i knew this would happen.

Damn Journalcon.

I’m still here in Pittsburgh, sitting at Eric’s mom’s computer and I’ve spent the past two hours going through journals of people I met this weekend. I had brought work to do, and now I haven’t done it yet. I need to make phone calls to apartments in LA to make an appointment to go and see them tomorrow. I need to be actually not dwelling on the people that I just met and instead focusing on the future.

Damn Journalcon.

Damn Journalcon for being more fun than I thought it would be. Damn Journalcon for that one twinge of guilt I felt when I heard the “rumor” that people thought I was a snob for going out with Eric’s family to dinner on Friday night instead of going to the planned party. The truth is I had gone to the planned party but everyone had already left early and went to Karaoke. I don’t know how true the rumor is, and I didn’t let the rumor bother me. But damn Journalcon for giving me the opportunity to feel bad that I couldn’t hang out with people in the evenings. If it had been in Ohio I would have been all theirs. But I love too many people in Pittsburgh to ignore them for the conference. (Thank you, Jimmy, for holding court in the hotel bar for an hour. I got to spend a little more time with some journallers I like and he got to give everyone a small taste of meeting Eric.)

Damn Journalcon.

I’ve been up for about three hours now and all I’ve done is try and catch up on what I’ve missed over the weekend. My forum is filled with people who either feel punished or guilty. My email is filled with people asking questions that I can’t answer until I get to sit down with my computer and not be busy. I am spending time finishing up with Journalcon when I have other work to get done.

Damn Journalcon.

Damn Journalcon for making an enire collection of hideous pictures of me. God. Come COME ON! Were there not enough circulating around digitally before? I had heard the rumor that people thought I was prettier than they expected me to be. At first I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment. Then I realized all they’ve seen are this wretched photos of me here and there (Diane’s Charles Bronson photo comes to mind), and now there are several new ones just sitting there trying to prove that I am one funky looking girl. The truth is I move pretty quickly and the camera has a hard time following me or at least snapping a picture when my mouth is closed or my face isn’t beet red. I’m ridiculous. I’m sure I annoyed the hell out of some people there. “She could shut up, you know, and I really wouldn’t mind.”

Damn Journalcon.

It has upped my damn journal reading number by at least two hundred percent. I was just starting to ween! I was just starting to say goodbye to some of the lives I was keeping up with and now I’ve met so many faces and I’m gonna be pulled back in and adding new journals and basically back where I was when my links list was a mile long. Damn journalcon for making me have so much more to read and for introducing me to some very cool people who didn’t bat an eye when I said “It’s like” and “She’s all” and “She goes” at the start of every sentence. They didn’t treat me like a bad kid, a cool kid or a snotty kid. They just talked to me. And joked with me. And drank with me.

Damn Journalcon.

Because now I’ve got more people that I’d love to spend lots of time with that I just can’t because they live very far away.

Damn Journalcon.

For being in Pittsburgh. For making me go to you when I would have loved to have the entire weekend to spend with Jimmy, Kristen, Charlotte, Judy, Dee, MathFace and everyone else. I didn’t have enough time for either.

Damn Pittsburgh

For looking lame in front of all of those people. You know you aren’t really that dead and empty, just that area where the hotel was. Thanks for the lame parade, but couldn’t you have left open a couple of bars or something?

Damn Journalcon

For bringing me here. I’ve been accidentally speaking Pittsburghese for two days now. I said “dahntahn” in my panel. That’s unacceptable.

Damn Journalcon

For making me do ten minutes from my show. The least you could have done was taken a better picture. I look like… I don’t even know. That’s the worst picture I’ve ever seen. Oh, God. I can’t leave the house anymore.

You can find out what everyone else thought about Journalcon right here. But it’s a lot of reading and you’ll spend the rest of the day searching around trying to find out who liked whom or who thought so-and-so was mean. It’s like reading through the high school yearbook.

And no, Jackie, that’s not a diamond ring on my finger there. But I find it amusing that you were so repulsed by the picture that you instead had to focus on the small amount of flash by my ring finger. I understand. I was staring at my shoes, wondering if I was hurting my knees by sitting like that. It’s what you do when you try to avoid the ugliness.

I swear, people that have never met me, I’m actually kinda cute. I wasn’t made for still photos, that’s all.