First Post-CONvergence Panel Thoughts

I had hoped to have something of a running commentary here about CONvergence, but alas, I found myself too cheap to pay the hotel $10 a day for internet access.  I barely spent any time there anyway, so it would have been pouring money down the drain for about an hour of access all weekend.  Anything timely was found on my Twitter feed and the format is not sufficient for longer expression.  I knew on the first day that blogging my CON experience would be one of fond remembrance rather than real-time happenings.

Writing about CONvergence is not going to be easy.  There’s just so…much.  Much like my w00tstock experience, there’s no way I’ll be able to address everything and frankly, I’m not going to even come close.  The more I think about CON, the more topics of discussion come up.  What will likely happen this week is that every blog post I have this week will be somewhat influenced by going to CON last week.

But just today, I’m going to talk about one thing: the panel we hosted called Men are from Tatooine, Women are from Naboo.  It was essentially on maintaining the geek relationship and how to navigate some of the pitfalls of being a geek with someone you love.

I was pleasantly surprised that our panel was 1) well attended after going up against so many other excellent panels at the same time (including one that I really, really wanted to attend), 2) went smoothly overall and 3) gave us the chance to do something super fun with Annie and Josh Lynsen right out of the gate.  They kept it free flowing and offered the credibility of many years being together.  Melanie did excellently, chipping in insights I was not even aware of and pleasantly surprising me.

For my own participation, I felt there were times I seemed to stick my foot in my mouth.  In fact, I do know of one particular time I caused a couple of facepalms in the audience.  After talking with Melanie after the panel was over, I realized that at least she knew what I was doing and she later explained my own actions which prior to that time confused me.  Unfortunately, she didn’t volunteer that information during the panel, so at times, I did seem like a bit of a heel.

For those that are curious, it was when I was talking about what areas of geekiness my wife was interested.  I never went into an ounce of detail about it and even included a dismissive hand wave.  This made me seem very aloof towards my wife.  This wasn’t the case, of course and Melanie later told me I was doing; when I don’t have the words for something, I drop that part of the conversation and talk about something I do have the words for.  In not knowing how to sum up in a few words what I believed my wife’s interests lie, I moved on, waved my hand–which is apparently a hand-crank for my brain–and blathered on about something I had more immediate words.  All of that made me seem a bit crass.  Oh well.

After the panel, we did get to talk to some of the people who attended.  It was great to do that as they had some comments which would have made it better, things to improve on for next time, and also just talking to these fellow geeks and sharing stories.

And for today, I’m going to end it there.  Seriously.  I’ve got too much going on in my head about the whole thing.  Trying to get it down in any coherent state is going to be messy and take time.  More later.