Go Ask Me: conference advice

A couple of months ago, Lauren from Better in Real Life wrote to ask my advice about conferences. "I actually just got back from Alt Summit and your post on not really enjoying conferences and always feeling awkward and out of place really struck a chord," she wrote. "…I don't feel good at being around hordes of other bloggers, but I'm worried avoiding these get-togethers is going to hurt my business. (I'm looking to use my blog as outreach for freelancing, not so much living off of advertisement.) How do you go about navigating the social aspect of the blogging world?"

Well! First of all, Lauren, you are so cute I kind of want to marry you. If I said that at a conference you'd run away. Or maybe I'd run away because I would not be able to believe I had just said that. But it's true!

I realize we can't marry each other, Lauren. I KNOW THAT. Come back!

Okay then. Now that you're all relaxed and I'm giving you a back rub and you're totally into it (what?), here are some of my tips for surviving and even enjoying conferences. It can be done!

1. Know that conferences are awkward for most everyone. Even the "cool" people or the ones wearing matching pink satin jackets who keep brandishing switchblades at you. Conferences are overwhelming, and many of us are introverts at heart, no matter how gregarious we seem at these things. A lot of people are sweating as violently as you are.

2. Know your reason for going. You've already said you're looking for freelance contacts, so good! You have that down. With that in mind:

3. Go in with a plan. Know exactly how many panels you want to attend. Have a sense of who you want to meet, and contact them beforehand to say hi, if you haven't already. Try to gather up a group of friendly acquaintances who are also going, and plan to meet them somewhere at the beginning of the conferences.

4. Go easy on yourself. Having a plan also means planning downtime. If you hate gathering with the conference crowd for morning breakfast, order room service, or go out for a quick breakfast. If you're a morning person, don't commit to staying out late every night. Don't feel like you have to attend every event on the schedule. Plan a nap, or just a half-hour in the room to read a magazine or surf the Internet like humans were MEANT TO DO.

5. I'm going to reiterate that last point, because it's really important: you can pick and choose what you do. By no means do you have to do everything. Pick the stuff that works for your reasons for going, and cut down on that by 1/3rd, because you don't want to exhaust yourself.

6. Bring snacks. Maybe it's just me, but I always find the food part of conferences the most challenging. I need a lot of protein or I get shaky and emotional. Which is two of the worst things to be at a conference.

7. Have an exit plan. You don't have to attend all of the conference, as I've said. You don't have to attend more than one event, especially if you make some valuable contacts at that one event and feel good about yourself. If you have friends in the surrounding areas, talk with them about meeting up or even crashing at their place, if you're one day into the conference and can't deal. It's really okay. And it doesn't mean you should never attend a conference again.

8. Don't schedule important work or much of anything, really, for a couple of days following the conference. First of all, especially if you're traveling long distances, you'll be suffering from Social Hangover, which can only be cured with a day or two of dumb movies and no one talking at you. Secondly, every time I've gone to a conference I've come back with some kind of virus. Which leads me to tip #9.

9. Remember to wash your hands frequently.

Now, the big question is, are these conferences worth it?

Well. Who can say, really? You never know who you're going to meet, and what good stuff might come your way as a result. I've gone into conferences thinking NEVER AGAIN, and come out with good memories. I've gone in with enthusiasm and left feeling awful. But really, the more I get used to them and how weird they are, the easier they get. You have to weigh the hassle and the awkwardness against the potential reward, but I think good things can come out of them. Now go forth and conference!

(Everyone else: if you see Lauren at the next conference, don't you dare whip out your switchblade in her presence. You do, you'll have me to answer to. And I've got a shiv tucked into my garter.)

Communication breakdown

The Universe is, apparently, telling me to be quiet. If I believed in astrology I'd observe that Articulus, the Star that Controls Verbiage, is in retrograde, which explains the problems I'm having. Then I'd do those flying-yogi jumps out of the room, and you and all your buddies would roll your eyes at each other, like you always do. Boy are you guys judgmental. Like you've never read your horoscope! I've seen your dog-eared copy of Linda Goodman's Love Signs in your bathroom. Sure you were reading it ironically. I believe that. Guess who's rolling her eyes now? WRONG IT'S ME.

As I was saying. So first my computer broke, AGAIN, which should not have come as a surprise because for weeks it's been making alarming noises, the kinds of sounds that computers have not made since the '80s, when our hard drives were 32K big and made out of squirrel meat. My fancy computer of the present was going chickety-chickety and tch-tch-tch and I ignored it. And then over the weekend it lapsed into a coma, and Scott took it and lectured me AGAIN about eating while I worked, as if the few (okay, many) crumbs on the keyboard caused its innards to fail, and now he's at the Apple Store with my computer and I'm here with his. But his settings are all weird and wrong and also none of my stuff is on his computer, which is also weird, plus wrong. And okay I bought myself an iPad (I needed it for travel! Something something else rationalization!) but none of my files are on it and it's weird to transition the iPad from cool movie-watching fun-having-on to serious work technology. So that's communication problem #1.

#2 is that my jaw hurts and I can't talk. Yesterday I found it increasingly difficult to eat dinner. I was enjoying the slow-cooked pot roast I had made but was alarmed at how painful eating it was. With each bite, I found it harder to open my mouth. I was forcing the tines between my teeth and crying out piteously. But it was so delicious! I had to soldier on! By the end of the night I was talking like someone with lockjaw. (Have you guys ever heard of Locust Valley Lockjaw? (You can Wikipedia that yourself, right? Must I provide a URL for you?) Which I believe was written about in the Preppy handbook? Listen, I went to high school in Locust Valley, and I'm here to tell you it's real. I had friends whose parents talked like Thurston Howell. And I'm talking like them, clenched jaw and all. I feel like complaining about Muffy's poor behavior at the Creek Club, and how her husband Chip--you know Chip from Yale, I suspect--WELL, he was mortified, simply mortified and he swore he'd never let her have a second Tanqueray and tonic no matter how she begged.)

My jaw's had a disturbing tendency to go off the rails ever since I got into a car accident in college and suffered a mild concussion (for weeks afterward I couldn't remember which number came after 5) and also my jaw got knocked out of place. So now it complains whenever I eat bagels or salad, and it opens at a weird angle, which I thought you couldn't really see but watching several Momversation episodes has convinced me otherwise. I am betting you have never noticed because you haven't studied my jaw movements. Not yet, anyway.

This post is going nowhere. I don't care, I'm putting it up. This is the best I've got. Our book comes out MONDAY TUESDAY and my jaw's gone funny and I'm afraid I lost valuable documents and I had to turn my shrimp and red pepper curry into SOUP in order to eat it. SOUP!

Okay, the soup turned out pretty delicious.


Down here on earth.

A few days ago I was lying on my bed, talking on the phone with my friend Jessie. I was telling her the grim details of the horrific flight I had on my way home from BlogHer. I haven't said too much about my homeward flight, because every time I think about it I end up hyperventilating under my duvet, and one fewer trauma to relive would be nice. All I can say about it now, without the flashbacks driving me to peel the skin from my face, is there was some turbulence. And by "some," I mean "a lot," and by "turbulence," I mean "death was a near certainty." Except it wasn't. So that was a relief.

At any rate, I apparently felt well enough while talking with Jessie to really let loose on the whole ordeal, including the panic attack that kicked into high gear as all the conscious passengers were gripping our armrests and praying fervently. I didn't realize, while I was talking, that Henry was in the next room. So there I was recounting the hours of dry-heaving into an air-sickness bag as my tears soaked my copy of O , when my boy strolled in and asked, "What's a panic attack?" I was still on the phone, so I screeched, "You hush up while Mommy has her Me Time!" Actually I stared at him, wondering how much he had heard, and then I told him we'd talk after I hung up.

Then he asked me thirty more times in rapid succession. Making it really hard to say goodbye to my friend. I still did it, though, because I am able to both talk and wave dismissively at a child. I am a professional.

Again he demanded to know what a panic attack was, and was I really going to die on that plane? The second part was easy, because I definitely did not die on that plane, so obviously those thoughts had more to do with my panic than with the brain-rattling shaking I hyperventilated my way through. "But what's panic?" Henry wanted to know. I contemplated telling him it was a fun new video game I was playing on the plane, but instead I went for the boring, awful truth. I tried to explain, but it sounds pretty silly, all the fear-over-nothing and adrenaline and nausea and so forth. I hope he never has to find out firsthand what a panic attack is. It doesn’t look good for him, given his family history, but a girl can dream.

"Are you having a panic attack now?" he wanted to know, which was silly because I wasn't on a plane convinced that I was going to die at any minute. Except, whoops, I was having a panic attack, actually; I've been gripped by stupid low-grade panic since I got back. There's something so embarrassing and ridiculous about being this panicked all the time. How do you express that feeling to someone else? How little sense does it make that I feel like each step I take is the last one before I hurtle off a cliff?

"Nope," I said, "Come lie down on the bed with me." Which he did. And we laid there for a while. He stared at my face while I looked out the window, attempting to approximate some kind of contented expression.

"You had a bad look on your face," he said to me. "Are you having a panic attack?"

"Not at all," I said. It's really hard to lie to him. Damn it all.

"I'll be okay," I told him. Which felt like the truth.

The worst that could happen.

1. I am driving on the highway and start to panic. The force of my panic is so great that it causes my car to lift into the air. Looking around me, I see that the other cars are also levitating. Now that our cars are in the air, none of us have any control over our direction or speed, and we hurtle higher and higher skyward, smashing into each other repeatedly. As we leave the earth’s atmosphere, I can hear the other drivers screaming, "Why, Alice, why?" before we all blow up.

2. Because I never got my son to eat more than four foods, he grows up--if you can call it that—to become a shred of a man, unable to find love, hold down a job, or walk down the street without breaking something. "The saddest part," his doctor tells me, "is he’s just aware enough to know what you did to him. That if he had only had a few more nutrients in his system, he could have been someone." In fact, Henry writes a memoir called "What Could Have Been." The New York Times declares it "terribly written, lacking in style or subject-verb agreement, that is nonetheless a grueling condemnation of possibly the worst mother the world has ever known."

3. After my haircut, I tip the woman who washed my hair, only I accidentally tip the wrong person. "What the hell is this crap?" the other hair-washer demands. "Why would I want money from you, complete stranger?" The woman whom I meant to tip bursts into tears because I have made her feel like less than a person. She runs out the door and straight into traffic. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE," screams the salon owner. Everyone in the salon, clients and staff alike, beat me up. The next day the headlines read, "Alice Bradley is a Thoughtless Jerk." We have to move.

4. Afraid of tipping the wrong person because after all they all have the same damn hairstyle, I leave without giving money to the hair-washer. A ritual murder-suicide ensues. The note makes it clear that it was my fault.

5. I fail to take proper care of my yard. The earth spins off its axis.

6. I allow Henry to watch an extra half-hour of television while I nap beside him. The show turns out to be a PBS special called "How to Take Drugs and Kill People."

7. I forget to take Charlie for his rabies shot. He immediately contracts rabies and jumps the fence. His deadly rampage begins at the playground and ends at a day care center, with a brief stop at the nursing home.

8. I forget about Henry’s checkup. Somehow he also contracts rabies, even though rabies has nothing to do with his checkup. The world agrees that I am responsible.

9. I put off vacuuming for a few days. The next week there is an ABC special report on neglectful mothers. Turns out that Henry’s new friend from preschool was actually an undercover reporter with a hidden camera. As I watch footage of dust bunnies skittering across our floor, I realize that I should have wondered why his new friend was so tall, and carrying around that briefcase. "A little boy has to live in this squalor," the reporter intones. "That is, unless we intervene in time." The doorbell rings. The authorities are here to take me away, along with some cool girls from my high school, who wanted to see what a dirty loser I had become.

10. I go to the supermarket in my old sweatpants. The sight of my baggy-assed sweats renders everyone so desperately sad that half of them die and the other half throw up into their carts and then die. I am a pariah. The pictures of my ass make the newspapers, and the world is thrown into chaos. God gives up on us. He decides to create a better universe, one without hopeless pants like mine. Before He does, He offers me one last chance to apologize and make things right. But when I try to say something, all my teeth fall out, because I forgot to floss the night before. We are all destroyed.