Maybe I Wasn't as Motivated as I Thought

So it's been a little while. Six years, one month, and nine days, to be precise.

My last post was that long ago, and is an ironic exultation of newfound motivation to make something of this blog. I had aspirations of turning this into some sort of successful comedy blog. My expectations and priorities have shifted significantly over the past six years.

I have no grand plans for making a living on comedy blogging. I may still post some humorous original content here, but I wouldn't be counting on it any time in the near future. If anyone is even reading this, you may wonder why I'm even bothering to write and publish this. I'm asking myself the same question.

I have a million different projects I've started and left half-finished (more like 1% finished, if I'm being honest). Over the last six years since I've abandoned this blog I have attempted to write a novel, imagined multiple small business I never started, tried to make a video game multiple times, tried to sell beef jerky, make a living colorizing photos, and countless other imaginings that never got off the launching pad.

I've had some successes as well. If you're reading this, you probably know me personally. I met an amazing woman who is now my wife and mother of my unborn son. We bought a house. She started a small business and is kicking ass at it. I've continued to advance my career in digital marketing/ad tech. Overall I've been doing far better than I expected to, in spite of all of my creative failures. Those failures I still firmly believe are not due to a lack of creativity or passion. Six years ago I may have blamed the ever-elusive motivation. However, some more inspiring people than myself have led me to believe that motivation will never be enough to get you to where you want to be. Motivation works as long as it's fun. In order to push through the writer's block, the self-doubt, and the many other roadblocks and curve balls life throws your way, that takes discipline. 

But I'm not here to play motivational speaker, even if I'm only speaking to myself. The real reason I'm writing this is that I'm getting ready to take an awesome trip to Europe with my wife and I may decide to write about it. I've taken two previous trips to Europe: one to Germany, and another to Denmark. I will be returning to both, as well as spending one day in Holland. While my previous trips have been memorable, I really wish I had documented them better. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you know what else is?

A thousand words.

So I'm hoping I'll get a chance to write about some of my experiences, especially those that are not captured on film. The older I get the more I forget. I want to remember this, and I want to share it with anyone who is interested. I'm working on my own website where I will have a multitude of various blogs. It isn't done yet, though, and I won't get it to a place where it will be ready before I leave. Therefore, I am re-purposing this blog—at least temporarily—to document our European trip.

We'll see if I actually post anything. If not, maybe I'll put something here in six more years.

Motivated! Motivated! Hell Yeah, I'm Motivated!

Motivation is a fickle mistress. You may think you have her figured out, that finally you have seduced her to complacently obey you, only to find yourself cuckolded yet again. Her one redeeming quality is that is always willing to return if you are willing to court her properly again.

If my metaphor is confusing you, I'm saying staying motivated is a bitch. I was doing a decent job of updating this blog, but the moment I made a post I wasn't happy with, I abandoned it. You have to admit, the New Years post was pretty bad. I was reaching for funny, and came back with randomness. And moles. I still don't understand the moles. I knew it was subpar, I wrote the whole thing in less than half an hour. But the pictures. Oh, the pictures! I had discovered the wonder of working with Adobe Illustrator. Vector graphics, how I have missed thee! I used to do a lot of cheesy flash cartoons way back in the day. This was my only experience with vector graphics, but I found them a dream to work with. No pixels? Sign me up! When I started this blog, I shamelessly ripped off the MS Paint artwork idea from the brilliant Allie at Hyperbole and a Half. I soon realized that it was not my forté. I couldn't decide if I wanted to go simple and messy, or super detailed. When I tried to go sloppy and messy, my images didn't emote the way her's could. When I went to detailed, it just looked like I didn't know how to draw smooth lines properly. I played around with Fireworks once, another old program I have a history with. Did not like. And then Adobe Illustrator came into my life. At first I was reticent. I had to learn it from scratch. It wasn't quite the same as flash. Some things that should be simple, such as filling lines, seemed to elude me. But I stuck with it, and once I began to learn to achieve what I wanted, I fell in love. I had finally found a program that allowed me to portray my images in a way that suited me. Unfortunately, I was so set on one or two images I had set in my mind for the New Years post, I took a full month making them. Then I published it, despite being very unhappy with the actual content. After receiving little interest in the post from the few people who were kind enough to read it, I got down on myself. I cringed away from any idea, convinced it would be crap. And maybe they all will be, but I'm done just letting this project collect dust like so many others.

Granted, I am still struggling to find an artistic style that can define this blog. My writing is hit or miss (or maybe just miss). I may not always be able to post at least once a month. But dammit, I'm going to keep making stuff. One day, maybe, I'll stumble upon a great idea. Maybe the blog can come together and find its identity. Maybe it'll stay hidden as a testament to my shame. Regardless, I'm not going to let myself get discouraged. So stay tuned, more posts to come.

Happy (Late) New Year!

I wrote this post a month ago. Due to a very hectic month at work, as well as learning to use Adobe Illustrator, the drawings were not completed until tonight. I rushed some of them in order to make this even slightly relevant. So do me a favor and just pretend this was posted a month earlier.

Happy New Year, everyone! As everyone eases back into the soul-sucking grind of five day work weeks, I'm sure most everyone is also feeling the stifling oppression of overly optimistic New Year resolutions, and trying to come to terms with the fact that we will not be achieving half of our idealistic goals for 2011. That's a lot to swallow barely a week into the new year, but such is life.

Really? You're going to just nod your head and agree with that kind of pessimism? Have a little faith in yourself! We're not even a week into the new year, and you're already considering reneging on your resolutions? The cigarettes aren't going to hop out of your mouth and refuse to be smoked. That dream job isn't going to just land in your lap! I'm sure that new girlfriend will find you, as soon as she realizes how attractive taking bong hits off a table made of pizza boxes really is! And I'm sure you can melt that fat away through sheer desire without actually having to move your tubby ass off the couch. In an effort to help all of you through what I am sure is an eye-gougingly difficult struggle to make minor life adjustments, I will reveal to you to some normally privy information. I will reveal to you my resolution list. "But how is your resolution list going to help me?" you may ask. Well, after you see the difficulty of what I plan to unleash upon the world this year, your own resolutions will seem like easily surmountable trifles. So, without further ado, I present to you my resolutions for 2011.

1) Make molehills out of mountains
Everyone in their life has made mountains out of molehills. It is a common expression used to indicate that someone is being overly concerned with a minor issue, or blowing something out of proportion. I plan to make molehills out of mountains. I do not mean in a figurative sense. I am literally going to turn every mountain on earth into a giant molehill. Finally, all the world’s homeless moles will have a safe place to reside and raise their families in peace.

Happy Moles, floating above the non-existent floor of their very bland mountain home.

2) Raise public awareness of purple carrots.
This is a real thing. Carrots are not just orange and, in fact, come in a variety of colors. Thanks to the Dutch, orange carrots have had a hegemonic monopoly on public awareness. I purport that it is time to end the chromatic monotony. I want purple carrots in my salad. I want to dip white carrots in ranch. Who are the 18th century Dutch to decide everyone should eat only orange carrots? This totalitarian grip on our diet that orange carrots possess must end!

3) Perfect teleportation
Pop quiz: You find a genie lamp. You rub it, and out comes a genie. Because he went on a bender and is recovering from a wicked hangover, he only offers to grant you one wish.

So, yeah, you can only have one superpower. What do you choose? Trick question. If you chose anything other than teleportation, you are dumb, and the genie is really Lucifer and you’re condemned to eternal damnation in the lake of fire. Teleportation is by far the supreme super power. I could write pages on why, but simply contemplate on it for a short while, and you will see that I am correct. Want to fly? Put on a Wingsuit and teleport a few hundred feet in the air. A little low on cash? Teleport to a bank vault and back out. Legal troubles? What are they going to do, throw you in jail? Hah! I rest my case. If some of you remain unconvinced, perhaps I will dedicate an entire post to the awesomeness that is teleportation. I have had some limited success with teleportation. In fact, I teleported on New Years Day. I was simply at the bar, throwing back some drinks. Then, the next thing I knew, I was in my bed. The only flaw with my current method of teleportation is that it is typically not instant. If I can cut out the hours in the void between worlds and teleport instantly, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

One of my earliest teleportation attempts.

4) Fix the global financial crisis
Yes, I realize some of the greatest modern economic minds have failed to do this. You see, though, I have a master plan which cannot fail. The biggest problem facing the current global economy is the insolvency of banks, and the horrendous deficit the United States has found itself in. If we can simply pump enough true wealth back into the economy, we can recover. I do not mean printing money. That is worthless and only leads to inflation. What we need is a cheap source of exploitable labor.
This is where the molehills come in.
You see, the moles, now void of the distraction of obtaining reliable and steady shelter for them and their families, will have plenty of time for other preoccupations. The last thing we want are a bunch of moles with too much time and nothing productive to do. Next thing you know, they’ll be on every street corner trying to sell meth to your grandmother.

And everyone knows moles have the best shit.

In a mutually beneficial move, we can offer all the undesirable jobs to the moles. They may resent being stuck with such demeaning work without adequate pay, and we certainly don’t have the financial means to compensate the appropriately. Luckily for us, moles are blind. We can simply tell them we are paying them a lot. They won’t know the difference between a check for one cent and a check for a million dollars. Then, when they try and cash their checks, we can just pay them in the now out-of-fashion orange carrots. Moles love carrots. And then, if they ever catch on and revolt, and things go worst case scenario, I will simply teleport to an isolated location while the rest of you are subjected by the mole people. Hey, I tried!

5) Learn to dance
Nothing special here. I can’t dance.

Blood Brothers

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Elevators

While leaving work the other evening, I began to pontificate upon another topic which we typically overlook due to its common presence: elevators. I bet you can't tell where I was when I began said pontification. Oh? You guessed in an elevator? Damn. Okay, maybe you can. That aside, I'll be spending the next few paragraphs enlightening you about elevators: the good, the bad, and maybe a story or two. I think we should start with my general distaste for elevators. I know they are useful, especially in buildings with more than four floors. I work on the eleventh floor of my office building, but there are many times I find myself wishing we had a staircase. Here are my main complaints with elevators:

Picking which one will open first

This only applies in buildings with more than one elevator. You go and hit the button to go up or down, and there are two or more elevators that respond to the button, and you stand there trying to guess which door will open. This is even more awkward when other people are waiting for you, and exceptionally awkward when there are more people trying to get on the elevator than can fit. Then, if you guess wrong, you're shit-out-of-luck.

The latecomer

Whenever you are in a hurry to get somewhere via elevator, there is inevitably somebody at the end of the hallway yelling, "Hold the elevator, please! I'm almost there!" So everyone in the elevator must wait on this asshole who thinks they're so important that they can't be bothered to wait another 30 seconds for the next elevator. One day I was walking into work when I saw an ancient relic of a woman shuffling at a blazing two feet per minute into my building. She had an aide with her, and I passed them to go inside. I got to the elevator, hit the "up" button and waited. It took a bit longer than normal for one of the three elevators that go above the tenth floor to arrive down in the lobby. I went in, along with several other people. Right before the door closes, an arm shoots into the gap with the righteous speed of a caretaker of the elderly and decrepit. "Please wait, she's almost here," I hear the aide say. Everyone in the elevator had seen the osteoporotic dinosaur, and I was surprised that the aide didn't burst into flame right there from the concentrated amount of hate being directed towards her by my fellow elevator occupants.

Yes, hatred is combustible.

"Please be patient, we'll all be there some day." The bimbo had the nerve not only to patronize us, but also to remind us of the fleeting nature of youth right before we all went to waste yet another day of our lives stuck in an office. We stood in the elevator for literally two minutes while we waited for the old woman who avoiding the grim reaper by the skin of her false teeth. It was infuriating; nobody said anything, nobody even gave telling glances to one another or the aide, who continued to condescend to us as if we weren't being patient enough. She wouldn't stop talking down to us about being patient, which is like Hitler trying to tell Jesus the importance of being a good person. This was the woman who was so impatient she had to hold up an entire elevator so she didn't have to wait for another, even though, I guarantee, at least three more elevators could have come before the fossil made it to the one her aide had commandeered.

Selecting your floor

Once everyone crams into the elevator, everyone tried to squeeze towards the buttons to hit their floor. When it's really crowded, you may hear something akin to, "can you hit eight for me, please?" A reasonable request, except for when I'm going higher than eight. Every stop between where I am and the floor to which I'm going is comparable to sitting in traffic. Worse is when somebody on another floor is waiting for the elevator. The light on that floor doesn't show, but the elevator stops anyway, and half the time when the door opens there is nobody there. Somebody either hit the wrong direction (I understand, the difference between up and down is utterly perplexing) or hit the button just to be an asshole. Oh, and don't even get me started on little kids who think it's a fun game to hit all the buttons in the elevator. I have a fun game I'd like to show them.

My favorite game, followed closely by "Let's play in traffic."

Where the hell am I supposed to look?

Probably one of the most uncomfortable things for me in an elevator is where to look when there are other people in there with you. Most elevators have at least one reflective wall, making it really hard to avoid eye contact with your elevator passengers. Even trying to stare ahead of you, the reflective surface makes it to where you're nearly staring the other passengers in the eye. This is bad, because it becomes painfully obvious that everyone is trying really hard to not interact with anyone else. Then you get the random talkers, who think, because the mirror-wall makes it seem like you're making reflected eye-contact, that it's a good time to bust out conversational gems like, "Hot enough for you outside?" or, "Hey, at least it's Friday," or, "Excuse me, would you mind sucker-punching me in the larynx?"

Okay, I just wish they'd say the last one.

I could probably write a whole thesis paper on the unsavory aspects of elevators, but, instead, I will move on to the one thing I enjoy about elevators. I can only enjoy this when alone in an elevator with hand rails. I find it very amusing to lift myself off the floor using the hand rails and lift myself a few inches several times. I find it oddly fun to feel the g-force fluctuate with the speed and direction of the elevator. I like feeling really heavy when traveling up, with the very end making my body weight seem like nothing as it slows, and vice versa when the elevator travels downward. This reminds me of a story.

I believe it was the winter break of my senior year of high school. A group of aproximately eight of us decided to go to Centennial Olympic Park where they had set up an ice-skating rink. Not wanting to navigate downtown Atlanta traffic, my friends and I decided to take MARTA (Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, for my imaginary readers unfamiliar with Atlanta). We parked on the third floor of the parking deck and meandered to the elevator. We piled into the elevator, and for shits and giggle, without having consulted anybody about any kind of plan or giving any intentions, when the doors closed I simply said, "One, two, three!" Here is how events unfolded.

In case the pictures weren't clear, on the count of three, everyone in the elevator jumped. We had never done this before, and it's not like anybody had said, "Hey, we should count to three and all jump!" I simply counted to three, and everybody jumped on cue. I was not expecting this. Neither was the elevator. In less than two seconds we went from the third floor to right between the first and second floor. We basically caused the elevator to free fall about ten to fifteen feet before the emergency cables caught us. After we picked ourselves up off the ground, we soon realized what we had done. We tried to open the doors, but we couldn't get them open more than a crack, through which we were able to see the floor/ceiling dividing the first and second floors. After being in there for about fifteen minutes, some of the girls began to panic a little bit. Then, after about half an hour...

Everyone knows human eyes glow in the dark.

Pandemonium. You would have thought we were in a horror movie. Not all the girls went into OMGWTFWE'REGONNADIE mode, but even one is too many. We waited around in the dark for another fifteen minutes or so before the lights came back on, and old mechanic knocked on the door and said he was working to get us out. It was about another fifteen minutes before we emerged from the elevator-turned-Alcatraz. So it was only an hour, nowhere near as bad as it was for this guy, but still not fun. We then took the train to the stop closest to Centennial, walked a few blocks and finally got to the park. There we sat, looked at the skating rink, and, being the spoiled suburban high school kids we were, turned our noses up and refused to pay $10 to skate on it because, "that ice rink is like the size of my garage." I'd like to blame someone else for that condescending comment, but alas, I have not always been as amazingly talented, athletic, sexy, and most of all as humble as I am now.

Jesus Saves

Toast Chee

The e-mail server is down at work. Oh, yeah, I'm no longer unemployed. But if you're reading this, you already know that, don't you? I suppose I hold the hope that one day, in the distant future, somebody who doesn't know me first hand might actually read this blog. So for the sake of this fictional reader, I will provide details that may seem superfluous and/or redundant to anyone who actually might read this. I apologize; let me dream.

The recurring Viking-on-a-unicycle-carrying-a-leprechaun dream.

I could go into detail about what I do at work, but you probably care even less than I do. Suffice it to say that without e-mail, I'm left with pretty much nothing to do and lots of time to kill, hence this post. I've actually got another post or two I've been working on, which somewhat explains my lack of updates, but mostly the reason is that I've been too lazy to draw the pictures for the random crap that I write. So I'm sitting here on my second week of work, crammed into my kindergarten-sized desk, because we have to rearrange the office in order for me to get a real-person desk. You would think that with the e-mail server down and nothing left to do around here we would do said rearranging now, but it hasn't happened. My boss/supervisor/guy-who-is-in-charge-of-rearranging-the-office says that it has something to do with getting phone lines moved or something stupid like that, but I suspect everyone else is doing something more fun, like running an underground turtle racing gambling ring.

On second thought, that doesn't really sound that fun.

So while I wait to get assigned some task that will take me all of five to ten minutes to complete, I've been browsing the vast interwebs. I've gone from the usual entertainment sites, all the way to the uncharted territories unbeknownst even to StumbleUpon. I'm pretty sure by now I'm like the fucking Ferdinand Magellan of the internet. I googled his first name, because I had nothing better to do and it makes me sound smarter. Except I just told you I googled it, so nevermind.

It's time for Wild Wings. As you can tell, not many fucks were given in the making of this drawing. It was the last one.

So now that I've circumnavigated the internet (and I didn't get killed by Lapu-Lapu (I told you I beat the internet). Take that, Magellan!) I've been left to my own devices and deep philsophical contemplations. So far, my most sagacious of observations (I just took another web-voyage and discovered the word "sagacious") has been on the packet of crackers sitting on my desk. They are "Toast Chee Crackers", made with "real Peanut Butter". You know these crackers, if maybe not the exact brand. They're your typical orange crackers with peanut butter.

Yum. Doesn't that image just make your mouth water?

I ate a few, and I began to ponder. Why are they orange?. I've been eating these cracker since I was in pre-school. Well, mostly only when I was in pre-school, but the office and pre-school bear striking resemblances.

Exactly the same, minus the nap time.

But it was really only today that I fully began to theorize as to why they would make a cracker in such an unnatural color. I know of no other crackers that are orange. I just sat and thought for a minute after typing that. Now that I reflect on it, I suppose you could count Cheez-Its,but I don't really count those as crackers. They're sort of their own entity in the munchie world, kind of like slime mold. Plus, Cheez-Its aren't that unnatural neon orange, like what I imagine the radioactive waste looked like that made Chester Cheetah (that's a story for another day), or, coincidentally enough, like Neon. I mean, they don't even taste like cheese! Actually, wait a minute.

Om nom nom. Yeah, I did it. So what?

Yeah, pretty positive I don't taste any cheese. Which again begs the question, why orange? I could understand if the crazy color had some tie to the flavor of the cracker, but I did a thorough study using all four steps of the scientific method, and I have deduced that these crackers do not taste like anything that is naturally orange. So then I wonder, if you're going to make a cracker some random crazy color, why not go all out and make them lime-green, or hot-pink?

Woah, I think they were laced with something.

I could continue reflecting upon the intentions behind my orange crackers, but now there are more pressing matters which require my brilliant contemplation. Like who got to decide what the standard margins are for notepads, and why they come in so many different sizes.