All Entries in the "Idiocy" Category

Fool Mettle Alchemist

I was reading Seth Godin’s blog last week and he had posted this video:

Here’s what he said about it:

My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That’s when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it’s guy #3 who made it a movement.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been taking one hour a night and devoting that hour to working on a project. I have about a dozen projects, and, all totaled, I believe they can be completed within a year.

Many of these projects are creative ones. Doing something creative, and putting it out there for the world to see can be scary. After watching the video, I found myself thinking about what it was like being on stage at USAO.

Our drama department put on some pretty damn good shows. They didn’t start out being damn good shows. Usually, they started out as awkwardly-delivered lines and half-understood scenes. But we would stop, re-read the lines, pick apart the scene, the words, we would try saying the lines a different way maybe, we would try out different blocking to see what worked best. We devoted ourselves to understanding the story, and the characters. And, by the time opening night rolled around, we knew what the hell we were doing. We knew how to make the audience laugh, and we knew how to make them cry.

And the reason the performances were good was because a group of people agreed to look foolish together, and to say that it’s okay to look foolish. This permission to look, and act, and be foolish is why members of an acting troupe can be so close to each other. Only by being willing to suffer through looking foolish can we develop our skills.

If you want to learn how to roller-blade, you have to be willing to look foolish. You’re going to scream, flail your arms about wildly, and fall flat on your ass. Somebody will laugh. You might be tempted to give up, but you shouldn’t.

Give yourself permission to look foolish, and over time, you’ll scream less, you’ll perform fewer gravity-induced gyrations, and your bruised ass will heal.

Now, that first guy in the video? He’s brave and/or crazy. The second guy? He’s also brave and/or crazy. But that third guy, the one Godin says turned crazy dancing into a movement? He’s the tipping point, the one that gave everybody permission to look foolish, to do the thing they wanted to do when they saw Guy #1 and #2, but couldn’t because they were too afraid. He’s the one that gave them permission to express themselves, and have fun.

But it all started because Guy #1 didn’t quit, and we need to remember that. So, if you have your own creative project, you and I, we’ll be Guy #1. Our friends? They’ll be Guy #2.

And let’s keep going until Guy #3 shows up, okay?

Water

I had to go to Sam’s to pick up some kind of hyper-super eye drops that I’m supposed to use the day before my Lasik. I was a little thirsty and had twenty minutes to kill, so I went to the food area. This is what happened after I sat down with my drink:

A sizable woman and her son (looked about 4-years-old) made their way passed my table. The woman, carrying a huge purse, two jackets, and an empty 32 oz. styrofoam cup (that’s the only size Sam’s sells), struggled toward a table so she could unload her items. The boy, also carrying an empty 32 oz. styrofoam cup, did not follow her to the table, but stopped at the soda fountain. He walked back and forth between the two machines.

BOY: Which one is water, Mom? Mom, I want water. Mom, I’m thirsty. I want some water.

MOM: Stop it. Wait ’til your grandpa gets here.

BOY: I want some water.

MOM: No! Now sit down! I did not pay a dollar so you could drink water. We can get water for free.

I mean, what kind of stupid-crazy do you have to be to force your kid to drink soda instead of water…when he clearly wants water? What the fuck, people?!

Lame Crazy Stupid People At Halloween

So, I was talking to my friend Chris (Traci’s husband) while he was standing at the door, handing out candy, and he was telling me that tonight he had seen two weird things in kids’ Halloween candy sacks.

The first thing he noticed was that some lame jackass had given out those stupid Jesus-crispy how-to-avoid-burning-in-Hell comics.

And the second weird thing was that some other crazy jackass had stapled little “Vote for Ron Paul” cards to candy, and for some insane reason thought this would be a good thing to hand out.

I told him if anything like that shows up again, trade the kid some candy for it, and about 5 minutes (and a fun-size pack of Sour Patch Kids) later, a kid showed up at the door with this note in his candy bucket.

Maybe this person and the Vote-For-Ron-Paul person should get together and go bowling.

“It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.”

Dick Cheney. Fuck-head or fuck-wad?

You decide.

Chickens In Charge

Looking at the news this morning, we found this puzzling image from a story on Thanhnien News Online.

The caption says it’s a picture of “Policemen”, but I’m not sure. It could be Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany or the “Soviet monument”.

Either way, it’s usually a bad idea to put a chicken in charge of anything other than laying eggs or playing tic-tac-toe.

I’m just sayin’ is all.