SxSE during SxSW

Update: March 2006

I just noticed that this post has been getting a lot of traffic lately from people looking for the SxSE festival in Myrtle Beach, SC. Somehow it has bubbled to the top of Google’s index on the topic even though it was from last year and was about my inability to make it to the SxSW Interactive festival. Weird. To anybody I might have confused, I’m sorry. To exclude search results that are talking about SxSW, try searching for “sxse myrtle beach“. Hope that helps!

Continuing on with the old post…

I’ve known that it was coming. How could I not with all the buzz about it for the last few months? The truth is that I would love to be at South by Southwest (SXSW). In the past week alone the following people have posted about packing up and going down to Austin:

But like Jeff Croft, I won’t be there. There’s just too much up in the air right now. Financially, Amy and I are saving up for a move to a location we don’t even know yet. She’s in that weird holding pattern between graduation and hearing from PhD programs. We’re pretty confident that she will get accepted at the University of South Carolina in Columbie for the Fall, but we can’t start making plans till we get that letter/email. Which means we don’t know if we’re even going that direction, which means that I can’t start looking for employment, which means we can’t set any kind of budget, which means no major purchases for a little while, which means plane tickets to Texas.

There’s times when we (at least I) don’t think about the impact of all this, and just go about life as normal. But there are other times when you can cut the tension with a knife. One of the biggest issues is that our extension for living in on-campus married housing here at UF expires on April 18th. It would be nice if we could stay there in the same apartment until we’re leaving Florida, but if we can’t get another extension, the reality is that we’ll be putting our stuff in storage and finding a sublease – or moving home – or something.

Regardless of all the circumstances and uncertainty though, I stand behind my wife. As long as we’ve been together, it’s been her goal to get a PhD in Chemical Engineering and its my goal to encourage her to pursue that dream, but there’s not much I can do to encourage when we’re playing the waiting game. In the mean time, I’ll be praying for an acceptance letter from South Carolina – soon!

4 comments on “SxSE during SxSW

JD says:

Wow! Your wife is really lucky! I am planning to marry sometime next year and I hope I will also be good husband and help my wife achieve her dreams!

And yes, all the best to Amy for her PhD admission! 🙂

I’m in the same boat as you Jason, my girlfriend has submitted applications for a Masters program at 4 different schools around the country (one in beautiful Vancouver I’m crossing my fingers for). Until then, we’re just saying that in the summer we’ll be gone…we just don’t know where yet.

Oh and wish I could’ve gone to SXSW too, maybe next year.

<shiver>Vanouver?</shiver> Amy and I drew a horizontal line across the middle of the US map and decided not to apply above the line. We’re both way to Floridian – niether of us have ever actually seen snow. She applied to Univ. of North Carolina, Univ. of South Carolina, Rice University, and Georgia Tech. I’m hopin I’ll be able to go next year too once we’re all settled in…so, perhaps I’ll meet you there.

Vancouver is actually quite warm, in the summer. I’ve only been there a few times, once during a very raining January and once during a very warm July. The bay is actually warm enough in the summer to swim in (no, not with a wetsuit or anything).

My girlfriend and I sound like the exact opposite, the four schools of choice are: Univ. of British Columbia, Chicago Art Institue, Bard (upstate NY) and Columbia (NYC). Looks like we aren’t going south of the same horizontal line you and Amy have drawn 😉

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