i speak in public and do not spontaneously combust.
Saturday
The buzzer went off at 7 and I thought, Carolyn and I can wing this stupid session, we don't need to chat. But I got up anyhow.
I hadn't discussed my morning plans with Darin. I have a tendency not to tell him everything I have planned, and he gets really ticked off when he discovers there's a whole agenda going on he hasn't been previously aware of. I'm working on telling him about things, honestly. I always think it's no big deal, until I look at it from his perspective and realize he has no idea what's going on.
This morning, here I was, getting ready to go downstairs, and he wanted to know if we were going to have breakfast together or what. I actually had thought he would just stay in the hotel room until I was done. Then I thought about it and realized, No, that's a stupid plan. So I put on my new black jeans and my new lilac sweater from the Gap and said, Okay, meet us downstairs. So I took Pookie and a pad of paper down to the lobby to wait for Carolyn, while Darin got ready.
Carolyn arrived and I thought, Oh Christ.
She was wearing a form-fitting gray cocktail dress, a silver necklace, and open-toed black pumps. Carolyn is very dramatic-looking anyhow, with long black hair and striking coloring, so I felt about an inch high in my jeans. Well, at least we wouldn't have to think of anything to talk about, because everyone would just look at her.
She told me that after dinner last night, the crowd had moved from Dowe's to another bar, which was closing due to the fact that no one was in there, and then on to another bar, where they did karaoke until the wee hours of the morning.
Oh cool, I thought. Everyone will be hung over and no one will come to our session and we don't have to worry about this.
We went to the hotel restaurant, where Darin joined us. We discussed what we could talk about in our opening statements. We figured we could each take five minutes as an introduction. Carolyn said she'd talk a lot about her experiences back in the wilderness of the early days (that is, 1995) and I'd talk about the evolution of the journal. Then we could open the session to questions.
The session was an hour and twenty minutes long. I really hoped we weren't going to talk for fifteen minutes and then try to hum through an hour of questions.
Darin, Sophia, and I went back up to the hotel room, where I fed Sophia while Darin questioned me on what I was going to talk about. Darin's an accomplished public speaker, so he had several pieces of advice for me: have jokes ready, know a few points you want to be sure to hit (so you're always ready with something to talk about), and speak slowly. He emphasized speaking slowly -- you keep yourself calm, the audience can understand everything you have to say, and you take up a lot more time than if you rushthrougheverythingreallyfast.
I felt fairly relaxed, to be honest. Not because I'm anywhere near as good at public speaking as Darin is -- my voice has a tendency to go up an octave or two when I have to talk in front of people, to be honest -- but I figured, Hey, the people sitting in the audience are friends, we're all in this together, it's not like I'm going to have to duck tomatoes. This went a long way to keeping me calm.
You wanna know what's disconcerting? Sitting down at the front of a session room and seeing everyone crowded into the back rows of seats, leaving two completely empty rows at the front.
"We bathed, really!" I said. "Not together. But each of us bathed, separately."
Before we got started, almost all the seats filled up, which was both gratifying and terrifying. There had to be a few attendees who were fighting off hangovers to get there by 9, an effort I appreciated, except for the part where I was going to be up front trying to make that effort worthwhile. Hey, no pressure.
To be honest, I think the session went very well, which is high praise indeed for me to make about a venture I'm involved in. There was laughter (at appropriate moments, thank goodness), there were questions, there was interchange and byplay. We filled the entire hour and twenty minutes with no problem.
I know we touched on the community of online journals (because before I said anything Beth raised her hand and said, "That's what the session Pamie and I are doing is all about") and the cathartic properties of keeping a journal (because Patrick raised his hand and said, "That's what the session Dreama and I are doing is all about"). We got into whether the bar for entry into keeping an online journal has been lowered too far by services like Diaryland or software like the Journaling Script. (The next session was all about the Journaling Script and other software intended to make keeping a journal easier, so we didn't get too much into that either.)
And I remember making jokes about the early days of Open Pages, where you could find almost all twenty online journals in one place!
I'm afraid, however, you will have to look in other places for reviews of my session. I'm just glad I didn't spontaneously combust up there.
Amethyst led about twenty-five of us to a place that was supposed to be Italian but pretty much had typical American lunch food (burgers, sandwiches). I had a frittata. At our end of the table we had Ryan and Greg Bueno and Kelly O and a very, very tired Sophia, who sacked out as we chatted.
We came back for the readings. Let me just say this about the readings part, and then I'll shut up, because my comments probably won't be appreciated anyhow. Readings are a good idea; one to a customer, please. I think only five people read during the readings session because Margaret read three entries (!!!) and Patrick read two. I liked all of Margaret's and Patrick's readings, honest I did. But I liked Rob's and Dana's too, and I would have liked to have heard others whose writing I didn't know. I think future Journalcons either need more Reading sessions or a system in which you can read multiple entries...provided you keep getting back in line to do so.
At some point -- can't remember exactly when -- I found Darin in conversation with John Scalzi. They had bonded over the fact they're both stay-at-home dads. It's funny, because I know John stays at home and I know Darin does too, but I would never have put them in the same category. Hmmm.
I skipped Patrick and Dreama's session on "Revealing as Healing" in favor of napping. This didn't show much support on my part (I'm sorry, really), but I was so tired I managed to fall asleep even with Darin watching TV. I heard it was a great session, dammit.
I kept trying to get a hold of people to see about dinner, but no one was in their hotel room. (No one else needed a nap, I guess.) I did get a hold of Patrick and Carolyn, and we agreed to meet in Dreama's room.
A huge group of people convened on Dreama's room to see about dinner. There were too many chiefs, very little dinner planning. So we all went down to the lobby, where a group of us said, Let's not try to go en masse. About twelve of us set out for the Pittsburgh Fish Market, which was a few blocks away. The Fish Market couldn't handle a group of our size for two or three hours (!!!), so we went upstairs to the Doubletree's bar, where we sat in two groups around tiny bar tables and had dinner. Darin and I sat with Jen and Renee. I didn't get to talk to Patrick, dammit.
Renee walked back to the hotel with Darin and me. We went to the hotel restaurant for dessert, but the service was lousy and the restaurant had fewer choices for dessert than did the room service menu, so Renee came back to our room with us and we ordered room service. I went nuts and ordered four desserts for the three of us, so we could try some of everything. We chowed down and chatted. Renee told us about the area she lives in -- here's what I have to say about that: "!!!" I could see why the Internet is such a wonderful thing for someone like Renee, who isn't like her neighbors!
We told Renee about our favorite room service story, from our honeymoon: we were staying on Maui. One of the hotel's restaurants had had a killer Bananas Foster, made with Maui bananas, which are sweeter and more flavorful than the mass-consumer Chiquita banana. The last night we were on Maui we decided the only thing we wanted was more of that Bananas Foster, so that's what we ordered from room service.
Darin insisted on watching TV before we went to sleep. You know how everyone has a different measure of how rich they'd like to be? Mine is: every time Darin and I stay in a hotel, I want to have either a suite or two hotel rooms connected by a door, so that Darin can stay up as late as he wants watching TV in one room while I sleep in the other. I know it's not the same as "I want to fly a (non-exploding) Concorde everywhere," but it's mine.
He finally turned off the TV around midnight or so, after I whined endlessly about being too tired.
Sunday: Back when computers only came in manual-shift...
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@nobody-knows-anything.com