A Girl...

Coming Home

It's happening the way it always happens. I go to Italy or fall in love or spend a weekend with dozens of my favorite online friends and then when I get back in front of my computer and stare at the empty screen, all I can think is DUUUUUUUUUHHH and I end up either writing nothing at all or little snippets of memory about it over the next three years.

I can't describe this post-BlogHer state any better than to say I feel hungover after an entire weekend of boozing it up, chain-smoking non-filtered cigarettes, and dancing on tables with strange men, except, of course, there was no drinking or smoking (at least by me), and sadly very little dancing and very few men, although most of the ones I met were strange, with their not-so-slick marketing pitches and insincere "Sooo...what do you blog about?" And yet, although it's not my liver and my lungs and my legs that have had too much, it's my brain and heart and pancreas--all suffering in the wake of an overdose on too much of a good thing. So much brilliance, so much love, way too many doughnuts and candy bars and caffienated beverages and promotional Dum-Dums. By Saturday afternoon I was turning down free cupcakes. FREE CUPCAKES! All I wanted was a cucumber and an ice water, for the love of god! Can anyone help a girl out?

For the last two days I've been trying to wrap my head around what made this conference different from the last two (which were very different from each other in very obvious ways). Overall, the pace was much more manageable (no shuttles or planes or cabs to catch, thank all the patron saints of pregnant ladies), the location much friendlier (no schlepping forty pounds of swag between the conference hall and the hotel several times a day), and the company much more like returning to summer camp with the same group of girls I had such a good time with the year before (which equals less pressure, albeit less opportunity, to make new friends as well). But I did make new friends, and made better friends of old friends, and the cumulative effect of so much goodness, goodwill, and good hair is enough to make me want to liquify that feeling and dump it into a bathtub and soak in it for the next few hours or weeks instead of trying to pound it out here for an audience.

(I realize that in my effusion I am being regrettably vague, but it's the most I can do now, so please forgive. Stories will pop out one by one when you least expect them, though, so fear not; this can be your reason to stay tuned if you're not already invested in that whole Wee Wombat thing (Big Ultrasound on Friday!!!).)

I think the most significant difference between this conference and years past has been that I came away almost unmanageably inspired to be a better blogger, writer, friend, and mother. I love what I do here, and I love that it sometimes involves little more than telling the story about that one time the kitten pooped on his own shoulder, but being around people who regularly do more with their websites, and more with their lives, is hard to ignore and not at least make me question whether I can do more, be more.

The community keynote on Friday night blew my mind, and when I wasn't laughing or crying, I was laughing so hard I was crying--an uncontrollable ugly cry, with facial contortions and everything, something I don't think I've ever felt in quite that way before. Although my uncharacteristic PDE (public display of emotion) was certainly related to pregnancy hormones (see also: inability to control my tears while in the presence of my furry pal Grover), it was also just a testament to what people are doing out there on their sites, with the same Wordpress and Typepad and five-year-old cobwebby Movable Type templates (ahem) most of us open every day. If you're looking for new sites to read, start with the community keynoters; you won't be disappointed. Of course, if you're looking for more stories about poopy cats, you know where to find me.

In the meantime, my little corner of BlogHer is up on Flickr for your viewing enjoyment, and I don't care what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words; this conference--these one thousand attendees--can not be captured in photographs alone. The words...the words...the words are coming.