LimmudLA ended a little over a week ago, and I've just unearthed some of the notes I took over the course of the weekend. Two of my sessions - Jewish innovation and the dating panel - took place on Shabbat, so there are no written records of what happened there. But as I go through the rest of my notes, which includes some reflections on sessions I attended and conducted as well as the people I met, I'll write up some thoughts and post them here.
**
"Esther? Are you EstherK from Twitter?" The question came at me at the beginning of a session I attended called "Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll and Judaism for Adults." Someone called me Esther, and this woman overheard. She identified herself as MillerMosaicLLC, and noted that she had found me looking for Tweets about LimmudLA. Apparently I was the only one on Twitter who was hashtagging LimmudLA, at least this year. Next year, expect that number to be much higher.
**
A guy approaches me on my way out of the Jewish innovation session. He's been urged by a mutual friend of ours to step forward and identify himself. About four or five years ago, he says, he wrote a response on one of my JDaters Anonymous posts, telling a story about a woman who had fallen asleep in her linguini while on a date with him. He tells me that I treated the story as so ludicrous that it couldn't possibly be true. (I've done a backsearch of my site and can't seem to track down the story, so we'll just have to trust his recall.) As he stared at me expectantly and I stammered through an apology for not treating his comment (that I didn't remember) seriously, I was reminded of something that all writers and certainly writers who blog should remember: the people who comment (in most cases) are real people with feelings. Most of them we never have to face, but if perchance we do encounter them f2f (that's face-to-face), we will have to stand behind the things that we've written, even if we don't remember them. As we meander through our daily rants and raves, this is a good reminder to have once in a while, because it demands that we ask ourselves to take the unseen others into consideration.
More memories of and reflections on LimmudLA to come...
Comments