For the Starbucks fans on my list...

Get free brewed coffee during "Starbucks Coffee Break" on March 15 from 10 a.m. to noon

http://consumerist.com/consumer/strabucks/free-starbucks-next-week-242448.php

Getting through the procrastination blocks...

Whew... am finally making progress on writing up a speech that I'm supposed to deliver tomorrow at a feminist psychology conference.

It's not that I don't know what to talk about... what I'm finding daunting is how to condense the topics of bisexuality, polyamory, feminism, counseling, and my research results into a meaningful 15 minute sound-byte. Yup, 15 minutes - I'm one of 4 panelists in an hour symposium slot on bi counseling, and I'm there as the resident poly expert. Hell, it would take 15 minutes to simply do justice to defining 'polyamory.'

As redhatmary points out, my job here is simply to inspire the audience to learn more on the topic, and handouts are one's friend. I suspect I will do a lot of "Refer to this URL on your handout for further information!"

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I also successfully fought the procrastination block on finishing up my taxes this week... I suspect that was a form of virtuous procrastination from writing up the talk, but hey, it works. I know taxes aren't due yet, but it'll be a help to my budgeting process to know just how much money I'll be forking over to the IRS this spring.

This'll also help me to know how much money to set aside to send them during the 2007 tax year quarters. When you're in business for yourself, you don't have an employer taking taxes out of your paycheck weekly... instead, you estimate what your taxes will be in the coming year, and send the IRS 1/4 of that amount quarterly. If you underestimate, you get a penalty. I'm getting better at estimating.

Progress...

Well, I have my talk drafted, and my handout of poly resources is printing. Need to do some more work on revising the talk, but that shouldn't take too much work.

I decided to essentially do the therapist-oriented version of poly 101. The audience will be feminist psychologists from all over the country, and while that implies some level of LGBT-savvy, there will likely be varying levels of knowing what polyamory even is. So, the topic lineup is --

- What is polyamory?
- How prevalent is it among people of different orientations?
- What are the benefits of being polyamorous?
- How is polyamory a phenomenon in keeping with feminist ideals?
- What do we know about the psychological well-being and relationship satisfaction of poly folks?
- What do we know about bisexuals in poly relationships?

I think that if my audience is more poly-savvy than I am anticipating, I'll chuck the above and read excerpts from my writings on what poly-specific topics might come up in therapy. But if I'm right about the baseline poly knowledge being low in our crowd, then poly 101 is more appropriate as an intro to the subject of poly counseling, and they will have pointers to my articles on the actual counseling end of things in their handout.

Whew...