Anime Central 2012, Day Zero: How Did I Get Here?

Notice to my co-workers: I'm likely to be obnoxiously happy April 30.

On that Monday morning, I will have just returned from Anime Central 2012 (ACen), the first convention of my life and the opening stop on my road to the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX).

To understand exactly what that means, we need to hop in the wayback machine and travel to summer 2009, a particularly hot and boring season I spent with my dad in Peotone working at Jewel, hanging out with community college friends and waiting to return to Champaign-Urbana and finish my creative writing degree (and my pursuit of a certain sophomore co-ed I awkwardly proclaimed my love to that spring).

I quickly fell into the weirdest rhythm of my life: wake up at 3 p.m., go to work from 4 to midnight, hang out or talk online until 3, play video games until 7 and repeat. I had fun - very few things beat wasting time with old friends and chatting up a new flame - but soon I was the definition of stir-crazy.

I resumed an old hobby, creating bizarre road trips I never actually take, but determined I would finally break the streak but taking what savings I had left, borrowing my way through my senior year and going to Seattle to congregate with gamers for three days. I spent untold hours creating spreadsheets (another fetish), gleaning any information I could from the PAX forums and plotting my trip on Google Maps and Orbitz.

Ultimately I decided not to travel across the country during one of the worst financial times of my life (I ran out of money the next February anyway). The desire to go to PAX. however, refused to die over the three intervening years. (Mitch Krpata's series on PAX 2010 had a lot to do with this.)

This spring, with my finances in the best shape since I graduated, I arrived at a new plan: hit local conventions, learn what I can, make sure it's for me and craft the ultimate PAX plan to execute when I'm out of debt. Step One: travel to Chicago for ACen.

The more research I did for ACen, though, the more I started to anticipate it for its own sake as opposed to PAX practice. Even as a lapsed anime fan, I can't wait to kick off the festivities with an Assassin's Creed themed wedding Friday - an actual wedding! - followed by a murder mystery, a Halo panel and a screening of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. That's just Friday.

I may look back, after I've gone to PAX East 2014 and beyond, and see ACen as just a means to an end. It now seems equally likely, though, that I'll remember it as a fantastic three days immersed in geek culture with some of those old community college friends and that (now nearly-graduated) coed.

Maybe I'll just start smiling now.