My conventional experiences

Tuesday, July 22, 2008
So, now that I’m back in Indy I guess I should sit and write about my experiences at Convention, because that’s definitely something that I am going to want to go back and read about. Let me back tack. I guess I left off Wednesday night, so I have about a week to catch up on. Here it goes!

Wednesday night I didn’t really feel like socializing too much, and luckily the girls (Becca, Malorie, Elizabeth and Rae) didn’t ask me to. After the night’s festivities, I just went back to my room, wrote the blog and went to sleep. I think I was asleep by like 10:30 or something like that. It was great. I did end up having a dream about dying. I don’t know what was wrong with me, if I had cancer or what, but I knew that I was dying. I was in Austin and I was in my living room sitting in my Grandma’s chair. This chair is her recliner that she brought down to our house from Fort Worth when she was getting sick so she was comfortable when she was at our house. She spent all of her time in this chair unless we were eating a meal. She had her oxygen tank next to her and her nebulizer, so I now associate this chair with her being sick and dying. I hope it’s not still there when I got back in September. Anyway, I was sitting in this chair. It was fairly dark in the room and my family was in there standing in front of me. They all hugged me and walked out of the room. Somehow I knew that I only had 11 minutes left to live. I started to freak out about dying. I simply wasn’t ready. I felt like I was way too young and then I started freaking out about whether or not I would go to heaven. I believe in God and Jesus and that Jesus died for us and all that, but I started to think that maybe since I haven’t been praying much or going to church lately that maybe my actual faith didn’t count for anything. What was going to happen to me when I died? I believed that my soul would live on and that this wasn’t the end for me, but what was it going to be like afterwards? It was awful. Then it got me thinking. My Grandma said that she was a Christian and she went to church and Cursillo and all that, but how do you really know? How do I really know what she believed and if she went to heaven? I hope she went to heaven. I like the though of her watching over me. It’s comforting.

Thursday morning I got up at 6 and went to work out! I didn’t have a lot of time to work out because I had to be pretty and fed by 8, but I still went and did the elliptical for half an hour. I was really proud of myself for getting up and going. Thursday is the day that we had the educational workshop blocks that I talked about in my last blog. So I guess my training session and workshops didn’t actually happen in the same day. That’s irrelevant. The first workshop I went to that day was the one about going green, and I obviously loved it! I took vigorous notes and came out of it with a renewed enthusiasm for going green, even if I have to start with just small steps here and there. The second workshop was about planning for your financial future and including a charity in your will. I’m not yet to the point where I’m thinking about my will too much, let alone if I want to give some of my (nonexistent) money to a charity, how much I want to give and how I want to go about doing it. So this workshop wasn’t really something that held my interest, plus the man that was leading it wasn’t very captivating. I felt really bad for him though. There were only like 5 of us in there and I could tell that he could tell we didn’t really care about what he was saying.

After the second set of workshops we had lunch and then our final workshop session. The one I went to was with Amber and about finding your own sense of style and making it work for your job and age and such. I didn’t really learn anything new in there, but it was still enjoyable. After that we had our first business meeting. There were three business meetings during the convention and I was excited about them. I was excited to get to see how they were run and to see our National Council sitting up there. The night before, Becca asked if it was required to go if you weren’t a delegate for your chapter (Malorie was their delegate). I told her that it wasn’t, but that it was recommended. I was kind of surprised that she and the other girls wouldn’t want to go, just to see how it compares to a collegiate chapter meeting, but then again, not everyone has the same crazy passion for ASA that I do (and, admittedly, this passion didn’t used to be as strong as it is now). If we were at some other kind of conference and there was something I didn’t HAVE to be at, I’d most likely skip on it too. The first business meeting was basically just introducing everyone. Lori Scott, our National President at the time, introduced our council, our staff (me included), the delegates for the chapters (collegiate and alumni) and other people of importance. Nothing of big importance was talked about. She did give the state of the sorority address, which from what I saw was amazing; she even made me tear up. I didn’t get to see all of it though because Nicole and I had to help Christy set up for a mini-memorial for Nora’s mom. Nora Ten Broek is one of our National Vice Presidents (and my favorite woman on National Council) and her mom, who was a member of ASA, passed away this past year. When she was alive she used to have a Manhattan at 5 o’clock everyday, so Nora set it up for everyone who was close to her to meet at 5 for Manhattans. Even though I didn’t know Nora’s mom, it was very moving being there. I also got to meet some amazing women during that time, and being that we were talking about her mom that just passed, lots of people told me they’d been thinking of me and my family, even though I’d just met them a few days earlier. It was nice.

After that I went to dinner with my chapter sisters and they paid for my dinner, which I really appreciated. It was nice getting to sit around with them and just talk. We ordered some drinks, relaxed and were there for like 2 hours. After that we went and got the ingredients to make some drinks and went back to the hotel. We drank some and just acted like silly girls. It was lovely! And I was still in bed by like 11:30!

Friday morning I was too tired to go workout. I had a breakfast to go to at 8 and I was going to be eating with National Council, so I decided to sleep in a bit so I would be able to be more conversational. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not always the friendliest in the morning! I was lucky and got to sit at a table with Nora and also with Cindy Kelly, another National Vice President. Both of these women are amazing and they both traveled as LCs back in the 90’s. After breakfast was our second business meeting, which was definitely the more exciting of the three! We discussed amendments to the National Bylaws and two of the amendment stirred up some discussion! It was awesome to see how discussion and voting goes at the national level. I loved that the collegians had the chance to get up and talk about the amendments and National Council listened to what everyone had to say. It really made me feel good. In the end, 22 of the 23 proposed amendments passed. After the second business meeting Nicole and I had to go to the Emporium and man the LC booth. We made enough fliers and sign-up sheets for 100 people, but we only had like 12 people stop by and talk to us about wanting to be an LC in the future. I did get to talk to a man while I was there about ordering t-shirts. Even though I am no longer wardrobe chair, I was still interested in what he had to offer vs. companies that I’d used in the past. I like what he had to say, so I got all kinds of info from him and I’m going to pass it along to my successor and hopefully she’ll find it useful. Later that night we had the red tie dinner and dessert so we all put on our red outfits (or in my case, my red accessories) and went to dinner. It was nice and they raffled off some red high heels. After that, we announced that Dot (a ladybug) was now going to be our OFFICAL ASA mascot. Up to this point, Ragedy Ann and a ladybug, and in some places an apple, have all been our unofficial mascots, but as of Convention 2008, we now have an official one. We all got cute little cards announcing it and a lady dressed up in a ladybug costume for us to get pictures with. It was adorable.