South by Southwest is an annual film/music/interactive festival that overtakes the beautiful city of Austin, Texas every March. I’ve attended for two years now because it’s an incredibly cost-effective vacation that provides two things I need on a regular basis:
- A smooth blend of relaxation and chaos
- Interesting and intelligent people to meet
It’s essentially a few thousand sponsored parties, shows, and events all designed to make you have a good time (and usually remember a brand or an artist). For the common man it means enjoying free food, open bars, live music, and creative people for twelve days.
When combined with CouchSurfing/staying with friends and airline miles it gets even more affordable. Just don’t buy an official badge. You don’t need it.
A few things I did at SXSW 2012:
- Ate heaps of burgers sourced from local, grass-fed beef
- Drank loads of Tito’s vodka, Lone Star, and Dos Equis
- Learned about truffles and truffle oil (and truffle fries)
- Watched at least 30 live music performances
- Saw a fight at a local grocery store
- Became jealous of Austin’s Car2Go service
- Watched the Austin Music Awards from the third-tier VIP section and saw Bruce Springsteen’s surprise performance
- Met dozens of incredible personalities from Austin, New York, Mexico City, and Toronto
- Consumed massive amounts of free BBQ and tacos
- Saw a concert in a church at midnight
- Personally returned a lost wallet
- Won a Sphero at a tech party
- Saw a mobile Occupy SXSW street movement and the police response
- Watched Jeff Who Lives at Home at an Alamo Draft House – my new favorite theater (you can silently order food/drink with little slips of paper during the film)
Home provides its own type of chaos. Perhaps the chaos and uncertainty craved by the traveler is really just a craving for simplicity. Unknown means no planning. It means your time is yours and yours alone. For me, unknown is easy. With too many variables, calculation becomes impossible. You can’t suffer from analysis paralysis if you can’t analyze the situation. I’ve said before that the present is all we have. Well, it turns out that while traveling the present is the only thing worth considering. Even for someone like me, a person who considers every option and almost subconsciously plans for every consequence, travel makes careful planning impossible. With an unwieldy trip such as this, the possible futures which cascade outward from every event are so multitudinous and varied that I can actually allow myself to not think about them. Mental peace.
