The people who read posts in the Community Keynote event kicked 10,000 pounds of ass last night. If you were there, thank you. If you weren't, when the podcast goes up I will put a giant blinking link up that says CLICK HERE TO BE RIVETED FOR 90 MINUTES in giant red letters.

I want to thank all the people who read, again. Some of them I only met for the first time as I introduced them, so, Hi, that kind of sucked of me and if the last time I saw you you were coming off stage in tears, or heaving a giant sigh of relief, I want you to know how utterly happy I was that you did what you did up there.

Here are all the links to the pieces we heard last night in the order they were read.

Best Rant

Sarah Brown, "Attention: I have some things to say about Goldfish snack crackers."

Danielle Wiley, "I am indeed a full-time mother, and yes, my daughter does watch Hannah Montana"

Megan Smith, "Michelle Obama Enjoys "The View:" A Recap"

Mr. Lady, "It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop."

Heather Barmore, "Guess who wants Typepad for Mother’s Day"

Blogging About Blogging

Liz Gumbinner, "I'm official! Hooray!"

Suebob Davis, "Blogging makes you lose your mind"

Stephanie Bergman, "Has Twitter Ruined Blogging?"

Zan, "Note to Self in the Age of the Internet: A Necessary Reminder"

Parenting

Casey, "The one about the overdose."

Doug, "Five going on fifteen"

Polly Pagenhart, "Thanks giving"

Lindsay Ferrier, "Every Mom Needs a Little Wiggle Room"

Letter to My Body

Yvonne, "Life Changing Words"

Schmutzie, "#744: I Nudged Him Hard, Saying: "Come, Gloopy Bastard, As Thou Art""

Jen Zug, "He should really teach all young men everywhere how to extract the truth from tired, chubby, stay at home moms"

Laurie White, "Letter to My Body, Letter to My Face"

Humor

Antonia Cornwell, "Christmas Poem"

Jenny Lawson, "High"

Evany Thomas, "Say my name!"

Deb, "Too much of a good thing?"

Angela, "The albatross and the whales, they are my brothers."

It's getting better than free caulk around here. Giant Conglomerate sent me a new camera to get my thoughts on it. My tech-free ruminations, several snapshots, and a video of my dogs panting are now up on my (ad-free) Reviews page.

I'd also like to draw your attention to the post I put up on Wonderland last week for a vacationing Alice. It's almost completely controversy-free, as long as you're one of those people who thinks it a-okay to decorate a child's room with a television set.

The job ended up being a pleasant sort of nightmare, whittling down almost 200 submissions for 20 or so spots on the dais at BlogHer next week. (The final list of readers is now here.)

"Nightmare" because of the juggling involved. I know so many people who write very well but who couldn't be included for one reason or another having to do with fairness and balance and other things the community-minded conference mistresses value, and rightly so.

"Pleasant" because even though it was excruciating to lop good writers off the list, I'm delighted about the ones who remain, and I was thrilled that through this process I discovered some bloggers I'd never read before, which it turns out is the whole bloody point of this event, introducing the audience to voices they may not have heard. Who knew!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go figure out which skirt I'm going to wear for the reading, the colorful, stiff, peasant-y one or the tweedy pink pencil number. Or both! And five pairs of shoes, dangling from every appendage! To overcompensate for saying no to so many people, I will now shout yes to everything in my closet.

So, what does this look like to you.



Because to me it looks like, over the course of several weeks, my dog, Peewee, has burned the word oui into the grass outside our condo. Peewee peed a "oui." Or, in other words: Pee? Oui!

I'll be sure to let you know when I find the Virgin Mary burned into my french toast.

I just threw out the unused portion of a sample pack of Celebrex. I'd seen the stuff advertised on TV but I guess I thought it was allergy medicine, so when I had some tight back muscles a couple of weeks ago and was laying on the floor with a tennis ball wedged into my spine (which gave me the heavenly sensation of having someone's fist pushed directly into the muscle knot using somewhere in the neighborhood of exactly the right amount of pressure to make tears spring from my eyes), I was surprised when Jack showed up with a fancy prescription NSAID. He got it off a friend who wouldn't be caught dead without a full pharmacy at his fingertips. I would say that this friend's family doctor must be a real pushover, but after my experience of going to the walk-in clinic, asking for a drug that I may not have necessarily needed, and then getting it, I have come to realize that for years I've been mistakenly operating by the notion that doctors aren't allowed to just wing it. Or put another way, it was news to me that some doctors will hand out whatever a reasonably intelligent-looking patient asks for. When I was a student in the U.K. way back before the Morrissey-Marr alliance was severed, I went through a fairly severe emotional crisis at one point and the only place I could think of to go for help was the student clinic. There I described my plight to a surly bitch in a white lab coat who wanted to know why I'd been so stupid as to waste her time with a non-physical complaint. Disgusted by the tears wetting her floor, she grudgingly handed me a tissue and then handed me off to a younger and more sympathetic colleague. When I screwed up the courage to ask doctor #2 for something to help me calm down and sleep, shook her head and kindly told me that this wasn't America, doctors didn't just hand out sleeping pills willy nilly in that green and sceptered land. Apparently the British fall asleep merely by pulling up their bootstraps and going down the pub for a pint or seven. That's what I did, anyway.

So anyway, it was a couple of weeks ago, my back was sore, I took the Celebrex, I had sex with my husband, and then I made some eggs for lunch. It didn't take long for me to start feeling sort of ill, but I didn't connect the queasiness to the medication right away. I was sad to realize that it had finally come to this: sex makes me sick. No, actually I wondered if maybe the eggs had been off. I dizzily took to my bed for the next fourteen hours, interrupted only for a couple of late night barfing expeditions to the land of cool tile and regrettably unscrubbed porcelain.

It turned out that the sore back muscles were a precursor to a mild viral infection that left me with a dry cough for the next few days, and despite the fact that I know, I know, I know to avoid extra-strength everything, I was too lazy to go up to my acupuncturist for a bottle of Wise Judge (you can laugh, but that shit works) to loosen the grip of my cough, so I started swigging NyQuil at bedtime instead. Seriously, I just came out of the NyQuil coma to write this.

Jackson's birthday party went pretty well. We took four seven-year-old boys to the 11:00 a.m. showing of Wall-E in Ventura. Two parents, four kids, military precision.

Me: "Four kids' popcorns, please."

Little boy #1: "I don't like popcorn."

Me: "Here's your popcorn."

Little boy #2: "Can I just get some candy instead?"

Me: [steely gaze]

Little boy #2: "Popcorn is fine."

And I wondered why none of them wanted to sit next to me. Jack, of course, is the king of making little boys think he's funny while at the same time making sure they're just scared enough of him to behave. When we got back home for the swimming and cake portion of the afternoon, one kid started getting out of line and teasing Jackson -- why does the littlest kid always have the biggest mouth? -- sending Jackson flying into my chest and tearfully telling me the kid was ruining his day and he wanted to send him home. I tried a few different lines of reasoning: "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission" was a little too subtle, I guess; I considered saying, "It's your party and you can cry if you want to but why not make him cry instead?" but thought the better of it. I think Jack laying it flat out and saying "If he doesn't knock it off we'll call his mom and tell her to come pick him up" really did the trick. And then looking the kid in the eye and telling him to chill his shit the fuck out.

Now if we could get that look of Jack's to make Peewee quit quietly chewing up beloved toys, shoes, pillows, and underpants, maybe Jackson would quit asking if we could sell him on eBay.

One day last week we were killing some time in the children's section at Borders, me and Jackson. Jackson has enough books to choke a television executive, thanks to an incredibly generous sales rep friend at HarperCollins, so we veered away from the stacks to check out a rack of Beanie Babies. I got sort of attached to a little beaver in a satin top hat and bow tie, and when I read his tag I was excited to learn that it was actually Punxsutawny Phil, the half-price groundhog whose selling window shuts pretty quickly every year on February 3. Jackson was trying to talk me into whatever, a stuffed fish or something, and this is where I admit that when we're in a toy-buying situation I will only loosen up the $5 rule when Jackson chooses a toy that I like. So, I won't buy him the $13 spy kit he's begging me for that I tell him is full of breakable, loseable little pieces that he'll be bored with after fifteen minutes, but I will buy him the $16 whirly light-up doohicky because I want to take it home and play with it myself. And since Phil was reduced to $2.99, well. We brought Phil out to the bench where Jack was waiting for us with a smoothie. I showed him Phil. "A stuffed rodent, fantastic," he said. "No, it's Punxsutawny Phil!" I said. "He was half price!" I waved Phil's little paw at Jack, who, predictably, once I reminded him of Phil's inspirational purpose, smirked. "They saw you coming," he said. However, not one to let cynicism spoil my groundhog joy, Jackson said, "When we get home, can we watch that movie where the guy lives the same day over and over again?"

I love being a parent most days, but extra much during a Groundhog Day/Ghostbusters II double feature in bed (with popcorn) on a Tuesday afternoon.


Phil says Hi!!