Six Month Attention Span

Well, I gave my presentation at the Green Living Expo, twice over two days, and it seemed to go well. No one boo'ed me off the stage, at any rate.

One woman, Friday evening, took notes furiously throughout my talk and then asked several questions afterwards. She seemed very happy to hear what I had to say. Other people just smiled and nodded during the presentations. Some people would occassionally nod, then grin really big as if I had just verified something they'd always suspected ("See, I KNEW I could just bury banana peels under the mulch!"). Some people got up and left halfway through, but I prefer to think they left because they had to go potty, not because they didn't like my presentation.

When it was first suggested to me that I teach a seminar (My friend TrailerParkGirl called me and said that the event organizers had asked her, did she know anyone who could teach a Permaculture-related seminar, and TPG thought of me and would I do it?) I was euphoric from the house-buying experience and said, Okay, sure! Then I shoved the idea to the back of my mind and did other things for two months.

In mid-december, the event organizer woman called and asked me, "What is this seminar going to be about?" Uh . . . your know . . . stuuuuuff? Since I'd just built a Mulch Bed over an area where I intend to plant a tree a year from now, and one of the first things I do for any landscaping client is immediately cover any bare soil with Mulch, I decided that Mulch was possibly a gardening-related topic I could talk about for a whole hour. "What will the class be called?" asked Organizer Woman. "Fun With Mulch!" I rattled off. "O-kay . . . what's it about?" "Um . . . Using Mulch and Permaculture Techniques to make your gardening chores easy and fun," I extemporized. It waslate afternoon and I was hungry, flippant, and perhaps not as grounded in reality as I should have been. I'm like that when I'm hungry.

Again, I shoved this all to the back of my mind and focused on more pressing issues, like whether or not the contractors might drop my house and break it. So it wasn't until two weeks ago that I really sat down and said, Okay, now I have to put together a presentation. Immediately, I was swamped by The Fear. You know, the kind of fear that masquerades itself as intuition? And tells you to run away for your own good?

But I was committed, the organizer woman had already printed my name on advertising flyers and complete with the inventive title: Fun With Mulch, Using Mulch and Permaculture Techniques to make your gardening chores easy and fun. Yes, there it was on the schedule, right between a tree-care class presented by an arborist with a list of credentials the length of I-35, the mentor to my mentor, and another class by a man who runs a huge non-profit organization called Treefolks.

Oh goody. My dinky little chat about mulch is sharing a stage with people like that. This is like standing up after a poetry reading by Maya Angelou to read a limerick you wrote while drunk. What was I thinking!!

I wanted, desperatly, to back out. But then, with my name all printed up on the flyers, everyone would know that I had backed out and that would suck. So I called TPG, I mean, it's her fault I was doing this! Come to think of it, she also talked me into taking on landscape design clients when I only wanted to do landscape maintanence. TPG is always getting me into trouble! She's a bad influence! I shouldn't play with her anymore!

TPG listened to me wail about my fears of inadequacy and told me, "No no, it's not about being qualified to share the stage with those people! It's that those people are all OLD MEN and a woman needs to get up and just BE THERE." Oh, and here I just thought it was about mulch. Now, Instead of feeling like a dilletante and poseur with no buiness teaching anyone anything, now I felt like the entire Female Population of Central Texas was depending on ME to show the rest of the world that women can be leaders in the organics movement, too. No pressure . . .

But it went rather well. After three hectic Springs at an Organic Plant Nursery, I can rattle off a ten-minute speech on just about any gardening-related topic, complete with a works cited list. It's just something we all learned to do as part of our job, just like punching numbers into a cash register while a co-worker crawls under your arms to get into the drawer where the invoices are kept. So a one-hour lecture became manageable if I just thought of it as three or four mini-speeches strung together. General Facts about Mulch, How to Kill Grass through Sheet Mulching, How to Grow Veggies in a Mulch-Bed, How to Grow Potatoes in Mulch, and then a Q&A session.

But another Fear cropped up. I was absolutely certain that the technology would fail me. The event organizers were providing an LCD projector. Simple enough, except that I did not own a laptop. Also, I did not have PowerPoint or anything like it. I didn't even remember how to use that kind of software; it's been eight years!

Sweetienookums came up with the brilliant idea of just buying a laptop and then installing an open-source software program similar to powerpoint (Open Office Impress). This is the plan that we went with, but I'm not sure I like it. I already have a perfectly good non-portable computer, and while laptops are fun, I only need one computer at a time so why own two? And why spend money on a new one until the old one breaks? What about the ethiopian babies who don't have any computers at all? What about the mortgage payment, and credit card debt, and WE STILL DON'T HAVE FLOORS! So, I'm not so sure we should have bought the laptop. It cost one-seventh of the price tag for new bamboo flooring downstairs. It cost one-fourteenth of the cost of locally milled, hand-planed Mesquite Hardwood flooring. I don't know how its cost compares to Marmoleum, but you can bet that when I figure it out, I will fret about what fraction of my downstairs could have floors if only we hadn't bought the laptop!

Well anyway, I spent a week's worth of spare time working on my presentation. I made Sweetienookums follow me around the backyard taking photos of me using mulch. I made Sweetienookums sit there and listen to my presentation and give me feedback, even though he was sick with a tummy virus.

Everything was fine. I wasn't a bit nervous. I don't know how my camisole got so damp, because I totally wasn't sweating. Not much. The LCD projector didn't malfunction . . . much. And the laptop only started acting wonky After my last presentation was over. So it all worked out well.



And, Snorty Stompy and HealerWoman came down to lend their support, complete with home-made signs declaring their support. I think next time I do this, they should paint their faces in the team colors.