Civilized Unconformity

It takes a lot of work to be crazy and unpredictable. Too much of one thing, and people say "oh, that again." Case in point: shaving-cream covered naked people running across campus, Sammy the Owl chasing a gorilla, live action role playing costumes, and so many other things are just norms now at Rice.

An easy way to keep from falling into a rut of "normal" craziness is to mix things up a little. What's the most unexpected thing I could do? How about being formal and responsible, and spend the evening listening to a public policy discussion?

With this new project in mind, I selected yet another costume and donned it. Ah yes, the pensive, intellectual college student, fully engaged in the material (complete with clipboard for notes...)

In this "character" I set out for Baker Institute. The speaker for the night was Rev. Jim Wallis, president and CEO of Sojourners. I was indeed breaking some social norms just by being there. Due to the importance of the speaker, and that many students are still taking midterms, I was one of the few undergraduates actually present. I'd estimate that the mean age of everyone in the room was over 45, and I was the only person on my row who was not either grey haired, or balding. (One nice old lady even sat in the seat next to me, looked at my mohawk, then scooted away down the row...)

While I was more of an outlier at the event, I was very glad I did attend. Jim Wallis spent a lot of time discussing connections between social justice and religion, arguing that Christians should be concerned with matters of national poverty. He shared how the injustice of poverty was a cause to be fought for, like slavery in the time of William Wilberforce, or Civil Rights at the time of MLK.

Throughout this, he emphasized how important it was that the new, younger generations be the driving force behind this change. Now there's a crazy thought for you.

So yes, I've been running around doing weird things, trying to break social barriers that inhibit people from expressing their creativity. Maybe those aren't the only walls that need to be broken.

We live in a nation of perceived wealth, yet over 46 million people in this country live under the poverty line. The serverys at Rice have 75 pounds of food waste a day, while there are starving people just a few blocks away (I don't even have to mention Africa). Rice students spend massive amounts of time and money on extravagant parties, while there are populations in Africa suffering from medical problems that students like us could solve with that same investment of time and money (just take a look at the Global Health Technologies classes).

So much more can be changed than just people's perspectives on unconventionality, and I can do more than just entertain people. While I'm still going to attempt many things theatrical and ridiculous, maybe I should be aiming for goals of social justice as well.

Aaand of course, ideally, I just might try to do both at the same time.

Of mice and men.

Sooo, singing in the academic quad today would have been great. Only I have a cough that is activated whenever I hit certain notes, which tends to hinder the singing process.

No problem. I'll just drive to a craft store, and get the supplies to start on my next crazy project. Only when I got to West Lot, my car wouldn't start. (It's either the battery, or a poltergeist, so I'm going to either need a jumper cable or Ghostbusters). So that kind of killed the plan for driving anywhere.

Life is still fantastic. Plans just had to be changed/postponed a little. To compensate for my lack of interesting content, please accept the following as a substitute-

Fashion Sense II and Non-Standardized Testing

The disaster shirt continues! A good number of people have paid attention to it now, or commented on it. Funny how a normal t-shirt can attract as much attention as a full costume.

The shirt now also includes marks of

- napalm

- a motorcycle accident

- being backstabbed by a friend

- random punctures from me testing every potential stabbing weapon in my room on it (forks, pens, staplers...).

- friction burns from my wall

The front now reads "Bad Day? Mine's Worse" thanks to a suggestion from Michelle. I rather think I'll wear it whenever I'm in high-stress test-taking environments, to remind people that it could always be worse. :)

Speaking of testing situations, I got to fulfill another longtime goal today. I had a test for Psyc 339, but due to the fact that I am no longer majoring in Psyc, I decided to drop the class. (What? I don't want to do statistics for fun?!?). I dropped the class over lunch, and did a little research before the start of the exam. I came up with this list, that I was well familiar with. I went to the exam, wrote a note to the professor on the cover sheet explaining that I had dropped the class, that I really loved his teaching, that I meant no disrespect to his test, and that I hoped he would be entertained. I then proceeded to take the funnest test of the year.

Obviously, I spelled things out with the multiple choice answers. I also added new options to the multiple choice answers, such as 50 digits of Pi, or logical paradoxes, and picked those. I used Russian and Greek letters, imaginary numbers, and sarcastic comments for multiple choice answers. Instead of True and False, I answered with "Lies!", "Debatable" "Eh, probably" and "Why not?". I correctly worked out the math for a bunch of the questions, only using roman numerals instead of normal numbers. (IV^II is so much cooler looking than 4^2). Oh, and I wrote all these answers with multicolored crayons...

For the last problem, in which I had to draw out a box plot and label various elements, I portrayed all the statistical terms with basic pictionary style doodles, and duly labeled them. You get an idea of it from the picture below-
I then turned the exam in, and left the room 45 minutes before everyone else. On my way out, I muttered "Boy, that was easy!"

I'm sure some of them still hate me.

Totally worth it.

The Tipping Point

Nothing bloggable happened today until dinner. You could almost call the day "normal" if your standard for normal includes ballet, squirrel chasing, and parody video filming. Which, if you go to Rice, it just might.

At dinner, my desire for mildly ridiculous circumstances got restless. I got very close to asking the man chopping meat behind the counter if the flank steak was actually "Hand Carved" as the sign said. But in the end I decided that asking pointedly ridiculous questions to men holding butcher knives is not the wisest life strategy.

As I was eating dinner, I noticed two girls outside, jumping from line to line on the sidewalk. It wasn't too remarkable of an activity, but it looked pretty fun. Naturally, I dashed outside to join them, and soon there were multiple sets of goals and parameters for line jumping. Josh, who I had been having dinner with, also joined me.

Initially, it had just been two friends having fun being goofy. People noticed, but didn't react much. After it became four people, all engaged in the activity, the social attraction to it grew proportionately. Almost every single person who walked by decided to try it, and those who didn't commented and made jokes about it. The social boundary of making a ridiculous activity acceptable had been broken.

Now, this only lasted about 5 minutes and didn't have much of a lasting impact on anybody. But I couldn't help finding a message to take away. All my undertakings so far have involved one guy doing something socially abnormal, hoping that people would notice. But one guy is not much of a social force, unless he soon gains company. The more people involved in activities, the more successful they will be in getting people to participate or play along. Maybe it's time to start expanding projects to include multiple people...

Look for updates on the Disaster Shirt tomorrow, and on public singing (possibly in Russian) on Wednesday!

Flipping Out!

For no good reason, (other than that it was Friday) I decided to try doing a backflip inside of every building at Rice that I had access to! I plotted out my first route the night before-Some of these locations turned out to be off-limits, so I ended up with a total of 56 locations across campus, then set out on my flippant quest. (Haha...)

This was crazy in a whole different way, but it worked! Yes, I trekked across campus for 2.5 hours to do it, and did goodness knows what to my knees, but I'm fairly certain that I am the first person at Rice to have ever accomplished this! Success!

Lab Experiment Gone Wrong

Snazzy intro video-

With this energetic start, I headed off to the engineering quad.

Of course, it would turn out that the first person I talked to was actually working in a nanotechnology lab. That killed my story really fast... You can bluff knowing certain things in life by just reading the wikipedia article. Nanoscience is not one of those things. (Ryan Leigon referred me to an excellent example of which subjects are best for pretending: http://xkcd.com/451/ )

After having my story about nanobots thoroughly shut down by a Rice science whiz, and after receiving several concerned looks from professors in the physics buildings, I decided my efforts should be relocated to less scientifically inclined areas of campus.

Sooo, back to Fondren. On the way, I managed to show a campus tour some of the more eccentric side of Rice. I also saw two girls whisper about me, and I'm pretty sure they took pictures of me on their phones. Sadly, they didn't ask me to pose, or I definitely would have (just ask the 3 people who took pictures with me on Cow Appreciation Day).

Fondren once again provided some great literature for my character. I couldn't find Pyrotechnical Chemistry for Dummies, but there was a section on Testing for Explosivity in "Safety Assessment for Chemical Processes".

I carried this book around for a while- to Brochstein, to dinner, on the inner loop bus. Sadly, the only people who commented on the combination of the book and costume were friends.

"Now why didn't I read this *before* the experiment?"

I did notice a few people staring at me, as my costume was at least a little more believable for Rice. Two acquaintances expressed mild concern about me having actually blown myself up. A few astute strangers also asked what the costume was for, correctly deducing that explosions near faces actually tend to send people to hospitals, not wandering around campus. The bus again yielded very few results, except for wonderful Son, the bus driver, who asked all about my attire and was very interested in the whole 4 Walls Broken process.

That's all for now! The project for hopefully Friday is still in the works, so no teaser for that.

Awesome self-appointed bonus points- several people have asked where I got my robes, saying that they'd want to try studying in robes. Success!

Fashion Sense

On my off day, I decided to have a little fun with fashion. Meet disaster shirt 1.0, currently equipped with signs of

- a zombie bite

- stab wounds

- a drive by shooting

- an anti zombie-virus injection (after the bite, of course)

- and a tiger attack

More destruction to follow. And you thought *your* day was bad.

On top of this, it was McMurtry's Masquerade night at pub. I showed up for free food, and of course I brought my mask.
Am I classy or what?

A Tribute to Scholars, Part I

Naturally, I would have to study for my first major test on Monday. Typical Rice schedule. Any plans involving lab coats and facepaint have been bumped to Wednesday. Today is dedicated studying...

Not to say I didn't do anything. Rather, I decided to acknowledge the long-standing tradition, started by monks, of studying while wearing a cowl. While long robes are less necessary in the Houston heat than in dank European monasteries, I still feel that it helps the learning process somehow. Plus it's a lot of fun. :)

I got a few double takes just on the way over to Fondren, which was encouraging. However, once inside, I got very few reactions. Given that silence is recommended in libraries, I really shouldn't have been surprised. Also, I noticed that even people I knew weren't saying anything. (People actually focus on their work sometimes, who knew??) I figured that I could have probably walked up to half the studiers in there while wearing a gorilla suit, and they still wouldn't have noticed. Yes, I will try this if people get me a gorilla suit.

I checked to see how people reacted to being in an elevator in Fondren with a monk. Apparently, the protocol is just to ignore monks. It took me six tries before a person actually asked me if it was a costume.

I monked the 6th floor for 1/2 an hour while studying, but ultimately decided Fondren was too serious to yield many results. As I left, I checked out a few books that I thought seemed appropriate. Sadly, the librarian did not even comment about the fact that a guy dressed as a monk was checking out books on medieval warfare...

I moved on to Coffeehouse, where the staff and a few customers were entertained by my costume and choice of literature. I explained to a Junior from Martel how it kind of made since for college students to dress as monks, considering they were equivalent scholars from their age. He was quick to point out, though, that while his studies might be the same, his weekend activities varied drastically from those of monks.

I finished off the day by riding the entire inner loop on the bus and observing people as they got onboard. Most of them just took one look at me, then tried to pretend like nothing was out of the ordinary. I did catch one football player looking back at me 5 times during the one stop that he took the bus. Considering that "normal" Daniel gets maaaybe one look, I considered this an accomplishment.

Overall, the first experiment was effective, but did not generate much feedback. Most of the people I explained myself to were friends. And even then, a lot of my friends weren't surprised. I think Marie summed it up best when she walked by and said "Hey Daniel! Being a monk again?"

...

Yeah, apparently I need to step things up a notch.

And so it begins!

Greetings ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to 4 Walls Broken, a social experiment starting at Rice University. The goal of the project is to expose the population of Rice to whole new levels of unconventionality and observe the reactions.

The name 4 Walls Broken comes from the theater term of "breaking the 4th wall" which refers to direct interactions with the audience through the imaginary fourth wall of the room visible on stage. My goal is to take that interaction one step further, transforming the audience and their environment into the stage, putting them in constant interaction with the actors.

The cast of this new performance is one man- me. Not because I am limiting this to a performance of one individual. On the contrary, it will be fantastic if others join me. The cast is one man because that is all that I have control over. Starting Monday, I will be spontaneously altering my style of dress, behavior, and speech at random times, so that I can see and comment on how Rice reacts. On top of this, I will be staging a variety of bizarre and, I hope, entertaining performances all across campus. What will they be? My costume closet and I can wait until Monday to find out, so I suppose you can as well.

For an endeavor like this, I suppose I need some qualifications. So, while you wait, here's some evidence supporting why I think I can pull this off:

Title- "Let's Go Crazy!"

Alternative title- "Why Daniel Burns should not be given sugar."

All footage was taken from random videos from the past year, completely unassociated with this project.