When I arrived at the social on Friday night, I was jittery and nervous. After all, this conference was my offspring, and I wanted it to do me proud. It was hard for me to settle down with my nerves all aflare with anticipation and anxiety, so I just flitted from person to person, giddy with my own success, like a very caffeinated butterfly. It was fun, but not too fun. I was too keyed up to really enjoy the people.
Saturday was different. Everything that could be done had been done. If it flopped now, there was nothing I could do about it. So I just relaxed and enjoyed myself. The highlights of that day for me were the classes I taught. Jenn and I had been preparing for our parenting workshop for a long time, and I thought we did really well. We jelled together in front of an audience just like we do in Jenn's living room. I loved the amazing feeling of being a team with my best friend and business partner. I think we hugged 40 times during Mini-Con. It felt like we could never be separated again after accomplishing the conference together. I found that teaching the workshops was as much fun as I had hoped it would be, and the experience cemented my desire to make Cultivating the Virtues into a business.
Teaching my poetry class was exciting as well. I was very nervous about reading in front of all those people. What if I make "Ulysses" boring? What if Keats rose up from his grave and told me off for mangling "When I Have Fears"? What if people left my class thinking, "Wow, I thought poetry was boring before, but now I KNOW it is."? But after I started reading, I wasn't nervous anymore. The poems washed over me like they always do, and the audience was very responsive. They didn't say anything, but they looked it. I could see that people were feeling the poetry, experiencing it, not as a school project, but as art and emotion. It was a wonderful feeling to read the poems out loud - to lock eyes with a person that I knew loved the poems already and to see the joy dawning on the face of someone who had never heard them. I've always thought that one of the great perks of an English teacher is the opportunity to be a person's first connection to Tennyson or Yeats or Wilbur. It's what I imagine a missionary must feel - the power to save souls.
Saturday night was the big ass party. Rather than saving souls, I was busy getting kinda drunk and singing Johnny Cash songs. It was awesome. Stoney's Pub parties are always fun, but when Lynne and Stephen Bourque and Shea Levy are added into the mix, it's liquid nitrogen fun. (Ask Aaron just how fun that is.) I stayed up way to late and drank way too much and probably sang way too much.
Sunday was more subdued (mostly due to the staying up late and drinking too much), but our second parenting class went great, as well. It was a smaller group, and we did more talking with the participants and really delving into problem solving, not just the hows, but the whys, which was awesome. Afterward, the pool party was refreshing and relaxing, by far the most chill part of Mini-Con.
So what was the best part of Mini-Con? The people. Sometimes it feels like the world is full of people who neither know nor understand me, people who are so different that sometimes I feel invisible or distorted. I swim around beneath murky water, holding my breath and constantly pushing against the pressure of the water just to move. But during Mini-Con, I surfaced and breathed in cool air and felt the sun and could see clearly. The world was beautifully crisp. If art shows us the world as it could be and ought to be, then my Mini-Con was art.
This picture is the visual representation of Mini-Con:
