Once upon a time I was an Electronic Dance Music virgin. That's right: I have never gone to an EDM festival. Everything changed when the festive virus attacked a year ago...
It all started with a picture of a synthetic owl surrounded by lights and fire with someone running towards it. I asked my friend, who I am going to call Lena, what was that. "It's Kinetic Field," she said. She had that sparkle in her eyes. She told me Kinetic Field was the main stage for the paradise that is Electric Daisy Carnival. What's Electric Daisy Carnival? Well, children, it's heaven. It is one of the biggest EDM festivals in the galaxy, with its headline happening first in Las Vegas, Nevada. Every since its debut in the 1990's, headlines have happen in other places like Brazil, Orlando, and, most importantly, New York! I became addicted from the start. "What are we waiting for? Let's buy our tickets!" And then it happened. The shadow of death walked through her face. It compelled her soul to say "tickets are 250 dollars."
I understand. We are college students. As I said before, it is in our nature to be broke. My will collapse. But as I was about to succumb to the economic pressure, she said "it says here there are payment plans!" And we praised the lord with rejoice (insert emoji here). At that exact moment we knew we had to make a choice. Whether to be responsible people, save money, and spend the spring bored out of my minds or actually have fun while selling a hand and and a leg to Lucifer. And so we threw our morals out of the window and we bought our tickets.
The real work started after we got them. We had to brainwash people into coming with us. Not so bad. We just had to explain to them that things were going to get weird. That we were going to party until the late night. That it was going to take us two hours to go back home. That our muscles were going to decay a bit. That we needed to do meal plans. That our parents were not going to see us for about three days. But then again, you only live once. Thankfully, we got friends to come with us.
The day of the festival we woke up at 5:00AM. That's right, people. This is a festival we are talking about. This is the only thing we really have to wake up early for. Besides, if we were had shown up late, we would have missed out on the fun. When we miss out of the fun, we cry. When we cry, it is not pretty. We have priorities. Nevertheless, after surviving the sea of people that is Port Authority, we got to our bus and we drove to the promise land.
Eventually, we got to Metlife Stadium and we just heard the anthems made for my generation blasting through the winds; going faster than the speed of light. Also, did I mention that we went to the festival with sweatshirts? Yes, it was a cold morning, so we wore them. Little did we know that the sun came to literally roast us. To make things even worse we had to wait in line for about five hours. The bright side? I was wearing my Greek Letters so I made lots of friends in Greek Life. It was worth it, because as soon as those doors open, we were the first in line. So we just ran where like lights couldn't chase us. Danced like love could save us. We didn't let that moment go.
I became part of a new sub-culture. I met a side of me I didn't know. And even though some got carried away with substances (let's call them that), we had a wonderful time. After spending two days dancing like there was no tomorrow in that universe, we still didn't want to leave. We didn't want to face reality back in the toxic non-fictional world. Although, the friends and memories we made were enough of a good souvenir for us. The music brought us closer.
