Beyond First World Problems

Hopefully everyone is already familiar with the concept of first world problems.  If not, here's my post on the concept from last year.

After the absolutely fantastic Centennial, Rice students are running into a whole new line of difficult challenges to face every day: Centennial Problems.
These are issues like-

"What, I have to go to class, and it's not in a giant magical tent?!"

"What, projectors are now used for powerpoint slides, not for epic light shows?!"

"What, we have to go to the servery to eat food that someone else prepared for us, rather than just being provided with giant towers of cupcakes wherever we go?!"

It is with great difficulty that students across campus this week undergo this paralyzing suffering and hardship.  But Rice students are known for thriving even under the heaviest of burdens.  How else did we learn to deal with the other challenges we face on a regular basis.  Without this resilience, we might never have survived having to walk all the way to Tudor Fieldhouse to eat on Sammy's picnic.  Or having to slave away at putting all our recycling into bins for H&D to pick up.  Or even sitting through lectures in Herzstein, on hard, wooden chairs.  With *really cold* air conditioning!!!  

Yes, we suffer greatly here at Rice.  But we have what it takes to carry on.  Somehow.

On a similar topic, I happened upon a wonderful video this afternoon.  Saturday Night Live did a fantastic job at picking up on a similar problem plaguing our nation, through the form of the new iPhone 5.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/412897

Truth

Yes I do, Facebook.  Yes I do...

One year and counting!

Holy cow!  I've had this blog for over a year, and just realized it now!

Silly me for not realizing this.  Taking a look at the statistics, it's fun to see what topics and audiences I've gotten to play with this past year.
I've had over 2,500 views from 9 different countries.  Not too bad, considering I do very little to advertise it.  It also speaks considerably to the larger range of people that I have contact with now, considering that this is more views than my youtube channel got in 3 years of steadily advertising it in high school.  Of course, being in a K-12 school with just 200 students total, it's kind of a limited viewership.  I think the most views for a video I made during high school was me being a goof off with too much caffeine and Shakespeare, which got a little over 200 views.
Getting to Rice, I had a change in audience, with suddenly so many more people around me who were of similar interests.  This naturally produced a lot more views from people who wanted to watch things I made, and even better added a lot of highly talented people willing to film with me.  This resulted in quite a few fun videos, ranging from trying to give myself food poisoning to the Party in the Library Incident.
Now, this last video was great, not only because it guaranteed I would have far more fun trying to run for public office with that online, but because it showed that with a few posts and tweets, Rice University could get more views on one video in a week than I could in years of working by myself.

And now this blog is moving up into the top spot of viewership of media that I'm producing.  I'm quite a fan of this.  Hopefully, this means people are even more interested in reading in what I have to say than simply viewing my work for comic relief.  I'm sure many people still do read this just because they like seeing me be ridiculous, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that my top viewed post this past year was First World Problems, which got even more views than my backflipping escapade. 
So maybe I can have some sort of impact with my message.
Before I leave- an interesting note on technology-
I read a rather ridiculous article on super expensive computer chipped socks.  Seeing things like this always frustrates me, because sure, while I'd love to have my socks match themselves, I'd rather see brilliant scientists putting work into researching ways to treat neglected diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of people.  And $200 for a pair of socks is disturbing when 50 cents can give someone immunization against many of those diseases for an entire year.
Not that I'm against the development of pricy technology as a whole.  There's this awesome device, the Vscan, which is like a stethoscope that costs $8000.  The cool thing though, is that it also can analyze the heart well enough to prevent the need of a potential follow up echocardiogram that costs $1,500 to run.  Plus, this thing can be carried in a backpack, and could be used to scan hearts basically anywhere in the world.

So that's my rather lengthy post for the day.  Yes, there's a bucketload of hyperlinks, and probably too much text for more than a few people to actually read all the way through.  But I've done some self assessment, and seen that pulling random ideas together from different fields to form an argument or conclusion is something I'm good at.  So I'm going to keep doing it, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me. :)

More words, more words, more words?

Last post was pretty non-representative of most of what I've randomly written these last few months.  Just for fun, I'm going to put up a smattering of random quotes or excerpts from things that I find mildly amusing or thought provoking.  These can be musings, class notes, or attempts at a novel this summer that I still deserve to be beaten to death with a fish for not completing...

"The material on the SmarterBoard was always formatted the same way and the walls were always that same color of puke beige.  Not that puke is a shade of beige, but that’s what Devon wanted to do every time he saw it." from Numberless, the book that I've needed to write ever since I had to go through AP testing...

Why Daniel is too ridiculous to be allowed to title chapters:
"Chapter 1: Night is dark.  And there’s no light too."

"HOW DO PEOPLE HAVE TIME FOR 151 HRS OF TV A MONTH?!" A completely valid reaction in notetaking to learning this country's average tv viewing habits.

On selecting character names:
"Other names come up off the top of the author’s head, or from random encounters with envelope labels, waitstaff, or other works of fiction that names are subsequently borrowed from.

These particular names come from popular names for pet slugs.  Thank you, yahoo answers.

As you can tell, I do not have the highest opinions of men, particularly ones I get to write about."

Aaand finally, the introduction to a book which rightfully was not followed through with, because writing books about my life tempts me to live a far too dramatic of a lifestyle.
"Fiction is the expression as life the way we wished it went, with less rules, physics, social norms, or any inconvenient, inglorious obstacles.  It minimizes the average in the human experience, and brings out our fantasies and heights of imagination.  It is a wonderful thing to live these out on paper, on television, in a perfectly simulated environment where we play the roles of that which we wish to be.  Yet by empowering the imagination artificially, one key factor is overlooked.  Man’s potential is not bounded to reality in the dull patterns that we see when comparing it to new unreal worlds.  It can become so if we siphon our creative efforts solely into worlds where we cannot be physically present and invested. 

We are all that stops us from entering a world as good as fiction.

Who says we cannot write our own story?  We’re already responsible for 50% of the dialogue, the actions of a main character, and some portion of the direction.  Authors can write a story without knowing the ending, if they know how to follow their instinct.  Life doesn’t have to be a set course.  Decisions can change its course, move us from one plotline to another.  Characters and subplots can be addressed or dismissed, and learning experiences can easily enable new adventures.

Open your eyes to the story around you.  This is your book.  You can be an author of a greater story, or merely a citation for dialogue."

Words, words, words...

So, considering the fact that I sometimes admit that I'm a writer, I don't post a lot of independent writing on this blog of mine.  Musings, yes.  Bullet-points, definitely.  Snarky commentary, ahhh, sometimes.  But not straight up writing.
Thing is, I do lots of it.  All the time.  Some of the time.  At sporadic intervals, that nonetheless lead me to believe that I enjoy writing when I take the time and focus to do so.  It happens a lot in the fall or after I've been in the mountains, not sure why.

Anyways, I'm just going to start randomly putting things that I write up here, and if anyone has thoughts about them, let me know.  Otherwise, words don't do all that much just sitting in a document on my computer.
I just listened to Ke$ha's new single, and this little bit of counter-pop poetryish sort of just happened.

I will not die young

Nor lead an unlived life

You only die once

You live as much as you let yourself

Your life is not one shot, one course, or one direction

But a myriad of ever-changing fluctuating choices

An exploration of the vastness of knowledge and experience

Partying like there’s no tomorrow is fine today

And sucks tomorrow

Partying like tomorrow will happen can be just as fun

Every day for the rest of your life

A one-night stand lasts…

Lets see…

One night.

But true love never dies.

Playing with fire is fun

But so is growing a redwood forest

And then playing in it for years on end

You can’t be both an arsonist and an arborist

And expect both careers to pan out

Austin is Weird. But we're weirder!

Alternatively titled-
Keep Austin Weird(er)
^Making

Pride parade + Large amounts of sidewalk chalk + Free saturday = Instant epic road trip

Roadside art is such a cool thing to try.

Especially when combined with an awesome parade that was just asking for a little more rainbow!

Naturally, no one stopped us or asked why we were making a giant rainbow starting line all the way across the street in front of the parade.  Most people just took pictures, or asked us questions about the event.  I love it how having fun, effective ideas that you're prepared to put to work makes people just automatically assume that you're supposed to be doing it, or that you're in charge.

Also, Grace and I got our money's worth from some epic knee high socks from Target.  In the middle of Texas's city of "weird" full of hipsters and people trying all sorts of eccentric styles, it was great to see just how many people complimented our matching neon-striped awesomeness.

Naturally, this also gave me a cool reminder that I am definitely related to my sister, who wore almost the same combination the next day in an unconnected, but equally awesome, fashion decision.

Arrrgh! It Be Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Shiver me timbers!  I almost forgot that today be Talk Like A Pirate Day!  Many leagues have passed beneath me keel since I've used me buccaneering mannerisms!  Blow me down and have me marooned, but I won't let that be happenin again.  Seein' as I be at my apartment with costumes about as often as a landlubber sights a giant kraken, I had to make do with the flotsam and jetsam of me OC locker and the props of me mateys.  (There was a guy who gave a presentation recently about following our passions.  I may have used his business card to help make the eyepatch in the costume.  I hope he's proud.)

Though I've seen many a more threatenin' pirate climb a mizzenmast, I was still piratey enough to be considered a health code violation, and asked to leave the (ARRR)RMC.  But I did manage to get a complete stranger in a suit to voluntarily ARRRGH! at me, so if nothing else, I'd consider the day a success.

So, even though I had totally forgotten the vast amount of pirate that has been trained into my system, things are starting to come back now.  So here's a crash course in everything that is wonderful and piratey-

Quick tips on talking like a pirate, a must for every 19th of September- http://www.yarr.org.uk/talk/

All the best piratey songs for singing at top volume-

- Veggie Tale's Classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaWU1CmrJNc 

- A Pirate's Life For Me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A19q7rysLs

- What Can you Do With A Drunken Sailor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyPuey-1Jw

Fun facts about Pirates:

Pirates would wear one gold hoop earring not for fashion, but because it would pay for funeral expenses if people found their bodies washed up on a shore

Pieces of eight were actual 1/8ths of gold coins that would be cut up for smaller increments of currency

The city of Port Royal, where Pirates of the Caribbean is set, was destroyed in a catastrophic earthquake.  Then they rebuilt it.  Then it burned down.  After that, pirate life in the Caribbean area never recovered.

If anyone wants yet more piratey information, don't miss The Pirate's Primer!

Adventure is out there!

So I seem to have left some people with out an update here for quite at while now.  Thanks to the start of the school year, this is certainly not due to a lack of adventure, but rather a lack of time.  Mostly, that lack of time has been due to discoveries that have made me want to make adventure planning a double major of mine.
Most of these shenanigans have not included cameras, so there is very little documented evidence of some of these occurrences.  Maybe it's best if we leave it that way.  However, I can share some wonderful adventure lessons that I've learned over the past few weeks-
- If you shoot roman candles along the beach, you can skip fireballs off the surface of the ocean.
- 3 dollars of sidewalk chalk can make a 50 square ft PacMan game in the academic quad.
- Trees are great places to have conversations for hours. (Not really new, but still true)
- September 14th is henceforth "Bagel bundle with noodle kugel National awareness day".
- I am probably one of the very very few people in this world to both get a blue mohawk and learn how to use a sewing machine over the course of one day.

- You can get people working at late night food places to do pretty much anything if you ask nicely, and it's for a good cause.
- Mini fridges make excellent clothes racks.
-If you tell google maps you're trying to find a gas station in Houston's industrial district, there's a good chance you might end up in the middle of nowhere outside of the Valero Gas Refinery.
- Most importantly, if you decide that a night is going to be an adventure, there's a very good chance that it will be, but not at all in the way that you expected.

Partners in Crime

This evening, I’ve succeeded in finding several unsuccessful activities.  And by this evening, I mean at 1 in the morning, and by several unsuccessful activities, I mean:

• Parkour does not work when it’s slick and wet
• Backflip bicycle kicks are bad for my health, as I should have already learned from faceplanting in front of a few thousand people last year
• And sadly, two rolls of standard gorilla tape is not enough to go rappelling with…

But, somehow, we must press on with our insanity.  After a long string of failed crazy plans and unsuccessful invitations, I am changing tactics.  Rather than trying to plot everything on my own and then rope accomplices into things, I’m going for a networked version of plotting, with open invitations for anyone up to the task.  Any ideas go, and anyone can come along, if they can keep up!

To start things off, I’m compiling some of my biggest unachieved adventure brain children that I’ve come up with the past year:

-Camping on a rooftop.  I have a tent, and at least three feasible locations. 

Numbers- 2-4 people

Time frame- 1 night.

-Leaving trails of treasure maps, clues, and random notes throughout books in Fondren library.  See how long it takes people to find different ones.

Numbers: the more the merrier!

Time frame- Anywhere from an afternoon to an entire semester.  There is no limit!

-Get onto the lit part of the rainbow building.  One plan involves acquiring faculty sponsorship for a psyc survey on agoraphobia to get permission to go up.  Another is to simply get permission to take a film team up there as part of a student made documentary of campus.

Numbers- As many people as wanted to be survey subjects/”film crew”.

Time frame- Depending on the project, a few days worth of organizing, request letters, and an afternoon to go up.

-Busking tour of the USA.  Taking a group of people to observe and participate in street performance culture in some of the America’s top busking cities: New Orleans, Boston, New York, and Chicago.  The trip would document street performers in each city, develop and perform a variety of acts in each location, and keep a running blog and video of the whole process.

Numbers: My car holds 5 people.

Time frame: hehe.  This one is going to take a lot.  I have an outline of the whole process, but it would still take weeks of planning pulling together details, grants, and any other funding.  Then the trip itself would be about 4 weeks total with driving time and time spent in each city.  (Also, depending on the talent pool, it could take a fair amount of time rehearsing/acquiring skills for various performances)

-Creating storage compartments inside old textbooks and leaving them in various places on campus for people to discover hidden messages inside.

Numbers: just a few people.  Mostly needs ideas for messages, and old books.

Time frame: a few hours, plus as much message restocking as desired.

-Going without something normally taken for granted.  This could include shoes, rooms, 1^st World food, beds, etc…

Numbers: the more people involved, the more people will notice and think.

Time frame: A day, a week, who knows?

-Ride MS-150… on a unicycle.

Numbers: Anyone who’s totally crazy and wants to spend a lot of time training with me.  Also, a support crew would be awesome.

Time frame: I’m guessing training for this one will be killer.  3 hours a day starting a month in advance, and building up, methinks.

-The Impact of Travel on Novel Writing.  Requires getting a fellowship to travel Europe or another location of choice (preferably with mountains) for up to a month while creating a novel.

Numbers: a travelling companion would be awesome.

Time frame: Redrafting the old proposal, submitting it to a number of Rice fellowships for consideration, plus travel time in the summer.

-Build a sock monkey catapult.  ‘Nuff said.

Numbers: anyone who thinks this would be fun.  And all their sock monkeys.

Time frame: Until flaming sock monkeys seems like a better idea.

-Crashing a Rice campus tour of prospective students with full costumes, scripts, and/or any other random entertainment

Numbers: 2 means a dialogue.  20 means a flashmob.

Time frame:Planning time and as many excecutions as manageable.  (Not actually executing prospies though.  Not till I get Spanish Inquisition robes and raid random people’s conversations)

-Dress as Robin Hood and his Merry Men and chill out on Robinhood street

Numbers: The more the, well, merrier…

Time frame: one afternoon

More items include:

Costumes in the Galleria

Interpretive Dance in public

Elevator projects

Duct tape someone to a wall

Camping on 6^th floor Fondren

Leave comments or email if you’re interested in any of these projects.  And start throwing more ideas into the mix.  Adventure is out there!

Summer is a time for:

So, despite all intentions to the contrary, I have not been blogging at all this summer.  This is truly tragic.
Well, tragic a little for me.  This blog is my best excuse for doing crazy things, and is one of my few ways to get feedback on the adventures that I do choose.
So if anyone is checking this, and would like a glimpse at some of the non-standard stuff that I have been up to this summer, here's a quick update:

Not particularly current, but climbing a 15,000 ft peak in Ecuador was pretty freaking fantastic.  Also brought my total number of continents that I have climbed major peaks on up to 4. :)

Only a partial view here, but on arriving back from Ecuador with no mattress in my apartment, I was able to set up a hammock and mosquito net on my balcony for a much more alternative, and still highly effective sleeping arrangement.

Along with not having a mattress, I also didn't have any cooking gear upon arrival.  This was solved the first night when I, ah, liberated this beautiful wok from someone's garbage.

 Though extremely rusty, it was still in top notch condition.  However, the rust was quite easily removed with soap and water, intense scrubbing with a copper scouring pad, chemical warfare via powerful toilet bowl cleaners.

And voila!  Ready for duty.  I am pleased to state that we now have a fully equipped kitchen with everything necessary to make actual, home-cooked meals of a great deal better quality than Survival Food I-V.

I also got to join some friends in attending Houston's annual Pride Parade, an event with close to 100,000 spectators and more rainbow than you have ever seen in your life.

Naturally, I discovered that Rice had a float in the parade.  And yes, I did maybe abuse the fact that I had thousands of captive spectators to perform street tumbling for.  But of course, all the acrobatics was strictly for a good cause.  Because I never show off, nope. :)

And then recently, I celebrated Cow Appreciation day by going to Chic-Fil-A with roommates, dressed as a herd of cows.

Oh, the things I do for free food...

Not pictured are activities involving my transformation into Captain Diversity/4th of July Man/ the dude in the orange morphsuit with a rainbow mohawk and flag cape, parkour workshops, and a lot of general silliness inside my car.  When I get stuck in traffic, I frequently find myself reenacting this Sesame Street video with myself.  Great stress relief!

And of course, my summer employment as a math teacher has mostly led to me convincing high schoolers all across the city in groups of 10-30 that I am, in fact, crazy.

We meet again, NaNo Insanity!

After a 7 month hiatus from any productive writing activity, I'm putting myself up again to the National Novel Writing Month challenge.  Due to the exceptional lack of homework, travel, and exams this month, I'm laying down the 30 day, 50,000 word writing challenge for the month of July.

The chosen topic for this attempt is Truth, Fiction, and Fantasy.  I'm writing about issues of uniformity and society versus self-reliance and variance in expression through the eyes of three different plot lines.  One will be following my own life and commentary on the issues for the month, another will be in a real world setting modified where standardization is in place at a nationwide level in education and employment.  And then of course, the third section of story will be straight up epic fantasy, with a team of conspirators attempting to overthrow a controlling, corrupted, dystopian government.

For anyone unfamilair with NaNoWriMo, or anyone who just wants to laugh at me, I have my original commercial for this contest, created back in high school.  You can watch it here.

I'm already 3,600 words in, so here goes nothing!

Back again!

It's summer now!  I'm looking at two months to fill with crazy adventures, with absolutely nothing academic to get in the way.
Soooo... Things that are happening in that time:

• Writing a book!  That's right, it's novel time!!!  I'm bringing back a plot inspired by AP tests and everything else that is standardized and evil.  I'm brushing it up, adding a few twists, and inserting some of the knowledge and in depth research on the subject gained from two years of higher education.  If I don't finish it by July 31st, you have my permission to slap me to death with a speckled trout.
• Furnishing my apartment!  This might seem a bit dull or non-crazy, except for the fact that most of my ideas so far have consisted of PVC pipe and duct tape, hammocks, or suggestions from anarchist guidebooks...
• Learning to do things that most people can't do!  So far, I have a parkour gym, how-to books, and wikihow lined up, and I'm open to suggestions!  Skills to learn include but are not limited to fire breathing, advanced juggling, lockpicking, and miscellaneous forms of dance.

Plus of course work and learning how to cook and all those oh-so-crazy real life things.  But before my summer starts to look extremely agenda oriented, here's how goal-oriented I am right now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2UVsyVLLcE

Survival Cooking Part V

More food!

Next on the list of fun survival foods I tried was Mountain House dehydrated hiking food.

While these are lightweight hiking options, they definitely lacked in taste and substance. First off, after the magic of MREs, getting single servings of food with no internal variety just isn't nearly as cook. Next off, you actually have to boil water and add it to the food, then wait for it to cook and rehydrate? What's up with that? :P As a hungry college student, with a college rush for time, I will gladly take a mysterious instant-heat package over waiting for water to boil any day.

Furthermore, when it takes several minutes to discriminate between the ingredients of the meal in order to figure out which one is the meal, it's just not a good sign...

Sorry, Mountain House! You just can't quite live up to the competition.

Survival Cooking Part IV

Next on the menu- Mainstay Emergency Food Rations

These munchies are twice the size of Datrex, and look something like squares of cornbread, only they're about 4 times as dense. They're lemon flavored, but are thoughful enough to not be overpoweringly scented. Also, the bag comes with a built in ziploc seal. (So considerate!)

With 400 calories a cube, these Mainstay blocks really can replace a meal. However, while they're not bad, they did lead me to start thinking about the purpose behind food. Sure, you can consume all the calories you need for a day in blocks of uniform, well-preserved food, but is it really worth it? So much of food is in the experience of taste and variety, different smells, changes of texture, even variations from how the same meal is prepared different days.

Without an experiential side of living, what are we really gaining? If we cut out the sensory input of life to be able to survive on through routine, eating without tasting, living without feeling, what is it we are hoping to gain by that sacrifice?

Unrelated to existentiosensory abstraction, I'd definitely pick Mainstay over Datrex as a food source, but I'm not really planning on stocking up on either any time in this, well, lifetime.

Survival Cooking Part III

MREs- Meals Ready-to-Eat/Maybe Relatively Edible?

MREs are the most commonly used survival rations, used by the US military and emergency relief packages alike. Now that I've sampled one, I can see why.

First off is the sheer convenience of the meal. While most survival rations consist of one calorie-loaded entree, MREs consist of a complete meal, beverage, entree, side item, and desert, and all you need to do is add water.

The main meal is nothing short of magic. I put the foil package of chili and pasta into the heater envelope, and added a few tablespoons of water. This activated a chemical heater in an instant. All I had to do was slide it into the angled cardboard box, and wait a few minutes for the whole meal to heat itself up. No fire, no electricity, no waiting for water to boil just, just... shazam!

Anyways, it was pretty cool.

The entree itself was pretty close to the edibility standards of food in our servery (and we have the 3rd best food in any school in the US). There was a little more pepper than I would have liked, but considering that MREs stay edible for decades while some servery leftovers in my fridge are already going stale after a week, I'm not complaining.

Additional items included a package of peanut m&ms, crackers, and a dairy shake that fell between Instant Breakfast and an iceless strawberry smoothie in tastiness.

So while shows like NCIS can make derogatory jokes about MREs as food sources, I totally vouch for their use in any number of situations. I'm going to be hard pressed to find another long-term food source providing so many easily preparable calories (over 1000) with so much variety. I'd even consider it as a handy option for the occasional OC meal next semester, backpacking supplies, or a picnic lunch. I'd even say they could be a substitute for serving for breakfast for kids, but I think only Vin Diesel can pull that one off.

Survival Cooking Part II

It is important to include vegetables in a healthy diet. These do not all have to be normal vegetables.

Sunday night I hit up Kroger after a parkour/acrobatics training session and acquired, among other things, nopales. Don't feel bad if you don't know what they are- even the guy at the register didn't know the name (a sure sign you're buying sufficiently unconventional food). Nopales are cactus leaves, typically incorporated into certain Mexican foods. Or, in our case, pasta sauce!

Recipe- buy a bunch of vegetables that sound good, tomato sauce, and an unusual ingredient, simmer well, and top with a weird cheese.

Thus, we had spinach and cactus pasta with goat cheese, a remarkably good dish with a lot of powerful, complementary tastes.

Note- these ingredients also make a great sandwich! It's just like swiss with lettuce and tomato, only goat cheese with cactus and spinach. :P

Survival Cooking Part I

So, serveries at Rice have been closed for almost 4 days now. This has provided the freedom to explore frontiers of food never before encountered by man. Not even kidding.

The first item on the list was DATREX multi-purpose emergency rations.

Each pack contains 72 hours worth of food, broken up into 18 individually wrapped bars of a questionable brown substance (flour, shortening, sugar, water, coconut, and salt, to be precise). These are designed to provide enough calories and nutrition to survive in low water environments (they have much less sodium than MREs or canned food). So great items to put on all your life rafts! They also remain safe to eat for at least 5 years. So, one giant case of these could survive long enough to feed you all through college!

When you crack open this vacuum sealed package, the smell of coconut will immediately begin to permeate the room. I advise storing DATREX in a ziplock bag after opening, unless you're really, really fond of smelling coconut, and nothing else, in your room.

After opening one of these beauties, you can bite into 200 calories worth of nondescript beige. The taste itself is relatively pleasant. It has the flavor and texture of a shortbread cookie, minus the Girl Scout touch. However, the aftertaste and general digestive sensation is not particularly enjoyable, and highly encourages eating DATREX in conjunction with another substance, to dilute it.

I personally would rather take my luck trying to catch sharks on a life raft rather than subsist on a diet of DATREX for 3 days. However, if you're just looking for a way to boost your caloric intake, I've discovered a few fun uses for it. It functions as a tasty ice cream mix-in, adding a nice crunchy texture, and effectively tripling the caloric value of a scoop of ice cream. A half-gallon of bluebell and DATREX could suddenly feed a small village. :) Other thoughts include using it as a pie crust, or else using it as a smoothie supplement.

Stay tuned for more cooking adventures with cactus and goat cheese, MREs, and more survival foods!

What happens when you give me free time

Watch out world, it's Spring Break!

Less than 24 hours in, and I've already accomplished goals and new adventures I would never have expected to pull off. Even better, it appears to be contagious. :)

Also, stand by for reviews of things like survival food sources, semi-illegal books, or parkour techniques!

Superficiality

Today, I got to deliver the message of the kids' skit summed up in one phrase- "God doesn't judge people by their outer appearance."

Sure, I was wearing robes, and telling small children about the importance of young David being picked as king, even though he was just a shepherd. But it's still highly significant, when you think about how much physical appearance matters in how we think of people.

Example 1) Celebrities (aka Daniel wants an excuse to put up a youtube video)

Celebrities are so often looked up to as being ideals for what we want to look like, or what social standards of beauty are. Say what you want to the contrary, if you've grown up watching television, you've been to some degree subconsciously programmed to have actors and models be the people by which you set standards for physical appearance.

I find this highly ironic in the digital age. Setting our standards based on people who we see pictures or videos of is skewed so much, because you can alter so much digitally. No really. Don't believe me on quite how much? Check this out- is this what you want your standard of real beauty based on? :)

Example 2) A Test Case

Now, wouldn't it be interesting if we could remove all physical traits that cause people to make judgements about us, and have everyone start on equal grounds? Well, that's never going to happen, and it's probably for the best. However, it is possible to temporarily remove a lot of those factors, with the help of some costuming.

Without admitting to anything, it's possible to take everything that factors in to how people assess you, and replace it with just the color orange. Place that single characteristic in a group of people that are all, say, dressed in white, and what happens? Lots of strong reactions. High fives, random greetings, taking pictures- limelight. Has this person done anything to merit attention, praise, or excitement from other people? Have they proven any inherent value that deserves this special treatment? Nope? All they've done is given someone an initial visual stimulus that triggers a reaction to judge based only on what they see.

Although, when what they see is a dancing orange man, you can't really blame them.

It's pretty cool.

Tough Mudder

It's me again.

So, yesterday I did this little race thing called Tough Mudder. For those of you who remember, I tried to run it last fall, but it was cancelled. (see original post if you'd like to hear me complaining about the stupidity of cancelling a mud run due to rain).

This one was not cancelled. It was quite the interesting event. Perhaps we can sum up this event through some before and after pictures.

Before:

After:

Hmm... Now if you're going entirely based on direct observation, some of you might be thinking

"So all I have to do to be a Tough Mudder champion is to swap my tutu for a some brown shoes, and wrap myself in tinfoil?"

While I would love to see any of my readers try that, there are a few overlooked factors in the whole Tough Mudding process. Perhaps some more in-depth explanations will give a better picture than a surface glance.

First off- why is Daniel in a tutu? (Actually, I don't know if anyone was asking this. I think most of my friends just take these things for granted now. *sigh* Let's pretend no one actually knows me)

My stated reasoning behind the tutu was proving that I wasn't doing the race just to be tough and to satisfy my egotistical male desire to do impressive things. However, by saying that, I realized that I was just actually making myself sound way humbler than I actually am. Which is, in a way, still showing off. There's just no way to get around being a narcissistic slimeball some days...

The real reasons I did it were

1) I wanted to wear something ridiculous over my swimsuit to be entertaining.

2) Party City was out of grass skits, otherwise I totally would have done this. (Thank you, Lion King!)

Anyways, the actual event itself wasn't too bad. I'd done all this before, so I was psychologically prepared for everything.

Except of course, for the fact that they added new challenges.

Okay, so they randomly added 3 miles to the course, making it about as long as a half-marathon. So what? That's just an extra lap around the outer loop. Okay.

Yes, so they added the Chernobyl Jacuzzi, where you have to submerge yourself completely into a tank of ice water. So what? That's just UNBELIEVABLY FREEZING COLD.

And that was in mile one. It took me until mile 4 of running before my body stopped shaking and my fists unclenched. Not even kidding. Having no body fat has its downsides.

The upsides of being so small though is that climbing 10 foot walls, crawling through tiny, dark, mud-filled tunnels, and balancing across beams over pools of water is really easy. Oh, and the cargo nets.

The silly people hung a cargo net obstacle like this-

Let's see- one net, two trees. Statistics alone could have told you I would climb a tree rather than the net.

Everything was hunky dory for the rest of the course. Hopping over logs, crawling through mud, getting tutus caught in barbed wire. I was very pleased with the amount I got to use my power-wading technique aka-

Anyways, one last thing I wanted to bring up, if you're actually still reading (attention span statistics say probably 70% of people have already left the page).

I mentioned adding new challenges to the race. A new one, that I definitely hadn't heard about, was added, affectionately called "Shocks on the Rocks". I think the only reason it was named that was because "Sadistic Nazi Torture Weapon" was already trademarked...

It's a remix of their favorite mud run event- where you crawl on your stomach through mud under barbed wire.

Only instead of mud, it's piles of ice, and instead of barbed wire, it's dangling electrical wires that SHOCK THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS OUT OF YOU BECAUSE YOU'RE SOAKING WET!

Seriously, why would anyone ever make you do that? You've run a half marathon, soaking wet and freezing cold in the middle of January, and you have to lie down in trench full of ice, and crawl 20 feet while being shocked with enough voltage that it makes your entire body twitch. Really? Oh, and in case you're wondering- no, that's not me in the picture. I do not have a full mohawk, and my shoulders are not larger than my head.

But anyways, I got another cool t-shirt out of the event, and life today has seemed much warmer, easier, and electric-shock free thanks to my crazy event habits.

Yes, it's raining.

Twice this month now, we're having flood warnings here at Rice. Houston has a great drainage system to remove water from the city- namely, by creating mini-river systems in all the streets. Rice gets it's fair share of this- with streets and sidewalks pooling enough water to wade ankle deep through on the way to class. And I'm not even going to mention West Lot...

On the other hand, we're still in really good shape. Sure, we get wet, a few cars get stuck, we create our own tidal system in the inner loop. But after a few hours, it all goes away, and nobody is much the worse for wear.

Compare this flooding to Thailand last fall.

Almost 10 million people had their homes and livelihoods damaged. 657 people lost their lives. A quarter of the country's rice crop was destroyed. (Thailand provides 30% of the global supply of rice, to put that in perspective).

So really, is getting wet on the way to class that bad?

For more pictures, click here.

First World Problems

I was almost annoyed by this sign.

And then I realized what a stupid thing that would be to be annoyed by. Only in such a elitist, overly-endowed, high-tech location like Rice do we have an additional college-specific ID card reader IN ADDITION to the specially cored locks that work with all the keys that also correspond to individual rooms across the campus.

First. World. Problem.

For anyone unaware of the concept of a first world problem, it's a petty issue that is only relevant in the most developed, over-affluent areas of the world and pales in comparison to any issue people struggle with in the rest of the world.

For more commentary on this deeply rooted issue of life perspective and socio-economics, I will now refer you to a highly respectable expert in the field- a teenager with a youtube account. First World Problems.

Back to Business

Yeah, yeah, it's been forever since I've posted on my blog. I'm going to blame it on the fact that I during the past few months I had to suffer through a debilitating viral infection from the tropics while still spending hours every day working on a project to help fight starvation in Ethiopia. (Not that this was what happened, but it sounds like a pretty cool excuse.)

Anyways, it would make sense to kick things off again with a really cool story with pictures of me running through flames in a tutu or unicycling around Rice covered in orange spandex, but I'm sorry.

Those are posts for next week. :)

All you get today is a somewhat silly video of me talking about this Stop Online Piracy Act, a so-called attack on freedom of speech that wants to restrict access to illegal material online.

Discussion is highly encouraged.