Day Two: Torture Chairs
I got a completely late start this morning. I had intended to wake up at 7am, so I could take Timmy down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. I found it funny that we’d yet to enjoy breakfast over in the restaurant downstairs once since we’ve been here, and here we are, almost half the convention is over. Todd woke up first before 10am, and then as I was realizing exactly how much time we had left before the voucher booth closed at 1pm, I snapped awake and started kicking people left and right to wake up.
This year, as a special to those of us who pre-registered for AX as well as booked a room at the Hilton (though I’m not sure if the Marriott or the Coast offered this as well), they issued four vouchers, one for every name I put on the list. Each of these vouchers is good for either the Music Video Contest or the Masquerade. You can exchange the voucher for either one, and you can only do the exchange at the vouch booth in the Marriott, which is just across the little convention street from the Hilton. The hours of operation were 10am to 1pm. Now here’s the big kicker. You would think that with four guys in the room, it would not take us much in the way of getting ready with two or three hours to get over to the Marriott. However, these lazy bastards left us with about fifteen minutes to spare, and when we got to the line, they capped it off! I was about ready to rip someone some new orifices for being paranoid about the voucher line, as I kept explaining to the guy in front of me that the AMV contest was tonight, and there was no other time to exchange the tickets.
Luckily, using logic and my awesome powers of persuasion, we were able to slip in and get our tickets. So, the only real errand that needed to be run was accomplished and we ended up with sequential tickets. One would think that everything was fine, but wait, there’s more. Dave, Todd, and I went to the Kajiura Yuki concert in the same main events hall that we were going to see the AMV contest, and I noticed that the sequential numbers we were given have a slight flaw. Out of the four numbers, two of them were aisle seats. In other words, two of the seats were on the left side of the row, while the next two seats were on the opposite side of the row, one row back. We would not be able to all sit together, but later on in the day, we would figure something out.
The Kajiura concert was interrupted for me, though I did get to hear the one song I’d been dying to hear since I’d heard it online under a month ago. A friend of mine from Fanime had been trying to get a hold of me since before we arrived at the Hilton yesterday, but due to the amount of noise and frustration, I didn’t hear the voicemail until the first day of the convention. Brian Doan, who was the master of ceremonies for the Fanime’s Der Cosplay, ended up being invited to act as the MC for AX’s Masquerade, and since we’d worked together on staff back in 2001, we’d kind of missed one another. Being on staff with someone of a like mind tends to bond people together, so while I came away from Fanime with sourness, I didn’t forget the people who made it fun through all the bullshit. Brian was one of those people. Anyway, he called me in the middle of the concert, and I invited him up to the third floor of the Anaheim convention center to meet me and chat. We ended up chatting all the way until the AMV contest at 8pm. It was good to see him again, and I hope we keep up contact a little better than in the past.
Thomas informed us prior to the seating period, that he had an extra ticket for the AMV contest, since Alma decided not to go. This meant Timmy could go, but then we had another pair of tickets that were separated from each other. Jody’s eyesight was pretty poor since he had lost his glasses a while before AX started, so we sat Jody and Timmy together in seats that were in the 300s, while the other four of us sat in the 2000s. The AMV contest was long and the seats they used for the audience were torture on my back and rear end. I made it through three and a half categories before I just said enough is enough and went back to the room, downing a couple of Aleve’s and ordering room service. As an aside, by this point, I had spent over three hundred on room service alone.
