prematurely grey

One of the reasons I was excited about going to SXSW was the chance to hear some of the leading women bloggers talk about their work. It was my guilty pleasure, an interactive affair I was planning to keep my true self afloat through the film festival, the awkward parties, and the time on the floor at the trade show. Inside, I knew who I was, even though I was with a film business. Down the hall in the convention center, there were other people like me; I could just flash a golden badge and go sit and laugh and live blog with them.

Leading up to SXSW Interactive, I had become more than a little agitated about the state of the blogosphere. It was starting to eat me alive and I knew that one of us was going to have to go. I’d outlined my plan to my friend Prentiss (pay attention here, reader; he’ll keep popping up over these next eight posts) at our daughters’ volleyball practice earlier that week. It went something along these lines: people have to shut up. Especially women who are angry at other women because they haven’t made identical decisions that might possibly bolster the toothpicks their self-worth is structured upon.

Prentiss asked me what I thought of BlogHer. And I said I didn’t know about BlogHer. And it was then I learned of BlogHer and the upcoming invasion of Austin by “The Queens of Cyber Space.”

Longtime readers will realize that this prelude to SXSW took place during my earlier consideration of jealousy, in particular, of how jealousy gets in the way of almost any discussion about opting out. Gets in the way yet manages to remain unseen. And how my jealousy of writers and bloggers who are already being read by people like me makes me think that my writing is completely pointless because these other people are already doing it. The way thinking about it makes me feel right now.

Once I checked out BlogHer and the Chronicle articles and other reasonably reasonable mother/women/feminist sites on the web, I started to feel that dreaded little warm spot inside that always leads down one of my spiritual alleys. This one was: You are not alone. You will find an audience. Other people will value your path of intelligence, moderation, and constant scrutiny of your hair for signs of the Second Coming. Maybe, if you go listen to them, SOMEDAY YOU WILL HAVE READERS TOO.

The BlogHer panel was Saturday morning. At the exact same time as my brother-in-law’s movie.

Point, BlogHer.

But maybe I could go to one of the other panels about blogging on Saturday afternoon. Maybe I could catch something that would rub off on me and I could become a famous enough blogger this year that people would ask me to sit on a panel next year and I wouldn’t have to feel so completely horrible about all the decisions I made.

That’s when Chris told me he had a migraine and had to get home.

I had parked the Saab pretty much across the street. The Saab had become my ride because the air conditioning was out. Chris got the Passat. But the Passat was full of stuff for the trade show and was parked someplace else. It was over 85 degrees, Chris felt like he was going to throw up, and we got in the Saab.

Well, the air conditioning was also out in the house, somebody had to pick up the computer Bside was renting for the trade show booth, the computer wasn’t ready when that somebody got the the computer store in a hot Saab, so she had to wait around for 35 minutes, the sitter took Mazie to her sleepover but forgot her bag (which was at the sitter’s house, where they’d walked on the first 90 degree day of 2006), the air conditioning repair guy, my friend Allen from the cold day the heat went out back in December (remember that one?), arrived just as I got back with the iMac (which would turn out not to have wireless–impossible, you say–but that’s really getting ahead to Sunday and why I didn’t get to the panel I wanted to go to because I was the person who could go buy a router and cables at Office Max), and Chris started rallying just as the wiring problem with the A/C had been identified, and he ate some of the ham and cheese brioche I’d managed to pick up en route to picking up Mazie from her morning’s sleepover.

While this was happening, I imagined the men and women in the convention center discussing how blogging is transforming social interaction on the net.

I was aware, in the moment, of the irony that my life, the thing that forces me to write as perhaps the only way to keep from losing my mind, my life of driving around Austin in a frenzy, praying that some song will come on the radio to keep me from going over the edge, the source of this blog that has started to take on some personal significance I wish that it did not have, my subject, was in fact keeping me from being in a room of people I thought of as my virtual tribe.

I imagined the BlogHer women, the mommy bloggers, the hip mamas, all talking and laughing and linking to each others blogs while I was trying to figure out how it was that the computer that was ready on Friday at 5 was not ready on Saturday at 3. Trying to figure out who could let in the A/C guy if I was stuck watching an operating system being installed. Trying to figure out what we would do if Chris didn’t get better. Trying to figure out where Mazie’s bag was. Trying to figure out what to wear to a party full of people who’d spent the day in the freezing convention center.

I was not going to make it to the ball. I was going to stay in my life even when the circus came to town and I’d been practicing my juggling all year long. I seem to be destined to keep practicing and never quite make it to the audition. And how would anything get done if I just ran away and joined the circus?