Fault line

I feel like today was important, but I also feel like I need to make this brief, because my body is not entirely complying with the recording impulse.

Today is the last day in my previous flat. I had to pack all my stuff into cardboard boxes and sign the new lease agreement. Then I got to spend the first hour in my new apartment and see just how much of the office building I see through the windows (all of it), how many trees (none), and how many cars I hear driving down the busy street right outside (all of them).

It was not a good day. There's other shit on top of that, but it shall go unaddressed.

Then in the evening A came. We bought some munchies, some rose wine, and went to the new flat. A talked. A lot. Then we had a conversation. Not about the flat per se, just about life. I drank most of the wine because she's ill. A thunderstorm came. She left. I felt... so much better. Things would be ok.

Then stuff happened, but it's inconsequential. The story really picks up when I was with B, looking for a cab to take them home, and talking about... stuff. Stuff that I decided I would talk about, on this particular day. Stuff that made us forego the cab and go for another drink somewhere else.

And we talked. About various things, some of them perhaps more vital than the trump subject, but... it was an important moment as well. There was a pretty rudimentary connection. Here I was with a good person who, as it turned out, had my best interest at heart. Which should have been obvious, but it wasn't. And it will be from now on.

Were, I to write this tomorrow, I'd probably do a better job, but I felt the need to mark this moment now. Today was important.

Reemergent shapes

Going to see a promising flat the day after tomorrow. Hope it pans out.

One of my instant imprints from a while ago popped back up under somewhat different circumstances. Potentially debilitating, but that's life. If nothing else, it will provide me with a poster child for getting in shape.

This is my head right now:

Austin: The Veterans, Day 1

On the next day we got up really early, because we had to meet our next hosts at a cafe at 9:30 a.m. I have to say I don't exactly miss the early mornings. For two weeks or so I ended up being exhausted by 10 p.m. and that's just WRONG.

Anyway, we managed to locate the cafe, though not without problems, and were greeted by a sweet middle-aged couple. We started off by the guy trying to give me keys and me thinking he's going in for a fist bump, but it got better from there. They are veteran couchsurfers, to the point where they have several sets of keys to their place, and a whole FAQ on the inside of the door - wifi password, cat's habits, etc. As we were dragging our suitcases to their door, a guy dismounted from his motorcycle in the parking lot and asked if we were staying with them. And then he told us they actually hosted him a couple of years back, when he was couchsurfing, and he liked the city so much that he moved here, and now he's their neighbour. There was something completely cinematically economic about this moment - as in: all background characters serve some purpose, because there's just no time to have random people pop up and not tell us something about the protagonists.

Unfortunately, that 30 minutes at the cafe was also the longest we ended up talking to them, because they left for work before we got up, and we'd come home after they've already turned in for the day.

Once we had the keys, we moved our stuff from the kid's place to the other one, which turned out to be all the way across the city. Which made me miss my first movie. Once we got there, we met a fellow couchsurfer - a Burmese native who came to USA when he was about 16, lived in New York, and then had a quarter-life crisis, burned out, and is now traveling around the world and trying to figure out what he wants to do. Obviously, we went for tacos. They were my first proper tacos, and they were good, though we were kind of confused by the fact that you should apparently order 2 or 3 at once, because they're kind of small-ish.

After the tacos Gosia and the Burmese guy went to see a movie, and I decided that it was finally time for me to get a local SIM card. I googled the location of a T-Mobile store, and set out to find it. On foot, because Austin public transport suuuuucks. I found the street easily enough, and started walking. I walked. And I walked. And then I walked some more. It seemed like I was actually leaving the city. I crossed some railroad tracks, and in my book that's always a bad sign. Turns out that the street just went on forever. I had a crisis of faith after about 45 minutes, but I was already more than halfway there, judging from the home numbers, so I persevered. Eventually I reached that friggin' store, at about half an hour before closing time, and managed to get the SIM card. I was so happy I sat down on the curb and immediately replaced my Polish one with the new one. And everything worked! Off to the bus stop I went. Leaving my Polish card on the curb, never to be recovered again. Yay.

At the bus stop, there was a homeless guy sleeping on the bench, and a portly fellow staring at the road wistfully. 30 minutes later we were joined by someone from the transit authority who came by to get rid of the homeless person. He had no idea when the bus was supposed to arrive though, or even if it was going to come at all. This pretty much meant that I wouldn't make it to yet another movie. Eventually I started talking to the portly guy, and we agreed that we'll wait 10 more minutes, and then call a cab and split the fare. Our ultimatum worked, and God sent down a bus, so we got to talk some more. Turned out he was from England, came for the music part, and was on his way to some sort of animation screening accompanied by free booze. Because apparently there was that as well.

I managed to just miss my next screening, so for the next hour or so, I ended up wandering around the city like a total twat. At that time, it was the definite low point of the trip. Finally, I reconvened with Gosia, very happy to see a familiar face and have someone to talk to, and we went to see a documentary on some punk rocker lady. I wasn't overly impressed and skipped out on the Q&A to get ahold of Ian (who came down for the weekend from Dallas) and possibly meet up with some Pajiba people. Which is how I missed Amanda Palmer, who apparently was at the same screening and had some questions for the lady.

On my way to the Pajiba people I managed to get lost, and actually arrived at the bar after Gosia (who stuck around for the Q&A). I was completely deflated and ended up sitting on the very outskirts, next to all the people I knew, so I wasn't even able to interact with the people I came to meet. And they were all tired, so they called it a night pretty quickly. The whole evening ended up being a pretty stinky anti-climax to an exhausting day filled with failures great and small. Ian was loads of fun though, from what I recall, as was his childhood friend who was also there, though I don't recall why.

Austin: The Kid, Day 2

My apartment search is still underway, but I've got some leads now. And I'm once again slightly drunk on that orange vodka, so let's keep the ball rolling.

On our first proper day at SXSW, we went to see Much Ado About Nothing. We got our first queue experience. I got saddled with a rather boring music blogger guy, who's seen it all before and sneered at all the people excited about various freebies. I was one of those people, but kept my mouth shut and soldiered through the small talk.

The film was ok. The panel afterwards was better, as the whole cast (and Joss) was there. Everyone, except Fran Kranz, was funny, but I don't remember a single line. Fran just seemed full of himself, and his line I remember: he said something about being grateful for these roles that allow him to show "his amazing acting range". Oof.

The Whedon fans were a bit overwhelming. One poor girl nearly had a nervous breakdown. But you know what - more power to them for standing up and having a public moment.

After the screening, we went to the food truck enclosure to get something to eat, and oh my God food trucks. There were these tiny sliders, they had 6 varieties, I think. One was with pulled pork. One was with a meatball in tomato sauce. One was with some sort of honeyed chicken butter thing... I'm drooling, I need to stop. But yes, food trucks.

When we got back home the acroyoga guy was there, and he juggled Gosia around for a bit while we gawked and giggled. After that surreal interlude, we got shuttled to Before Midnight by our host. We were supposed to meet him for drinks later, but that never really came together... but I'm getting ahead of ourselves. Our next queue line experience turned out to be an elderly couple from Austin who have been attending the festival from the very start. They have a flat in one of the highrisers downtown (which was surprising to me), and at some point the elderly lady mentioned that when she last checked Twitter there was a tornado warning. So yes, twitter-savvy grannies. And tornados.

Unfortunately (well... I guess - I'd like to see a tornado) that never materialized, but when we got out of the theatre, there was a rainstorm. Thankfully our host came to pick us up right off the street. When we got into the car, we realized that a) the boy is drunk, and b) there's someone else in the front passenger seat. A quiet, slightly giggly Indian-looking person who wasn't really introduced to us, so we had no idea what the deal was.

To make matters even more fun, it turned out that there's MORE couchsurfers coming - a French couple who had had a dismal layover in Chicago (they missed their flight) and were due to arrive in Austin any moment. And they kept calling our host, who wouldn't pick up the phone as to not be saddled with international charges. Eventually he managed to learn that they landed, and that the taxi driver dropped them off... somewhere in the vicinity of his apartment, but not quite there. So he delivered us to the flat with the strange guy, and promptly left. Awkward small talk followed, until the guy - who by now we realized was also tipsy - said: God... I'm too old for this. I just want to go home.

And then, as we stared in dumbfounded silence, he proceeded to tell us that our host has this boyfriend, but the boyfriend's going off to college, so he's a bit lost, and this guy is some sort of deal on the side, but he's just really tired and this is weird and he just wants to be home now, but he didn't want to be an asshole, and also he has no idea why he just told us all that.

I started giggling uncontrollably. I tried not to, but I was just not ready to be a supporting character in one of those sitcoms.

At that moment our host arrived with the French people, and the Indian guy quietly negotiated getting dropped off at his own place. The final image from that day is the French guy suddenly perking up when he realized the two boys are leaving and asking: "Oh, you're going out, guys?" To which Gosia, of all people, blurts out in a moment of well-intentioned panic: "It's a private party!"

Austin: The Kid, Day 1

Ok, obviously this is very long overdue, but I have a bottle of homemade Sicilian orange vodka and...

And I just spilled some on my keyboard. Like, seriously. Thankfully it's a crappy cheap one, and I'm moving anyway, so I might as well replace this piece of hardware too.

Oh, right. I just learned (yesterday) that I have to move. The flat is no longer available. And I love this fucking place. It's home. Sigh.

Anyway, I can process that later and elsewhere. Back to the roadtrip. Austin. The couchsurfing adventure begins.

We arrived quite late in the day, towards 6 p.m. I remember that our host's flat was located in the north part of the city, and that it was a very nice area. Quiet, with low, two-story brownstones. They weren't really brownstones in the big city sense of the word, but they were made of brick, and the brick was brown, so I'm not sure what I should call them. Our host was young (23-ish, I think) and accompanied by someone else whom I took to be his boyfriend. The supposed boyfriend was thoroughly American in the sense that you really don't see bodies like that outside the US and American TV shows. Later it turned out that he was actually another couchsurfer, from San Diego, and that he was in town to attend an acroyoga workshop. Acroyoga, in case you were wondering, is a combination of acrobatics and yoga (I know!) And from what I gathered, and then saw - as we were given a show - it mostly consists of juggling people using your legs.

The guy actually had a good sense of humor, and seemed like a really nice, warm person, slightly in the vein of Rudy from Generation Kill - talking about taking care of yourself, good energy, etc., but as we were leaving I asked if I could get his personal information so that we'd be able to find him on Facebook and ask for sightseeing tips for San Diego (since that was on our route), and he said yes, but then refused to accept my friend request, so that has retroactively tainted my image of him. I mean, come on, he could have just said he won't be in town, or will be busy, or whatever. It felt a bit like a "oh, so I guess all this time i thought we were getting along pretty well, we really weren't" type of deal. But that only came later.

We put down our stuff and headed out to the opening events of the Interactive section. I've no idea why, or whose idea it was (it might have been our host's), but we did. As it turned out, the showcase was winding down, and we didn't have the credentials to get into the Interactive parties, so we headed downtown and stood in a random line to get into some other, more generic party. Later we were told that badge-holders (i.e. me and Gosia) could cut in line, but we didn't want to leave our host, so we persevered. Which is how we met an insanely talkative Pakistani girl and her reserved, but very nice, IT friend. Who accompanied us for the rest of the evening, which was actually quite a fortuitous thing in that whenever we ran out of things to talk about we could note how talkative that girl was. (She really was intense).

An hour and a half later we were in. At some... party. Promoting something. We never learned what it was, but who cares, the booze was free. I mostly remember grabbing something to drink and making my way past throngs of people somewhere. That somewhere turned out to be the roof. All around us there were downtown Austin skyscrapers. There was some sort of screen showing a not exactly engrossing visualization, an absurd amount of strange people, and a profound sense of being somewhere not home. In a good way. It was the sort of sensory overload that carries you with it, wide open to anything that might happen next, and screams "memories under construction!"

Eventually we got drunk and tired enough to make our way out, and try to catch a cab home. Apparently catching a cab in Austin during SXSW is... I don't think it ever occurs in nature. Eventually we managed to call one, and got back home, only to have our host put us in his own car and drive us to late night burgers at some drive through. Totally shitfaced. This was the first (of several) instances in which I was made aware that Europeans approach drunk driving quite differently than Americans. Apparently in the US it's no biggie - I mean, how else are you gonna get those late night burgers, right? There's no public transport! And nobody walks! Thankfully, I was still inebriated, and carried by the "Advernture!" current, so I didn't mind a bit and just took it all in. Weirdly enough, I remember the burger very well. At our host's advice, I ordered something chicken-based. It was dunked in batter, and almost sickly sweet, either because of the bun, or the sticky sauce. Weird. Foreign. Delightfully so.