Just Admit It

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Hanging from the office lights, I casually snipped off and conked the HR guy, Gavin, on the head with a freakishly large, size eleven boot.

It was his boot.

He was trying to get me to give his boot back to him. He’s so tall, you’d think he could jump higher, but reality isn’t always as you think. He jumped, but he barely left the ground. Then I let go of the lights and knocked him out. To play fair, I left his boot by his unconscious head. He’ll find it easily.

Teasing him is my habit these days. There are things about him that make it seem like he is absolutely begging to be teased. For one, he’s noticeably cute. He’s tall and very much a man. I’m very much a woman, so there’s that between us.

He also likes to wear hats. Stupid hats. He thinks they make him look like something other than what he really is. He has his wide-brimmed “adventure” hat. He has his bowler and his stovepipe and even one of those hats like the guy in the band Cake wears. It doesn’t make him look like the guy in the band Cake. It doesn’t make him look like anything to me except a target.

I stole his hats whenever I got the chance. I still steal them. And when he left his boots on the side of his desk while he was clipping his freakishly large toenails—that was nothing more than blatant temptation. How could any self-respecting tease pass up such an opportunity? How could anyone not see those boots sitting there like something more likely to be found in a dry dock? Anyway, I stole one while he was looking and he chased me for it. You know how that ended. While he was out cold, I stole another hat.

People in the office have called me “floozy” and “tease” and some other things not worth repeating. “Dum.” They call me dum. I’m no ladder-climber. I’m just in the office to do my job. Like teasing Gavin.

Don’t get me wrong. The teasing is not all one-sided. He can send the tease right back at me. He isn’t one of those who can’t take the bug—he could return the bug with style, if he wants. He told me once about how dum my spandex is. “Who wears stretchy pants to work?”

I do. It’s dum, like dum-dum dum, you know? It’s goofy and self-aggrandizing, but I’m addicted. Addicted to spandex. Is spandex a brand name? Should it be capitalized? I don’t know. I’m dum, remember?

Back to the point, though: thank goodness he never stole my pants and hid them behind the break room refrigerator. That could’ve been really embarrassing. And that would be where he’ll find his bowler hat if he thinks to look there. Behind the break room refrigerator.

His “adventure” hat is having its own adventure out on the fire escape ladder. He might not know to look there either.

He stole my coffee cup not too long ago and hid it on the mail delivery cart. I found my cup and stashed his stovepipe hat there in return. Do you think he’ll find it?

His Cake hat? I bet you can guess where that is. It’s in my spandex.

The other people in the office say I’m showing off my butt when I wear stretchy pants to work. What will they say when they see this odd lump on my rear? Will they even care? Will they tell me I need to go to the doctor and get the lump checked? Will they tell me to stop teasing Gavin? What will they say when Gavin wakes up? Will they tell him they’ve seen a hat shaped lump somewhere, but they can’t say where exactly? Maybe they’ll give him a clue. Maybe they’ll play that game Hot-and-Cold. I’ll have my deepest girly thrills if they do. They’ll all be saying, no, they’ll be ADMITTING, that my butt is hot.

A Bob Ross Positive

It really is easy not to like things. Or rather, I should say, it’s really easy to express a negative opinion about things. Especially art. Especially your own art. Art is easy to dismiss. Art is easy to criticize. It’s easy to find the faults in a piece of art. Everyone with a mouth can criticize a movie, a book, a painting, a wood carving, a sculpture, a poem, a song, a cartoon, or a sand castle.

Bob Ross enjoyed calling mistakes “happy accidents.” Why? Probably to just keep moving. You don’t get very far as an artist if you get hung up on the mistakes. The faults will happen. But if you swing it more to your own corner, then you continue with the art. If you slow down even a little bit, the slowing can turn into stopping. Then what are you doing? Not art.

A perspective of “good mistakes” or “happy accidents” will get you so much farther than a perspective of “disastrous mistakes” or “dreadful, deadly accidents.”

You’ve probably experienced someone who couldn’t get over a certain situation—someone who saw a mistake as something worse than it really was—and you probably wondered how they could see it that way. You may have tried to help them get over it, tried to convince them that the problem wasn’t so bad. They turned it around, didn’t they? They told you the problem was the most serious problem ever. They told you it was devastating. They convinced themselves it was the end of art, it was the end of the world, and they tried to convince you of the same. You probably thought, “This person is hopeless. They claim the light that illuminates the path is too bright and blinding.”

How could you help someone out of such a mental state? How can you overcome such a self-defeating attitude? Isn’t it obvious? The cure is to show the poor downer dude (or dudette?) some Bob Ross. Bring peace to the world through instructional painting videos. Bring optimism to the lost with beautiful landscapes and “happy accidents.” That’s not the only way, of course, but it’s in the Top 10 of ways to cure a self-degrading funk. So right about now, you’re probably wondering what the other nine ways are. I could be funny and tease you: “Tune in next week…” but I won’t. Here’s the list:

Top 10 Ways of Developing a Positive Creative Mental State

  1. Watch videos of Bob Ross. Pick up the habit of seeing accidents as a positive.
  2. Build a sand castle. Sometimes the most temporary art forms teach us how to be less serious, less stressed, less negative.
  3. Start making mistakes in your art on purpose, then fix them.
  4. Consider a child showing you some macaroni glued together. They tell you it’s their favorite and they made it for you. What is it? Does it really matter what it is? Would you ever tell that child their creation was ugly? If not, then why do it to yourself?
  5. Meditation. Sit still and contemplate things that are beyond your art. After a few moments of separation, then go back to your art. Rarely does meditation ever make people turn toward the negative.
  6. Rorschach test. Rorschach test upside down. Did your answers change?
  7. Go for a hike. What do you see in nature? Do you see perfection?
  8. Carve a bear in a tree stump with a chainsaw. Too difficult? Maybe the chainsaw artist thinks your particular brand of art is too difficult? Did you ever think of that?
  9. List the worst, the good, and the great about your art. Throw away the “worst” list. Post the “great” list on your fridge.
  10. Talk to other artists, especially those who do different art than you. Find out what they do and do not enjoy about it. Chances are you’ll find things in common.

Funny Tweets

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It’s funny.

Everything’s funny, really.

I can’t admit that I get out much. I’m the infonet version of a couch potato. My explorations into the far reaches of the infonet have yet to begin. If I were to draw you a map of the web I’ve visited, it would be a single line. Twitter? Yep. Wikipedia? Never. I avoid it like a plague. WordPress? Of course! Faceboogie? Sometimes. Darkweb? Pssh! Who has time for that? Not me. YouTube? Once every six months, maybe. Although I must admit, I watched a couple hours of Joan Jett videos one time. Would that be considered a binge? Probably.

I’ve seen the Kid Snippets and Bad Lip Reading and Studio C. All of those are worth your time, for sure. You wanna laugh? Check out any one of those on YouTube. For the most part, they hold up. They’ll get you chuckling.

The main thing I want to get across here is that even though I don’t extend my interests to Soundcloud and Goodreads, I can see that there are people who sincerely enjoy those sites. In fact, there’s a fellow named Fred Nolan who did a Soundcloud compilation of my one-liners for me. The best way to let you sense what I mean is to link it here:

Funny Tweets

Fred and I hope you get a laugh or two out of it.

Hiding in Plain Sight

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Hiding things usually requires some use of clever intellect. Premeditated hiding. The kind of hiding you did when you were a child playing Hide-and-Seek isn’t so far different from hiding your valuables behind a loose brick in the fireplace. When you try to keep something from being discovered, don’t you put yourself in the perspective of someone who might be looking for that thing? When you’re hiding yourself, don’t you think, “Where could I go where they wouldn’t expect me to be?” When you’re hiding valuables, you probably look for locations people wouldn’t normally reach, places people wouldn’t normally search or poke or probe, places they wouldn’t stick their nose.

When trying to divine genetic secrets, shouldn’t we look in all the places we wouldn’t think to look? If they really are secrets, shouldn’t we be seeking like a child, hoping to find a friend in the dark corners, forgotten closets, or behind furniture?

The hideaways of nature are no more easy to define than the hideaways of Providence. Where would you put the genetic pattern with the secret of regrowth? Where would you put the genetic pattern with the secret of rebirth? Where would you put the genetic pattern with the secret of evolutionary advancement? Where would you put it if you were a million times smarter than you are now?

How far would you search for a friend in a playful game? Would you search the same way for some item of value cached away in an old house? Would you search the same way for your inheritance? What lengths would you go to for a glimpse into the future of mankind?

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There is a not-so-secret system scientists call CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It’s a long name which doesn’t mean much if you’re reading it for the first time. In a pinch, it means an easy and inexpensive method of modifying a gene. See? You might not have gotten that meaning from those words, unless someone gave you an assist on the definition. The part of this discovered technology that is fascinating to me is that it was seen in the actions of bacteria. Bacteria were found using the CRISPR system to modify the genetic constitutions of viruses.

This is where all the questions above come in to play. I question myself. I had learned a long time ago that viruses were the rulers. Viruses have long proven strong, resilient, and adaptable. The medical community taught me about the virus “kingdom” in which bacteria were the lesser, weaker forms. In the old, assumed system you could introduce a bacteria into a virus occupied area and the virus would destroy the bacteria to stay resident. Then along comes CRISPR, a method bacteria use to “unzip” or “cut” viruses. Did bacteria learn this behavior? Or has it always existed and we humans didn’t know about it?

My problem with learning this is not that it exists, but that I didn’t question the assumption of absolute rule I learned earlier. Beware the absolutes. We humans get hold of these notions of absolutes and we tend to think we suddenly have super intelligence. Getting stuck on a certain way of thinking is sometimes referred to as narrow-mindedness. Having a bit more flexibility in your thought is known as broad-mindedness. I regret not being a bit more broad-minded. Then I might not have slapped my head so hard when I learned about CRISPR.

You Won’t Believe This…

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You aren’t going to believe this…I’m jealous of someone with diabetes.

My friend eats eggs and sausage ALL THE TIME.

Not that I’m a vegetarian, but I don’t eat a lot of meat. Meat just doesn’t appeal to me that much, until I see my friend with sausage and eggs FOR LUNCH. That lucky diabetic. Wouldn’t it be great to have certain meals at times of the day other than the traditional, other than the expected time of day? Breakfast for lunch, lunch for dinner, and for sure dinner for breakfast. And here’s this friend of mine who probably is jealous of my sandwich because, you know, the limit on carbs and all that.

What would we do if we went to a friend’s house and heard them talk like they were running a hotel or a cafe?

“What would you like? We serve breakfast all day.”

We’d tell them we wanted to move in and live there, wouldn’t we? I don’t really know about you. I would, though. I’d move myself in at least for a week.

It’s so enticing to think about being served whatever you want whenever the mood strikes. If you see your friend with delicious food, ANY food, as long as it looks and smells good, you probably crave it. If you’re driving down the street and you smell chicken cooking, you probably have a sudden craving for chicken. If you smell barbecue cooking in the neighborhood, don’t you think it’s barbecue time? And if you smell it and see it at the same time, oh yeah, you want to invite yourself to the party.

Bread baking in the oven? Forget about it! You want that first warm slice. You’d eat the heel on BOTH sides of the loaf, if anyone would let you.

Maybe, just maybe, even if you were diabetic. You’d skip a few other nutrients, just for that taste you haven’t enjoyed for so long. You’d exercise more, just to feel the warm bread on your tongue. You’d eat one thousand boiled carrots for the chance to make the first cut into the warm bread.

I’m not sure about any of this. I’m only empathizing with people with diabetes. See how much empathy I have for you? See how I managed to convey a little compassion there?

Now could you share some of your eggs and sausage?