BlogU, or I Can Make an Ass of Myself Away From Home Too!

You’re about to see the Internet explode with praise and enthusiasm for a blog conference called BlogU (and it is well-deserved praise and enthusiasm, I might add) that I attended this past weekend. This was the second year BlogU happened, and I couldn’t make it last year, but I’ll be making it next year and any other year they'll have me. BlogU offers “classes” on subjects of interest to bloggers of all kinds—subjects like SEO, collaborative blogging, and building a brand. There were many fabulous faculty and guest speakers, including New York Times bestselling author Jen Mann of People I Want to Punch in the Throat. She’s also the editor the anthology in which I was published, so I was looking forward to stalking meeting her. The story I’m about to tell you is really only funny if you know who she is, so if you need to pop over to her site and familiarize yourself with her (although why don't you already know her? Because she is hilarious), be my guest. Maybe buy a book while you're there. I’ll be here when you get back.

Ready? OK, Jen Mann is very down to earth, funny, and approachable. She posted a comment in the Facebook group for the conference on Thursday evening that she was in the lobby of the hotel having a drink if anyone wanted to join her. I had gone out to dinner with a few folks, and saw it when I got back to the hotel. I messaged her and said if she was still there, and still looking for company, I’d be happy to join her.

“Sure! Come on down!” she responded.

I got to the lobby and joined the group of ten or twelve women. I introduced myself to a few of them, and we chatted. Jen was involved in a conversation with someone else the whole time I was there, and I didn't want to interrupt. I finished my wine and headed back upstairs because it was getting a little late, and I knew have other chances to meet her, so no big deal if it didn't happen then.

As I sat down in front of my computer for one last social media check, a message popped up from Jen.

“Are you coming down? We’re wrapping up here.”

I replied that I’d been there and had just gotten back to my room. I asked if she wanted me to come down, that I was still wearing regular clothes and so forth.

“Yes!” she said. I went down and we had a lovely chat about this and that. I assume I gave the impression I was a normal person. That wouldn't last.

Friday morning I was sitting in an almost-empty auditorium waiting for the first session to start. Two ladies a couple of rows back were discussing the upcoming parties (one on Friday night, one on Saturday night). They were a bit alarmed that we’d been given only two drink tickets at check in. Was that it for the weekend? Only two drinks? Of course I couldn’t help but overhear them, so I turned around and joined in their conversation.

“I think it’s a budget thing and it’s only two drinks tonight, but on Saturday it will be unlimited. I wasn’t here last year, so I’m not a hundred percent sure, but that’s what I’d guess. I mean, you know, don’t quote me or anything…”

One of the women began (jokingly) grilling me. “Yes, what’s your authority on this? I am going to quote you. What’s your name?”

I held out my hand and said, “Hi, I’m Jen Mann.”

Since everyone at the conference knew who Jan Mann was, and I clearly was not Jen Mann, we all had a laugh at that.

Fast forward to the Friday night party. I found Jen and said, “Hey, Jen, can I tell you something funny?”

“Sure!” she said. I told her about my conversation with the women in the auditorium and that if she heard of anyone going around campus impersonating her, it was me. Thankfully, she thought it was funny.

The next morning the first session I attended was one Jen was teaching. Because I clearly have anxiety about stupid things, I got there early to get a seat. Jen and her lovely co-presenter JD Bailey (of Honest Mom) were getting ready. Brown nosey teacher’s pet that I am, I picked a seat in the front row. JD was doing something with the computer, so Jen had a free minute.

I said, “Hey, Jen, can I tell you something funny?”

“Sure!” she said.

And I proceeded to relate to her the exact story I told her at the party the night before. When I finished, she just looked at me without blinking for whole seconds (yes, seconds are short, but several seconds strung together are very, very long, especially when you’re sitting in front of a New York Times bestselling author whose next anthology you'd like to be in—trust me).

“You told me that story last night, and I laughed.”

Awesome.

I swear I wasn’t drunk, wasn’t stoned (I don’t even do that anymore), was completely in what’s left of my right mind. I just have a terrible memory at this point, which is why I write down anything I really need to remember. Apparently now I also need to start writing down things like, “Told funny story about impersonating her to Jen Mann at Friday night party. DO NOT TELL HER AGAIN.” Talk about embarrassing.

However, I will say this, I got a lot of mileage out of the How I Humiliated Myself in Front of Jen Mann story for the rest of the conference. And in another conversation, Jen mentioned that a few times she’s met people and said things like, “Great to meet you!” and they’ve said, “We’ve met before—we had lunch together last year” or something, then she feels sheepish for not remembering them. I don’t think that’s going to be my problem. I think  next year when we meet (assuming she doesn’t avoid me the way you avoid a hyper chatty semi-stalker who for all you know is a psychopath and can’t remember what they said twelve hours earlier), she’s going to say, “You’re not gonna tell me that fuckin’ story again, are you?”

She’s probably hoping I won’t even remember her. But I will. 

Because I wrote it down.

I'M IN A BOOK and Now I'm Scared to Death

Our topic today is anxiety. Specifically, my anxiety. Specifically, my anxiety with regards to OH MY GOD A BOOK I’M IN CAME OUT TODAY OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD. 

Let’s cover the most important point first (ha, see what I did there?). This here

Is now available on Amazon, from iTunes, or at Barnes &Noble.

What is it, you say? It’s a collection of some funny and some touching essays by women, mothers, daughters, aunts, and all around badass bloggers.

So that’s awesome, you say. Where does the anxiety come in? Excitement, sure, but anxiety? What’s wrong with you?

That’s the problem—something is wrong with me. I don’t have anxiety so crushing it keeps me from living an ostensibly normal life, but I am afraid of things like having to talk to strangers, asking people to do things that directly benefit me, and speaking in public. All things that will need to be done in the next few months if this book is to be successful.

I’ve struggled with anxiety most of my life. When I was a kid, I just assumed I was a “fraidy cat.” I don’t know if it was necessarily a bad thing that I was, because I’m sure it saved me from engaging in a lot of risky teenage behavior. I was terrified that the first time I did any drug I would be transformed into a hopeless junky, so I did none. I drank a little, but wouldn’t have driven for anything because I was sure I’d plow into a tree, even if I’d had only the smallest amount to drink. My one high school friend who convinced me to sneak out of her house with her spent the entire time we were out assuring me that we were perfectly safe, even as I spent the entire time looking back over my shoulder for our would-be attackers.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more uptight about…well, pretty much everything. Just last week I was sitting in a meeting at my kids’ school in which we were being trained on a tool I already knew how to use. For laughs, I made a list of very high level things that make me anxious. Here’s what I wrote down:

• Strangers and that they might be scary or mean
• People I know because they might be mean to me
• Leaving the house because something bad could happen to me
• Developing agoraphobia because I never leave the house
• Crossing the street because a rogue car could come out of nowhere and hit me
• That someone on my side of the street will be the person who commits one of those freak crimes where they pull out a gun and randomly shoot the people around them for no reason
• Kids because I’m afraid they’re judging me
• Adults because I’m afraid they’re judging me
• Driving and having an oncoming car crash into me
• Being a passenger and having no control
• The idea that everyone who was watching me make this list was judging me for not paying attention, even though I already knew how to use the tool we were being shown

So you see.

That’s far from a finite list. I also worry about being able to find a table at Wendy’s, getting a parking place, and that my kids will be bullied in school. And that I’ll get cancer. And that my husband will drop dead of a heart attack. And that I’ll get fired. And that I won’t be able to think of anything to get the kids for Christmas this year. Sorry, I’ll stop now.

I’ve been through a parade of therapists and social workers trying to “work past” the problem, but I’ve never been able to overcome it. I know all the techniques, all the tools: ask myself what exactly I’m scared of, review the possible worst case scenarios and problem solve how to deal with them, visualize a situation from beginning to end with a positive outcome. I also know that old line about life beginning at the end of your comfort zone, so I have pushed myself outside my comfort zone from time to time. I started doing Crossfit even though I was terrified of the idea. I signed up as a Girl Scout leader, even though that has the potential to put me dead in the sights of some of the judgiest judges ever.

I don’t know the solution, and I wasn’t really planning to resolve this issue here and now. This is intended to announce my book, and possibly get a few sympathy purchases from you guys. You will go buy it, right? Please? See, now I’m all anxious that you won’t, and you’re annoyed at me for asking you. I’m going to eat some chocolate now. 

Some Whining and an Annoucement

I’ve been kind of quiet for the past couple of weeks. Sorry about that. My husband won us a trip to Las Vegas by selling the hell out of the world’s most boring product (sales tax software—it’s not just software, which itself is a total snoozefest, but it calculates sales takjfadf;kjsdfsj  see? I nodded off just telling you about it). We came home from that trip to turn around four days later and fly to New Hampshire to clean out my father in law’s house.

This was even less fun than it sounds, because on the last day—the Last. Damned. Day.—we got a call from the shipping company telling us they wouldn’t be able to pick up our shipment until the next afternoon. That was a deal breaker, because the house had to be empty for a walkthrough Friday morning. Shipper number two could come get it that day, but they wanted SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS because the pallets weren’t standard size and couldn’t have anything stacked on top of them. They wanted us to pay for the cubic space above each of them in the truck as well as the weight we were shipping. Apparently air in trucks is much more valuable than regular air, and this air was going to cost us seven thousand dollars.

As my husband dashed out to buy packing cartons so we could pack up a bunch of this crap and UPS it (plan B), my kids asked if they could play in the basement. I’m not sure if I’m glad I let them or not, because they walked down there and found Lake fucking Michigan on the floor. As I attempted to mop it up, I realized water was still flowing but couldn’t figure out from where.  

While I was on the phone with the plumber, one of my kids came over, tugged my arm, and pointed to a leak in the kitchen ceiling. Of course. An ice dam.

This story does have a happy ending (two, in fact): the basement water problem turned out to be the hose bib which was repaired the next morning, the buyers bought the house even with the ice dam problem, and we were able to get everything to the UPS store to ship by the time it closed. I did come home with a desire to rid myself of every material thing I own, leaving us with a coat hanger and three salad forks as our sole possessions. I'm sure this will pass, but right now the urge to get rid of it all is pretty overwhelming. Still, if it prevents one unnecessary purchase, it won't be a bad thing.

The OTHER happy ending is that I get to tell you about a very exciting thing that’s happened to me. You may have heard about the anthology that Jen Mann over at People I Want to Punch in the Throat is putting together (it's all over social media). It’s a follow up to her earlier awesome and successful anthology called “I Just Want to Pee Alone” and it’s called (you’ll never guess) “I STILL Just Want to Pee Alone.” You’ve probably already figured out by now that I am IN this book. Yes! Me! Along with a shit ton of other super funny and fabulous bloggers. I've spent the last few weeks virtually pinching myself because I'm so thrilled to be included.

Today I get to show you what the cover is going to look like! Ready?

 TA DA!

As you can see on the shot of the back cover to the left, I am in outstanding company. In case you want to check out some of my amazing co-contributors, here's a list:

Jen Mann of People I Want to Punch in the Throat

Bethany Kriger Thies of Bad Parenting Moments

Kim Bongiorno of Let Me Start By Saying

Alyson Herzig of The Shitastrophy

JD Bailey of Honest Mom

Kathryn Leehane of Foxy Wine Pocket

Suzanne Fleet of Toulouse and Tonic

Nicole Leigh Shaw of Nicole Leigh Shaw, Tyop Aretist

Meredith Spidel of The Mom of the Year

Rebecca Gallagher of Frugalista Blog

Rita Templeton of Fighting off Frumpy

Darcy Perdu of So Then Stories

Christine Burke of Keeper of The Fruit Loops

Amy Flory of Funny Is Family

Robyn Welling of Hollow Tree Ventures

Sarah del Rio of est. 1975

Amanda Mushro of Questionable Choices in Parenting

Jennifer Hicks of Real Life Parenting

Courtney Fitzgerald of Our Small Moments

Lola Lolita of Sammiches and Psych Meds

Victoria Fedden of Wide Lawns and Narrow Minds

Keesha Beckford of Mom's New Stage

Stacia Ellermeier of Dried-on Milk

Ashley Allen of Big Top Family

Meredith Bland of Pile of Babies

Harmony Hobbs of Modern Mommy Madness

Janel Mills of 649.133: Girls, the Care and Maintenance Of

Kim Forde of The Fordeville Diaries

Stacey Gill of One Funny Motha

Beth Caldwell of The Cult of Perfect Motherhood

Sarah Cottrell of Housewife Plus

Michelle Back of Mommy Back Talk

Tracy Sano of Tracy on the Rocks

Linda Roy of elleroy was here

Michelle Poston Combs of Rubber Shoes In Hell

Susan Lee Maccarelli of Pecked To Death By Chickens

Vicki Lesage of Life, Love, and Sarcasm in Paris

Kris Amels of Why, Mommy?

Mackenzie Cheeseman of Is there cheese in it?

The release date is March 27. You realize that's in 31 days? Not that I'm counting or anything.

Better Know a Blogger: ME! On One Funny Motha

You guys, I'm featured in Stacey from One Funny Motha's excellent series Better Know a Blogger. Every week she asks a blogger a bunch of questions, and posts their answers. (Spoiler: I got the one about grandpets wrong, even though I felt like my essay response was pretty strong. Oh well, can't win 'em all!).


Jump over and check it out! You won't be sorry. Stacey asks some really great questions. You can check back every Wednesday to see other great bloggers featured as well (or check her archives, because she's been doing this for several weeks now!)

Blog Tale: A Strage Coincidence

I have to share with you guys something super weird that happened on these here Innernets a couple of weeks ago. I think this falls under the “It’s a small world” heading in my personal filing system. It involves me and a couple of other bloggers, a chance post about “five things about me” on a blog, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and high school. Sound sufficiently random? It is. Ready? Here we go.

Michelle over at “Rubber Shoes in Hell” wrote a post based on a Facebook meme in which she was participating. It was to tell five random things about yourself, and then tag some other people do to do the same. Michelle doesn’t like to put people on the spot like that, so she tagged Elvis, Gandhi, and Winston Churchill, but in what would turn out to be an interesting stroke of luck, she also used it as material for her blog.

I read Michelle’s blog (and if you don’t, why not? Get over there! She’s awesome!) as does Cassandra over at The Next Delusion (again, not reading her? And her cool blog-partner Momus? You need to! A team written blog? How great is that?). Cassandra commented on Michelle’s post—her thing was that she’d met Ric Ocasek. Twice.

In my comments, I mentioned that I went to elementary school with JW Marriot’s granddaughters, and that I was at Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s high school graduation. I went to a school that started in third grade, and went up through high school. The graduation was held during the day on one of the last school days of the year, so everyone attended the graduation ceremony. I just happened to be in fifth grade the year Julia Louis-Dreyfus was a senior (and I have the yearbook that has her senior picture in it, along with about a million other pictures of her—she was in all the plays, and was, I believe, extremely popular with her classmates).

I went back to the comment thread a little while later because Michelle always has something to say when you comment (I love that and try to do it myself—it’s always nice when there’s a bit of a dialog). I found Michelle’s comment, but also one from Cassandra: “Oh my God! You went to my high school! I went to High School with the Marriott girls and Julia Louis Dreyfus SPOKE at my graduation. This is a small freaking world.”

What the what?!? So we emailed on the side, and it turns out that, indeed, Cassandra went to this school, but our tenures never overlapped. I attended from fourth through sixth grades, then went on to a different school that was closer to my house, and had a very different atmosphere. Cassandra started in ninth grade, and did all four years of high school there.

The school Cassandra and I attended was an all-girls school that was founded in the early part of the 20^th century for the academic and spiritual education of girls (it’s not parochial, they just stress an education of the mind, soul and spirit). We wore uniforms, although when you got to middle and upper school, you could be “out of uniform” on Fridays. There were guidelines though—no shoes without heel straps, and restrictions regarding other items of clothing. For me, going to this school was kind of like going to school at a country club (I mean that in a good way). There’s an indoor pool (although it was built after I left), a weight room, a theater, and the whole thing is surrounded on three sides by rolling hills and fields, and has a wooded plot on the fourth. It’s a bit of pastoral tranquility that’s just off a busy road in a populous suburb of a major city.

When I transferred, I switched to a school that was inside the city limits. It was housed in a building that had at one point been a girl’s school, but had most recently been owned by a nearby law school. It was started in about 1968, so it was quite a bit “younger” than Cassandra’s and my mutual school.  It was co-ed, started in seventh grade and went through high school, and there were no uniforms. We called our teachers by their first names. The kids who were seniors when I was in seventh grade told stories about when they first started, and how they sometimes sat on the floor of the classroom because there weren’t always enough desks (they had remedied this by the time I got there). There were no school buses; I took the city bus from my house. We had the option to leave the school building during lunch to go to nearby stores (there was a Giant that had a salad bar, and some places that sold sandwiches) instead of eating a hot lunch in the school cafeteria (because there was no school cafeteria). In short, it was as different from my previous school as it could have been.

Understand I’m not intending to say one or the other was a better school. They’re both good schools with excellent reputations. I’m just pointing out how very different they were.

So Cassandra and I emailed, and as one does, we tossed around some names. She picked girls she knew had been there in fourth and fifth grade, and indeed, I did recognize everyone’s name. We talked about where some of the girls were now, and some who’d left whose whereabouts were unknown to us (one girl had left just before senior year to attend boarding school).

So to summarize, Michelle wrote a post that Cassandra and I both read and commented on, and in the process discovered we’d both gone to the same school (albeit and different times) and even knew some of the same people. But we figured it out in the comments section of a blog run by someone neither of us has ever met. We just both happened to stumble on her blog at one time or another. How weird is that?

Of course, now you've got that song in your head. Sorry.

A little while ago I was searching through some old pictures to find one to use on Facebook for Throwback Thursday. The box was a random collection of my family pictures from a generation or two ago, plus some from my childhood, and a handful of pictures of my own kids. I pulled out a small picture, taken in about 1980 with one of those Kodak cameras with the drop in film cartridge and the four sided flash that went off and then left what looked like a mixture of ash and whipped cream inside the flash cube.  It was a picture of my birthday party from the fourth grade. I looked at the girls in the picture, and named them to myself: my neighbor Laura, Tamara, Jessica, Melissa, and…whoa. There was Josie Levine! That was one of the girls Cassandra had said she was friendly with in high school, and here she was in a picture of my fourth grade birthday party.

It’s not a particularly original thought, but it really is a very strange, very small world.