New Blog

Heyo. You've found my defunct blog. If you're looking for my new blog The Lemon Child, you can follow this link.

Update

So, as I had feared, the workload of "doing a thing" everyday and writing about it has begun to take its toll. I started this week strong at the Mall of America, but failed to take into account how long reading the entire newspaper would take. Thus, I'm behind on all posts, exhausted, and I haven't even touched todays thing yet.

I still really enjoy the idea of the site, and love the opportunity to write and draw, but the whole process needs a bit of an overhaul.

Hence: I'm going to relax for the remainder of the week and figure out a new, more feasible schedule. I want to continue to do things and post interesting and humorous perspectives, but I'm afraid the current schedule will result in sub-par posts.

So I'm going to enjoy the next few days, come up with a game plan, and come at with with fresh eyes on Monday.

Sorry to all ten of my disappointed readers.

O:DAT – Week of January 9th through January 15th

Monday – Walk around the Mall of America for three hours

Tuesday – Read every word in the newspaper

Wednesday – Accomplish three life-improving tasks

Thursday – Put together a one year time-capsule

Friday – Draw on a shirt

Brevity & Levity

Have the best day of work ever


This isn’t a particularly interesting post. I’m quickly learning that some things, however valuable they may be, aren’t worth writing about.


I work in the mornings as a recess monitor at a middle school and in the afternoons as a one-on-one in an after-school program. This being the first week back from a two-week holiday break, the children have been a bit insane.

In both jobs my primary goal was to stay calm, enforce the rules, and have fun.

Notable occurrences:

-       I calmly let a group of sixth-graders know that teasing a small autistic girl was not appropriate behavior.

-       I stood in front of the door and made a screaming mob of eighth-graders wait an extra five minutes before they could go inside.

-       I played 4 games of chess, 3 games of kings corner, and 17 matches of foosball.

And that was pretty much it. The day was calm and uneventful; I focused on positive thinking, and drove home with a smile on my face. No real story here, but if I went into work with this mentality every day than I think I would lead a happier life.

Vicious Viscous

Build a marshmallow mask

Marshmallow mask was an idea that looked fun on paper, but proved difficult in reality. First off, is it a mask that looks like a marshmallow or a mask made of marshmallows?

Here was my final result:

See, I drew a marshmallow shape on a piece of paper, the I cut it out and… No, I’m kidding. That would have been lame.

I picked up the following supplies:

1 needle

1 spool of thread

1,500 toothpicks

1 bag of small fruity multi-colored marshmallows

4 bags of medium marshmallows

Initially I tried stringing together the mallows like you do at Christmas with cranberries and popcorn. My plan was to then coil them all up into a mask-like shape and reinforce with toothpicks. This proved to be the slowest, stickiest task imaginable.

I abandoned the thread and started using a tremendous quantity of toothpicks. It then became apparent that I would need more marshmallows, so I ran back to the store and purchased three more bags.

Finally, I sharpied on a face and quickly attached the separate hair and face sections. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

This is what the resulting mess looked like:

Not wanting to be wasteful I conducted the following experiment:

What happens when you microwave 280 marshmallows for 10 minutes?

Results:

Next: Have the best day of work ever.

Absurdity Ad Nauseam

Discover an Absurd Phenomenon

So it turns out that the phrase “Discover an Absurd Phenomenon” is incredibly vague and open to wide interpretation. This is what happens when the week’s planning process consists of me coming up with random word combinations and making projects out of them, (more on this in the marshmallow mask post).

In the loosest definition, this Do a Thing required me to learn of a senseless or illogical occurrence. Initially I had envisioned this as unlocking some instance of pop-culture correlation, like The Nostalgia Critic did for Big Lipped Alligators. But it could also mean me finding out about something strange I was previously unaware of, or observing a bizarre moment out in the world. So I’ve put together four potential completions, just to cover all my bases.

1)    Discover a strange pop-culture correlation:

All Disney-animated annoying comic-relief characters are dudes.

I know that critiquing Disney movies on a basis of gender roles is a bit played out, but I’ve never seen anybody else cover this. It seems like, in at least one of the fifty or so films they’ve made there would be one funny female sidekick.

Little Mermaid: Two dudes, three if you count the seagull. Beauty and the Beast: Clock-dude and Candle-dude. Aladdin has a whopping five dude sidekicks, (Carpet is clearly one of the guys). Even characters that act like girls, talk like girls, and have girl names turn out to be dudes, (I’m looking at you, Flower from Bambi).

I’m sure I’m missing one somewhere. I haven’t seen every Disney movie, and there are several I barely remember. But even if there’s an obscure funny female sidekick in there somewhere, the tremendous unbalance of it seems like an injustice.

2)    Discover a bizarre moment in my everyday life:

I saw two crows chase a squirrel into the street where it got hit by a car.

That’s kind of it.

3)    Discover a strange cultural movement that I was previously unaware of:

Vore (Vorarephelia)

While randomly surfing Youtubes I stumbled upon a video entitled Voir Clips. It is a bunch of short scenes involving people being eaten my monsters and frogs. Underneath it I found the following unsettling comment:

According to Wikipedia, Vore is “a sexual fetish and paraphilia where arousal occurs from the idea of being eaten or by the process of eating. The fantasy may involve the victim being swallowed alive, and may or may not include digestion.”

Here was my reaction:

But I don’t want to judge other people and their interests, so I will leave it at that. Wikipedia also tells me that if I want to learn more, (which I don’t), I could check out the book Le sexe bizarre: Pratiques érotiques d'aujourd'hui. Which is kind of an awesome name for a book.

4)    Watch the film Phenomenon:

It was really bad.

Haiku Review:

Man with brain tumor

moves pen with mind and then dies.

Schmaltzy as all hell.

Next: Build a marshmallow mask.

A Rimy Run

Run five miles

As far as I can tell, “do a thing”s end up falling under one of three categories:

1) Goofy art project

2) Thought problem

3) Life betterment

That last category ends up being the most personally satisfying, and the most difficult.

I’m no stranger to running. I “played” cross-country from second grade through twelve. I’ve run at least fifty 5ks, and a handful of half marathons. At my very best I was able to clock a mile at 4:24.

The problem, however, is that all of these impressive running events occurred a significantly long time ago. Seven years, to be precise. While a sense of endurance is never lost, things like cardio strength, muscle mass, and general fitness dissipate rather quickly when neglected. So when I decided on Sunday I should run five miles, it was based on a fuzzy recollection of fun warm-up runs and not on the reality of my current physique. Also, I somehow forgot that it is freaking January. That’s how I ended up running a very painful 5.3 miles this morning in -7° temperatures around a frozen lake.

This is the route I took:

Blue Dot: My House

1) Lake Calhoun

2) Awesome Cemetery

3) Businessy District

4) Obscenely Nice Neighborhood

5) Nice Neighborhood

6) My Neighborhood

Here is what I probably looked like while I was running:

I bet you want a close up:

(Not pictured: It was so cold my eyes kept tearing up and little ice crystals formed on my eyelashes and would occasionally flake off and land of my chest.)

While exhausting, and significantly longer than I should have committed to, it was a wonderful run. There’s something magical about a jog that seems to wipe away all worries and clear the mind. I’ll have to do this more often.

As a bit of an aside, Lake Calhoun is a wonderful running destination in the city of Minneapolis. Typically it is surrounded by a wide variety of bikers, skaters, joggers, and walkers. However, in the dead of winter it becomes a bit empty. In my run around the lake I encountered only three living things. Here are drawings of each:

 Hipster in disguise I bet.

Either a large man in one coat or a very small man in ten.

Dog in jacket. I’m pretty sure it was judging me.

Next: Discover a new absurd phenomenon.