it's the time of the season for blogging

I'm not a big conference person, but I think that's generally because all the professional conferences I attend leave me wishing I was smarter, more advanced in my career, and not as squashed into my black suit pants as I somehow always end up being.

Enter BlogHer {stage left}, the conference for women bloggers, about which I had little idea prior to going ("Sure Stacy, whoever you are, I'll share a room and potentially a bed with you in San Jose for five days. That sounds grand.") Some other people don't seem to get it either. I wish more people did.

Last year a few of us caught a little flack for attending. I think there was some perception that our attendance reflected some sort of naiveté, a desire on our part for each of us to be guaranteed entrance into blog superstardom, whatever that is.

But really what BlogHer ends up being:

[men, continue reading here; women, continue to next paragraph] is three days of ridiculous, n*ked fun. Of pillow fights and lace teddies and a good bit of girl-on-girl action. There are strawberries in Cristal glasses, hot tubs and belly chains, sure, but most of it is good, clean sex with [enter your town here]’s unsuspecting, boyish pizza guy. Oh, and the hourly washing of cars in our white BlogHer tissue tees. (While listening to Whitesnake, of course.)

[women carry on here . . .] So anyhow. What this conference really does is create a sense of community within an unbelievably large population of writers. In the course of two days you are certain to encounter blogging genres completely outside your former circle of reference, given that blogroll jumping is not yet a viable full-time job. You meet well-known bloggers, or at least hear them speak from a well-positioned chair, and find out that a life of posting under pressure and relatively constant accessibility isn’t as carefree as you thought it might be. You discover during a session introduction that two of the people in your physical circle, out of a small group of 10, are listed on your sacred blogroll. And you surprise yourself, because at that very moment all you want to do is accost them like a weeping Beatles groupie to find out where one learned to express her humor so subtly and to pressure the other to tell you that one ridiculous Manhattan cab story in person.

It’s pulling up a chair at a table where you might not know anyone, and having six instant conversations, with one woman who blogs about dining in Minneapolis, another who has a site devoted to contracts law, another a photography blog of only black and whites, two more who write about two very different families, and one who posts well, about life. It’s imbibing the Ecto Cooler of alcoholic drinks, ones graciously sponsored by established companies who recognize that this blogging thing is here to stay. It’s having the woman at registration say she knows your site and loves it and feeling like all you want to do is squee and call your mom because, can you believe it? Someone actually reads this thing and came back for more after that post about Celine Dion – and she is an actual real, live person.

This real, live person will be there,

[this line for my male readers] learning about CSS in a French maid's outfit . . .

[this line for the ladies] in most unattractive, ill-fitting night clothing, potentially stealing leftover pizza from your room service tray while brandishing a plastic glass of Pinot . . .

hoping you are too.