Momentary Panic

My brother is a prolific YouTuber. He went out to San Francisco for the YouTube live event. Just 3 days, he took Friday off work and the event was on Saturday and we went to pick him up in Des Moines today.

G had to get a hardtop suitcase to carry a desktop computer to the trade show in Dubai, so we stopped at the Samsonite outlet in Williamsburg. There was a buy one get one half off, so we got a new big suitcase for us to replace the falling apart one I brought to Colombia. I also got a new laptop bag, a padded silver one that I'm SO wanting to take out to a cafe somewhere so I can feel terribly romantic and professional. Maybe tomorrow. :D

Anyway, G also needs a black suit jacket, and we were trying to figure out if we should just make T wait longer and stop at one of the nice stores at the outlet mall or continue on and go to the mall in Des Moines. We opted for the latter since we were pretty behind schedule and didn't want to make T wait too too long.

I called my cousin who lives in DM (and only about 5 minutes from the airport) to see if she might be able to pick him up so he could wait at her place instead of in the airport. She was out but said if she went home before we got there she would swing by and see if she could see him waiting outside.

T's flight was supposed to land at 2:15. I tried calling him at about 2:20. Straight to voicemail. Same deal several times after that. It's just a temp, pay as you go phone he only uses for traveling. We figured he probably wasn't freaking out that no one was there quite yet and would remember to turn on his phone as soon as he wondered where mom was. Called my mom to let her know what was going on in case he called her (she was originally going to pick him up).

My cousin drove by the airport around 3:30 and didn't see him, and he still wasn't answering his phone. I called the airline to see if his flight had landed and it had. G and I got there a little after 4 I think and T was nowhere to be seen. Des Moines is a tiny airport, you can walk the whole area that you're allowed to walk (baggage claim, ticketing and foodcourt/gift shop) without a ticket in about 5 minutes.

This is where the panic sets in. My mom had called him once while he was in SF, but he didn't answer. I knew he'd made it to SF because he'd sent out a Twitter saying so but hadn't heard anything after that. The airline people can only tell me that he hadn't changed his reservation but his original flight arrived on time. I don't know if they actually KNOW if he boarded and just can't tell me or if they don't even know. There didn't appear to be any operators working the white phone paging system because it just rang and rang and rang. I started crying. My mom called me back to say that she'd talked to his hotel and he had indeed checked in on Friday and checked out that morning, and she was trying to look up his flight number and call the airline to see if she could track him down another way.

G points out that there is another flight coming from Dallas (T's connecting city) at 4:30, which by now is only minutes away. I continue to freak out. T finally, finally calls, he is indeed on the 4:30 flight and it has just touched down. His flight from San Fran was delayed due to weather in Dallas or something, and when he got to Dallas his phone didn't work. He didn't check any luggage, so when he gets off the plane we can go straight to the car.

On the way to the car, he tells us that he had had a headache, and ended up watching the event on his laptop from his hotel room. He'd left his sunglasses at home, so apparently walking around all day without them gave him a headache. (He does have really sensitive eyes.)

It turns out he couldn't find the place it was being held, even though his hotel was supposed to be a 7 minute walk away from it. Apparently the map was misleading. By the time he figured out he was lost and went back to his hotel and got help with the directions, and made it back to the event, THEY WOULD NOT LET HIM IN. Even though he had an e-ticket. Which was apparently fairly meaningless, because it was first come, first serve, and he was late enough that they said they were at capacity. I thought the point of tickets was to RESERVE YOUR SPACE at an event?!

So now I'm pissed. Here's a guy, YouTube is a MAJOR part of his life, he has over 400 videos and watches plenty more than that. He can tell us all about these people by their screen names, many of which are a combination of numbers and letters like xx23pandaxxx. It's his community. I don't know how many people actually watch his stuff or if it's a one-way connection, but he took a whole day off work, spent money on a ticket and a hotel, and made at least two videos that clearly demonstrated how excited he was to be going. One was him simply dancing around in pure joy, and the other an improvised rap. His stuff is nowhere as polished and professional as his idols, but you have to give him the devotion and passion points. And he gets to this party/concert event that is being billed as a community building event/celebration, and ends up watching the thing on his laptop in his hotel room. It must have felt like a betrayal on some level I'm sure. Thank goodness the hotel at least had internet. It would have sucked even more to not get to see it at all.

Here's the thing, my brother has a mild learning disability. In school they called it ADD, I think some later time they called it a form of asbergers. It's not a big deal and he's fine living on his own, but it's little things like my mom did want to make sure he had family nearby, so T lives in his own apartment in the basement, he's probably never going to drive a car, and he sometimes seems to ignore people when they talk to him. I think it's also why he wears sunglasses a lot, because normal life/light is too overwhelming for him sometimes.

But some people aren't going to know all that. Some people are just going to think he's weird, or stupid or stoned. And they're going to be mean and make fun of him. I've seen it in some of the comments people leave on his videos. And the big sister protective vibe kicks in big time. But all I can do is give those comments a thumbs down, and that's probably more than I can do in most of real life. I've gotten a lot better at not taking it personally and making it my responsibility to protect him all the time, but the whole thing still breaks my heart sometimes. He's such a good sweet person, generally happy and mild mannered and creative. And the YouTube thing has given him a chance to reach out and connect. I just hope he doesn't get too discouraged by stuff like this.

Maybe I'm the one more bummed out than him, he's already got a bunch of plans to tell the organizers how they could do a better job next time, and he's already got some ideas about how he can be proactive from his side (finding out how to get to the venue is the night before the event, trying to meet up with some people he can go with from the same hotel, etc.)

Anyway, he's home safe, and learned a bunch of things.

And now that's off my chest I can remember that I wanted to mention this morning I stopped by the cafe because Anais had run out of CD's at the concert and was supposed to bring one by this morning, but it turned out she'd really run out, so she said she could mail me one. I brought my box of jewelry that I'd made for the Farmer's Market and let both of them pick something out. Rachel immediately grabbed the green chunky bracelet that was on top, and looked through a couple other things but said, "well I think I might have already found it", and I said "I had a feeling you might like that one" and she said "who me, green?" hehe. At that particular moment, she was wearing green glasses, a green hat and had long green fingerless gloves. Then Anais said she had to choose carefully because she tends to just wear one jewelry item at a time until she loses or breaks it, and picked out the big wooden etched medallion on a sheer green ribbon necklace. It matched really well with what she was wearing. She asked if I was saving it for anyone special and I said I would be happy to for her to have it. The fangirl in me really wanted to take a picture of them wearing the stuff, but I didn't want to be too, well, obviously fangirly. heh. Would much rather be a friend.

Then they had to go, for a quick dash to The At Home Store for yarn, and then back to Chicago for one more show of their mini tour. (We were a quarter of it.) Sharon was out in the lobby playing her guitar so I sat down and talked to her for a bit. She asked me what I had and I showed her the box of stuff. She particularly liked one set of earrings and said she'd buy them from me later, but I told her she could have them as an early Christmas present, because I was probably going to give her something and it was probably going to be from that box so she might as well have one she liked. I told her about my experience FEELING the guitar, and she agreed that it's pretty easy when you get into the business side of it to forget about why you started at all. And then G called cuz he was ready to go to Des Moines. So a good little quick plug-in with my music peeps for the morning, glad I made it over while they were all still there.