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