Yesterday a reporter called me. He’d heard through a mutual friend that I was presenting at Ignite Phoenix 6.

First question: “Why are you doing this?”

And I had absolutely no idea. I had just remembered sitting in the audience at Ignite Phoenix 3 thinking, I could do that. And then I did Ignite Phoenix 4. And suddenly it’s almost a year later and I still have no idea why I’m doing any of it, but I need to give the reporter an answer. So as usual my mouth opens and I say something tactless:

“It’s like nerd prom!”

And then I wonder in my head if I should backpeddle — nerd is a pretty harsh thing to call a fairly cool group of people. But my rationale is like this: It doesn’t take much to be a nerd, all you need is a deep interest in something other than an Approved Normal People Topic of Conversation™. Which is more or less limited to the following:

• The experience of being So Drunk
• Buying things
• Your children and the things they do
• TV, and the people on it
• How About Those [$sports-team]
• Dieting and Working Out

If you have a deep interest in other stuff, you learn not to share it with the world, because the world still loves to piss on The Different.

Ignite plays a very important role, here: This is where The Different are allowed to come out of the closet in an eyeroll-free environment and use big words and technical terms and Twitter while people are talking. To me it’s not about passion, it’s about being allowed to be you for five minutes of your life.

That’s the nerd part. Now the prom part. I told the reporter that I found a new dress and some shiny yellow shoes, and it had been years since I’d had a reason to purchase something just to feel good about wearing it. You get to dress in your favorite version of yourself, and socialize with hundreds of people, and get really liquored up afterwards. That’s prom, right?

Plus it feels great to be on a stage, knowing that for once you’re not competing with 67 cute blondes who take singing lessons. In high school, I tried out for musicals, and it was always Get The Hell Off My Stage, You Dance Like a Clydesdale. (Not really. It was more like, “Ooh, Stacy, you should be in the pit orchestra! Go downstairs with the other homely children, please.”)

So  I guess to answer your question, Mr. Reporter, I do Ignite because these are my people, and I like having epic fun with them.

Dear judge who is making my friend’s life miserable:

You weren’t there the day that the bottom of my friend’s life fell out. I was. That was the day she found out her husband was having an affair, and he was leaving her for the other woman.

Their relationship was rocky when they married, but she was pregnant and wanted to “do the right thing”. She wanted her baby to have two parents.

Four years later, her husband walked out, and the dream was over.

Fortunately, my friend is a really amazing, strong, gifted, beautiful woman. She fell in love again and married someone who treated her little boy as his own.

Unfortunately, her new husband made the mistake of serving his country in the military, which meant being transferred to — oh god, wait for it — Oklahoma. You declared that military families in exotic locations such as Oklahoma are “unstable” and awarded full custody of the little boy to the father who left the family, and his live-in girlfriend. For a “family-values” conservative, you have a really interesting interpretation of which situation a child should grow up in.

This morning, you dragged my friend to court and told her that she needs to pay a ton of child support, because she made the mistake of going to college and bettering herself and thus makes more money than Father of the Year does.

I’m not sure why you think it’s more important that my friend’s son live in Arizona than with the parent who didn’t abandon him, but you’re being a hell of a role model for desperate, pregnant women who wonder if “doing the right thing” is indeed the right thing…