So yeah, I was at JournalCon this past weekend. I spoke on the "Writing for Fun and Profit" panel (I tried to get it changed to "Fun and Prophet", but no soap). The panel was at nine in the morning, on a Saturday, yet people still came. So weird. The moderator, Mo, asked lots of insightful and topical questions, and the other two panelists, Sarah Bunting (one of the founding members of Television without Pity, nee Mighty Big TV) and John Scalzi, answered them with incredible poise and brains. I mostly just burped and giggled and ate cookies.

The night before, I went to the conference bond-a-thon dinner, which was held at the same chinese restaurant as the "Will Code for Chinese Food" banquet I went to years ago, where Linus Torvalds addressed a writhing horde of Linux crazies. (Whole lot of penguin jokes.)

Just like last time, the food was really, really chewy. Chew, chew! And all that masticating didn't seem to make much of a dent. The only way to get the food down was to tilt your head back, swallow the chunk whole, and then stroke your throat like you were pilling a cat.

In the heat of all that meat, one of the JournalCon artists handed out souvenir envelopes filled with glitter to all the attendees. Giddyed up by the shininess, I immediately rubbed it all over my face and arms, a bold move that soon soured into regret (as so many of my moves do), what with my entire apartment now completely overrun with sparkles, like a glittery flea infestation. Or a rolling, sneaky litter ball attack.

Me (dude, where's my car?), Pamie, AB, and a whole lot of fine, American orthodonture.

After dinner, Anna Beth (who was cuter than a pile of puppies), "Pineapple Girl" (who neither looked, smelled, or tasted like a pineapple), the world-famous Pamie, and I went off to the Lone Palm to meet up with (my co-panelist) Sarah and (my new best friend) Adam. I was really stoked and pumped to finally meet Sarah after loving her column for so many years, but I managed to contain myself and not spray urine everywhere.

Pamie makes sweet, sweet love to some guy's sweater (which actually makes sense when you understand that his ass had been proposing to the back of her head all night).

We lucked into a table right away (we wouldn't have stayed otherwise because it was packed like a Tokyo subway car in there, a smokey Tokyo subway car), and for the next three hours, we drank and spilled things and added more smoke to the bar smog (not me, though ... I'm saving my lungs for marriage) and rubbed our heads up against fraternity boy asses and screamed and photoflashed each other and generally had ourselves a boozy old time. But then someone went and stole Sarah's bag! So no cellphone, no earplugs, no photo ID to get Sarah on the plane going home. Total fucktoberfest. I hate it when bad things happen. Bad things for vice prez, man.

The next morning, after staggering through my early morning panel, I sat in on some of the other panels. "How to have the most popular journal ever in the history of universe" was really good, and not just because I finally got to face-to-name Beth after like six (seven?) years of reading her site(s) and sporadically exchanging email with her. It was interesting to hear people talk about some of the down sides to having a site get really popular (all the money for extra bandwidth, increased stalker potential, free-time vortex), especially since all most people talk about is how to get more, more, more people to bookmark the shit out of your site.

Mena and Ben Trott came and delivered a little talk about the bountiful benefits of Movable Type, and my lord are they cute. I wish they came in a pocket-sized version -- I'd sew them little outfits and make them mini hot fudge sundaes and prop them up on the music stand thing on the elliptical trainer and talk to them while I gymed.

And after that, I went home and took an unplanned nap, which stretched deep into the night and left me wrinkled, sweaty, and grumpy, so instead of going to bond-a-thon 2, a very special karaoke evening, I just turned on Steel Magnolias -- it's one of life's real comforts that at any given time, you can turn on the television and hang out with those Steel Magnolias, the Pretty Woman, and the Karate Kid.

The next morning, I went back to the conference to see the "Kiss and Tell: Writing about sex in your online journal" panel, primarily to get a long, close look at Javina, a woman who's written some boggling stuff about life as a shock-therapied, eating disordered, former sex worker and "cutter". Cutting isn't something I understand really well, and I know even trying to describe it is going to make me sound like a power mom, but from what I gather, cutters are people who slice themselves up as a way of ... relieving internal pressures? Distracting themselves from other kinds of pain? Fulfilling a compulsive need to see that particular hue of red? (I bet you know a lot more about this than I do.) In any case, after a lifetime of hearing very little about this phenom, it's suddenly everywhere, a ghoulish little leitmotif -- just in time for Halloween!

I had thought this panel would be rabidly well attended so I got there early, but the crowd was thin and very, very quiet. And the discussion itself was considerably tamer than I had imagined. I'm not exactly sure what I expected. Titillating anecdotes, maybe, about the truly shocking things that even these people don't write about? But I guess when someone puts so much of her life out there in public, there's not much left to talk about. The panel might have been better served if they'd gotten a few people up there who pointedly DON'T talk about the naughty parts of their lives, and the audience could have badgered them for gory details. As it was, the audience knew so much about the panelists already, I think it was difficult for anyone to come up with new questions to ask.

I had planned to introduce myself to Javina and tell her how engrossed (and just grossed) I am by some of the stuff she writes about. But when confronted with the reality of such a complicated person, I couldn't go through with it. She said in the panel that a lot of people are intimidated by her, and that was part of it. But mostly I was freaked out by the intense chaos she seems to embody. The idea of making small talk with someone like that seems patently ridiculous since I know, and she knows I know, so much about her nitty-grittiness. But cutting (haha. ha.) to the chase and asking her about, say, her lastest trip to the hospital, would bring me closer to the edge of her than I was prepared to go on that sunny Sunday morning. I mean shit, I'm still drinking decaf.

I did, however, work up the momentum to approach Devon the Escort, who was very gracious in the face of my manic hand-shaking, nodding, smiling, and unstoppable chattering about my scandalized fascination with the insanely detailed escort reviews, which I hadn't even known existed before I read Devon's site. He also made a super interesting comment during the discussion (he was in the audience but should have been on that panel) about how using an online diary as a marketing tool severely limits your ability to say anything but glowing things about clients. Devon? Hi. You need to start keeping a superdoublesecret tell-all diary, and give me the fucking password, stat!

Other than that, I didn't talk to all that many people at the conference. I was actually kind of confused, and even a bit overwhelmed, by how defined the Online Journaling Community is. Maybe it's because I don't frequent the discussion boards, like at all, but I was surprised to find out how well everyone seemed to know each other already. There were in jokes (the difference between "journal" and "blog" got a lot of play, for instance). There was commonly known gossip about who broke up with whom and wrote what about it, and why. And man, I had no idea how much of a following Pamie has. I mean, she's crazy-awesome, and she's ridiculously fun to hang out with, and her panel was some kind of wonderful, but I didn't realize just how many people felt the same exact way about her. Anyway, it all left me feeling kind of freaked out, like I'd lifted up a rock and found a nutty, thriving community where all I'd expected was moss or plain bagels or, I don't know ... something less evolved. And any attempt I made to insinuate myself into that group felt like the arrhythmic girl trying to leap into a double dutch jump rope session, all tangled and awkward.

So if I was too weird and in my head to talk to you, hi! I'm sorry we didn't chat. You have a really nice ass.

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)