ORDER OF EVENTS.
day 1: friday.
a bag of candy-coated peanuts and cheddar goldfish sustain us for three hours, and we arrive, on time, at 5pm.
we get to the hotel and are stunned. my hotel room is half the size of my apartment. i have a king-sized bed and two TVs. i love white fluffy towels.
brenna and i are half-asleep on the plane, still amazed that we are going to austin for five days. i have never been to texas and my expectations involve cowboy hats and yee-haws. my mom's expectations are little more detailed: find a nice texan man to marry. she was kidding. i think. i hope.
me, trying not to blow away while crossing the street.
we walk up congress and over to 6th street to find a restaurant. we end up at the pelican street café, and i have my first-ever expensed meal. i devour blackened halibut on a bed of pasta, warm sour dough bread and a salad. for dessert, a crepe with strawberries and cream and an irish coffee. i don't realize that the irish coffee is 80% whiskey until i'm halfway done. thank you, place of employment. i am now nice and toasty.
and it helps, because we are braving the foreign streets during the stormwatch: lots of lightning and wind. we also discover grackles, which are evil black birds that sit in swarms and shriek endlessly. dust gets in our eyes. it's colder than we thought it would be. brenna and i make up headlines. "two girls get struck by lightning -- or grackles. found dead before south by southwest conference even begins."
it sure looks pretty from up here.
i'm excited to see maura, who arrived a couple hours after me, but she lost her wallet and isn't in the mood to go out. brenna and i have already missed the first party, so we decide to go to the four seasons, where there's some other swank shindig thing going on. i feel very self-conscious, as we lightly tread among the black-tie and slinky-dressed folk. and then i spot my first web persona.
"you're bryan boyer," i say pointing at him.
he introduces us to ben brown, who tells me another one of those small-world stories about someone who submitted to behold and grew up in his neighborhood. they give us drink tickets and introduce us to people, but it's barely sinking in who anybody is. i am downing a gin and tonic when a tall, lanky australian boy approaches brenna.
"you're not VC, are you?" he asks.
"no, no," she says.
"good," he says, and then begins his schpiel of how he is so tired of venture capital people. of course, he proceeds to talk about his own project that needs funding. soon we are surrounded by his friends and one of them asks us to pose for a picture. i try to escape, but somehow i find myself beside brenna smiling for some stranger's camera. i give brenna the let's-escape-please look and we go to the bar for another drink. we have a few sips before we realize how spinny the room has become and how we should really go to bed. i take a photo of the view from my window, try to scribble a few notes into my journal and fall asleep on 1/4 of the bed: the right side.