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!