The SXSW festival taunts me. It’s in my own back yard, my Twitter feed is jammed with festival hashtags, email invites are flying around, and here I sit on the sidelines. Badgeless. Uncredentialed. Lanyard-deprived.

I am keeping with my “South By” tradition: meeting with a few people, dropping in on a party or two, then heading out of town for the bulk of the fest.

My problems:

I like doing funnels on Padre.

The festival coincides with Spring Break by design, so all those pesky UT students will get out of the way so the grownups can get good and SXSWasted. But it also means that the rest of my family is on vacation. My choices are to say a) “Go ahead on a vacation without me, I’ll just hang out here” or b) “If you guys wouldn’t mind hanging here and watching TV for a week while I go get SXSWasted, that would be great.” Sound good to you?

It’s a great stocking-stuffer.

Did you know that a “Platinum Pass” to get entrance to all the fests (film, interactive and music) costs between $920 and $1225, depending on when you register? An interactive badge alone is $400 at the cheapest. And I would argue they are actually good values. The opportunities offered by that badge boggle the mind. But the number is just too big for DadLabs, too big for me personally.

The world just can’t get enough of me.

I’m not crazy about the whole “panel picker” system of choosing festival content. I could try to get in the back door by scoring a panel slot, but this would require yet another campaign of self-promotion. Obviously, I’m not afraid the market the brand, but sheesh, really? Another set of emails and tweets and posts asking friends and fans to vote for me. I saw some gripes about this online, that this system results in a lot of panels based on social media because these guys are good at stuffing the ballot box. (Which is actually *more* appealing to me than the really techy-leaning panels of the past, but the list of panels still left me pretty cold.)

I’m completely jealous. I’ll own that. And I harbor fantasies that when the kids are a little older, I’ll be able to afford passes for my wife and me to run off and explore the fest together, a couple of progressive old geezers trying to capture the past and ask, as Ladybird once asked us, “What are the young people thinking?” For now, and probably for the next couple of years, I’ll remain badgeless in Austin.

Now this doesn’t mean I don’t want to have a drink with you if you’re in town, quite the opposite, but would you mind waiting until after I tuck the kids?