“When I stepped off the plane, I felt like I’d just left and had been gone forever all at the same time. It’s the same every year, the convention is tricky that way. You find yourself in a completely different world for 10 days and the longer you are gone the harder it is to remember how the real world functions. You have a job back home? What job! You have a car payment back home? What car! All I need is a golf cart! After living differently for just long enough to start to get used to it, it’s hard to come back home and not have the post-convention blues. I check the WFFC message board every day and have read through Keith Abner’s journal to still hang on to the feeling. I try not to think that it’ll be a whole year before I’ll see you all again. BUT – I’ve decided the wait is worth it. In the end, it gives us all time to remember how to live in the real world so next year the convention will make the same unexpected impact on us as it did this year. We need the time to forget, so next year we are surprised again. –Karmalized.com

I won’t, mind you, but that so totally and perfectly sums up the post-convention experience that it gave me chills.

For the last 2 weeks people have been asking me how my vacation was, how the convention was, and I invariably reply, “Fantasic, but hot,” or some similar permutation of the two. Detail beyond that is sparse and vague. I imagine the reasoning for that is twofold. Firstly between the heat and the alchohol, i think even my own recollections are sparse and vague. Second, however, is much less environmental and yet all about the environment;

“What happens at the convention stays at the convention,” is a common mantra, though not necessarily true, especially with all of the cameras and photoblogs. I think more of it goes to the fact that, at least for me, lots of the stories, fabulous as they are in my mind, fall a bit flat out of context. Some things totally translate, but i find that trying to get across the vibe of the convention is a bit like trying to describe to a whuffo what skydiving feels like.

I know i had a brilliant time out there, if y’all wanna know more about it, meet me there next august :-P