There's been a huge post-convention lovefest amongst the JournalCon 2002 attendees in their journals and over at The Usual Suspects, a forum I frequent. There's a lot of silliness and smartass remarks but the sense of community, of connections and bonds made, is palpable underneath it. I suspect it's going on in other forums as well, and much emailing and IM'ing is occuring. TUS is a thriving community all by itself, but there are quite a few new Usual Suspects around, and they're having a great time continuing friendships begun at the convention.
I think our con committee can take some credit for fostering those connections. We did a fine job on the convention itself and upped the ante for future JournalCons. We've gotten many compliments. I feel really good about that. What I haven't been feeling good about is a sense of having been personally invisible. This is, of course, not precisely true but it is part of my post-con letdown. It's interesting to observe who gets gushed over and who doesn't. I am not talking about perceived popularity as a journal writer, either. I'm talking about statistics and emotional reality and those newly formed connections. I didn't have time for most of that.
Inevitably, the committee worked quite a lot of the con. Someone had to buy the food in the morning, make sure the panels ran on time, lead groups to restaurants and on tours, and generally focus on the vehicle of all those squealing good times. My Whirlpool of Fun dissipated because I was ill and stayed home, so I wasn't around for Saturday night karaoke and I missed the alternate bonding experience of getting giggly drunk and spilling my innermost thoughts to all my new best friends (and a few old ones). In a way I was invisible.
Nonetheless I've been reading through the numerous accounts of JournalCon excitedly looking for my name, hoping to read someone say they were thrilled to meet me, or barring that at least a comment on how my sparkling personality was every bit as charming as my prose. All right, so my expectations were unrealistic. I'm not particularly active in the journal community any more. My fifteen minutes of fame are years in the past. And yet I thought I'd made more of an impression on people. Wow. Apparently not. Except as a member of the committee, which is super cool. The committee as an entity felt the community love.
Well, Lucy, I hear someone (perhaps my conscience) saying, and did you spread the love among the attendees in your report? I think not. I think you name checked 'em the majority of them because otherwise your Journalcon entry would have been gigantic and you knew you couldn't do justice to everyone and after all there were something like a hundred attendees. Three words: pot, kettle, black.
So I just want to say that I love every single one of the JournalCon attendees, even those people who didn't have a good time, and I plan to marry all of you. Now stop being lovey dovey and go back to writing insightful, heartbreakingly brilliant entries that make me want to kill all of you for being better writers than I am.
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