I spent yesterday afternoon here:

It’s a lousy cameraphone picture, but trust me, it was gorgeous.  It was a nice tonic after spending all weekend here:

Don’t get me wrong, the Sheraton is a lovely hotel, but even in lovely hotels the conference rooms tend to look like this:

As in:  rooms where one cannot fully appreciate the fact that it is finally, mercifully, GORGEOUS in Chicago,  after weeks of asshole rainy weather.

So. BlogHer: I’m tremendously glad I went, though I enjoyed it differently than I had  expected to.   I thought I’d attend and enjoy panels with topics like “who’s reading you?” and “lifeblogging outside the lines,” but I went to exactly one of those panels before I started looking around frantically for a paper bag to breathe into as people heatedly debated why “certain segments of this community get all the advertising dollars” and how “BlogHer ads won’t let you do xyz” and all I could think was “abort abort abort find friends and glass of wine, stat!”

I found it disorienting that Ragu wanted to sponsor our lunch, and Pepsi wanted to sponsor all of my liquid consumption for the weekend, and Degree wanted to give me samples of a deodorant called “Sexy Intrigue.”  (Thank God I’d gotten a heads up on the existence of this awesomely-named personal anti-sweating device, thanks to Amalah, or I would have laughed right in the poor product rep’s face when she did her “big reveal” of the new scent’s name.  As it was, I  made sort of a trying-not-to-laugh grimace.)  It just wasn’t doing much for me.

So instead of learning how to read my stats better, or do SEO, or get sponsorship dollars thrown my way, I started ditching stuff.  I coerced Alice into skipping morning sessions so we could go get the best french toast in the world.  Six hours later, I stuffed myself into a cab driven by a man with a death wish to have a carbo-loading dinner with five lovely ladies.  I sat for hours on the floor of their hotel room as tears rolled down our faces from laughing (mostly at Sam‘s accent).  I took deep breaths to overcome my profound feelings of moron-ness and introduced myself to people whose writing I admire.  I made Linda tell me which P90x videos to order.  (She counseled against the one with all the pull ups; probably wise given the state of my arms.)  I drank gin.  I ate pop rocks:

(Photo courtesy of Alice: I did not take one single picture because I am awesome.)

I’ve noticed something about other BlogHer posts: they’re not filled with raves about the content of a particular panel, or how well the conference prepared someone to “get her piece of the monetization pie.”  Instead, people are talking about the people they met, the reconnecting with friends, the laughing until incontinence.

That’s why we do this, right? That’s what this is about.  That’s why I’m glad I went.