U.S. as it goes by my window. 

Favorite license plates so far: 

HATENYA

HEWON (Jesus should know that this guy totally cut me off.)

Favorite directions: 

Go left on Ahoy from Starboard

Favorite business names: 

Hillbilly Hair -- This sign was on a trailer in Pigeon Forge that appeared to be open for business. 

Fo Sho Italian Grill

Prissy Polly's BBQ -- I do not want to eat any prissy person's barbecue, I don't know about you.

Assassin Pest Control

Jackpot Portable Toilets 

Ho Tre Bien (A Vietnamese strip club in El Paso. The name is a perfect storm of post-colonial misspelled potentially unintended pejoratives.) 

Christian Outlet Center -- Best Buy For Believers (I am not making that up.)

Favorite Souvenir: 

(Austin, I love you.)

Favorite Church Sign:

GO PRAZEY NOT CRAZY (Caps not mine)

Favorite Mistake Avoided:

I did not get a tattoo at American Rebel Tattoo Salon in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Because I am almost an adult, I only considered it.

Favorite Billboard Trivia:

The purportedly "largest adult store in the South" is at approximately Exit 375 on Interstate 4oWest

Favorite Second Best Reason Not to Eat at Chik-Fil-A: 

"Babee Gifts. Partee Favors. Chikin!"  These billboards make me dumber every time I drive by one. Whomever comes up with these lines must drink heavily. Has to. 

Favorite Creepy Business Sticker on a Car: 

Fuzzy Fanny Farm French Paint Silkies

Favorite Massive Accidental Geek Out Moment: 

I drove by a sign for Hope, Arkansas. "Wait. Hope. Arkansas. I know who was born there!" I said to my slightly slow self. Exited, easy peasy, there it was.  

I sat on Bill's first porch swing. In my family, that means we're friends. 

That's a dork right there. A Clinton-loving, Democrat dork. I don't even care. Four more years! (Later. After these four. I love you too, President Obama. Chicago is on my list.) (I can't stop being political. I'm having twitches not being able to fully focus on the election, plus the hurricanes, plus the election, plus my friends who aren't in my car. I do miss my friends who aren't in my car. Okay, I admit it.) 

Favorite Thing I've Done That I'm Glad No One Was There to See But Now I'm Telling the Internet So: 

Passed a "honk if you're rowdy" sign. Totally honked.  

Favorite Sign That It's Time to Stop Driving For the Day: 

Mentally arguing with Jimmy Buffet over the veracity of his contention that "If we weren't all crazy we would go insane." My bone to pick with this was massive at the time. I've since softened my position. It's amazing what a little sleep will do. 

Favorite Meal (So Far): 

Salt Lick BBQ, in Driftwood, Texas, just outside of Austin. Thank you, Wendi, for making sure I got there, and Laura for coming out to have dinner. 

Seeing some of my people along the way of whatever it is I'm doing here has been the best part. 

Favorite Thing, Overall: 

Every day, I can start again. I guess that's a good thing. 

I am headed to New Mexico now. I'm not sure if I have to present a special password to actually exit Texas, because it seems difficult to get out once you're in, but I'm going to try. Also, if you have any questions about Interstates 95, 40, or 10, I can answer them or find out. Let me know. 

Middle of Somewhere

I had this whole post written about why I'm driving across the country and I read it over this morning and it annoyed me so much that I'm going to spare everyone else .

If there is a person who can do short story long, it is me. I'm not sure how I got out of journalism school or why I so much time on a communication platform with a 140-character self-expression limit. Masochism. Irony. It is a conundrum, is what it is. 

This is the summary (please may it be shorter.): I came back from New York and plunged into a disgusting day-old salsa bowl of despair, loneliness, anxiety, and isolation. I have respect like you wouldn't believe for depression, seeing as how it's done its best for lo these past 12 years or so to dance around in my cortex and keep me down, like the chemical MAN. I get it, and I understand it, clinically and emotionally. I do not, however, always do the correct thing in response to it, because when I get in the bad mental neighborhood, my already abstract-brain melts in the trippiest Dalian fashion, good ideas dribbling off to the right, common sense a tiger dressed like a courtesan enmeshed in a map of the world in the middle. (That is not anything he painted, to my knowledge. I also make things up sometimes.) 

After two weeks of this nonsense, I decided that I needed to do something. I felt like hell, and it showed no sign of abating, and one can only do so many yoga classes and read so many inspirational blog posts. Sitting in my apartment in front of my computer like it was going to start spitting out hundred dollar bills every second was not helping matters. Living at a standstill in an area where I have a walkable neighborhood but no community, roots deeper than most in the metro but increasingly no sense of place, and a family I love but cannot serve so well in my current state even though I live close by all started to fall into place as a reality that I could no longer accept.

Yes, I can take medicine and go to therapy, but this time felt different. It felt like I'd located a pain source and needed to rip it out with my hands, and that is not just an unnecessarily dramatic turn of phrase, I swear. 

I worried and fussed for another few days, then I accepted an invitation in California for the first week of September with no idea of how I was going to get there. I also threw out a question about cities on Twitter one night when I was particularly restless. It sparked the best response I've ever seen there, and that made me curious about how people had found their spot, not just where it was, but what it meant to them. 

(Briar has written a four-part series on Brooklyn in response. I love this.) 

I only told a very few other people about my travel goals, people I can count on to tell me I'm for real out of my mind this time, and they didn't say that. I don't know if this is the part where the universe conspires to help you if you open your mouth (Coelho? Emerson? Lady Gaga?) But people (and this  is the part that blows me away) started contacting me when they got some idea that I hoped to do some traveling, and started offering me guest rooms and tour guides. I sat at my computer for a few days and cried at these offers, partially because I'm so strange about imposing to an almost paralytic degree, and partially because it occurred to me, fully as it had not before:

A lot of my community, if I'm going to call it that, is out there (which is now to say out here, by the side of the road in Western Arkansas, I guess.) I don't know if that is because I've focused on the larger world of the web at the expense of my physical space at home, but I can't really undo that now, and I don't want to, either. It's just the way it's turned out. 

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I left last Wednesday, my first stop a Duran Duran show in Portsmouth, Virginia. I told myself all day that if I felt funny I could just go home the next morning, but the next morning I got up and went to Asheville and hung out with Robin, so I guess it was a go. I took a somewhat overwhelming Pigeon Forge detour after that, which I may have to detail later. Then I went to Memphis for the weekend and Faiqa's family welcomed me, and my mind was officially blown by the collected stories of civil rights and rock and roll, obviously in very different ways.

Now I am headed to Texas (I'm a little afraid to drive Texas. It is large, Texas) and to see New Mexico for the first time, which I'm very excited about. It was a lot of years ago that a boy tripping on acid stood on my front porch and dared me to go to Santa Fe.

I think it's better that I'll be there without him. 

Then there will be other places, and at the end I'm told there will be margaritas with friends. And then I will go another direction home. 

 *************************************************

Most of the time I'm feeling good, and I'm okay with most miles that roll under me, although fast lane ignorance and abuse makes me sad. I love the moments of traveling, road signs and tourist traps, recalculating routes and checking new states off of my list. I've heard ridiculous songs I haven't heard in decades but still know all the words to on better radio stations than we have in DC by a long shot.

Ex.: A child of my age shouldn't have been singing along to the sleazy terribleness that was Hot Rod Hearts, but that's a long done deal, and and a new listen to Meet Me Half the Way indicates that Crystal Gayle may well have been my first girl crush. So I'm learning things.   

I'm excited to be bumping something up on the life list (boy does this sucker already need editing) that I had no idea would happen this year. I have no problem driving alone, or doing anything else alone, for that matter. But sometimes, because I am me, I am nervous and uncertain. This morning a colleague and friend texted me from the campus opening meeting that I am not at for the first time in many, many years. It arrived shortly after I woke up, and I wept in bed like a freak who really, secretly loved the job I left and hated the environment and what it did to my spirit for the work.

The sadness I am feeling about this right now is deep and strange, a different layer of a heart that is honestly hurting some. I think teasing out the things you miss from the whole is the hardest part of leaving whatever that is behind, and the most important thing about not looking back too hard or, god forbid, going back entirely. But it's still rough. Nothing is all bad, and stability has its merits. 

All this movement signifies something, though, and it's what my friend Laurie said last week when I was whining about whether to do this or what to do or blah blah blah: You've changed everything else. Complete the transition.  

(I have to write down many things she says. Again, if you are the smartest person in the room, get out.) 

This year has been massive so far for me -- change after change after change. I set out in February to make things different because what was going on wasn't working. But the truth is that you can change the structure of your days like crazy, and if you don't catch up with you out here, it doesn't really matter. 

You go everywhere with you, so you may as well be tolerable to yourself, and to other people, at baseline.

I'm really committed to doing that. I'm not in search of a geographic cure so much as a reconfiguring of my perspective, a better lens on what I've got and what I want, even for the short term. The best way to do that for me is to get out of my own head and among people I like (And even people I don't. That has its significant merits.) The walls of my physical space closing around me like they were was the usual metaphor, so I'm going to ignore that I went for the obvious open road variety as a response. It's the first time I've ever done it on this scale, so for me it's new. I can claim that. 

 *************************************************

Now that I have told the story, I can get to the fun stuff, which is daily recaps (I hope. I can get tired from all this running around, honestly, plus I still have actual jobs to do.) of where I'm going and what I'm doing and seeing. I'm also taking a lot of pictures, naturally, but I'm not sure how fast I can get them on Flickr because my laptop is not so reliable. Meanwhile, feel free to follow me on Instagram, where my username is laurieanne. 

 

Duran Duran Live -- Encore

I grew up surrounded by music, an environment my parents provided out of their love for it that has served me well throughout my life. When I'm not getting enough of it, especially of the live variety, something goes sideways in my world that has to be put back on course. 

So it was that I drove to Portsmouth, Virginia, yesterday, to see Duran Duran live on the first day of a trip I'll tell you about soon. I had seen them in October, the latest in a series of their concerts I've gone to that altogether kinda sorta make up for the fact that I missed seeing them on the Seven and the Ragged Tiger tour in 1984/85. That one was special, as in off the crazy train of awesome hook special, because I got to shoot some photos of the show from the very front of Constitution Hall. 

Very front. As in, that is John Taylor's hand, and I took it, so, yes, that is where I was. 

 

So I can say I did that, one time. That was a pretty big deal for me.  

Sarah took that, and lets me use it when I want to. Thanks, Sarah. 

Last night I wasn't in the photo pit, nor did I even have my big camera with me, because I didn't know the venue well enough to know if it would fly to have it or use it, and there is nothing more aggravating than getting stopped with a camera and my car was all the way over by the Coast Guard building and, well, iPhone, it is you and me, as usual. (It turns out it probably would have been okay, but I was actually kind of grateful not to have to deal with it.) (Every time I walked or drove or parked by that building, I said "AHOY!" aloud to myself. Don't you wish you were there? No? Yeah, I totally understand.) 

Ntelos Wireless Pavilion is a cool spot, an outdoor performance space on the water that is covered with white tent-like things that make it look like a much tinier version of the Sydney Opera House. Except yeah, it's totally not, and it's in Virginia. I catch crowd vibes quickly, and these people were out to have fun. Portsmouth was drinking beer and watching music this Wednesday, you guys, and it was fun just to be among them.

I also hadn't road-tripped to a show in years, probably since I saw Pearl Jam in Toledo in nineteen ninety-something, when I was living in Dayton. I liked being a stranger in a strange land inhabited by some of the most vocal, devoted Duran Duran fans I have ever seen, men and women, young and as old as I am, maybe even older, if that's possible. 

My highlight was overhearing the guy in sunglasses who came bounding from the stage area before the show to show his friend his setlist AND the lyrics to Planet Earth. I don't know where he got them, but he couldn't have been more excited. He'd seen them at Hampton Coliseum in 1984, I know that much now, and they were AWESOME and are STILL AWESOME. Yesterday appeared to be his Duran Duran Christmas and high school reunion combined. Favorite part:"Let the Music Play" is in the band's pre-show house music rotation. He recognized it, and yelled, pointing towards the heavens, "LISTEN! It's SHANNON! From the EIGHTIES!"

I like being around happy people, and happy people on music? Better. He was incredibly loud and in my ear with this, and I didn't even care. 

So, the show was fantastic. It might have been my favorite of the five I've seen. I like that they bring the same level of energy and range and crowd interaction to every show. I like that they are fun. I like that they don't play to some less-than-two-hour phone-it-in standard. I like that they have a gorgeous stage production. And yes, I like that they are still cute. (Because they totally are.) 

But most of all, I love the music, the old stuff and the new stuff. Of course I'm emotionally wired to react to The Reflex and Wild Boys, Notorious and especially the oldest stuff, like Planet Earth, which still gets me moving like no other. But I really like Girl Panic,  The Man Who Stole a Leopard, and the title track from All You Need is Now. It's a solid album. My favorite artists are those who keep reinventing over the years. This is why I love Indigo Girls, worship at the Prince altar, and cannot wait to see what Lady Gaga comes up with in ten years. This is why I can't get with Chris Cornell's solo work, because it's not...good. This is why I mourn Janis Joplin and Jim Croce especially hard, and why I'm sorry Amy Winehouse couldn't kick her demons. This is why I took myself to see The Red Piano in Vegas. Yes, Elton John is one of my personal and musical heroes (it's deep, I'll tell you about it sometime maybe, how I even forgive him for The One.) And one of the reasons is that he has changed so much, and tried new things. The wealth and fame of a pop/rock/whatever career doesn't guarantee or necessarily motivate this, so I appreciate growth and change in artistry more than anything. 

I'm happy that Duran Duran stuck around, and that they keep making new music, and that they keep touring a central part of their lives at what must be rather a sacrifice to their personal lives, but hey, I guess it's good work if you can get it. 

I'm especially grateful that they played "Save a Prayer" before ending with "Rio" for the encore. They didn't play it in October, and I thought I wouldn't hear it again. Thankfully my phone died (the only time you'll ever hear me say that, I'm pretty sure) before that, so I could focus on the music. I hope the girl next to me wasn't too freaked out by the lady next to her crying like a fool through the entire damned thing, but I couldn't help it, and oh well, I'll never see her again. 

"Take a chance
Like all dreamers can't find another way
You don't have to dream it all, just live a day"

It's interesting how favorite songs can change meaning for us as our lives change. That was good. Just live, one day. I can do that, I think. 

I need a life that includes more music, and more experiences like this, is the thing. That's what last night told me. This show gave me what I needed to help put me back on course. It made me remember my better self, what feeds me inside, what makes me smile and sing and dance. I haven't had many experiences like that lately. You never know what will do it, but sometimes you do. You just have to remember. You just need a reminder. 

I'm hitting the road better for it, I know. 

Thank you to Sasha at Red Magnet Media for hooking me up with the tickets, and to Duran Duran for making a day in my ordinary world rather extraordinary. These shows burn into my brain in the best possible way, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to share this experience with you. If you're in or near Atlantic City or Pittsburgh, they'll be up that way this weekend. Snag a ticket and go. I totally would if I could.

Because Todd Akin Is Wrong

I said yesterday that I feel like the world is one giant trigger alert right now, so consider this mine at the top of another post about Todd Akin, his evil and dangerous views, the ripple effect that I see throughout his political party (and, I can only therefore assume, a chunk of our society, as well), and above all, a desire I feel to wrap every woman I know and don't who has ever suffered sexual violence up in my arms to safety, if they would accept that from me. 

I wasn't going to say anything about it here, but I can't stop thinking about it, and I want to,  because I don't really know who deserves our advocacy, voice, solidarity, and love more than sisters known and unknown who have suffered the worst kind of physical violation, sometimes over a period of years? I do not know who. I go to Violence Unsilenced -- a site my friends have built, lovingly, on the words of many such women and men. I go to read and I leave a few words. I don't know when I started, or why I keep coming back, as distractible as I am. I think because it's the least I can do? Because I see the people who write these horrifying testimonies to survival and strength and courage -- some of the most honest, powerful, and certainly strongest and most important words on the internet -- come back and thank people, genuinely say that it helped to hear what people had to say.

It is, truly, the very least I can do.  

Likewise, I have read and read and read this week, post after post, news story after news story, tweet after tweet after tweet about Rep. Akin's statements. I feel sick and obsessed. I can't stop reading and I want to stop reading, but I feel like who am I to stop reading? I feel like the least I can do is bear witness to people who are stepping up and saying YOU DO NOT DEFINE ME OR WHAT HAPPENED TO ME, MAN. STOP. You don't know SHIT ABOUT MY STORY, JUST LIKE YOU DON'T KNOW SCIENCE OR INTEGRITY. 

By the time Mike Huckabee opened his huge, never-shutting-up, nugget-munching mouth (I do not like Mike Huckabee, at all. He is another evil, dangerous person) yesterday to announce that he had real, live actual proof of human beings produced from rape who had contributed greatly to society? I was sitting outside of the place where I was picking up my dinner, and I laid my head on the steering wheel, not because I was being dramatic for a change, but because it actually hurt and I was overwhelmed with sadness and frustration. 

Did he ask those people (the ones who were still alive, anyway) if he could name-check them in this context? Did he call them up after his intern found them through the Google and ask them if they were cool with this information being shared, not because it's anything to be ashamed of, but because it was highly charged, and it was their story to share and not his to make a rhetorical pawn?

Did he understand the hubris that it takes to use the names of human beings conceived through rape to advance his political message? 

I was guessing no, already. And just like every other time I heard some ridiculous, wrong, news this week, faces flashed in front of my eyes, of people I love who have survived rape, who have rebuilt their lives or who have, in one case, been killed in the immediate aftermath, so no she couldn't.  

I want every woman who has been raped who is listening to this twisted, sad, critical saga unfold from their television screens, computers, smart phones, and social circles to be protected from the exhaustion and emotion of hearing these uneducated, sick, uncaring fools talk and everyone else weigh in, even in support. I am devastated that we have reached a place in our cultural and political landscape where this is what we have to make women experience to prove that in spite of hundreds of years of progress, we live with the threat of Dark Ages mentality around every corner. 

I am pissed off that our troops die every day in war zones and there is no room to talk about it becauase we are embroiled in the shocking, baffling concept that our elected officials consider women chattel and would make laws for no reason other than to set us back whence we came. 

I am enRAGED that so many people I know who identify as conservative bleat about the economy and cannot put their megaphones down to hear the reality that awaits their daughters, sisters, lovers, and -- most confusingly, I admit it -- THEMSELVES, if these people continue to advance their views.

When did oppression become acceptable again? 

I want women who have been raped, who have suffered the ultimate violation of their bodies and minds, at the same time, to go only as far as they feel they can reasonably go now in disclosing or reliving their own stories out loud. Maybe they have done it, and they don't want to do it again right now. Maybe they are going through something else and the compounding of trauma is too much. Maybe they are attending to their lives and trying to work or get divorced or buy a house or plant a garden. Maybe they are busy and were operating under the assumption that you, sir, chosen by the citizens of your state to represent them, were not a walking, talking, uneducated trigger.

I don't want the women who don't feel ready, or who feel unable, or who feel done with it all, to feel like they need to speak up and share anything, while at the same time I feel grateful for the ones who do have the resources now to do so. 

I think the only good that can possibly come out of this -- besides not letting Akin or anyone of his mindset be elected, although I have to express my fear that, like ants, when he is removed another one, potentially worse, will pop up from whatever factory they're made in -- is that we understand again the gravity of speaking up. We get better used to calling bullshit on abusive talk and regressive systems.

I think there are probably women out there who have been carrying their stories around for a very long time, who felt motivated to share in the interest of educating people, not just about rape, but about the dangers of sitting by while people who would demean something so horrible are being interviewed on purpose on television, as authorities and public servants. 

I know there are. I am not one of them. I have never been raped. I have never had this experience. It has happened to people I love, however. It has happened to women today, women I don't know, and will never. It will continue to happen and to be excused, apparently, so we do what we must do. For many reasons, including what I have seen unfold in recent months, and, most critically, this week, I can only commit myself openly as an ally for the rest of my life. This has gotten out of hand. 

The "War on Women" is not a figment of the dirty liberal imagination or a fabrication of the Obama administration. That is wrong. Moving forward, how can we best help ourselves, and people who have suffered already? That is the only question I'm concerned about right now, besides saving the women of Missouri, and ourselves, from this kind of perverted governance. 

If you are a survivor of domestic violence, sexual abuse, or rape, you may find supportive resources at Violence Unsilenced here. You may read survivor stories here (please pace yourself, and be supported in some way, survivor or no.) and posts this week on their Facebook page. (For all the craziness, it has spurred some beautiful writing, and what I believe to be hope, community, and healing around this issue for survivors. I still wish it had happened in a different way, however, but I am a curmudgeon. :)) 

A favorite conservative trope is "taking our country back." It hasn't gone anywhere, and neither have many of us. We are still here, living our lives, facing our traumas, and, in the best of circumstances, supporting each other the best we can. We cannot allow untruths, abusive belief systems, harmful legislation, and insidious or explicit violence against women, to continue. We have truly, in many ways, come too far. 

If you are a survivor of any kind, I support you and salute you as I always have. If you are an ally, like me, I encourage you to speak up, particularly if you are a man, or know a man who may be encouraged to share his voice on this important issue. Hate and pain kill our hearts, our communities, our families, and our individual selves more than anything else. 

Thank you for supporting people who are trying to keep and make things better for all of us, especially those who need our help the most from day to day. 

Concrete jungle where exhaustion and spontaneous tears are made of, there's a lot of stuff you can't do.

Sometimes you stay up all night and listen to Elton (because he is your friend, OKAY?) and upload BlogHer pictures and think that yes, maybe things are just rolling along okay. 

It was in New York, so there were things like this: 

I met Margaret Cho and told her something I haven't told many people. She stepped back from me, put her hands on both of my shoulders, and said, "That's so beautiful, dude." 

I liked that a lot. 

I think we were both pretty excited about it. 

I also kidnapped Margaret Cho with my camera, and forced her to take pictures with Sarah and me (why didn't anyone take my hair down? I can only conclude that everyone hates me.) 

...and then with Tarrant and me.

Margaret Cho is gritting her teeth in exhaustion from me at this point. Except really, I don't think she is. She's a cool person. She may go out in the alley and punch herself repeatedly after these ordeals are over, but when she's in there, you don't know that. That's professionalism, man. 

I got to listen to Vikki read in Voices of the Year, and I loved it. I cried, because basically Vikki likes me to be in pain (Hey Vikki, typing your URL is painful. Do you know how confusing all of those p's are? 

No, seriously. I give Vikki a hard time, but that is because from the minute we Twitter-met, I got her. She's a spectacular human being, an interest in the game of Spoons aside, and although I really had no right to be, I was wildly proud of her writing something important and beautiful, and for reading it so well. 

Now I don't have to say anything nice about Vikki for awhile, right? Good. 

Spoons sucks so hard. KILL SPOONS WITH FORK FIRE. 

Let's see, what else? Oh. Schmutzie and Neil and I did a panel based on our Blog2012 chats, and it was so much fun. People filled the seats and had things to say, and at the end I ran around with a microphone like a fool for awhile, asking people what they needed help with from other bloggers.

Shhh, psst, y'all? Can someone pay me for that? Because it wsa invigorating as hell. I want to do it again, except I also need to eat. No? Okay. I'll just do it for fun. WHO NEEDS HELP?

The panel was pretty much everything and nothing we planned, but we took a lot away from it, and we are busily planning for more chats this year. I am so grateful to everyone who showed up. It was truly a highlight of my time online.  

I did not have my favorite conference year by far, but that was mostly me, because right now? I'm a hot mess. But it was New York, and so there was a form of twisted redemption after the second act, which is to say on Sunday and Monday after all you crazies got the hell out of Dodge. (I love you.)

There were buildings and slices of sky. 

Italian crudo I think about every day and wish to be shoving into my face (I am not lying. I don't think about any food every day, but for this one I make an exception, because it was glorious in every way. Please meet me in Eataly NYC, any time. Please.) 

There was an unexpected view of something so wonderful all I have is this to explain it. 

It was that wonderful. 

And yes, there was a vague, terrifying, memory of this. 

A promise of Chicago, too.

And always this:  

 

I'm pretty sure I'll see y'all there.

Happy

I am struggling with my chemistry, a lot. A lot a lot. It hasn't been this bad in a long time.

I had been feeling frustrated for a season of time, processing hurts and worry and assorted garbage. I think all of the transition -- the job change alone, plus the deep fears that my high blood pressure episode brought up in me, when I honestly thought I was going to die or be so impaired my life would never be the same -- got to be too much. I got snappish and pissy and overworked, angry again. I took on too many things after my job ended, piling on commitment after commitment in a panic, instead of stepping back, breathing, figuring out the logical and strategic way to manage this huge life change. 

I can tell you the exact tipping point.

When I got out of the cab at Penn Station on my way to the train last week after BlogHer, I rolled my unnecessarily gigantic suitcase up and over my ankle, ripped the skin off the side of it, and crunched my foot. It was a feat of totally involuntary and ridiculous clumsiness. Then the gate agent wouldn't take my e-ticket, yanked me out of line to go handle that, quite rudely. I was afraid that I would miss my train, and at that point, I needed to be home so badly that I freaked.

By the time I got on the train, I was done. My energy and adrenaline, all of the raw material I'd poured into the past three months, were gone. 

I came home, tried to sleep, and somewhere around day three, some familiar patterns emerged in my brain. And I got sad.

(Are you bored yet? I am. This whole thing is a colossal pain in the ass.) 

This descent is not new to me, but it is always jarring, frightening, and an inconvenient life and work killer. I am working my way through it every day, to try to make a plan, to take specific steps to accomplish the things I must do, to try to talk to my friends and family as I am always, still, entirely embarrassed and irritated to do.

"No, I don't feel so good. No, I'm not going to do that. Yes, I have called, yes. I know."

It is such a drag not to have good news. I want so badly to have good news. I'm surrounded by love but this is when it has trouble really touching me. I have angels on my phone and in my gchat, making me promise things and setting things up so I won't fall through this hole again. I can't tell you how hard it is for me to reach out and ask for help. I can't adequately explain the paralysis that hits me. The last time it was this bad was, honestly, 2005, which is when I started blogging, so I guess that's reasonable for what I know is a big transition year in terms of where the story goes from here. 

I'm making myself postpone radical decisions until I run them through my brain a few times, which means that I may take this trip I so badly want, yes, but in September, not tomorrow. Today I should send in three queries, but no, I will probably in fact send one. Today I will.

It is a bitch to know how to be a case manager when it's my brain. It feels like the most astoundingly reductive thing to do to myself, when in terms of clients all I've ever thought about (except for the occasional super mean one, full disclosure) is how to build up. 

But yes, I'm sitting with discomfort rather than racing around trying to make it go away. I am crying when I need to in hopes that the tear supply will run out and it will process my excess physical energy in a good way. (Apparently my eyes like to cry right now. It is incredibly inconvenient and I also have a chronic headache for the first time in months.) I am dragging my ass to yoga and om'ing as I'm told, adjusting the poses for hypertension, like a middle-aged boss. 

But the truth is that I would like a new Instagram filter for my life.

I would like to trade in these cards for some better ones right now.

I would like to avoid the parts that I know trip me up. I would like to push through the tangles of my neurons and synapses and just feel better. 

I am also trying to stay task-focused, because honestly I have a lot of stuff to do. So I was scrolling through pictures tonight, trying to get up my urge to post my images from the summer, none of them satisfying me at all in the way that they usually do. I came across this one. 

(Yes, these are pictures of me. It's a case study, kind of, if a lazy one.) 

This was Mom2 New Orleans, a couple of years ago. 

I'm sad I lost that ring on my right hand, but I know that I was happy. That night was so much fun. That was a great trip. I learned things. I  spoke. I made great connections and some new friends who are still in my life. My dad bloggers let me tag along in the Quarter, and it was the best of that place too, in spite of the craziness and gross puddles of God knows what (Sue me, I love it, even though I probably shouldn't.) I felt comfortable and secure in where I was and what I was doing.

Last year, I came home from San Diego and I looked like this: 

So tired. Kind of ridiculous. Still happy. Best trip, really, and there? I worked really hard, too. It was different, though. It made sense. I felt good about it. I came home strengthened in friendships and love, in my sense of myself in the work I was doing. 

I do not like how I look now enough to share it. This is no commentary on my physical appearance, honestly, but there's just an expression, you know? I don't know what it is, but I don't like it. 

One of the most challenging things about depression is actually the moments when the clouds break, when I start to feel better. It can be terrifying, striking a psychological chord much like "Oh, have you lost weight? I thought your face looked a little thinner." 

And then I might freak out because what did I look like before? What happens if you try to grasp onto this feeling of rare chemical normalcy, try to make friends with it, and then it leaves again? It's the classic taste of honey/none at all conundrum. 

It's worth it, though. It is. It just doesn't feel like it in the moment, even if it feels like it in the end. 

I know that the only way out is through, and that I can commit to the "through" so much. I know that this -- whatever this is -- is temporary, and that it maybe can even lead to something better.  I know that I am lucky to have friends who will check up to see if I'm writing for my own sake, if I'm going to post, if I'm going to go to the doctor, if I'm going to leave my house, if I need a place to stay if I do decide to just start driving. Lucky lucky lucky. 

It's just hard to feel the lucky sometimes, when it feels so bad, and finding it hard to feel lucky even when you know you are is a particular kind of guilt barn-burner, so screw that noise. It's just really important to get through it, to get through all of this. It's really important to make something better out of this stretch of days until they're over.

It can just feel so, so bad. And that is when hope is the most important thing. 

32 Loosely Related Thoughts

If Elan were here, she would maybe suggest to me again that I make a list, as she sometimes likes to do. So that is what I am going to do. I believe the last time she instructed that it be 18, 24, or 32 things long, so I'll see where I am when I feel like stopping and do that. 

1. Paul Ryan was announced as the Romney running mate today. I find no humor in it, and am focused on ignoring my 2000/2004 flashbacks. I am humorless about all of this, aside from the @PaulRyanGosling account. That's kinda funny. 

2.  No one seems to be talking to teenagers or young adults this election cycle and it's baffling and upsetting me, as well as scaring me. I'm used to being ignored as a single woman, but the Democratic party's focus on family (I like families. I do not hate families of any kind, except jerk families, okay?) at the expense of other demographics bothers me. Teenagers and young 20-somethings can be so disaffected about their options, and I can't blame them. Do you know how much they'd care, given something to care about? Christ TALK TO THEM. Huge failure, huge missed opportunity. I am in love with the Obama campaign for waking up like their house was on fire to LGBT issues, angry at them for ignoring the kids. A lot of them are also hanging around during the summer, so it would have been a nice, slow time to start talking to them. **Kicks things.**

3. This, this baby wombat and baby kangaroo, who found love and friendship with each other, are what made me feel better this week. I keep looking at them, because they are so, so cute, and I stopped hating everything every time I looked at them. 

4. I'm a hyper-religious-educated, lapsed Catholic and largely non-religious person with a deep belief in a human Jesus Christ who set out to do quite a bit of good in his time, and I'm sick of seeing him used as a political pawn. He just wanted everybody to have enough to drink and to love their mamas.  (Shut up, heathens can love Jesus too.) 

5. I am thinking quite a bit about loneliness, how I've backed myself into a corner in the place where I live where (in addition to living alone) I see very few people on a daily basis with whom I have a real connection. It just seems cruel, really, given my personality and what I basically need. It feels very stupid to say this, but I don't even really know how this shook out, and I'm not really sure how to fix it. I'm scared it will be this way forever, and it's kind of freaking me out. (I know it won't be. I'm working on it. Still, the valley is low right now. Uncomfortable.) 

6. My increased time on Twitter and Facebook is a direct result of this. It's making me more uncomfortable, and also reinforcing my desire for a family and home and community. So I guess it's all working together for good? Ugh. Sometimes I wish I could start everything over. 

7.  I woke up this morning motivated to clean and organize, and it's happening, to a better extent. This was a relief. 

8. I am tired of myself and thinking of ways I can help other people and situations so I can get out of my own head and dumb life situation. 

9. I think I want to move soon, so I asked Twitter and Facebook tonight (please cross-reference #6) who really loved where they lived, just as a backgrounder. I'm a terrible on-the-scene reporter, but committed to newsgathering, regardless. It's like I'm an editor, all the time. IMAGINE THAT. I felt like a huge dumbass asking these questions, but I'd just come in from this really unsatisfactory trip to the grocery store and Home Depot where I bought the entirely wrong, too-bright, track light bulbs for my kitchen, and for some reason this triggered a feeling that if I didn't get out of this area at large soon, well, I don't know. I'm not saying it was rational at all. It just seemed the thing to do to ask Twitter, no matter whether people think I suck because I can't stop talking on Twitter.

I am so glad I did! People answered, SO many people. They seemed to like being asked, and they got to talk about the homes that they love. The stories were so good.  

10. The upshot is that New York and California are winning as places to go, because at 41, I remain a cliche, apparently communicate with a lot of people on social networks in New York and California, and am also an idiot who likes to be broke. *If I'm still here next year, everyone is allowed to laugh and laugh at me. 

11. I have so many ideas, things that I want to work on. I feel like if I gave them to someone to organize, out from the alchemy would come this amazing plan. Left to me, it's all just neurons colliding at present.

12. Now that my front rooms are clean and organized, I feel like I can set this all straight and put it all in order. Check back with me in September.

13. I had all of these events to work on that I was so excited about from May through the beginning of August, and now I am at a loss. I feel like I'd know better what a double rainbow means than what anything is that I did, much less what I'm supposed to do next. 

14. I still most days think that quitting my job was the dumbest thing I could have possibly done, but I don't regret it at all.

15. This sounds horrible in my brain, but here goes. Sometimes I would like to be kept, in the sense that if my  basic needs were met and I didn't have to think about them, that I could make everything else for other people beautiful and productive, my brain would work better, and I could also earn money and contribute to the greater good with so much reduced pressure. (That sounds so terrible! What am I? A goddamned Geisha? I can't even keep a house like Alice from the Brady Bunch, not that there was anything wrong with Alice at all. Ann B. Davis, I apologize. I would still earn money and contribute. UGH. Oh well. Truth.)

16. I need to have conversations with some people that I don't want to have but that I need to have.

17. Everyone is on vacation. I need them to come back from vacation so I can get cracking. (It's all about me. Have nice vacations, guys!) 

18.  I saw the light slant for the first time today in a way that would suggest summer is waning and I don't like that at all, no ma'am. 

19. I am still vain about my BlogHer pedicure. Ken did a nice job, although he was WAY more concerned about pictures of his baby in Vietnam and also watching Spain vs. US beach volleyball at the time, selfish bastard. I wish I cared enough to keep it up every other week or so, but I am as bored of nail maintenance as other people are obsessed with and happy about it. I also let him wax my eyebrows after a year of him not-so-silently judging me, so I think I have to go back for that, though. 

20. I don't feel like dealing with my pictures on my camera or on my phone. I'd like to call July and August a mental "take a picture it'll last longer" era, delete them all, and move on to fall. I blame the death of Flickr on my uploading ennui. Facebook does not get my good stuff. Not sorry, Facebook. God I hate you. 

21. My twin obsession along with loneliness and how I've constructed this bizarro world of solitude out of relationships with hundreds of people, is love. Can it go away as an issue? Because, really. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd say that I was a murdering, pillaging Visigoth in my past life for the lack of luck I've had in this one. I don't believe in it, though, on principle, because if I'm going to say I believe in that, how in the hell am I going to justify my rejection of the literal resurrection and the glorious mysteries (Welcome to Catholic fantasy island. Sorry, Grandma.) How are these different concepts? It could be really easy to blame my state on earth now on some nonsense from back in the day when my name was Ermentrude and I beheaded someone or just, oh, maybe mildly pillaged, but I can't. So I'm left with shitty luck as a touchstone, which basically means I'm an apparition, not really here, because I left five minutes ago for a 24-hour convenience store in Baltimore to lean up against the counter and play Keno. 

22. This has gone off the rails a little bit. I think I may need to dust off the Tumblr. This kind of writing is encouraged there, right? 

23. I feel like I'm watching the hugest pot of water and stopping it from boiling.  

24. I bought white boards before BlogHer. I have written many tasks on them and have even wiped some accomplished things off. I think this means I'm an adult. 

25. Apropos of #15, my fondest vague vision of myself remains in some big-ass kitchen/dining room combo, open door sort of situation, making large meals for whomever shows up and not caring that my partner in life likes to slap me on the ass every now and then in some kind of affectionate passing. So basically I'm a larger, brown-haired version of Millie in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, with one sibling instead of six fake ones and no creepy songs about the Sabine women. And yes, this movie will always remind me, ironically, of Lesbian Dad, one of my personal heroes of humanity, who can live-tweet it like a...Polly. Also, in this version of my life, my potted herbs don't die, and all of my computer, music, television, and movie situations are integrated through no effort on my part. Both of these things make me so, so happy. (I don't have many daydreams. Therefore, the ones I have are very specific.) 

26. I thought I'd be so much happier at the end of this summer than I am, but I still have amazing moments of fun and good stuff from time to time. There's just something really missing that is driving me crazy. 

27. I am doing my first portrait shoot in a long time tomorrow, and I am nervous. My subject is someone I know very well and love, and I think we'll work well together. Still nervous. 

28. If I don't get a dog in my house soon I am not going to be responsible for my actions. #emptythreats

29. Isak Dinesen said, once when not writing Out of Africa, presumably, that "the cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea." I would really like someone to take me to the beach and knock out the other two. (Honestly, it is beautiful, so true, and my favorite quote. I keep saying it over and over to myself so much lately in between weeping and heaving through yoga classes, along with its annoying companion, the Rilke "Live your way into the answers" business.) 

30. Can the fall tv season start already? 

31. I look forward to being 42.   

32. Anyone who read this? I'm sorry. You are a champion blog reader, or you love me. Flowers at your feet, virtual ones, but flowers, all the same. 

Everything After

*I have no interest in publishing this post, but there you have the story of my blog life. 

I'm back home, wandering the rooms, frantically pounding out work that didn't happen when it was supposed to because so many other things were, not really sure of my space yet, pressing my thumbs against my arms for some sense of solidity. There is dust everywhere, half-dead pots of herbs, anthems on the tv and a newly strange sliding-glass-sized view. 

I feel weird, ungainly in a different way than I usually do in August. I promised myself last year at this time I would have a refuge slated. I dreamed a place -- anywhere in Europe, mostly, or maybe just a beach anywhere, because I am predictable -- to ease into where I could breathe out the exhaust of intense ideas and social interactions, of the competing pressures of moving and traveling and presenting and being, of speaking and hearing millions (what had to be, right?) millions of words, alphabets of them crashing into each other and melting in the New York heat.

I didn't end up doing that for myself, of course.  It was an extra, unhappenable thing, that ended up seeming untenable for lack of dollars and sense. So I'm trying to make that happen here, which would work better if I could drum up the energy for groceries beyond coffee rations and soccer game Prosecco.

It's not so bad, as it always isn't, unless it really is. It's quiet but a little too much, the familiarity not exactly what I wanted, but it will have to do, because the urge to work to go anywhere in this moment is absent.

**************************************************************

I want to be better this year. I am dissatisfied with myself, my thought processes, the way I dwell on wrongs. I'm not proud of so many things I'm thinking and feeling, of my dissatisfactions and my petty irritations. I am good things amid the wreck, but it's the wreck I mostly see. Mirrors are hard things.

I don't know what will happen now. I'm scared of it, to tell the truth. There is this next expanse of time to fill that I don't understand quite yet. I feel like I'd been looking at life since May as a pre- and post-BlogHer proposition, and now that the post- is here I'm out of mulligans (That is a golf term. I'm pretending to know something about golf now. See? I'm a damn dirty liar.)

I'm afraid of not doing whatever it is that I'm capable of doing, basically. I'm afraid of not fulfilling a prophecy that I can't possibly know, but feel like I should.

I'm afraid of being alone, of lack of love, and a little bit, of myself. That I'll never get it. That I'll dwell too much in possibility and miss the exit. 

I worry that I'll always be one step behind, that what I leave won't mean anything, that the things I've broken down will be the story. I'm sick of myself, of my indecision, of any kind of unhappiness, of grieving what I've lost and, worse, what I just can't have. I'm sick of working on boundaries and letting go. I'm sick of working on anything. I'm mad at myself for the things I can't stop being sad about, for resenting the relatively small things I have to endure, for not being more graceful in disappointment and want, for my inability to recover from pain more quickly, for my tendency to dwell, for being the worst. person. IN THE WORLD, right? 

I hate that I'm embarrassed to write this down, that I know I'll be embarrassed to send it out into the world, navel-gazing, self-loathing bullshit. Emotional dreck, whatever. 

I know I can be better, is the thing. I know that all I can do is take responsibility for the things I've done that aren't so good, and move on, to dare to hope, I guess, for a little slant of sun. 

I wish it would hurry up, though -- the better-getting -- because I am tired of this particular stretch of verge-of-midlife-suburban-wanderer highway. I aso know that I can sit down on my living room rug and turn up my hands and invite it, too, that I'm probably missing it in the fray. I know that I can forgive myself for the things I smack myself around for, that I can say for sure that even my most ridiculous actions are generally rooted in some hazy good intention, that I am not really all that bad. 

Maybe I feel like if I dump this out old-style  the poison of my thought processes that are wrecking up my plans will seep out of me. I told the people who so kindly and remarkably (honestly, I could not believe it. I was terrified to see it, as much as I was pleased and gratified) filled a room the other day to listen to Neil and Schmutzie and me that I am never as happy as a writer or an online person or a person of any kind as when I come back to this empty white blog box and type stuff into it, so maybe this is just some sick way of proving that true, that there's a comfort and satisfaction in it even when I can't see the screen for dumbass tears. 

**************************************************************

I need something better, you guys. It's been a long time coming dancing in front of me. I don't mind working but I feel like I've been grasping, and no good comes of that after a time. I think I know that I have to do some radical, physical, movement to get to what it is, the yard and the sun and the dog and the face I can kind of see but not quite, that I want to acknowledge as my truth, somewhere I can land to do what I know I want to do. I can't sit here anymore, not in this zip code or this head space, and expect to have the generalized sense of being on the right path that all of this 2012 drama has been about. 

I know this, and I know it has to start now. I knew it when I was walking those crazy halls in New York and I knew it when I hugged my friends with a peculiar sense of desperation. I really knew it when I bought myself an extravagant lunch and then took two cabs and finally ran for a train only to come back to sit in this spot again. I know it when I look for what I'll never find on the internet and yet can't seem to see here either, when I refuse phone calls and shut people down, when I do whatever it is I do to knit together a routine. 

I know it. I don't really want to, because for some reason it is a hard last hurdle to jump, but I do. 

This time I really do. 

*Photo by Leslie Fandrich, who is a very sweet soul, among other very good things. Text by Robin Plemmons, who is Robin Plemmons, master of train horns and human hearts. 

PS: One more thing! Tonight, Alexis Hinde posted a lovely video in answer to a dream Schmutzie had last night about Bret Michaels, who is one of my favorite last vestiges of the hair metal culture of my teenaged years, and who -- I am not kidding you -- I admire for his staying power. Say what you will, but dude is a master of reinvention, and also a mogul.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn is one of my favorite songs of all time, and for reasons only she can know, Alexis offered to sing it. She did a beautiful job, and it made me feel much better about life, the universe, and everything before I called it a day. We're not sure if it's cool to post it here, but just knowing it's out there makes me feel better.

It's the little things, the little things that are big things, that keep us going.  Thank you, Alexis, and Schmutzie for everything else, pretty much. 

BlogHer In New York, BlogHer At Home, basically it's all BlogHer around here right now so yeah

Oh, here we go again, me about to spin my yarn about how I got on an aeroplane in ye olde 2006 and flew to California for the first time, pretended I knew how to make a "podcast" so this nice lady who ran this blogging conference would spot me a ticket while I proceeded not to try to wreck her audio recording situation. 

It's quite a yarn. 

This is a different, more recent one. I just thought I'd get that shot out of the way early. You know how sometimes, in 2006, you fly to California, and then five years later you're standing at the same, now way huger, event, next to a giant toilet? Yeah. 

Then there's the part about how I didn't know anyone before I got there, and I had never been to California before, and I stood awkwardly in a crowded party room with other people who had recently been hired to be editors for this newfangled lady blogger website. 

I would also post photos like this on Flickr then, apparently. That's different from now. 

And then I went to sessions and gawked at the same five bloggers everyone gawked at then, and made a few friends, and drank some wine, sat by the pool with strangers, didn't wreck the audio after all, and fell completely in love with this weird scene. 

Then at the end I drove to Santa Cruz and came back to San Jose and flew home, and that was it. Goodbye, old life. Hello, new, strange, half-in-the-computer-half-out-of-it one. 

I have since gone to six more BlogHer conferences and several other offshoots, the Foods and the Writers and the Businesses, the one in Boston and one in DC.

Barefoot in a San Francisco hotel lobby at 5 a.m., waiting for a cab to take me to a bus and then a train. That happened. 

Also in SF, this was on a telephone table by the elevator, by someone apparently needing to check in about her conference experience. Or maybe his. Is that Neil's handwriting? 

I've written for the site for seven years. I've taken pictures for the events. I met my best friends writing for it, and some of my most valued professional and personal mentors (who also happen to be my friends, which is nice.) 

In May I quit my teaching job as an indirect result of the path that first conference set me on, and now I am trying to find a combination of life and work in the things that blogging reminded me again that I love the most -- writing and photography and, interestingly, a sense of community, shared and sometimes opposing ideas,  with the common denominator still for me that in 2012 we have the power to strike keys and press a button and send our words around the world. 

And maybe meet childhood toys come to life. That too. 

I will never get over that this happened in my lifetime, even on days like a few lately when the internet drives me crazy and I want to leave it entirely. It is still the defining thing, for me. I spend too much time in and around it, I feel like, sometimes, but this is the straw I drew, and I'm not sorry. 

I can't tell anyone how to get ready for this conference, or what kind of time they'll have, or if it'll be like what they thought or wanted or didn't. I cannot help you with shoes in New York or with social anxiety, because I never bring the right ones for my terrible feet and I have such terror sometimes of making an ass of myself that I actually do it, and for an introvert I am generally quite shy around people at first, even if I act like I'm not.

This yearly trip into the island of misfit blogger toys is the core of my core. It is what it is, every year, and what it is is always good, so there really isn't a whole lot to say about that part. 

This year, because I quit my job in May (which is something I need to keep saying over and over again, it seems,  until I get used to it) I have had the challenge and the opportunity to try new things online (in the online SPACE, as the cool kids say. Space. The online space.) This has included working with a couple of events, helping to bring their on and off-line communities together. That means that this year I'm the bizarre fairy den mother charged with hosting BlogHerAtHome on the Twitter, and on the BlogHer website.

No, I will not myself be at home. But I will be roaming around the Hilton New York, trying to share content from this conference with people at home who, although they won't be there, can still benefit from learning from the speakers, mostly, and I want to help them access that. I'll also be sharing real-time photos and tweets from parties and expo hall activities and whatnot, and just the general knitting together online of one person's conference experience. 

I'm most excited for the people following along and hopefully speaking up from home that they'll get to be in touch with other people, maybe make some new Twitter contacts, share their blogs, try to connect in a good way. The space (I can't stop saying it now, see how that happens?) is so crowded now. When I went to BlogHer San Jose, there were maybe 350 people there? I don't know. Math. The projection this year is for right around 4,000. 4,000 people, people.

But my guidelines for what gets you where you want to go online are just like they are anywhere: Talk to people. Listen for opportunities. Work hard. Know what to turn down. Talk to people. Listen. Listen listen listen. 

I wouldn't have any of the gigs I've got now if it weren't for friendships and professional relationships that developed from conversations, from writing I did that turned into more, from photos I shared online that somebody liked, from conversations I had in hallways that turned into deeper exchanges that turned into "Hey, I know someone looking for someone who does what you do." 

It elevates us all when it's right, I think. 

So if you're going to be home, follow @BlogHerAtHome, if you're into that sort of thing. If you're going to the conference, I'll be the one over there, hoping you're having a good time. 

It is my favorite thing, every year. It's good to know that about a few good things, and a lot of good people. 

(Oh, and PS, one word of advice, so I totally lied about not telling you what to do. If you like good writing and good people, I highly recommend NOT skipping Voices of the Year or the Listen to Your Mother Salon. Also do not eat at the "microbrewery" down the avenue from the Hilton, because it sucks, and if you're going to the meat cart, please bring me something, because I can never stand to stand in line that long. Otherwise, do your thing. It's totally allowed.)