I have never thought of myself as a particularly organized person, nor do I think I am a slob. My clothes are usually hung up or folded on a shelf, though there is a bench in our bedroom that has a tendency to become strewn with random articles of clothing over time. Books are either organized on the bookshelf in alphabetical order or put in the giveaway box, but that’s usually not until after they have sat in the increasingly larger “read” book pile beside the bed for a few weeks/months. Sometimes, I forget to update my car registration until the day I have to take it in for state inspection. I’d categorize myself as moderately organized, with fluctuations depending on how busy my week is.

The one area where I give myself an organizational gold star is with email. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I am slightly obsessive about email organization. During work hours, my inbox is almost always at zero unread emails. The email apps on my phone look like this:

If they don’t, they will soon (side note: I have a friend, who shall remain nameless, who does not have this same obsessive behavior and will occasionally text me screenshots of her email app showing 10,000+ unread emails. I screamed the first time she did it. It makes me feel itchy just thinking about it.) This behavior stems from my reflexive need to be helpful. In order to be helpful, I need to promptly respond to any question I receive. I can’t respond to the question if I can’t find it in my email; ergo, I must keep my email organized so I can find the question I need to respond to so I can be helpful.

This almost pathological obsession with responding to email in order to be helpful corresponds closely to my mindset when I am having an in-person conversation with someone. If, during the conversation the person I am speaking with presents a challenge or problem they are experiencing, my instinct is to immediately try to solve the problem and share this advice with them (The Vanilla Ice lyric from Ice Ice Baby — If there was a problem, yo, I’ll solve it — comes to mind. Perhaps not the ideal person to gather conversation advice from.) This drives my wife crazy. It took me years to understand that sometimes when she is telling me about a problem, she’s not asking me to fix it. She just wants me to listen and sympathize with her. I’m getting better at that. (Note from Scott: I am rushing to show this to my wife right now so she knows I am not the only one with this issue. We have had this conversation sooo many times)

Last week, we took our youngest kid to D.C. to start her first year of college at George Washington University (Contrary to what you may have read recently, D.C. is still standing and is not overrun by hoodlums and scofflaws. Yes, we feel safe sending her there. Yes, we felt that way months ago when she made her decision. I’m getting angry again. Time to move on.) Incredibly, with both kids now away at college, I am an empty nester. My daughter had her first day of classes yesterday, and it took every ounce of willpower not to text her on an hourly basis to check in and see how she was doing. How are classes going? Is everything OK? Is there anything I can do to help?  (UPDATE: Classes are fine, everything is fine, my help is not needed. Sigh.)

So, what does a guy with an inherent need to be helpful do when his email inbox is at zero and his family has little interest in soliciting his advice? He reminds everyone else that the CMEpalooza Ask Us Anything hotline is open and waiting. Whether it’s questions about CME, email organization, or the name of the teen drama musical that Vanilla Ice starred in in 1991 (it’s Cool as Ice), we can help. Let us help you help us help you: If you have an issue (professional or personal) you want us to help with, you can click here to submit your question(s). 

I had one of the stranger CMEpalooza-related conversations of my life over the weekend. I was in one of those interminable zig zag lines where you go back and forth…back and forth…back and forth…only to get to what looks like the end of the line but then find that you are merely getting dumped into another zig zag maze. It’s a psychological horror show, and yet we often voluntarily subject ourselves to it over and over again. The amusement park, passport control in the airport, ordering food at the ballpark — I can’t imagine how much time I have wasted in line just this past month!

Anyway, as I was zigging and zagging in one direction on Sunday, a man with his wife, adult daughter, and grandkids was zigging and zagging the other way. After we had passed each other maybe, I dunno, 10 or 11 times, the man stopped me to ask “I keep looking at your shirt and wondering, what is the CMEpalooza STEPtacular Challenge? It looks pretty awesome.”

Now before you think I am some sort of celebrity that gets recognized in public everywhere I go (that would be Derek – he is the Taylor Swift of Chestnut Hill) I should back up for a second and acknowledge that I was wearing my Spring 2025 CMEpalooza STEPtacular Challenge (sponsored by Talem Health) t-shirt. I know I have mentioned this before, but these t-shirts are super comfortable and quite breathable on a hot summer day. If you don’t have one, you should totally enter this Fall’s STEPtacular Challenge and get one. Did I mention that they are free to everyone who enters?

Anyway, I knew I had about 30 seconds to respond to this kind gentleman’s question before we zigged and zagged out of earshot. So I started with Part 1.

CMEpalooza is a biannual online conference that I co-produce. It is geared to people who plan and create continuing education programs for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.

“So CMEpalooza is for doctors?” he asked, seemingly familiar with the healthcare world (I’m guessing he was a physician, though I don’t know for sure). “It’s a way for them to get CME credits?”

No, not exactly. CMEpalooza is for the people who develop the programs through which doctors and other providers can get credits. People in academic centers, who work for associations, medical education companies, pharma folks – people like that.

I zigged. He zagged. Five minutes later, the conversation continued.

“So what about this STEPtacular Challenge?” he inquired. “What’s that all about?”

It’s this event we hold a week or so before each of our live broadcast days. You just have to send us a screenshot of whatever app you use to count your steps. Any day you reach 10,000 steps or more, you can enter. We give away a few hundred dollars worth of prizes. It’s open to anyone who wants to enter. Win or lose, you get one of these amazingly comfortable t-shirts just for entering.

I zigged. He zagged. Five minutes later, the conversation continued.

“So what I hear you saying is that I could have turned on my step counter the moment I stepped into this $@%#-ing zig zag line and I would have gotten enough steps in to enter? How do you afford all of these prizes?”

(Turns around to show back of the t-shirt)

You see how it says ‘Sponsored by Talem Health?’ They sponsor the STEPtacular Challenge every year and provide the financial support to allow it to happen. We have lots of great sponsors of CMEpalooza — they are one of them.

(Whispering to his daughter, who it seemed was also a healthcare provider) “Maybe we should check out this CMEpalooza thing. Assuming we ever get to the end of this $@%#-ing zig zag line.”

Becoming a sponsor of CMEpalooza doesn’t require jumping through hoops, filling out endless forms, or yes, zig zagging through another interminable line. I mean, there are currently 28 sponsors of CMEpalooza Fall, and they certainly are all too busy to waste time with any of that. No pressure or anything, but if you want to have any chance of being as popular as Derek is in Chestnut Hill, you might want to consider joining them as a CMEpalooza sponsor.

If you want to see what we currently have available for this Fall, you can check out our current Sponsorship prospectus (also available on our Sponsor tab). Our Fall sponsor event is coming up once the leaves start turning, and I am sure that Derek is already working on his haikus for our higher-level sponsors. I promise we’ll treat you right.

Last Wednesday, Radiohead surprise released a new album (it isn’t really a new album, so to speak, but a new live album of old songs, which, as I always say, old Radiohead is better than no Radiohead) and gave me the great idea that I should surprise release a new CMEpalooza blog post to, you know, generate buzz, and guerilla marketing, and increase synergies, and whatnot, though it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to do a suprise CMEpalooza blog post if I told Scott about the surprise CMEpalooza blog post, so I had to figure out a way to write up a surprise CMEpalooza blog post without telling him I was doing that, which is a little bit tricky since I usually send him a heads-up whenever I have a draft of a new post, so he can edit all my typos, crazy punctuation, and run-on sentences, which he is much better at than I am (don’t tell him I said that), but I can’t send him a heads-up of a surprise CMEpalooza blog post because then the surprise would no longer be a surprise and that would ruin most of the fun of it, which is why I decided to write the surprise CMEpalooza blog post as one long run-on sentence, because then the only punctuation I need to worry about is commas and parentheses and I mostly know how to use commas and parentheses (it’s those dastardly semicolons and em dashes that always get me) and also then I don’t need to bother with all those annoying rules of paragraph formation, like only one idea per paragraph, blah, blah, blah, geez, give me a break, I mean, if that Norwegian guy Jon Fosse can write a 700-page novel as one long winding sentence and win the dang Nobel Prize for Literature, than surely I can do the same for one surprise CMEpalooza blog post, though I have to admit that I have discovered one flaw in my plan for a surprise CMEpalooza blog post, which is that I don’t really have any particularly urgent or new news to share that is worthy of a surprise CMEpalooza blog post, making this, uh, all a bit awkward, unless, let me check, yes, yes, we do have a few new updates to the CMEpalooza agenda that I can report, including new information about the 4 PM Afternoon Snack Session (sponsored by Medscape), and additional faculty added for a couple of the other sessions, so please be sure to check out the updated CMEpalooza agenda if you have not done so recently and thank you for reading my surprise CMEpalooza blog post.