It's the Park Avenue Jinx

The very second we pulled onto Park Ave, I remembered. It had been a few years since I last travelled that road. Yet, the circumstances were the same. The BlogHer Conference was just a few miles away. Traffic was … special. Park Ave offered an opportunity to cut the travel time for those miles in half.

An hour plus cut to roughly half an hour.

BEAUTIFUL.

I should have known the second I recognized where I was that something was going to happen. Five years ago I sat in bumper-to-bumper-to-bumper traffic on Park Ave, waiting patiently to move closer to the conference. Five years ago a bicyclist came bustling by and cut things just a little bit too tight and went tumbling into the road after getting caught on my car mirror.

This year I made it a block further before something happened.

The thing about NYC is that you don’t need to be a particularly good driver to navigate the roads. You don’t need to be because nobody else is. It’s like a game of Frogger where your only mission is to keep moving forward without getting hit or hitting something. Everybody is moving slowly because everybody is trying to get to the same place. Pedestrians dart into intersections. Bicyclists weave between cars. Other drivers shove thousands of pounds of steel into places they really shouldn’t fit. You just have to carefully inch forward and hope for the best.

Sometimes when you go to inch forward, you realize that you better inch a little to the side because HOLY POTHOLE, BATMAN.

I marveled at the size and severity of dozens of potholes in New York. As I was driving an SUV, I rolled my way through most of them, grateful to be a little bit off of the ground so that my vehicle didn’t scrape the ground. THAT pothole, though. It was a grisly beast.

Thus, I swerved a little to the left. A foot, maybe.

There was a curb there.

A well-worn and ancient curb. It was so well-worn that it had a piece of rebar sticking out of it.

Hello, flat tire!

WOMP WOMP WOMP.

A photo posted by Burgh Baby (@burghbaby) on Jul 16, 2015 at 3:08pm PDT

 

I kid you not, I was maaaaaybe a block away from where I had an incident the last time I drove in NYC to attend BlogHer. (Note to self: Take the long way next time. NO MATTER WHAT.)

A little light flashed on my dash the second the tire began to lose air. That was a very good thing because it allowed me a moment to turn into a side street and make my way to an empty parking space along the road. As I thunked my way into the space, I explained what had happened to the backseat driver named Alexis.

She was not amused.

It really wasn’t a big deal, though. We were two miles from our hotel in a safe location and I knew I had a spare tire in the back.

Easy.

This is the point when I will admit I do know how to change a tire. I do, but I have managed to go through life without actually proving it in a real-world situation. I had no plans of changing that at the time, so I called for roadside assistance. It’s part of our insurance and it made a lot of sense to let someone else change the tire in 45 seconds using good tools. If I had done it myself with the tools in my car, it would have taken an hour. Easily.

Roadside assistance promised that someone would be by to change the tire within 45 minutes. “I win!” I thought. That meant we would be moving again much faster than if I dealt with things myself.

So, Alexis and I settled in for our little 45 minute wait. We could have walked to the hotel or went exploring or something, but 45 minutes is no big deal. And what if they showed up early? It could happen!

It didn’t.

It really super didn’t.

After an hour of waiting, I called. It was at that point that I realized that I suuuuuuuper needed to find a restroom.  It was a task that was probably two hours past due, to be honest. When roadside assistance said it would be just 15 more minutes, I resigned myself to being uncomfortable because there was no way I was going to walk away from the car at that point.

No way.

Half an hour later, the situation was desperate. I decided it was time to abandon the car no matter what, so I drug Alexis down a busy NYC street in search of a Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts or ANYWHERE THAT HAD A BATHROOM OMG.

Apparently it’s super embarrassing to walk down the road with your mom when she’s doing the Peepee Dance. Who knew?

ANYWAY.

Once that situation was corrected, we found our way back to the car and waited some more. And some more. And some more. It took over two hours for roadside assistance to show up and then less than 120 seconds TOTAL for the tire to be switched.

By the time we reached the hotel, Alexis and I had missed the opening events of BlogHer 15. ‘Twas a sad moment, indeed. We made up for it by going to Times Square and eating ice cream, but the damage was already done.

Flat tires when you are two miles from your destination are super annoying. Waiting hours to get a spare put on is super annoying. Waiting hours and hours for a new tire is even more annoying.

But knowing with absolute certainty that you should never drive own Park Ave again? Well, that's just plain useful information.

BlogHer and Hatch and Alexis All Come Together

There are a lot fo things that happened this weekend. SO MANY. I mean, this was aaaaaamazing, and then there was the tire and the conference and Broadway and NYC and and and and annnnnd.

So much.

I forgot to take my laptop with me and can't be bothered to blog actual words from my phone, so now I'm going to spend a few days catching up and writing those things. I need to remember them.

First, though, I need to write about one of the things that Alexis said I need to write about.

**************************************************************************

Of all of the decisions I've made recently, taking Alexis with me to New York City has to rank really high on the "Good Job, Me" list. It was a decision that was born of a lot of factors, but that was clinched when I saw that this year's BlogHer conference was going to include some sessions for kids.

Hatch.

Hatch was promoted as programming for kids ages 8-18. The session descriptions weren't anywhere that I saw them before sign-ups, but the $99 price gave Alexis access to the kid-friendly sessions (which I didn't have to attend -- it was a safe place for her to be while I wandered in another direction). It also gave her access to the conference meals and Expo. Meals alone made it worth taking the plunge. I mean, the kid ate FOUR croissants at breakfast the first day, so there's $20 I didn't spend somewhere else.

Long story short, Hatch was FANTASTIC for Alexis. Absolutely fantastic. The first session was about "Personal Branding."

Let's all stop and laugh at the irony, okay? Okay. Yes, I am the person who spoke at BlogHer a few years ago about how I AM NOT A BRAND. Still, it was a good session because it was essentially a conversation about how to present yourself online. As part of the session, the kids had to answer questions like "What's important to you?" and "What do you want people to think when they see you online?"

I'm keeping Alexis' worksheet from it. Because ... yeah. She listed family as her most important thing. She also wrote that she hopes people think she's nice when they see her online. Something is going right around here and it was nice to see it in writing. It was also good to have someone who was not me reinforcing some of those things I've told her about being careful with what photos and words she posts because she wants to make sure they represent her in a positive way.

The second session, however, wasn't so fantastic. It was described as a session about being a good digital citizen and our relationships with technology. Which, GREAT!

That's not really what it was, though. Or, at least that's not what Alexis got out of it.

Alexis had wi-fi while at the conference, so she texted me about halfway through the session. The words she typed were, "Save me." I showed up ten minutes later to find the kids sitting in a too-warm room and broken into two teams. Each team was one side of a debate and was presenting their argument. One team was responsible for arguing that the internet is a good tool for kids to use. The other team was responsible for arguing that the internet is NOT a good tool for kids to use.

WELP.

Alexis was on the "NOT" team and she was waaaaaay not feeling it. Obviously, as a kid who grew up with me, she's all aboard the internet train. We've taken the path of trying to teach her to use it responsibly and to recognize the good and the bad and how to handle both sides of it and blah, blah, blah. She knows not everything about the internet is kittens and rainbows, but she also knows that doesn't mean she shouldn't use it. She needs to be smart.

In a few more years, she might be mature enough to understand how to debate something without believing in it. Today is not the day that she is that mature.

She hated that session. So hard. And, frankly, I don't blame her. There's a disconnect somewhere when you have a room full of bloggers' kids and you're debating whether or not the internet is a good thing, y'know?

That said, Hatch most definitely needs to happen again next year. Alexis is absolutely convinced she should go conferencing with me again. I love that she was able to get some content that was appropriate for her.

And with that, I now present Alexis' list of the things that Hatch did right and the things that need to be different. (The comments are mostly direct quotes from Miss Alexis herself.)

The good ...

1. It was fun being with other kids.

2. The teacher in the first session was super nice.

3. The first session was interesting and helpful.

4. It was good how the Hatch sessions were in a different place from the rest of the conference.

The opportunities for improvement ...

1. There needs to be more kids there. It would be good if they were split up by age a little bit, too.

2. General sessions about how to use social media tools better would be good. (For example, Alexis really super wanted to attend the general (adult) session about getting the most out of Instagram. If she could have had a kid-friendly session about photo editing and creating an interesting Instagram account, she would have been all of the happy.)

3. Alexis didn't specifically say it, but I can say based on conversations that we've had lately that she would like more information about how to respond when other kids use social media in ways that makes her uncomfortable. There has been a specific situation where a kid she knows from school often posts things like "Like this if you think I'm pretty." Those sorts of posts feel wrong to Alexis (which, HOORAY!) but she isn't sure how to respond. She feels like she HAS to like the post even though it makes her "feel icky." We're talking about how she should handle that stuff, but it's always good to have an outsider weighing in.

4. Do. Hatch. Again. Someone super loved having her own conference badge and feeling like she was part of something big and amazing. Now it just needs to be made bigger and more amazing.

 

These Things Happen