You can exchange SBD for Steem in a couple of minutes on the internal steemit market. Just click on the link next to "SBD" in your wallet, then the drop down opens, choose "market". There you can buy some Steem for SBD. Usually it takes only a few minutes to close the trade. That's exactly how I did it a couple of days ago, cause I didn't have any liquid Steem either :-)

We're going to get this account running NO MATTER WHAT!!! Haha