So Much For San Diego
San Diego Comic-Con only finished yesterday – I only made it home about nine hours ago – but it already seems a world away; I don’t know if that’s the power of a good night’s sleep (My first in a week! My first more than five hours sleep in more than a week, too), or my mind trying to repair psychic damage by hiding everything again or whatever, but it’s true. I can’t quite comprehend that, this time yesterday, I was planning out the Smallville coverage I had to do, or how I’d manage to see everyone I wanted to still try to catch up to see in the less-than-an-hour-before-the-flight I’d have available to me, or or or.
Con felt, if anything, busier this year, more packed with a million somethings that I wanted to do, either for work or for me – work won in almost every single instance, when they clashed, and I’m sorry for everyone I didn’t get to see, or see enough of (Sorry, Bonnie!) – and more exhausting. Staying up til 5am to file stories sounds like a journalist cliche, but actually doing it, writing in the hotel lobby because your roommate is asleep and you don’t want to wake him up, turned out to be depressingly true. It was the con of internet journalism frustration, again, like last year’s, but the frustration was different: last year’s was the “I can’t get in/can’t talk to anyone” con, and this one was “Why does our traffic suck?” I had multiple conversations with multiple people about the apparent evils of Twitter and it breaking the news faster than anyone could type up the story, and already I know that next year will be the year where everything will be liveblogged so that everyone can try and be first again. Such is the self-perpetuating exhaustion of the internet, I guess.
But there was another con, happening if not at the same time, then in the mornings and nights and moments where there was a little space to sneak it in; the one where I got to see friends again, and meet people I’ve known through email for the first time (Hello, Alasdair, and Ryan, and Jim, and Jonah, and AnnaMaria, and many others) or others who shared an Eisners and a snarky sense of humor (Hello, Snow), or even just get to spend time with folks who’re important to me. I said, as we rushed to make it to the airport in time for the flight yesterday, that I kind of wished that we had another evening in town, to just have one last huzzah of a meal or something, to relax together and talk and not worry about what stories we had to write up immediately afterwards. But, really, I wanted to go home.
I have a million funny, dumb, sad, frustrating con stories to tell, but I’m too tired to do any of them right now; I’m also too tired, mentally, to say whether it was a good or bad con, if that makes sense? It was a con. In more ways than one.
Normal service resumes on this here blog today. Hello again.
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