Sunday in San Francisco and I am sitting at an airport bar, drinking a peach martini, and staring down the clock with the knowledge that I have eight more hours to go before my flight. Eight more hours, on top of the six that I have already been sitting here.
Welcome to the Hotel California. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.
My San Francisco airport experience so far has included lost luggage, flight delays, flight cancellations, rebookings, rebookings on nonexistant flights, feeble admissions that those nonexistant flights apparently existed after all but are now booked, and resignations to the fact that I had best make friends with the staff of the Mission Bar & Grill or I'll lose the only table with a working electrical outlet that I can find.
"Such a lovely place.... Such a lovely face."
That should buy me another ten minutes or so.
This has been a lovely weekend, The People's Party was a raging success, more so than we had anticipated (ahem... there were free drink tickets and swag bags, but they flat out ran out), the sessions were so-so, but the people were beyond fabulous. If I ever doubted once that there was such thing as community among bloggers, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt now that it is not a mirage.
I decided not to blog or twitter during BlogHer and that once home, I would write one single solitary post about it and then let it be. But I find myself now in this strange limbo between BlogHer and home and feel justified to fudge a bit on that resolve.
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
I will absolutely go to BlogHer next year, assuming that I am still blogging. You never know. Life.
It is worth it. Perhaps not so much for the sessions, but for what you learn outside of the sessions. So many times I would be heading to some conference room to learn how to become a wicked smaht blogger and get distracted by someone that I had been longing to meet.
It was in the hallways that I learned about blogging.
Did I have fun? Yes. Were there awkward moments? Don't even ask me to elaborate, but yes. Gah. I don't know when to shut up. Was it full of cliques? I saw one or two, but I was so distracted by the different faces that surrounded me every day, that it was hard to believe that this was an issue.
I ate every meal with a completely different group of people. I watched every session from my place at a table full of completely different people from the last session table. I watched every keynote with different ears to whisper into by my side.
The downside to this diversity is that I rarely spoke with the same person more than twice and more than 20 minutes. From that perspective, I can see that some people could leave BlogHer feeling slighted by this woman or that, but you are looking at the wrong aspect of the experience, in that case.
By the end, I was utterly saturated and completely drained.
Yet full of joy.
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
See you when I finally make it home. If they ever do let me leave.
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