Meeting MJ

Need I say it? Maureen Johnson is freaking awesome. She is the physical embodiment of her online presence. Like, I hardly need to describe my experience because if you read her Twitter timeline, you can practically feel it.

Me and MJ
(this is misleading and we're probably the same height
but I was wearing high heeled boots)

I'm going tell you about it anyway but I just wanted to preface this with the fact that yesterday was textbook MJ. I could not have imagined it better.

I convoyed to the site with five friends and we were behind my schedule when we arrived at 10:30. For a 2 o'clock event. And there was no one there. After some mild deliberation, we left, bound for Value Village to do some Halloween shopping.

When we came back at 12, there was still no one there that we could see. There were some people hanging out in Starbucks who appeared like they could have been there for the event but still no line and Chapters seemed rather ambivalent about the whole deal. Soon, they seemed to realize that there was a thing happening and started setting up some chairs and a podium in a corner of the teen section. Naturally, my people snagged the front row, though this was a little intimidating. I started trying to nudge the podium farther away with my toe but it wasn't actually that bad. Maureen didn't stand behind the podium the whole time. Sometimes she stood beside it; sometimes she jumped over the audience to check out the extension pack of Settlers of Catan she'd never seen before; sometimes she got very close to sitting in my sister's lap.

You can't tell how close it was from this picture
but trust me, it was CLOSE.

It was great, you know. I'm not going to go over every detail because that might get boring. The easiest and possibly truest way to describe what Maureen did is rambled. She told us her events were pretty much exclusively q&a except a special brand of question and answer in which someone asks a questions and she rambles and answers a different question until she has forgotten the original question and then asks to be reminded of the question and then ignores it some more and then asks for another question that she can ignore. It's a pretty entertaining process.

After the questions ran out and several audience members had proffered gifts in the form of nanaimo bars and maple syrup, we all shuffled over to stand in line for the signing part. There were pictures and Sharpies and high fives and then we left. I'm slightly ashamed to say I didn't get anything signed to our blog--it only occurred to me later. Maybe the next one of us that crosses paths with the woman who threw us in the way of each other can get her to sign a badge that we can upload and stick in our sidebar. That would be cool.

I wish you guys had been there. It was jokes.

p.s. Can we all go to VidCon, please??? PLEEEEEEASE?