Welcome To The Flip Side

Two things I’d love to learn how to do well: 

1. Dance.
2. Play the saxophone.  

Check this out.

Disclaimer with regards to point two vis-a-vis the link: I’ve never really been ‘seriously involved,’ (goodness gracious, one uses the same language to discuss interpersonal relationships) with an instrument - studied the piano for a couple of years, but I put a stop to lessons when schoolwork began to conflict.  The only reason I want to learn how to play the saxophone is I think it sounds nice.  I know nothing about it at all.  I don’t even know if the soundtrack to the video has a saxophone in it.  It seems like it might.  

Anyhow, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve become very interested in conscious movement - especially over the past month.  I’m not necessarily interested in dance for its own sake (though dance for its own sake is a wonderful thing), but how I can learn to harness the power of conscious movement and apply it to other disciplines - such as clowning and physical comedy.  

The dancer at the other end of the link knows where all of his body is at any given point.  No bits are left unaccounted.  An inquiry into what style of dance he’s practicing turned up an interesting analysis.

“It’s a blend of everything.  Look, there’s broadway.  Hip-hop.”  Etc., etc.  ”He’s learned how to move his body, and he’s doing it well.”

Not helpful.  

“How can I learn to move my body like him?”

“Well…if I had to pin it down, I’d say that the closest thing to what he’s doing that you can learn here is hip-hop.”

So now, in the latest stage of my quest to become a master of conscious movement, I shall foray into the world of hip-hop dancing.

Let’s do this.  

“Party Down.”

It’s a television show about a bunch of bitter, not-quite-made-it actors etc. who work for a catering company as their ‘real’ job.  I’ve watched a few episodes - laughed my head off.  

There’s one character - name of Roman - who’s not an actor, but a writer.  Throughout the series, he’ll make comments re: why he ‘didn’t want that job anyway - I do hard sci-fi.’  This is funny because 1) Roman is looking for (presumably!) commercial success - but a ‘purist’ can only cater to a specific demographic, and 2) Roman is a terrible writer.  The scripts he write that occasionally work their way into the show are all resoundly atrocious.  It’s a bit sad.  

This isn’t an attack on sci-fi, by the way.  Good sci-fi exists.  There’s just a great deal of bad sci-fi as well.  

Anyhow, I recently watched an episode of Party Down wherein something Roman wrote wasn’t awful.  What changed?  Well, to clarify, the script, when first introduced to the characters of the show, was horrible.  After a bit of pressing, it was revealed that Roman never has readings of any of his work.  He doesn’t workshop, and he doesn’t re-write.  What made his writing better?  He had a reading, listened to some constructive criticism, and re-wrote.  

It wouldn’t have won an Oscar, but hey, improvement is a wonderful thing.  

And having readings of screenplays/scripts is an incredibly important part of the process of writing a screenplay and/or script.  

I wrote a post on how to deal with “worry” tonight.  Tumblr ate it.  This is the second night in a row this has happened.  I re-wrote the post last night because Tumblr only ate about half of it.  Tumblr ate all of this one, though.  I am sad, but not sad enough to re-type it.  I wrote it, and that’s the point of this project, anyhow.  Hell, I didn’t even get to see the Tumbeasts.

It is late.

I am going to bed.  

Good night.  

Something very strange happened to me last night.  I was out at about ten PM, taking pictures, when a man called out and approached me. 

“Hey, how are you?”

“Good, you?”

He handed me a piece of plywood, maybe two inches by four inches in as non-threatening a manner as possible it is to hand a two by four to a stranger at ten PM when no one else is around.  On the two by four was an image.  There was a wax base - on top of that there was a drawing of a goblet full of red wine.  Above the goblet were the words “HAVE SUM.”  

The man started to walk away.  I called out after him.

“Hey!  What’s the red stuff?”

Without turning around, he yelled “Blood!”

I stood there for a good five seconds, trying to process what he’d just said.  

“Really?” I croaked.

“Nah, it’s wax.”

It was difficult to tell if he had been joking.

I walked to the general store in a daze, the arm holding the plywood stuck out at an unnatural angle.  What to do with this piece of art that might or might not be a biohazard?  Stick it in a ziplock bag, intend to keep it, then think better of it, photograph it, and throw it out.

Because while adventures are awesome, I have no desire to get caught up in a random person’s problems.

And that was creepy as shit.  

A friend of mine recently challenged me to participate in the following writing exercise. 

Note - the following text appears many places throughout the internet.  I chose to cite a Penn State website.  

“The T.S. Eliot/John Gardner Killer Exercise: This exercise is quite possibly the most difficult, demanding and important exercise a writer can ever do. The poet and critic, T. S. Eliot, coined the phrase “objective correlative” to designate what he believed was the most important element in writing: Rendering the description of an object so that the emotional state of the character from whose point of view we receive the description is revealed WITHOUT ever telling the reader what that emotional state is or what has motivated it.

The late John Gardner, recognized in his lifetime as the leading creative writing teacher in the United States, developed the following exercise for students:

    A middle-age man is waiting at a bus stop. He has just learned that his son has died violently. Describe the setting from the man’s point of view WITHOUT telling your reader what has happened. How will the street look to this man? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? That this man will notice? What will his clothes feel like? Write a 250 word description.”

My first response of many to the prompt (not necessarily here - in general).

“The man stands at the bus stop.  He wears a t-shirt, running shorts, headband, and sneakers.  He can feel his pulse in the soles of his feet and in the hollow of his throat.  He breathes heavily, but does not correct for it.  

He thinks:  Will the bus show up?  Of course it will.  Why wouldn’t it?  Well, why would it?  Society functions not at the direction of an all-powerful, centralized authority, but as the sum of promises, commitments, and routines individuals make and keep.  Keep, hopefully.

The bus comes.  He steps on board, pays the fare, and sits down.

A muscular man in his twenties with dyed hair sits down across the aisle.  The first man stares at him.  The man with dyed hair looks forward, glances at the first man out of the corner of his eye, and returns his gaze to the front of the bus.  The first man turns away and bites the seat in front of him.  

Twenty minutes later, he thinks: I should probably cry.”  

You can do anything with duct tape.  I recently had the pleasure of watching an episode of Mythbusters which started off like this:  (to paraphrase)

‘Crazy With Beard: Hey, do you think we could do an entire episode on duct tape?

Bald Guy: Yeah, that sounds good.’

That conversation probably happened just like that.  

*Note: Don’t attempt any of the things I mention in this post.*

Originally used by the army (and known in its early days as “duck tape,” it was used to patch holes, hold things together, and do what it’s used for now.  Why did the army like it?  It was (and is) both water resistant and incredibly strong.  A single strip (doubled over) can deal with - at least for short periods - seventy-five pounds of force.  That’s not a measure of the strength of the adhesive - that’s just the point at which the fabric/plastic backing gives up.  

You’ve got this crazy strong tape, and you have your own television show about doing crazy things.  What do you do?  A lot.

First, the mythbusters guys lifted a car by attaching a duct tape sling holding said car to a crane.  One hundred strands of tape held the car in the air (for about a minute until they started to break)!  What else do you do?  See if duct tape over a hole in a boat will keep it from leaking.  Answer - yes! for about half an hour.  What else?  Build an entire sailboat out of duct tape!  Does it sail?  Yes!  Completely seaworthy.  The duct tape acts as a futuristic, indestructible skin - like animal hide, only more space-age.  What else?

Build a cannon entirely out of duct tape.  Yes.  A cannon.  The kind that shoots cannon balls after you light the fuse.  Normally, cannons are made of (with good reason!) metal.  Strong metal.  The kind that isn’t duct tape.  I watched with wide eyes as the mythbusters team constructed the duct tape cannon (Two inch thick walls of tape to contain an explosion.  Two.)  and then fired off the control, metal cannon.  The resulting puff of flame and force sent the cannonball over five hundred yards from the launch point.  The team fired the duct tape cannon, after remarking that if it wasn’t strong enough, it wouldn’t be a cannon, but a bomb.  

It worked.  

As a friend watching the episode with me commented, “This stuff is too powerful for people to have.”

There’s more truth to that than humor.  

Lady Gaga.  The woman follows me everywhere.  Inside my head and (maybe) physically.  

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being in New York City.  As my mother and I were driving though it, I noticed a very nice car acting very stupidly.  The specific actions have faded into the mists of deep memory - practically speaking, she was driving badly, and it showed.  She was endangering the lives of everyone on the road - and we were behind her.  

Heh.

Why do I say ‘she?’  That isn’t a sexist remark.  What do you do when you’re behind a car that’s driving strangely?  You pull ahead of it.  As we squeezed past the Porsche, I caught a glimpse of the driver.  She was a platinum blonde either talking on the phone, doing her makeup, or both.  

“She looks like Lady Gaga.”  

Mom processed this information.  Some gears clunked into place.  

“It might actually be her,” she said.

“What?”

It wasn’t crazy talk.  We were around the area she’s from, and disregarding that she was on tour at the time…it wasn’t just a Porsche.  It was an exotic Porsche.  

“Can you get a second look?”  I nodded and turned around.  Mom slowed down - we were still a safe distance from crazy lady, but close enough that I could make out her face.  And…

“Nope.”

Mom immediately sped up, and we left weaving-Porsche-ditz to destroy the East Side.  

Mom spoke.  ”How do you know that it wasn’t her?”

“Didn’t look like her.”

“She’s got all that crazy makeup all the time - it could have been her.”

For the record, I firmly believe that we hadn’t passed Lady Gaga.  (It really didn’t look like her.)  However, my mother raised a valid point.  When you’ve got makeup and crazy outfits, you become the sum of material accessories, at least in the eyes of the public.

Hence, this picture is incredibly interesting, especially from a photographer’s perspective.

This isn’t something you would wear outside.  I’m willing to bet this isn’t something Lady Gaga wears on a regular basis - at least, not without hairspray and safety pins (which in and of itself wouldn’t be surprising, but whatever).  The aesthetic appeal of the pose is in its temporariness.  Gaga looks like she was interrupted - by the viewer or a gust of wind is irrelevant.  You can’t walk into a club like that.

Or maybe you can.  It would look sill(ier than it would anyway) though, because the style would loose its ‘transience.’  It would become an elaborate permanent style, as opposed to an ‘interrupted look.’  

I saw a blind man today.

He’s appeared around town a few times.  Every time I’ve seen him, I’ve been struck by how noble he looks.  There he is, this guy walking around with a cane in front of him, eyes shut - and his posture is perfect, he’s well dressed, and he seems like he’s in his element.  (It doesn’t seem like he really needs the cane - he barely uses it when he walks.)  Combine this with harsh, angled winter light and the fact that he is, in fact, a handsome dude - he looks like some sort of minor deity.  Age - anywhere from eighteen to twenty-two.  

As I implied, I passed him earlier today.  We were going opposite directions.  Ten minutes later, I came back the way I had come, towards my dorm.  As I approached, I saw a figure without a coat standing outside my dorm, eyes closed, arms crossed in front of them.  I assumed it was someone welcoming the day.  Then I got closer, and realized this wasn’t just anyone.  

It was the blind man.

He wasn’t wearing his coat, and his cane was nowhere to be seen.  As I watched, he stepped slowly, but very surely, onto the sidewalk and began to walk down the street.  Combined with the context and harsh light, it was beautiful.  Talking to him seemed like it would create an unnecessary distraction, and taking his picture would have just been rude.  He kept on walking, and I went inside, big smile.  

I’m going to find this person and ask his name.  

Video games: a case study in how you shouldn’t conduct an interview.  

            Me: Why do people who don’t play video games not play video games? 

Tabby: Because I’m bad at them. 

Me: Any other reason? 

Tabby: No.  That’s all.

The Pyrotechnic: I do, I just don’t play them that often.

Me: That’s not what you said before. 

The Pyrotechnic: Yeah it is.

Me: Well, no, I asked why do people who don’t play video games not play video games? And you implied that you don’t play video games.  Regardless, why do you not play them that often?

The Pyrotechnic: I dunno, I just do other things more often.  Like I’ll read something more than I’ll choose to play a video game, and I just don’t own that many.  But I do enjoy the ones I have. 

Me: You mentioned an objection to content earlier.

The Pyrotechnic: Oh, yeah.  It’s just that I get really emotionally invested, so if you’re running through zombie infected villages in a non-descript European nation’s backcountry, it starts to get a little pathetic because I keep getting killed because I’m too invested.  But I really enjoy playing the video games that I have. 

Todd: She just didn’t like Resident Evil.  

Me: Why do people who play video games play video games?

Todd: Is there a time we can postpone this interview to a time I’m less sleepy?  

The Pyrotechnic: I didn’t care.

Todd: Yeah, but it seems like a big mental effort right now.  Are you writing everything that I’m saying?  Because that’s not conducive to anything.  I’m done now. 

*Pause* 

My teeth really hurt. 

Touch.  

Defined by dictionary.com as “to come into or be in contact with,” touch is powerful.  ’Touch’ doesn’t need to be human-to-human contact.  For example, to paraphrase an exchange I had a few days ago:

Me: “Hey!  Did you change your shirt four times this rehearsal?”

Dancer Friend: “Yeah!”  

“Why?”  

“I’m feeling low energy.  Changing my clothes gives me energy.”

While there is a certain satisfaction in wearing a ‘fresh’ garment in and of itself - one that isn’t sopping with your sweat, grime, etc. - there’s more going on than just hygiene or a hyped-up novelty effect.  Affecting tactile stimulation seems to ‘reset’ whatever part of the body experiences said touch.  I don’t really understand the mechanics of how it works, but it does work, and I’m not complaining.  

This post isn’t going to be an analysis of anything.  It’s just going to be a recap of something awesome which happened today.  

There’s a play going up which may or may not be set in an insane asylum.  The stage directions call for various different noises one might hear in a poorly run, anachronistic, creepy-as-all-hell insane asylum.  How to get those sounds?  

Record them.

I just spent a fairly large chunk of my time tonight running around, screaming, yelling, chuckling, and moaning.  The director of the aforementioned play is a sound designer in his spare time - it was interesting to work with someone who really seemed to know what they were doing.  

“Now this group move to the end of the hall, this group halfway down, and this group move to the other end around the corner.”  We’d get into formation - properly spaced, etc.

“Great!  Now I’m going to move the microphones and we’ll do that again.”

An educational experience?  Yes.  

In “Eurydice,” by Sara Ruhl, a father has this advice for his daughter.  

“There is no choice of any importance in life but the choosing of a beloved.”

While I agree with the father’s sentiment - “the choosing of a beloved” is important indeed - I think that there’s another choice in life which carries an importance comparable to - if not greater than - that of choosing one’s life partner.  

The choosing of a name.  What’s in a name?  It’s a tag strapped to your consciousness - baggage for better or for worse.  It’s how you identify yourself, how others identify you - it’s part of who you are.  Damn right it’s important.  

I don’t wish to touch the nature vs. nurture debate, other than to say that, regardless of extent, one’s name affects one’s life.  

A friend of mine recently told me that they’re a “name-hipster.”  That is, they dislike oft used names.  To paraphrase, ‘I can’t stand it when there are five people in the same room with the same name.’  That’s why nicknames are important.  They provide sometimes sorely needed variation, both for practical and aesthetic purposes.  

How does one come up with a nickname?  Two ways.  

1. You can let them come on their own.   
2. You can take matters into your own hands.  

If you’ve chosen option two, here’s what you might do.  

• List the characteristics of the thing you want to make a nickname for.
• Find a word that, in one way or another, reflects those characteristics.

An example, drawn from the aforementioned friend’s quest for a nickname for a friend of their own.

Characteristics:

• Toast
• Bread baked on top of a mountain
• Facial hair
• Slow dance

The name?  Pan.  Pan, the hairy god of revelry, Pan, bread baked atop a mountain and toasted.  

Hello, Pan!

“MOM: A Boy Scout?!  You mean to tell me you did community service?  Voluntarily?!

DAD: I was eight years old, Delores, I wasn’t thinking.  You remember what it was like back then - it was the 70s.  

MOM: Great.  So what’s going to happen now?  Our son will think, ‘Well, my dad sold Boy Scout Cookies, so- 

DAD: (Overlapping:) We didn’t sell cookies.

MOM: -maybe I’ll up and join the Peace Corps.”

- Jonathan Rand, “Drugs Are Bad.”

The quote preceding today’s post is from a humorous play about a mother and father who raise their child ‘right’ by permitting all the things he ‘shouldn’t’ do and forbidding all the things he ‘should.’  It’s classic parental reverse psychology.  

Interesting that the mother labels the Peace Corps the ‘worst of the worst.’  If anything, the Peace Corps - both conceptually and in its practical application - has seeped into the public consciousness.  But what is the Peace Corps?

It’s a governmental organization whereby volunteers travel to assist countries that request help, in whatever form that might be.  For example, from a paper I wrote on the topic back in high school - “’Peace Corps Response provides opportunities for returned Peace Corps volunteers…to undertake short-term, high impact assignments in various programs around the world’[1] that can range from three to six months in duration.  These assignments often include disaster relief following natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods.”

 The Peace Corps website has this to say about its mission:

“The Peace Corps’ mission has three simple goals:

1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.”

Very commendable goals.  It’s kind of crazy, though.  Think about it - an organization designed to ‘help’ people?  No ulterior motives.  Just helping people.  Wonderfully bizarre.  And who could get such a crazy organization off the ground?  A man named Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps.  Almost all descriptions of Shriver make note of his energy (his staff referred to him as “His Bubbliness” at least once), his charisma, and his tirelessness.  Shriver was also a bit nuts.  He was known to throw himself at potentially hostile locals with an outstretched arm and huge grin, almost never sleep (excepting places where you shouldn’t be able to sleep, like in jeeps rocketing across a desert, or beneath his seat on airplanes), and generally be a beacon of loud American friendliness.  

As I mentioned, I wrote a paper on this during high school.  As I was going along, I noticed that there were no contemporary references to Shriver.  I assumed that he’d died, but I did some quick research to be sure.  Nope.  Sadly enough, he was alive and kicking - but suffering from Alzheimer’s.  Life doesn’t seem fair sometimes.   

Sargent Shriver passed away today.  He was ninety-five.  

A moment of silence for Shriver.

May the Peace Corps live on.

[1] http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.former.response

‘“It’s fun going to new places,” [the pilot] said.
“New places!” shouted the Head of the Air Force. “What the blazes d’you mean new places?”
“This place we’re flying over now isn’t in the atlas, is it?” the pilot said, grinning.
“You’re darn right it isn’t in the atlas!” cried the Head of the Air Force. “We’ve flown clear past the last page!”…The young pilot was still grinning broadly. He said to them, “That’s why they always put two blank pages at the back of the atlas. They’re for new countries. You’re meant to fill them in yourself.”’

- Roald Dahl, “The BFG”

I read “The BFG” ages ago, yet, even as the specifics of the book faded into the recesses of my brain, this passage remained clear.  Why?  

1) It’s beautiful.  A subjective measure, but true nonetheless.  

2) There is, within each of us, a desire to explore.  To find new things, to map the unmapped, chart the uncharted, etc.  To go where no person has gone before.  There’s a peculiar relationship man has with the undiscovered.  It’s difficult to describe in words - something simultaneously primal and intellectual.  It’s kind of like the feeling you get when walking outside on the street late at night after a light rain in the winter.  The air is cold, but humid.  Lights reflect off of the road.  You realize that poetry has permeated reality.

It’s difficult to come up with something completely new.  As Carl Sagan said,  ”If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”  Heck, computers have a hard enough time as it is generating random numbers!  Something improvised, then, is rarely (if ever) without precedence.  Most improvisation, in all contexts, is a variation on one or more themes.  A good metaphor - building a house atop a preexisting foundation.  

This is why jumping into contact improv cold isn’t the best way for a non-dancer to become more adept at physical comedy.  

As I mentioned yesterday, a contact improv jam took place today.  Watching it, I realized that though, (again, as Wikipedia says) contact improv doesn’t have a closed vocabulary, it’s not based off nothing.  The dancers I watched today all made use of ‘general’ physical dance vocabulary.  Hence my previous excitement at what I perceived as the benefits of contact’s open-endedness was misdirected.  I don’t yet command either a massive ‘general’ dance vocabulary or a physicality as deliberate as theirs.  Learning a form of dance with more of a formalized (perhaps even quantifiable) structure would help develop both of the aforementioned traits.  

I’m interested in dance.  Not necessarily ballet (which is sometimes what first comes to people’s minds), or even anything really stylized.  Just conscious movement.

Oh, phooey.  How do I explain this?  

Let’s start with comedy.  Actually, let’s start with physical comedy.  For the record - though most physical comedy involves people pretending to hurt themselves/one another through clumsiness, etc., there is very little clumsiness in the actual performance of physical comedy, scripted or not.  Everything is controlled.  Every part of the body is accounted for.  It’s that control a physical comedian strives for.  

It’s that control that characterizes dance.  If something moves, it’s because you want it to move.  Consider for a moment how monumental accomplishing that is.  

So that’s why I’m interested in contact improv.  What is contact improv?  According to contactimprovisation.net (which in turn cites the book Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and other Moving Ideas, by Nancy Stark Smith and David Koteen, available through Contact Editions), contact improvisation, among other things, can be defined as “spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges.  Alertness is developed in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one’s basic survival instincts. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones…”

Another interesting thing about contact improv.  According to Wikipedia, “[w]hile there is now an established CI Fundamentals technique, CI dance vocabulary is not closed.”  This means that it’s easy to pick up - meaning it provides a quick to learn way of practicing conscious movement.  

I’m going to see a contact improv ‘jam’ tomorrow.  It’s going to be lot of fun.  

Also, it’s improv.  And I’m always interested in improv.  

Every so often, you come across a phrase so powerful it feels like it touches your very core.  Gives you goosebumps.  I recently came across one of those.  Someone I know said “This is my journey.”  

Not only is the phrase, objectively speaking, pregnant with implication - it’s also deeply touching in a subjective way.  Teenagers are concerned (to a fault!) with identity - the whole ‘how do I stand out?  What makes me different?  What makes me unique?’ thing.  To be able to say with any certainty that something defines you or what you do is a big deal.  It’s a little bit like tattooing yourself, though, in general, teenage proclamations of identity are less permanent than permanent tattoos.  

Or it’s an overly dramatic pronouncement by a hormone fueled youngun.  I’m tempted to say it is, in fact, the latter, but something stays my hand.   What’s to say that the person from whom the statement originated wasn’t being overly dramatic AND wasn’t claiming any specific ‘identity?’  What if they were just acknowledging the ‘vastness’ of their existence?  

That’s just as touching, if not more so.   

Running barefoot.  Humans have done it for as long as they’ve been around - until we invented shoes.  I’m not going to touch the debate on whether barefoot running is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ for you than running with fancy running shoes.  (Though I’ve heard - and my quick sweep of the internet can’t find a source to back this up, so you’ll have to trust the shoe salesman who didn’t have a vested interest in telling me this - that barefoot runners have stronger foot bones than people who run with shoes.)  

I mention barefoot running because I tried it today.  As part of the rehearsal process for the show I’m going to be in this February, the cast is participating in a physically intensive training regimen thing.  As part of my own warm-up routine, I run for twenty minutes or so.  Today, though, I remembered that a fellow cast-member had, the day before, hurt her ankle while running on snowy sidewalks and is now not feeling so hot.  I thus decided to run laps around a gym.  My shoes were really wet, though, and it seemed inconsiderate to track water everywhere, so I shed my shoes - and then my socks, to gain traction - and ran.  Barefoot.  

This study ”suspect[s] that the most common form of [barefoot] foot strike was a forefoot strike.”  Lots of things on the internet I find about barefoot running say things to this effect.  ”[T]hose who are tempted to try running barefoot — or nearly so — should proceed slowly.”  More specifically, the aforementioned Harvard study mentions that “[i]f you have been a heel striker most of your life, it will take lots of work to switch to forefoot striking.”  It’s supposed to be difficult to unlearn one style of running and switch to another.  However, while this advice is probably very sound, it neglects one thing - humans generally respond to pain.  

It hurts to strike the ground with your heel first when running barefoot.  

Unconsciously, within a few strides I shifted to a forefoot strike.  Whether it was, from a technical perspective, a ‘good’ forefoot strike is irrelevant.  (It probably wasn’t.)  A person who had worn shoes all of his life had figured out the right way to run without shoes in mere seconds.  Other thing about that - though my form is on the right track, the normally shod runner faces another obstacle: a lack of protective callouses.  

Ow.  

Random: (adj.) proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason,or pattern.*

Randomness.  There’s something about chaos that’s devilishly appealing.  A lack of order - no explanation for anything.  Rationalization?  A bad joke.  Randomness lends itself to absurdity, which brings me to my main question - is absurdity funny?  If so, why, and to what extent can absurdity be utilized effectively in humor?

I was recently in the kitchen when a fellow student who lives down the hall came in with a stack of post-its.  Onto the freezer went a graph displaying an exponential relationship between number of gerbils and time.  I laughed, of course.  One of the people I was hanging out with at the time was less amused.  

“I don’t get it.”  

The gerbil mathematician explained that (and I paraphrase) “it means whatever it means to you.  It doesn’t have to mean anything.”  He then proceeded to label various kitchen implements in a similar fashion.  It was quite funny, and it got me thinking.  There’s a fine line between absurdity for the sake of absurdity and clever, absurd humor.  Where is that line?  

As a sort of experiment, I decided to semi-participate in a silly facebook game.  The rules:

• Go to Wikipedia.  Click Random Article.  This is your band name.
• Go to quotationspage.com.  Click Random Quote.  Scroll to the last quote on the page.  Choose the last four or five words of the quote.  This is your album name.
• Go to flickr.  Click to see the interesting photos of the last seven days.  Choose the third picture.  This is your album cover.  

I tried it and followed the rules as scrupulously as possible.  As I should have expected, the resulting thingy made no sense.  The band was Jesse Benavides.  The album: “of you, make him mad.”  I don’t really want to post the photo here.  Needless to say, the finished product wasn’t even pleasing in an avant-garde sort of way.  It was just bad.  So I decided to break the rules.  I would still take my source material from randomly generated lists, but now I would refresh until I saw something that worked with what I already had.  This is the result: 

(photo from Le***Refs *PHOTOGRAPHIE*’s flickr.)

It’s not as random - and this slightly more directed album cover was far more effective. It’s in the nature of this relationship - in this existence between ‘directed’ and ‘true’ randomness that we can distill the aforementioned line between absurdity for the sake of absurdity and clever, absurd humor.  

Also, why is the hipster who lives above me playing Ke$ha (Kachingha) at one-thirty AM?  

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*“random.” Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 12 Jan. 2011. <Dictionary.comhttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/random>.

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

- Albert Einstein

Wise words.  What do they mean?  (Heh.  I made a meta-funny.)

This piece of advice operates on the assumption that all things explainable can be distilled to the point where a six year old would be able to understand said things.  Can you imagine explaining calculus to a six year old?

Okay.  I’m taking this too literally.  The quote means that if you can explain something - if you can teach it - in as simple a manner as possible, you understand it.  To do this, one must present information concisely.  Lack of understanding is rooted in the overly complex.  

A good counter-arguement goes: “What about poetry?  What about literature?  What about the things you need to study in depth?”

My counter-arguement to the counter-arguement: “We’re not talking about raw material.  We’re talking about the distillation of the raw material.  Sure, ‘War and Peace’ is complex, but you know you understand it when you can explain it to your knee-high son or daughter.”  

PS: Writing this post was incredibly helpful for myself.  Of course, for you the reader, that’s neither here nor there.  Just throwing that out there.