LaurieWrites

BlogHer Voices Of the Year - Community Keynote 2010

BlogHer changed my life. The BlogHer Community Keynote changed my life some more.

In 2005, BlogHer helped me find my voice as a writer again and a place in a community of people who were doing the same thing. In 2008, this community gave me the chance to stand on a stage at a very low personal point in front of hundreds of people and read words that I had written.

This really has always been about the story and the need to tell it, for me. The other stuff came later and even though it takes awhile sometimes and I'm easily distracted it's always circled back around to the words and what they turn into in the end, like it or not.

I did everything about writing the post I was going to enter in the wrong way, as usual. I sat down on the afternoon of the submission deadline and pounded it out with the desperation only a writer who is as truly, equally inspired by and terrified of a deadline as I am knows. 

A number of weeks after I wrote and hastily submitted the post in the Letter to My Body category for the Community Keynote, I received an e-mail that I'm sure I still have somewhere saying that I had been chosen to read it at the BlogHer conference in San Francisco in July.

I managed to do it without incident, with the help of a relatively high threshold for constant anxiety and a very kind and supportive roommate. It was one of the most terrifying and important days of my life. I was certain I would not be able to do it but I did. I stood backstage with people who I knew were incredible writers, people who would be my good friends shortly thereafter, at least one person who brought out the fangirl at the time, and others who I was sure were light years ahead of me in terms of confidence and certainly popularity, whatever that means.

It didn't really matter, it turns out. It doesn't. I mean, it did matter, being backstage with those people. That was the best part of this experience, in many ways.But it didn't matter, what they were that I was not and vice versa.

I unfortunately was also not at all comfortable with my body at the time, as much as it was my face that was the focus of the letter and not the rest of me. I was at the highest weight I'd been in years. I skipped the afternoon panel in a panic to go to H&M up the street to buy a dress an hour before show time, suddenly deciding that nothing in my wardrobe was sufficient, that nothing would make me look good - which nothing really will in my eyes, when I feel like that. In the aftermath of reading, I was obsessed with obsessing about how bad I looked in the pictures. I still can't watch the video.

(That's me with Mochamomma on the left and Clair, whose link I will find and post shortly because my land I have got to post this and get out of here but I care, I really do, on the right at the MightyHaus party afterwards. I can finally post this one and not hide it on old Flickr sets. Woo! /Sarcasm.)

Hey, this is why I was in the Letter To My Body category and not humor, people.

This is the daily part of this being me business. It is never easy. But what I can say is that it turned out that getting up and reading the post I'm about to re-post below (with some pronoun edits to fix some aspects of it that have bothered me for two years.) was a very important thing to do. It is important to me to know that I can say "yes" to things that scare me to death. It is important to me to participate when I'm asked. It was an honor, really, and those don't come along every day, or sometimes even every year.

This is all to say that I am so happy to be one of the curators for the Design category of this year's 2010 Voices of the Year Community Keynote, announced today. I get to do this with Karen Walrond, who came into my life with her book and notepad and yes, of course, her camera last year as a result, she said, of hearing me read the year before. She has inspired me more than she knows, to examine my negative observations of myself and to consider how I consider myself different and whether or not I'm ready to say that that's beautiful.

She makes you work hard, that one, on important things, and I'm okay with responding honestly. And in the process she has taken my picture and become my friend.

Sometimes I can't believe how this all fits together, but when I look back over the past five years, it really has.

Anyway, this is what I stood on that stage and read:

Body: n. The entire material or physical structure of an organism, especially of a human or  animal.

I keep getting stuck on this letter, with this idea of addressing my whole body. It's overwhelming - too much, I think. There are so many things I could focus on, but I keep coming back to my face. It deserves a letter. It has physical and psychic seniority over the extra 40 pounds, the wonky ankle, the aggravating stretch marks – especially so because there aren’t even any babies to attribute them too, just cheeseburgers. All of those things, as hard as they’ve been to face, along with all of the things about this form that I celebrate…well, they’re chump change compared to my face.

So my face, it gets the letter, although just writing "Dear Face" feels too awkward, so it's more of an address in its general direction, which I hope will do. It gets it because it’s worked overtime from that random genetic moment in the womb – about four weeks in, so I understand – where it didn’t fully fuse, leaving me shooting out into the world with a split lip and palate, to its daily grind since then.  It, unlike any other part of this body, takes the really sharp turns. It reads the road signs and knows which line at the grocery store is better, right out of the gate. It picks the winners, or tries to. It finds the empty parking spaces and answers the tough questions. The arms and legs, they just fall in line.

There are no photos before the day at six weeks of age when I went into surgery for the first time, when my hippie plastic surgeon in the American flag t-shirt sewed my lip together. Hospitals didn’t take many if any photos of babies with facial differences then, although my mother said she wanted one. A nurse cried over her in her bed, for me, for my problems, giving birth to a rage in my mother that she told me she had trouble – at 20 years of age – understanding, much less responding to. This was still, she said, her baby, her baby's face. But in the days before digital cameras and immediate records, before blogs and communities where people could inevitably find someone to share their story, and more importantly, before differences were more acceptable, it was better to wait until I was – almost – whole to start snapping.

My face fends off strange looks when people notice the irregularities, the scar at the midline of the lip and nose, the asymmetry that little kids can see when they look up from beneath. It’s responsible for eye contact, important when you want people to see you for you, for the words you can say and the thoughts you think, and not focus on the scar tissue from a genetic fluke that really, when it comes down to it, is completely manageable. It doesn’t affect intellect, or humor, or skill of any sort. It just makes me snore pretty loud, which isn’t fun, and it also makes me whistle occasionally when I talk, which can be jarring, because I can't do it in tune.

It’s not easy being at the front of the pack when you look different from the average in this super looks-obsessed culture, according to the maddening scale that changes depending on location, time of day and who you’re talking to. Bars in college weren’t so fun. Just like fifth grade, remember? Except in fifth grade men weren’t yet coming up to me to ask for my best friend’s number, because surely it was my life’s dream to hook my girls up with unworthy partners.

My face still watches and hears people call it a cleft lip, call it a facial difference, praying they don’t call it a harelip, because that still sounds so ugly. It’s not politically correct – it’s just an old word, a word that doesn’t fit anymore, at least not for me. 

My face became, anyway, a big talker, a hyper-verbal life of the party. For someone who didn’t like people looking at it much, it blabbed on and on from the time I could talk, encouraged by indulgent adults to share my thoughts, which didn’t need any help coming out in the first place. And only when a keyboard got involved did the flow of words pipe down just a bit.

As much as it - as I- talked, though, it listened, paid attention, watched for the oncoming cars, for the people who didn’t know better and for the many angels who’ve helped us along the road. It holds my head up every time I’ve turned it to the ground to avoid a straightaway glance – for the times I’ve begged silently for someone to just look me in my big brown eyes, anywhere but at my mouth. It watches people – subconsciously, I’m sure – trace their fingers over their upper lip absentmindedly while they’re talking to me, something that makes me smile now after years of self-consciousness. It likes half and half and red wine and has an unhealthy preoccupation with olives and brie.

It has trouble still sometimes, after all these years, working with my brain to respond, to defend, to fight back or to clarify.

When a friend recently asked if I knew that Joaquin Phoenix was rumored to have a cleft lip and put the subject out there, I should have felt more solid than I did in saying that it was just a thing, a personal thing, and more power to him for making it in a looks-driven industry, guarding his decision to talk about it or not, even if he is famous.

When the girl I worked with in college asked me "why in the world I wasn’t going to have more work done” I  shouldn’t have felt like I needed to make an appointment with a plastic surgeon immediately. Instead, I should have told her the truth – that I was tired of being cut into and reshaped, that anesthetic terrified me, that I needed nothing more than to relax into myself and love (or at least not hate) the face I already had.

Instead, I probably went in the back and smoked a couple of cigarettes and cried in the car on the way home.  19, you know.

When the client in graduate school – schizoaffective, no social filter, but still – walked up to me and said, “You had that THING. On your FACE,” I’m sorry. I didn’t really know what to say. Schizoaffective. No social filter. I reached out to her and calmed her because I knew she didn’t understand and was actually crying for me. But still…would everyone say it, if they didn’t know it wasn’t okay?

And when Connie said on the drive to Columbus that that young nurse who took care of her husband “had that problem” I had, so she married the first guy who asked, who turned out to be an alcoholic and wasn’t that terrible, but still? She had that problem? So she’d better marry the first guy who asked? Right?

I didn’t.

And when the man who loved me and who I loved back, years later, told me that he wasn’t sure at first that he could date me because he had a thing for symmetry, and my face, it really didn’t fit that bill, I maybe shouldn’t have been so understanding. I maybe should have gotten up off the couch and left the room, left the apartment and the state. But I didn’t. I cared too much and knew he did too, that he was trying really hard to put truth out there and it was time to either grab hold of it or stay stuck. So I put it in the bag I kept such things in inside, and instead made it an important conversation that somehow built a tenuous bridge between him and me, and managed somehow not to hate what I looked like and what I had to offer - much.

These experiences and the thoughts and feelings they cause aren’t so much carry-on baggage at this point as they are cargo for my body, my face and me, are they?

Say it with me: harelip. And then throw it away, that terrible, ugly, made-up word, that label, just like we throw away the other stuff, the worries about the pounds and the knee and the ankle. Just like we embrace the fact that we can stretch to the sky, we can move ourselves wholesale out of an old house and into a new one. We can walk the beach for miles. We can travel across a country 8000 miles from home and tell stories, even though there this face is still a bit more shocking than it is at home, something we can tell by the way eyes linger longer, why questions are asked more pointedly there than they are here. We can use our ears to hear foreign languages and try to reach across cultures anyway. We can answer questions that aren’t whispered and try to help people understand what it’s like for a little girl to go under repeatedly, be wheeled into operating rooms with her mom and dad just beyond the big green doors, where even though the kind reconstructive surgeon played classical music and sang to her while she went to sleep, it was still a lot like dying every time.

We can put all this aside and still get out there every day and try, at least try, to look people in the eye. We can smile, even if it’s a little crooked. We can use the mouth that's still so big even though it's long since been sewn together to yell when things aren't right, to speak the truth, and more frequently than ever these days, to defend principles and other people along with our own fragile selves.

And if I can never embrace it fully, this blip on the genetic screen that caused this problem for me, for my body and my face, I can still hold people in my arms and in my heart like at one point I pushed them away with equal force. I can try not to be angry as a matter of course and try instead to be nice. I can thank the stars for every shallow person a facial scar sent away, and thank them for every minute in the deep end with good people who don't just see the surface. I can be a little better about knowing when to talk and when to shut up. I'm so strong now that if anybody says “that which doesn’t kill you…” it’s just sort of comical, and I can tell them that my face and I have had enough, that it had better be all sunshine and roses from now on.

And always, always, completely on purpose, I will wear fabulous lipstick. 

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If you feel that your work fits one of this year's categories, and you are going to be at the sold-out-with-a-waitlist BlogHer in New York Fucking City in August, please submit something. Take a chance. I promise you it will be entirely, terrifyingly worth it. Everyone can't win, sure, but it's a guarantee that no one has a shot at hearing you if you don't speak up. This may be the year that 2008 was for you, the year that things were supposed to really start to change.

And I promise that I will be there to applaud you. I'm a good applauder, and I usually come with wine, or the beverage of your choice. True story.

Tell yours.

Covered in roses

Today started with an excellent breakfast at Dottie's Bluebird Cafe (I think?) in downtown San Francisco with my BlogHer roommate Genie and the excellent Jen Zug who was a fellow reader at the Community keynote Friday night. We spent the hour wait in the gray damp morning talking about nothing and everything in between and decided it was worth it when the food came. Wow. Best breakfast, really, that I'd wait for again, which generally speaking isn't the case.

After breakfast Genie had taken off for the airport and I stuck around in the room to check my e-mail and try to arrange transportation to San Diego from San Francisco, a task I thought would be stunningly easy. Cue the Westin kicking me off the wireless when the BlogHer "FREE" bizness stopped almost exactly at noon. Then cue me trying desperately to cram two weeks' worth of crap into two suitcases, while the "what to keep" pile of stuff I was bringing home from the conference got smaller and smaller.

Suitcases closed, I arranged my camera and purse and whatever other detritus of my life stood between me and a life beyond the Westin walls, when a wave of horrible emptiness came over me and I began to weep. I'd had a dream about my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend (whom I do not know and will never, by the way? So, weird?) in the early morning hours. I felt suddenly, overwhelmingly sad. BlogHer was great and powerful like Oz for me this year, and it was over. I missed my family. I hadn't seen enough of the city. And most of all, I was oh so VERY all alone in this hotel room and thus it would ever be. I really really lost my shit there for a minute, and as a result had absolutely no idea what to do next.

What I did was somehow manage to pile all the junk into a set-up that I could stumble downstairs with, stopped crying after a few minutes, and went out to the elevators. And when the elevator doors opened up, there was my dear BlogHer co-editor Catherine Morgan and her mom, smiling big smiles and inviting me to run around the city with them to do some last-minute shopping and sea-lion watching and whatnot. Catherine and I connected at last year's conference and I'm in touch with a number of my BlogHer girls (as I call them in my head, where it is neither inappropriate nor reductive, by the way. ;)) every day. She stuck with me today as I realized that a $350 rental car return fee in San Diego wasn't going to cut it, and worked with my quiet hysteria while I tried to arrange alternative transportation. She and her sweet mom Frances listened to me babble on at lunch, and by the time I left them at the sea lions to go meet two other really great women who had stuck around, who I felt comfortable reaching out to for some company and support even though I didn't know them very well at all until tonight, I felt - if not completely settled with the weirdness of the day and every single conflicting emotion that seems to bookend everything for me these days - at least grateful that I'd had that time with people I liked and cared about. At least I wasn't crying anymore, In fact,  the crazy sea lion barking made me laugh out loud and that's definitely preferable to the weeping.

This kind of experience is what I really love the most about what BlogHer has brought to my life in the past three years and what makes me go all warm and fuzzy about it like I don't about many, many things, trust me. I'd call it out if it wasn't true and when parts of it don't work for me I do that too. But the stark truth is that very few things in my life have given me the chance to not only get better at the writing but also to connect with people in these really astounding ways. It's an experience that takes me up really really way high sometimes. It can have me stupid in the street at 4 a.m. with people I've just met. It makes me laugh and talk and eat and drink and think and cry when it's over.

Which it is. And I am finally getting the hell out of here.

Learning to fly

I always worry about my plane crashing. I used to be a pretty normal flyer - a few butterflies on takeoff, random worries about the things that go bump on the plane, as it were, gratitude when I was on solid ground again, annoyance that that woman with all the crap in the overhead bin just couldn't slide over just a LITTLE bit so as not to impede the progress of 100 people trying to get the hell off.

Sometime last year I became a super nervous flyer. My mind became a total jackass and turned me into that person who actually buys the little bottles of cheap red wine for MEDICINAL PURPOSES. I don't know why, but it made a (total of, with layovers) 20-hour trip to Hanoi an exercise in hell, and sets me on the edge of my seat for the bulk of every flight, unable to sleep.

My trip to San Francisco for BlogHer, I planned for this - planned ahead, that is, with a little bit of medicine for mama to take the edge off, I admit it. I wished I didn't have to, but I was not going to go through this hell again, leaving me uncoiling for the first day of an event of which I do not wish to miss a single minute. Crazy stuff: it worked. I made it everywhere in good form, arms and legs quite loose and brain not completely overwhelmed and just all warm and fuzzy and in love with the universe.

Still not a huge fan of the flying thing, but if pressed, I would say that the reason my plane didn't crash on the way here was so I could read last night in the Community Keynote.

I love this conference. It's my third year, and the haters can shut it, because not only is it not ONLY about the shoes (although, for me, it's a little bit about the wine, but that makes it no different than anywhere else in my world) it is about everything else. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me in my writing life, and it's up there in my personal life as well. I am an unashamed, unabashed supporter. And now my love is just off any chart in existence, because no other opportunity has arisen in my life - ever - to get up and read something incredibly deeply personal in front of almost 1,000 people, and - once I got out there, after much pre-reading angst - to look out and feel completely supported and at ease.

And afterwards? AFTERWARDS? I'm still amazed that several wonderful people took the time to seek me out - in the hotel lobby - on the way to the party - at the MightyHaus shindig later - to tell me how they felt about what I wrote. They told me their very personal and meaningful stories. They cried. They made me cry. They said things about me, about bravery, about...well, just a lot of things that I have trouble owning for myself a lot of the time, and have to say I don't always believe, but this has been a pretty big step in the right direction of shutting up the aforementioned jackass brain.

I'll write more about this later - my battery is dying and I have to go speak on a panel about blogging without kids (which, gotta say, after standing up alone in front of a ballroom full of people? let's just say I hope it isn't harder than I think it's going to be.) But because I know some new people are stopping by here today, thanks to the awesome Eden Kennedy, I just wanted to say that the experience was one of the best and most meaningful of my life. I'm really glad my plane didn't crash so I could do it, and I don't really know what happens next, ever, with anything, but this was pretty fucking awesome.

Race and Gender in Election '08

Cynematic's pre-post on the panel here.

Adele Nieves

Maria Niles

Caille Milner:

Jill Miller Zimon: Mainstream media pushes what THEY think the conversation is!

People who blog politics tend to be junkies.

Cynematic: Metaphor fatigue with identity politics.
Ridiculous to say I could only be a race person or a gender person.
Power works upon us, we get called forth as a woman.
Identity is open source, not in a box.

Question about Obama New Yorker cover:

When satire missesthe point, it reproduces what it is meant to criticize.

Jill: In Ohio political blogs, what is sexist enough? What is racist enough?
Very few white feminist bloggers wrote about Michelle OBama lynching image on Daily Kos.
Shout-out to Professor Kim @ BlogHer.

Liz Rizzo: We have to be really careful about images. They have power.

Jen Posner: In this election year, we as bloggers will be sought out more. Important to develop relationships with media and get our voices out there. Be really active.

Caille, Jen: Women must get past their resistance to submitting op-eds and blog posts!

Laurie Toby Edison: Bad reaction as an artist to Obama New Yorker cover. Then saw it.

Satire can do lots of things that we really don't like but are profoundly okay. That cover was something else.

Deep images in this culture about race and gender. Tap into them, raise up this stuff we are all carrying around. In that case, cover not satire, deep racism in this country. Thining about it - I'm Jewish, if they showed a bunch of Jewish men running their hands over mon ey on the cover, same thing. Tapping into worst part of zeitgeist.

Why is McCain's "whiteness" not a problem?

Maria: White, male, able-bodied, straight, all these are the norm, anything else is othered. Don't talk about McCain's whiteness because we don't have to. Intrigues me we don't talk about white identity.

In order to get there, we first have to acknowledge privilege. Getting past that is really difficult.

Admitting your privilege and guilt are two different things.

Mention of Blogging While Brown conference...Late, late registration is open.

Jill: Asked black friends, WHY DIDN"T YOU EVER TELL ME I WAS A CLASS-PRIVILEGED WHITE FEMINIST?

Laughter.

Audience: White people need to talk to white people. Not black person's responsibility to educate.

Jill: I don't want to talk to other white people - not a primary source. Wants to talk to people who can help her understand.

What can we do beyond govt. policy - what can you do in communities, towns, workplaces - what has worked and what hasn't?

Jill: Take risks, don't be afraid to sound stupid or something potentially offensive. If you're a white person don't let yourself be overwhelmed by guilt. Not about being guilty, it's about doing what's right, opening up conversation and dialogue.

When it comes to communication with people in community, people who aren't like you are part of your country and community. Blogs, news, elections pull it together, all looking for a government that works.

Do not be afraid of what's different.

Maria: There are all sorts of ways we're privileged and not beyond race and gender. Be superaware, challenge yourself, read people who don't agree with you. Can get single biased view from MSM all you want, plenty of other points of view out there.

Caille: What has worked for me is just finding different way to talk about these things so people don't immediately freeze up and get defensive. Watch how you talk to and about people. What are you saying, why are you choosing them? Are you talking to this person who looks different the same way you'd talk to someone who looks the same as you and if not, why?

We don't understand the world w/o language. If we start with what's coming out of our mouths, that's good.

Adele: As media makers, how are we changing this, instead of playing exact same game?

Cooking With Gas

One of the hugest disappointments of my life online is that wordsalad.com is not available. Suckers. Parked there for who knows what and for how long. I tried other combos of .infos and versions involving my name and whatnot, but none of them resonated, so I've stuck with the pedestrian, eponymous title that I gave my site on the day I set it up.

But to me, it's word salad. I don't like the definition that I learned in speech-language pathology classes (my undergraduate major) because it's pretty negative. I've always thought about it in a more fun, Alice in Wonderland jabberwocky sort of way, and I wanted it for my blog.

I wanted it for my blog because word salad....well, that's pretty much my life. Not a word cake or a word buffet or a word whatever else, but a word salad.

It keeps on going. The words keep on coming out. It continues.

So when I submitted my post to the BlogHer Community Keynote a month or so ago, I did it as a personal exercise, and it really worked. It was super helpful. It meant disclosure on a level I've rarely been comfortable with, as many words as I put out there on a daily basis.

And then? They picked me.

And now, oh holy hell, I am going to get up and read this post in front of 1,000 people, give or take. I'm setting it back to draft here because we're not supposed to share what post it was, but I know some of you who drop by here regularly have read it. It's really special to me, was as easy to write as it was difficult, contributes to a larger truth and conversation as much as it's myopically about my life, and for those reasons I'm pleased as much as I'm terrified. I'm going to get reacquainted with it in the next week...going to print it out and read it on planes and in bed, until I'm quite sure I can read it without crying.

And in spite of all of the pain and trauma that the past three years have held for me, I'm going to keep getting comfortable with the fact that there's been a bigger picture here that reveals itself in tiny snapshots day-by-day, not by any means a paint-by-number. It's been completely abstract. Some days, even recent ones, have been shitty ones that involved choices I didn't want to make and words - thousands of them - that I wasn't sure were right but I somehow knew needed to be shared. It's involved the despicable, necessary act of letting go of someone I thought I knew, someone whose choices confounded me but who I knew I had to accept or die.

Turns out she was me. Who knew?

So I've been cleaning up the place a little bit. And it's funny what happens, when you get right(er) with the world - not with God, necessarily, although I'm pretty actively engaging with some spiritual stuff too. Just right with the things that haven't felt right, the places in my heart and mind where I've felt akilter, where I've left things bad with other people or with myself. And that along with this keynote thing, and the other things that are happening, are strengthening my belief that this life is a circle. You come back around to the stuff you haven't learned until you learn it better, you make friends with old stuff that didn't get resolved, you make yourself face pain and depression and anxiety because it's the only way to let it move through you and away. You can't always medicate it. Sometimes you have to feel it to acknowledge it and move the hell on. I haven't felt this actively engaged with life - the good stuff and the deepest, grossest basement of it - in, well, I was going to say years, but really ever.

I don't really know what's happening right now, but I know that I'm open to whatever it is, and not just because I don't have a choice. I know there'll be good and bad days ahead, just as there have always been. But I am holding on tighter to a core of something, at the same time that I'm letting go. It gets easier with some practice.

And...and...I love this site, no matter what the name is. I almost shut it down a few months ago, sick of myself and the world and the garbage in my head. But something wouldn't let me do it, something told me that if I started over somewhere else with one of the multiple domains that I now own, that it wouldn't make any difference. Just like relocation doesn't always fix stuff - sometimes you have to hunker down and bloom where you're planted (hackbarfhack.) I love this site because it's my single-most dedicated activity of a weird, strange, random, horrible, beautiful period of my life. It's the fruit of something daily, the effort to make some sense of this nonsensical world and one life lived within it. It's at the same time nothing, and in the ways that it's connected me to so much goodness and opportunity, it's everything.

Really going to do this.

I procrastinated on posting my bio to the BlogHer conference speaker site, because in spite of the fact that I tend to procrastinate about everything anyway, I really don't like writing these things. So after ten tries, wherein I had to wrestle with speaking about myself in the third person and also deciding what was either a. interesting or b. important to share with the people going (and that's pretty subjective, at that) I got something done.

I'm as nervous to speak as I am excited to be a part of this year's version of the event that got me to California two summers ago not knowing anyone, and has really been a guiding force in my professional and personal decisions since then. BlogHer kickstarted my portfolio and has been the nexus of my online community, with not one single negative result so far.

How amazing is that?

Apparently our time slot has some serious karmic mojo (she says seriously), so we're up against some tremendously engaging competing panels and a few topics that make me so sad to miss the panels. But if you're going to be in San Francisco and you have any interest whatsoever in what it's like to blog and to NOT be a mommy, whether by choice or by some wrinkle in the divine plan that you just wish would reveal itself already so we can move on to other things more peacefully, please drop by and lend your voice to the conversation. I'm finding it to be a weird topic to discuss in-depth, when really what I keep coming back to is, you know, whatever it is, it's got to be okay.

Then again, I am reading an awful lot of Thich Nhat Hanh lately.

(P.S. Look! Apropos of nothing, except that I'm trying to get rid of the MIchael Jackson thumbnail there on the left and I can't! Flowers!)

BlogHer, seriously.

On Saturday, July 19, I'll be pretending like I'm not a complete and total nervous wreck, speaking on a panel at BlogHer in San Francisco. So far, Teri Tith is the other person I know of who will also be speaking.

The panel is about blogging "childfree", which is a really complicated topic for me, but an important one that I'm happy to speak about from my perspective. Anyone who's been around here for a while probably knows that I don't have kids, and although the description on the site speaks to contentment with that life circumstance, that's not exactly my situation.

I wrote about it a little bit here.

I'm really honored to be on the agenda at this conference. I've done a lot of speaking in my nonprofit and education careers, but I've never spoken at a media conference before. I appreciate them including me. It'll be totally worth the anxiety.