I headed to the nail salon on my way out of town for a pre-BlogHer manicure. It’s like the pre-prom manicure. For one day a year it’s nice to pay $20 to your Korean fairy godmother and pretend that you are a dainty specimen of femininity who always has perfectly painted pink fingernails and has never heard of a cuticle.

I personally find the trimming of the cuticle very perplexing. Why has that portion of skin been determined to be unacceptable? No one goes around trimming off the spare wrinkly skin from their elbow pit every time it grows back. We just assume that if the skin’s there, it’s supposed to be.

Every time I go in for a manicure once a year I notice various “waxing” services on the price list. I begin feeling sad about my eyebrows. They are one part of my personal grooming that seem like they should be easy to take care of but I am terrified to start plucking or allow someone else to do it.

Since it was the day before I would speak at a conference and meet hundreds of new people, it seemed like a good time to make a drastic life and beauty change. Without looking up, I mumbled to my esthetician that I’d like to get my eyebrows “done.”

“Get them done” like it was something I did every day or every 28 years.

“Sure,” she said as she skillfully applied white paint to the tips of my nails.

I started to have second thoughts. What if they did something crazy? What if I ended up looking semi-permanently deranged, angry or quizzical? I looked up at the girl who had just helped me lose 3 lbs of excess cuticle and was about to transform the whole look of my face. She had no eyebrows.

Okay. That’s an exaggeration. She had a line of hairs above each eye, outlined with a single stroke of brown liner which was thicker than the actual brow.

I started to panic.

“Um… so I just want a little off my eyebrows. Nothing drastic. I’ve never done this before and I’m really nervous. I’d rather take off too little than too much. Let’s just go easy.”

“Are you saying that because of the way my eyebrows look?”

Awkward silence.

“Because I don’t like my eyebrows either. I’ve never had eyebrows. They just grew in like this.”

And I was quiet. And she shaped me and plucked me and they actually looked quite lovely for a few days.

At first I kept up with the lawn maintenance, tweezers in hand each night, quickly snagging up any little guy that tried to make his way back into the fold. But I’ve let it go too long and now I’m afraid, afraid I’ll pull the wrong one and end up lopsided or with the apparent derangement of which I spoke previously.

I remember Amalah once talking about how eyebrows were the one thing you needed to keep up because if you had nice eyebrows but no makeup you look like you’re running late but if you have crazy overgrown brows, you look like you just don’t care.

So for about 4 weeks of my entire life, I looked like I cared and now I’m wondering if I care enough to continue to look like I do…

At BlogHer I learned that business executives are a lot like me.

First of all, in order to be successful they need to have a plan and some good management.

I got to meet one of my all time home organization idols Kathy Peel. Yes I have home organization idols. When I saw that AOL Body was offering the chance to eat lunch with Kathy, I. Flipped. Out. When Dan and I got married, I was troubled with the thought of quitting my professional life to be a baby machine and I decided to read everything I could on Home Management, Organization and Child Rearing so that I could really start thinking of my mom life as a career. I wanted to put every bit as much effort into my new role as I had in the business world.

Kathy’s books really spoke to me because she writes from a business perspective, using solid business practices and team building techniques to whip any home into shape. She helps you find solutions that work for you and she’s just a wonderful person. I think I got a little drool on her jean jacket as she was signing my book and she pretended not to mind. Honestly, there are very few celebrities who could get me that excited. (No, not even the Backstreet Boys.)

So, I want to run my home like a business, a fun, slightly messy, relaxed sort of business. I’ve let a lot of her advice get lost in the process of OH-MY-WORD-I-HAVE-CHILDREN-HELP-ME-ITIS, but last weekend Kathy got me back on track and I’m ready to get serious again.

Secondly, they like to give away free stuff, free stuff with their name plastered all over it, free stuff that for some reason ignites controversy in the blogosphere, but free stuff nonetheless. I like to give away free stuff too! I love it.

If I could have a job where I just handed out fabulous prizes all day long, I would take that job. Actually, I sort of have that job already. “Does anyone want a peanut butter sandwich, a clean bum, a rubberband to play with? I’ve got everything to make your wildest dreams come true!”

Going back to writing your name all over your stuff, did you ever see the Sesame Street episode with Donald Grump, a Grouch who owns more trash than anyone else in the world and insists on writing his name all over all his trash? I did. And I liked it. And I thought of it when I saw the new Trump Towers in Chicago with “TRUMP” written on every pillar. Um… yeah.

Third and lastly, when my kids fight over a toy, I’ve been known to put it in timeout. According to my architectural riverboat tour guide, the executives at Amoco were fighting so bitterly over corner office space when their 80 story tower (photo above) went up that the CEO had all the corners removed from the building and put them in timeout indefinitely.

Jenny, Eve and I stayed up WAY too late in Chicago and came up with all kinds of ideas. We decided to make up songs and sing in an atonal vibrato. We decided to jump from bed to bed wearing capes. And we decided to set up a community to encourage and promote moms who blog in the Greater Seattle Area.

If you’re a mom who blogs from anywhere in or around Seattle, please join us as we try to connect, support each other and undoubtedly take over the world.

Anyone is free to go over and nominate one of your favorite posts for the month. The post does not need to be by a Seattle blogger. The nominator does not need to be a Seattle blogger. However, only the academy of Seattle bloggers will be able to vote on the winner. We’d love your nominations!

I learned a few techie things at BlogHer and now I’m trying to act on them. I’ve finally gotten friendly with FeedBurner so if you’d like to subscribe to my RSS for your reader, you can click here.

If you’d like my new posts delivered to your email inbox, you can subscribe by entering your addres below. (Mom – I’m talking to you!)

At church I’m a liberal.

I am repeatedly amazed at the complex nuances of personal political identity and the bizarre need we feel to categorize each other along party lines. This becomes confusing because the way I’m categorized changes dramatically depending on whom I happen to be sitting next to. In an LDS Sunday School class, I’m fairly liberal. In the BlogHer organization, I feel like some sort of right wing extremist.

Elizabeth Edwards was the closing keynote speaker for the conference on Saturday afternoon. I knew in advance that I wouldn’t agree with many of her political views but was fascinated to hear her speak. She is an intelligent, strong, candid and passionate woman who has long been involved in blogging and maintains a blog on her husband’s campaign website.

I wanted to hear about how she balances personal opinion with the consolidated public message of a presidential campaign. I wanted to hear detailed examples of how the blogosphere is shaping political policy and how politicians are trying to carve out a niche online. I wanted to hear about her personal struggles with cancer and how she and Senator Edwards decided to carry on with the campaign. There were so many non-partisan issues I wanted her to cover in her speech.

However the questions very quickly turned to policy and much of the time was spent discussing her husband’s platform. The meeting came to feel very much like a campaign stop, with talk of how Senator Edwards’ positions differ from other leading democrats and even a statement that she assumed everyone in the room believed pretty much the same things with regards to women’s issues.

You cannot talk to a diverse room of women about your plan for universal healthcare and assume we all believe the same things. Growing up in Canada, I watched a friend’s mother die BECAUSE of socialized medicine. Although I want everyone to have access to health care, I’m not convinced that John Edwards’ plan is viable.

You cannot talk to a diverse room of women about your views on abortion, the Iraq War, gay marriage and other highly divisive issues and assume we all believe the same things.

Anytime we create an assumption of political consensus in a group of intelligent thinking adults, we’re headed for trouble. By saying, “I’m sure we all agree,” in essence what you’re saying is, “Any sane intelligent person would agree with me,” and I have a problem with that.

So although I vote for various parties at election time, register as a Democrat in the primaries and consider myself an independent, I raised my hand to speak to the fact that the discussion was being dismissive to conservatives. There was time for one more question and Elisa Camahort handed me the mic, potentially annoying several other eager people in order to let a conservative have a voice. I’m very grateful.

I’m not actually sure what I said since I was shaking at the time, standing in front of several hundred people and directly addressing the possible future first lady. The session video was uploaded to the BlogHer site but my question is strangely missing, an occurrence I assume was no more sinister than the video blogger running out of tape at the end of the session, but which strikes me as an odd coincidence.

Basically, I pointed out that the session had been dismissive to conservatives and that since I wasn’t planning on voting for her husband, I’d rather talk about blogging and technology than the specific policy of the Edwards campaign. My question was, “How many people review your blog entries before you post them to the internet?” Her answer was, “ZERO!”

I was amazed. With all the spinning and planning and message management that goes on in a presidential campaign, I am completely blown away that she is given total freedom to express herself on the Edwards 2008 website. Now I’m sure she is in constant contact with John and his many advisors and she’s smart enough to know which way the wind is blowing and where she should funnel it. Nonetheless, it was refreshing to hear this response from her.

Regardless of our political differences, I have great respect for Mrs. Edwards and feel strongly that she is sincerely doing what she feels is right and standing up as a bold force to promote her beliefs.

When I approached her at the cocktail party later that evening, she said, “I was just answering the questions in the room,” and it was true. She was just answering the questions in the room. I had a problem with the whole direction of the discussion, not her responses, and not the fact that she was a Democrat.

A friend (not a conservative, if that makes any difference) came up to me after and said she had the same problem. The whole discussion was too political and party-specific for such a diverse group, especially for the closing keynote of a blogging conference.

She gave the analogy that it was similar to inviting the head of Google to be the closing speaker and then letting him spend most of the time fielding questions about how to use Blogger software.

At the end of the closing session, someone asked me, “If a Republican had been the speaker and the conversation had gone the same way, would you have called her on it too?”

Absolutely yes. Although it’s hard to imagine that I’d need to. With the number of bold articulate women of the left in that group, people would have been tripping all over themselves to bring the discussion back on track.

I’ve heard Lisa Stone say that BlogHer is a nonpartisan organization and that if you have a different opinion, you should stand up and make it known. I often think those of us with leanings to the right feel so outnumbered that we’re afraid to speak up. I for one do not want to turn my site into a political blog because I enjoy the fact that I have a diverse group of readers and I like DaringYoungMom as a place for us all to come and be silly together.

However I’d like to be more of a catalyst for diverse political discussion among female bloggers in the future, if not on my personal site, then elsewhere.

Julie Marsh has written about this over at The Imperfect Parent and you can see most of Elizabeth Edwards’ interview on the BlogHer site, minus my question at the end. This is cross-posted to BlogHer.org.

BlogHer felt like an overwhelming success to me this year. I had cute shoes. The conference venue was gorgeous and things ran smoothly and were well organized. People were kind and discussions were thought provoking and respectful. (I’ve got a few words to share on the closing session with Elizabeth Edwards but that will have to wait till tomorrow.) I did not have to cook for anyone and the magical hotel fairies made the beds for me each morning.

My panel was on Friday afternoon, led by the excellent Liz Henry, a woman who can make anyone feel at ease and understood. How fun is she to be taking pictures of the panel and audience as she moderated it? That certainly helped relieve some of the nerves I’d been struggling with that morning. To be honest, I felt a little like a fish out of water in that group. There was Laina who writes about race, ethnicity and culture on the BlogHer website, Liz who seems to know everyone, blog on every topic and have one foot in nearly every social group and Tish who regularly stands up against The Man in a male dominated communications blogging culture.

Then there was me with my charmed life, writing a non-issues-based funny mom blog and periodically being touched by drama because of my religious beliefs. I’m much more comfortable being a smart-alec than having a serious discussion about social issues.

I think the panel went well. We had some good discussion, although I feel that it would have been more productive on a small group level. I wanted the chance to look my fellow panelists in the eye and really come to an understanding of what they were saying, something I’m sad to say didn’t happen.

In my closing statement, I said that everyone is intolerant of something. In fact, if you’re not intolerant, I’m not likely to be your friend because you’re either lying or you’re so relativistic that you don’t know who you are anymore. We tend to call each other on intolerance when our intolerances don’t match up. Personally, my main intolerance is towards mean people. Why can’t we all just respect each other?

Then I said something that I’m not sure about. I said that through my experiences, I’ve learned that what I love about the internet is that it is a great equalizer, giving everyone the freedom to speak their mind and to form communities of their choosing. I think that the people who spoke out against me because I’m Mormon had the right to do so and can form any exclusive group they want. If I want to have a blog for only people who like lima beans, I can do it and if they want to draw lines based on the Nicene Creed, more power to them. I said that if they didn’t want to include me, then there was no reason for me to want to be included, to beg to be part of their group. That statement doesn’t sit right with me.

In that particular instance, I’m happy for them to have their own little group because it doesn’t affect me in any significant way. However, I know there are so many cases in the world where people are being excluded in a way that is materially harmful to them and to the world at large and some situations need and deserve some direct intervention.

After the panel, two such situations presented themselves. Stefania spoke up in the State of the Momosphere panel and mentioned that she is constantly being pitched marketing opportunities on her various websites but receives none of the same offers for Kimchi Mamas, her successful blog for Korean moms. Kelly from Mocha Momma had started teh converstaion because she has experienced the same kind of exclusion from marketers.

Does it offend me that I am excluded from writing for Kimchi Mamas because I’m white? No. There are approximately one billion places a white woman can blog. I fully believe Korean moms should have access to an exclusive community. But I think it’s wrong that women of color are being excluded in so many other communities. If Club Mom or Parenting were making a point of only hiring white bloggers, I’d have a serious problem with that. So, is it only okay for minorities to be exclusive? I’m not sure where the line is. I just know that some exclusive groups are right and some are wrong.

Another example comes from my co-panelist Laina, who went out to dinner in downtown Chicago and was denied service when a black friend asked for a table but a moment later a white friend was able to get her name down on the waiting list. It blows my mind that things like this are still going on in places other than Uncle Bubba’s small town café in Backwardsville, US. Seriously? How can this country have come so far, and still have such a disconnect between our perceived shared values and the way people actually treat each other?