The Mexican

On Saturday I was a speaker at Show Me The Blog, a regional blogging conference where bloggers come from miles around to talk about, well, blogging.     

My friend Danyelle asked me to speak back in March so I had plenty of time to daydream about breezily delivering joke after joke, leaving the crowd in chaotic hysterics and one woman in the back clutching her chest, letting out one final guttural laugh before falling over dead. 

Of course those images quickly ran for the hills, leaving me exposed and stark naked as I walked into the conference room and saw over 100 people pulling out their laptops and actually expecting something in return for their hard earned 75 bucks. 

And any shred of false confidence I gained by listening to Gangster's Paradise on repeat for the 45 minute drive to the hotel was dashed as my friend Stef, who spoke immediately before me, talked about how she's been featured in People, Better Homes and Gardens, writes for Paula Deen and has about 700,000 people visiting her site every month.

As she spoke my mind flipped through my own lame ass PowerPoint deck.

I mean... this should get a laugh, right? 

Or this?  It's funny because it's true, see?  SEE?  LAUGH DAMN YOU! 

  

Shit. 

I wondered if I could butter up my belly and silently shimmy out the bathroom window, into the parking lot and directly to the airport where I would fly to Minnesota and assume a new identity.  It was the best I could do considering I didn't have my passport and only $153 in my bank account. 

Lunch was sponsored by Hardees/Red Burrito, and was served right before my presentation.  The pregnant part of my brain got into a major fight with the nervous part of my brain about whether or not it was a good idea to dump a bunch of spicy beans onto my small intestine right before a major speech.  

As usual, the pregnant brain won the battle but lost the war as I gripped the handicapped rail, bit down on my cell phone and expelled something that meowed in the toilet moments before I was supposed to go on stage.  

Despite forgetting a key joke about Steve Jobs locking himself in the bathroom and crying for three hours because Bill Gates wrote something nasty about him, everything went well and I was even able to work in the phrase "tap the meat keg". 

A lingual urban legend only dreamed about by world-renowned orators everywhere.   

 

Of course the glow from my self-appointed celebrity status got a bit dim an hour after I got home as I was wiping someone else's snot off my pants. 

But it was a nice change from my every day Mom gig to be the loudest one in the room, if only for an hour.