BronyCon, Day -??? to 0 · 6:31am Aug 8th, 2019

Day(s) -???:
Hi there! This is part of my blog series on the adventure that was the last BronyCon! If you're just joining us, you should probably start here:
Day 0
Part 1 of Day 1
Part 2 of Day 1
Part 1 of Day 2
Part 2 of Day 2
Part 1 of Day 3
Part 2 of Day 3
Day 4
Epilogue

What does "-???" mean, here? Well, it means that the process for taking a trip coast-to-coast clear across the continent doesn't just begin on the day of departure. How'd I get to that point?

Let's start at the start.

Funny thing: I decided I was going to BronyCon the day after I returned home from this year's Everfree Northwest. Now, there was of course a question I had to consider carefully about that particular timing: was this really the best time to make a decision like that? When you're still all pumped and hyped from just having been at a con? Admittedly, no, and I was aware of this. It made me wary, and I remember standing in my kitchen, cooking curry (I cook a lot of curry, it's my fave), weighing out the matter with myself while frying up vegetables and spices, and stirring them into a sauce, hot with peppers and bright yellow with turmeric.

The truth is, BronyCon wasn't particularly fortuitously timed for me. It actually fell in the second-to-last week of the summer term (I'm a Master of Computer Science student), which is... well, sort of spectacularly poor timing to be trying to take a vacation. That carried kind of a heavy weight against going.

But! This was not completely unmanageable, thanks to the fact that one of my two classes would already be finished up well before BronyCon (that class being only six weeks long). The other class had all the homework and course material posted ahead of time, with assignments due at a very reasonable one-per-week pace, so it hopefully wouldn't be too hard to push ahead and get the workload out of the way early and leave the block of time for BronyCon free.

Ultimately, though, those were just details. What my decision really hinged on, that night in my kitchen, over a pan full of spices, was a haunting thought that I couldn't shake:
If I don't go, I will always wonder what it could have been like, and I will regret it forever.

I'd never been to a BronyCon, and this was the last one. Ever.

That felt like kind of a Big Deal.

Everything else, every other voice - you were just at Everfree and you're not settled down from it enough yet, what about school, yadda yadda yadda doubt doubt doubt nag nag nag - none of those, not even all of them combined, could seem to speak as loud as that single thought.

I knew what I had to do.

I got my roommate onboard with this maybe-crazy "Hey, let's go to BronyCon!" thing that night (I'm a bad influence, lol), and started shopping for flights and booked the plane tickets the next day.

Now, I'm not saying I'm setting the responsible example here. Sometimes, in these things, there are definitely reasons to let the naysaying side prevail, however disappointing it may be. One of them almost happened to me. More on that in a bit.

All I'm saying here is that sometimes the stars align. Sometimes they don't quite, but you're privileged to be in a position to be able to make them align. So I did. And so the die was cast.

The first step on the road to BronyCon was clearing those pesky academic obstacles. The class that would potentially interfere was Data Structures and Algorithms, which we're using C++ for, which in turn means that, long story short, my price for going to BronyCon was doing a lot of C++ programming in a short time. Not exactly very arduous, though, since I like programming. I could tell you what specific assignments I had to forge ahead on in excruciating detail and how I solved the data structure and algorithm design problems they presented, and this would interest me, because Computer Science, but I feel like it wouldn't be particularly engaging for most of you, so I'll lay off on that. Suffice it to say, I was a good little Twilight Sparkle and got my homework done.

No, you probably want to hear about juicier stuff, and I've got some. In fact there was one bump in the road that could have derailed it all, rather dramatically.

One night, at about 12:45am, I started feeling a weird pain in the left side of my chest. Didn't think anything of it at first, because sometimes I sleep on my back at a funny angle and it causes an intermittent back muscle ache or a little bit of a nerve pinch and it felt kinda like one of those. But it kept persisting, long enough to start making me uneasy, and shortly after I realized my heart was beating faster than seemed normal and I was feeling warm and sweating a little, even though it wasn't hot in my room. My roommate was fortunately still awake, so I told him about this so he could keep an eye on me, and shortly after that I suddenly felt light-headed and had rubbery legs when I stood up from sitting in a chair.

Now, I'm only 37, not overweight, always had low cholesterol, never smoked in my life. The odds are very much on my side. But none of that matters; it's a constellation of symptoms you just don't screw around with. Ever. Because these things are stochastic, not necessarily deterministic, low odds doesn't mean zero odds, and stuff happens. So that's where we called it and I immediately had my roommate drive me to the ER, which is fortunately only like seven minutes away from where I live.

When you walk into an empty ER at 1am and tell the person at the desk that you feel like you're having chest pains and short of breath, boy howdy, things start happening quick.

I had an EKG going within a couple minutes or so. They listened to my heart and breathing sounds. I was given some chewable aspirin. An IV was stuck into my arm to draw vials of blood.

To my immense relief, tests soon started coming back the way you want them to.
EGK normal.
Chest and breathing sounds normal.
Blood oxygen good.
D-dimer blood test (useful at detecting clots, for ruling out the dreaded pulmonary embolism) negative.

As I was waiting, I started feeling better, I'm sure in large part because I was calming down. Adrenaline and fear can contribute no small part to symptoms like the ones I was having, in stressful situations - the phrase 'vicious cycle' is an apt one here. But they fade in time, and before long I felt pretty normal, aside from kind of silly that I was likely there for nothing. But better safe than sorry, or, uh... dead. Right?

Finally, after monitoring and some double-checking, they were satisfied that it was in fact nothing, or at least nothing immediately threatening and identifiable. There could have been more tests run, but they would have been increasingly expensive tests for increasingly outlandish possibilities, so I decided to forego them, given that all the tests most likely to indicate anything were negative and symptoms had subsided. Before too much longer, they let me go. All told, I was only there for a bit over a couple of hours, which I think is probably phenomenally quick for an ER visit. I'm very thankful luck was on my side. Looking back at it, I'm fairly sure it was in fact just a back/nerve pain along with unfortunately coincidental but unrelated other symptoms that, in combination, looked really bad. I've been fine ever since, no need to worry about me.

Still, it was a good scare at the time. And when did this happen, you ask? Well, that's the best part: just three days out from departing for the con (two, technically, since it was very early morning). Because of course something like this would happen just exactly then.
Of.
Course.

So that's the big bump that could have derailed this whole adventure just before it started.

But it didn't! I had to decide if I would stay home just to be on the safe side, or continue as planned, and believe me, I weighed out the risk/benefit very carefully. Ultimately, though, nothing good in life is without risk, and you can't let fear stop you from living. I made my decision, and I think it was the right one. The rest is history - a piece of history I don't regret being there for in person. Not for a second.

Day 0:
Wednesday, July 31, 2019.

All the pieces were in place. Airplane tickets bought. Hotel room booked. Four-day BronyCon badge purchased. Papers for all of the above printed out. Clothes, phone, laptop, and various support electronics packed. Pet guppies fed enough to be fine on their own for a few days. Rent check dropped off ahead of time for the next month because we wouldn't be there to drop it off on the 1st. You know, the usual putting of things in order for a trip.

Our flight was at 9:25pm, so my roommate and I left for Seatac Airport at about 7pm. The plan had been to take my roommate's car to the airport, and park it in long-term parking. Only, guess what? My roommate, it turns out, hadn't booked airport long-term parking. He booked parking at some (IMO) sketchier long-term budget lot near(ish), but not at, the airport. And then failed to take the extra time for the periodic shuttle from there to the actual airport into account.

Groan.

But we got there, and printed boarding passes at the self-serve kiosk things, and it seemed to be going okay. Going through security, I did the usual thing - put my laptop by itself in a separate bin, empty my pockets, take off my shoes and belt, the drill. I was a bit flustered while trying to do it as quick as I could, both because there's always people behind you and because we were cutting it pretty close.

Then the bin with my laptop carrying bag got flagged for secondary inspection, which confused me. The heck? I KNOW I didn't have anything in there.

Only I did have something in there. See, I lost a multi-tool a while back. It was in a backpack I used to use for school, during undergrad, when I had classes on a campus. At least, it was until I lost it. Just disappeared one day, as if into thin air. I'd flipped that backpack inside out and upside-down multiple times hoping to shake my multi-tool out of whatever pocket I was sure I'd left it in, but never found anything. At that point, I assumed it had fallen out and been lost for good.

Guess what I'd put into a pocket on the inside of my laptop bag, months or possibly years ago, for some reason I can't remember now?

Yeah.

The good news is, TSA found my long-lost multi-tool for me! The bad news is, TSA says you can't fly with a multi-tool because it has a knife in it. Fortunately, the TSA agent lady was pretty chill about it and it was no real trouble. People forget they have knives and whatnot all the time and stuff like that happens pretty routinely, and TSA has a few options for you when it does. You can choose to have them mail the offending item back to you if you pay the postage, or you can just turn it over to them and not get it back, which was quickest and easiest, and the multi-tool in question was pretty cheap, so I did that.

So I said goodbye to my multi-tool, collected my stuff, and that was security done with.

On to the airplane part of the flying process.

That part? That part almost didn't happen, by the barest hair. My roommate and I made our way to the gate, and found it totally empty. For a very confused moment, I wondered if we were by some very odd circumstance the only ones on the flight or something. Nope. Turns out everyone else had just already boarded. The door to the ramp was even shut and everything. Fortunately, we were just, just barely still in time. The person at the gate scanned our boarding passes, opened the ramp door back up for us, and we got on right before the plane closed up, pulled out, and started taxiing. I guess the upside is we didn't have to wait around very long on the ground. Still, wouldn't recommend cutting it so close!

The flight itself was pretty uneventful. They kept the cabin darkened, and I tried to sleep, but it never works out great on airplanes. As a result, I got to start Day 1 pretty tired right from the get-go.

But that's Day 1, and that's the next chapter of the BronyCon Adventure. So, until then... see you in the next blog post!

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