Nightmare Santa

I've begun work on a story board. It's for a project that I've been running through my head over and over again, lengthening, refining, and I'll admit, endlessly obsessing over.

I honestly don't know if I'll ever be able to actually complete this project. It's a short film, but it would need to be all CGI- like, we're talking legitimately 100% fabricated imagery. And since I have neither the programs and experience or the money to commission a professional to create this short, it's probably going to stay on the drawing board for a very long time.

That's the only problem with having an overactive imagination. Most of the things you come up with are totally unreasonable. Awesome, but unreasonable.

Which reminds me, no, I'm not going to tell you what it's about just yet. I have to get some of the pages done first and THEN I will let you all in on it. If I just went and told you, my bet is that at least one of your brains would implode from the sheer magnitude of my rampant nerdery.

Which is a risk that, while tempting, I'm not willing to take.

Anyway. Back to the reason most of you read this stuff: story time!

As you all should have figured out by now, I live in Trustees. 3rd east, Citadel, all that. What you probably don't know is that I have a habit of pacing the halls sometimes- when I'm bored, looking for inspiration, or whatever.

Yesterday, I was wandering around the building, when I came across something I wasn't expecting:

My pace quickened considerably at that point.

Probably the most unnerving thing was that when I had to actually leave the building about 20 minutes later for a class, I was walking down some stairs and took a peek down the hall Nightmare Santa was lurking on-- and he was nowhere to be found.

Gone. Into thin air, just like that. Weirdest thing that's happened to me this week, other than making snow angels in the snow with nothing but a speedo on.

I know what you're all thinking, and no I'm not making of picture of that. Sorry.

On a related topic, the weeks most DISTURBING moment came from the caf- little surprise there though, I guess.

As is my usual fare in that building, I had grabbed a plate from the shelves and was hunting for identifiable food. That's the joke, in the caf- if you can figure out what it is, it's safe to eat. Otherwise, hopefully your insurance is paid up.

As I was passing the main line, I overheard a short exchange between two of the workers. It went something like:

One of the workers came out of the kitchen to check on the amount of food still available. The second staff member noticed him and waved him over, saying "Hey, so and so, could you go get me some more of the..."

He paused and looked down at the meat tray he was standing next to. Silence ensued for a moment, then he looked back up and finished, "some more of the, uhm, meat?"

I was floored. And a little disturbed. Was this really happening?

In case you didn't catch it, NOT EVEN THE PEOPLE WHO WORK IN THE CAF KNOW WHAT THEY'RE SERVING US. People always joke about a schools "mystery meat", but in our case, it's literally an enigma.

Maybe it's just me, but ewwwww.

Dysfunctional Doesn't Even Begin To Describe It

It's so good to be home in the good old frozen north. Massachusetts. Very liberal, but still home.

I had an interesting experience a couple of days ago, at a conversation during dinner (lunch?) with the swim team. It was either hilarious or extremely depressing, I honestly can't tell which one.

Oh and as a bit of a warning, normally I don't address more mature things in my blog as a matter of principle, but here I'm going to slightly deviate from that policy. Consider yourself warned!

Ok. Dinner. I was sitting near a bunch of the other swimmers when one of them makes a joke about how guys are totally useless.

Now, normally I'd be inclined to take the other side of that argument, but I was kind of hungry and so I stayed out of the vast majority of the conversation at this point. What ensued was that, after some people had retaliated with the expected "well, girls are STUPID", everyone began to think of lists of what guys and girls respectively are good for. Were we sarcastic? Yes. Were we also incredibly sexist? Well, yeah. But that's ok because girls were making the girls list just as much as the guys were, and vise versa.

Not to mention that if you can't take a joke, well, you're just really lame. :P

The lists are as follows:

GIRLS

1. Cooking

2. Cleaning

3. Conceiving

4. Looking pretty

GUYS

1. Cuddling

2. Physical labor

3. Random, useless facts

4. Technological skills

Everyone had a good laugh about it, until one of the girls who I've elected to leave nameless suddenly turned to me...

She looked at me for a second, and then blurted out wait- Brian's so much smaller than the other guys!

Obviously what she meant by that was I'm a lot weaker than them. Embarrassing, but a sad reality I've been working on.

Well, yeah, I said. This is true.

Then, my technical skills came into question, at which point I needed to admit that I wasn't particularly good at fixing things either. I laughed and said something about how useless I was beginning to feel.

The girl in question laughed and said "That stinks, I guess you're probably only good for sex then."

Geez.

Guest Post: Artistic Blunders

Hey, everyone. How's it going? Just a disclaimer, I'm not Brian. As far as introductions go, I'm Ari and I'm a senior at Needham High School. You'll be finding out more about me in a little bit, after I finish writing a smashing introduction about how much I like Brian and what a cool kid he is. (Stop smirking, Carolyn!)

Anyway, I am so excited to be blogging for Brian! He wrote a guest post for me a while back, and after that I really wanted to make an awesome post for him as well. I finally got around to it during my 20th Century Physics class, which is a complete joke and equivalent to nap time. Actually, today we were assigned homework for the first time in nearly a month and I almost had an aneurysm. Which is remarkably similar to what Brian is going through now. Just kidding. He's just sick and throwing up all over the place. (Feel better!)

So moving on. Brian's blog is one of my absolute favorites, very reminiscent of one of our mutual loves (Hyperbole and a Half). And this is a reminder to him that he owes me some mac & cheese. You want to know the story behind that? Of course you do. One time, Brian used an interesting analogy - he compared a certain blog to a recipe book, saying, "No one likes to read recipe books unless you get at least some muffins out of it. I mean, come on, muffins > no muffins." - to which I replied, "So he's just bluffin' with his muffin. Lame." He apparently got a kick out of that and rewarded me with 100,000,000 Brian dollars, and supposedly 100 of them will get someone you don't like to be tackled, and 1000 of them is the equivalent of a bowl of macaroni and cheese. So I want my mac & cheese, yo. :)

Alright, now to the real shiz. I welcome you to...
So most of you have probably noticed that Brian has some cool drawings on his blog. He does really funny mini-cartoon type things, filled with little puns and corny jokes. I love them. They make me LOL.

I kind of wish I could do something that awesome, too. The problem is that I'm Asian. Which means I have small eyes. Which means when I try to do a caricature of myself, it looks a little like this:
And it's impossible to convey different expressions, a crucial part of any comical sketch, when your eyes have to be drawn as mere lines. It just cannot be done.

In order to solve this problem, I considered drawing objects around me with very expressive eyes in order to show what I was feeling. For example, if I wanted to draw what my thoughts were on Brian, I could vicariously show my "distaste" through a sun in the background.
Except then, it looks like the sun is repulsed by me, not like I'm repulsed by Brian. And then people will assume that others are hating on me for my insulting Brian. Which is totally not the point. See the dilemma?

There is actually one expression that I can draw using squinty eyes, and although I'm sure some people would like to argue that it is quite an appropriate face for me, I would have to disagree. This expression is one of distrust, of suspicion, of disgust. (Unintentional rhyming ftw.)

And it is very, very ugly. And not exactly the greatest image to look at. (I made it gray on purpose to show how dismal it is.)

So although I adore these little drawings and wish I could do them regularly on my blog to tell cute stories, I have decided that it is best to stick to what I know and do well:
So I take pictures, I bake cupcakes, and I write. And in between I throw in a little lovin' for my friends and my life in general. ♥

And that's a heartful of Ari! This was a brave endeavor considering my lack of confidence when it comes to my artistic skills, so I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to stop by my blog if you want to see my photography, find out more about me, etc. (click here)

Thanks for letting me guest post, Brian! I expect more awesomeness from you soon. :)

A More Personal Update

I really don't know how this happened, but it sucks so bad.

I woke up this morning after having spent an amazing saturday with tons of different people doing all kinds of fun college weekend stuff, and almost fell over when I stood up. My head was swimming, my stomach was throbbing and I was incredibly weak.

Turns out I'm rampantly sick right now. Surprise, right?

I've been bedridden literally all day, except for the one adventure I went on from my dorm room to the front door to get some get-better-gatorade and soup from Courtney LeMay.

This is Courtney. She swims the same events as I do here, the 50 and 100 free plus relays. She's also our team photographer! (most of the time, anyway. She does a really good job, though)

...I'm too disoriented to do a full bio on her, though. I'll finish hers when I can sit up without feeling like I'm going to pass out, promise.

I also got some of the same stuff from Nathan Runtas-

Runtas is the guy on the left who can clearly out-lift anyone reading this blog. Not Runtas is actually Andrew Canada, a senior on the team.

But anyway, Runtas brought me crackers in addition to more gatorade and soup, so I am very well taken care of. That being said, the only reason I could write this much was because I threw up about five or six times and it messed up my body enough that it thinks it's been purged.

Unfortunately, that not-quite-as-bad feeling is leaving more rapidly now, so I need to go back to bed before something bad happens.

I hate being sick...

Yawn

I'm tired today so I'm not going to be posting anything particularly interesting.

I will be, however, working on a draft for a comic that I'm going to submit to the campus paper for the next time it gets published. Hopefully they'll like it. I'm just testing the waters for now, I guess.

Exciting stuff. At any rate. Time for a nap! Welcome to college :)

*UPDATE*

Ok, so instead of working on that draft like I had promised I was going to, instead I found myself getting roped into hanging out with Daniel and then later going to the student center for a while to see what the hijinks over there was on about. (They had cookies covered in frosting, it was a good time)

Suffice to say I didn't ACTUALLY get any work done? But I'll bring my notepad with me to the swim meet tomorrow and work on it during the bus ride.

HURRAY FOR PROGRESS

* 'NOTHER UPDATE*

So I couldn't really think of any particularly successful ideas on the bus ride home. Instead I drew a picture of Presto (I'll talk about him later, when it's NOT 2:20 in the morning) riding his old segway and waving a cowboy hat. It seemed appropriate. I'll post it later. Maybe.

No Shave November?

I have a confession to make.

I entered November making the same promise as any self respecting guy capable of growing facial hair: no shaving, for one month. GO BEARDS!

However, almost exactly one week into it, I came to a realization. I look utterly ridiculous as anything other than clean shaven.

Some people can rock the bearded look pretty well. Take Pat for instance.

It is important to note that Chris is not Pat. Chris is the happy one. Pat is the less openly happy one. Maybe I'll talk about Chris at some point, but for now we need to focus on Pat.

He's the third, yet-unmentioned-so-far freshman guy on our swim team. He's from Colorado. The thing about Pat is that not only is he an INCREDIBLE swimmer, but he's also impossible to make fun of. People can tease Daniel for acting a little excitable sometimes (no offense meant, Daniel), I get called out on being a social psychopath, but Pat...

I mean, he's Pat. Look at him. He's awesome!

Anyway, Pat rocks the bearded look pretty well. I couldn't find a good picture on Facebook anywhere of him with a beard... so...

That's... kind of what it looks like. It looks a lot better in reality, trust me.

The point is that some people can get away with the bearded look, others (such as myself) can't.

As such, it became obvious that measures needed to be taken to prevent my further descent into freakdom.

I'll get over the shame and humiliation eventually. I also gain solace from the fact that I look more normal now.

Fist Bump of Horror (at last)

Sickening deja vu, I know. This post has been coming for quite some time.

But since you've all been waiting oh so patiently for this story, I'll give it to you. I apologize if it makes very little sense, it's been on the shelf of ideas in my brain for some time now. (Please bear in mind I was planning on posting this about a week and a half ago, so the story is a wee bit outdated)

During one of the swim practices, I was rather surprised when Dorothy- our coach- moved me up into one of the more intense lanes. Since I'm more or less the pansy of the guys team I don't normally PRACTICE with them, I'm with some of the girls in one of the side lanes.

Today however was different, as per the whims of Dorothy. This meant two things: one, my arms and legs would be functioning very poorly for the rest of the day, and I would be swimming with Tyler.

Now, what you have to realize about the mens swim team is that most of them are really intimidating. They're a great group of guys, and Tyler wouldn't intentionally do anything to scare/injure me, but having to stand next to him in the pool is along the same lines as putting a kid on a tricycle next to Bruce Wayne on his bat motorcycle thing.

Exactly.

So I figured that so long as I could remain a respectable distance behind him, I wouldn't be TOO humiliated by my failure to appear competent by comparison.

This proved to be quite the difficult task, however. Tyler is much better at swimming than I am, especially when we were doing pull sets (basically you just swim with your arms while wearing these paddles on your hands- they make you go a lot faster, but they take a bit of a toll on your shoulders). Having never done them before college, my arms are still rather unaccustomed to the effort. I was quite tired when the next set started.

I don't even fully remember what we were doing next, but one particular part sticks out in my mind:

I was swimming a little farther behind than before. Tyler had already done his turn and was heading back towards me. Right when we were about to pass each other, I had turned my head up to breathe, when I saw this headed right at me:

The most powerful thought going through my mind at the sight of Tylers fist was DEAR LORD I'M GOING TO HAVE A HOLE IN MY HEAD IN ABOUT ONE SECOND

Logically, there was only one way to avoid being killed. I had to punch him back.

Ok, obviously not just aim for his face. That would be terrible- "Brian! What the heck were you thinking??"

"I had to! Otherwise he'd have hit me! ..maybe."

"So.. you punched one of our best swimmers in the face... because he might have hit you. Brian, people get hit in swimming all the time!"

"Wait.. oh."

"Moron."

So I aimed for the giant fist headed my way, instead- and connected.

I somehow managed to keep scrambling my way down the pool, but my nervous system was totally convinced that I had destroyed my wrist. It was gone, probably reduced to dust. I would never be able to write an essay or take notes in class ever again.

Actually, hold that thought. I hate doing both of those...

I would never be able to hold a cheeseburger the right way or type normally again. The point being that I was now short one hand- at least, that was the way it registered.

The sad thing is that it didn't even hurt all that much afterwards. I had gone through a pretty medium level panic attack at what I thought would be a career ending injury, only to discover that my skeleton had responded positively to the thousands of gallons of milk I consumed in my youth. Reassuring in a sense, but the event was still wet-your-pants terrifying.

I mean, I normally pride myself on being a pretty big guy- I'm like 6'2" and I have a pretty broad frame- but Tyler is HUGE. He almost accidentally PUNCHED me. Think like Nick Nemeth is giving you a hug, trips somehow, and hammer drops you onto a sidewalk on your head. We're talking about a pretty terrifying level of "Sorry about atomizing your spine, man- promise it wasn't on purpose!"

I guess the moral of the story is that you should drink milk? Otherwise your hands might get shattered in freak punching accidents.

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Disclaimer

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The reason it took so long to post this was because for some reason, when I saved the batman picture the first time, my computer decided to save every individual pixel i hadn't colored in as a different shade of white. Meaning I had to go in without the paintbucket tool and color the darn thing in myself, which I would get bored with rather quickly.

So, my apologies, but I don't want to devote an overwhelming amount of effort to my posts. That would be silly.

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End Disclaimer

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I get to register for classes for the next semester today! Hopefully I'll be able to get into the ones I picked out, otherwise I'm going to get stuck with a boatload of unhappy for the spring semester.

And no one likes unhappy.

Illogical at best

I was originally going to post this yesterday, but then Taryn sort of "borrowed" my computer for a while, and so I figured that meant I didn't have to post since you were all sufficiently entertained. :)

That having been said, I really ought to finish what I start, and if I don't then I'll be hounded by this guilty feeling for days on end. Plus, it would be rather lame if I just up and let my blog die, so...

At any rate. Post.

I don't know why it's taken me this long to realize the oddity of this phenomenon, pardon the technical speak, but I finally have and as such will speculate about it ad nauseum.

The sun. It's a giant ball of incredibly hot burn-y stuff that floats really far away in a land of pure nothing. It's yellow, or at least we like to pretend it is, since looking directly at it would melt our eyes. It's really big, like I mentioned before, to the point where if you put the earth paradoxically next to itself just over 109 times, that would ALMOST be as wide as the sun. It keeps us warm, lets us see, moves across the sky, probably does other things behind our back that we're not aware of....

and it makes us sneeze?

It's true, sunlight makes people sneeze, but apparently not everyone.

For example: I have never seen some of the people here at college sneeze. Daniel Bowman has never sneezed, as far as i can tell. Some Needham people, such as Jansen, have never sneezed before in their lives (so long as I was there too).

Other people, like my little brother Matthew-

The one in the orange shirt is Matthew. He's been unanimously selected as the most awesome of the Keeler brothers, of which there are four: Andrew, myself, Stephen, and then the aforementioned Matt. He's probably smarter than I am, and definitely just as spontaneous. You have not truly experienced childhood until you've pretended to be a "grazing pony" and rolled around on your front lawn with him for over an hour while your dumbfounded neighbors look on suspiciously. Hooligans.

Anyway. Where was I going with mentioning Matt?

Right, the sun. I apologize, all of my non-sequitors are rather bizarre.

Matt is the worst offender I have ever met for the sneezing in sunlight thing. Give or take about 20 seconds after he steps outside, he'll suddenly let forth a stream of rampant ah-chooing. EVERY TIME. It's like he's allergic to the sun, but in the really pathetic cartoony way where people only sneeze instead of breaking out in hives or something horrible along those lines.

That having been said, it's probably a good thing that people don't just erupt with horrible rashes when they go out into sunlight... that wouldn't be very conducive to living productively/ for long periods of time.

Ok, so some people sneeze in the sun. Some don't.

WHY?

that question suddenly occurred to me, and has been pestering the portions of my mind that should be devoted to working on papers for school and such. Why doesn't either EVERYONE or NO ONE sneeze when they walk outside into the sun? Am I the only one who's bothered by this??

Probably.

You know, it's probably God who does that. I really wouldn't be surprised. I mean, think about it- it's totally harmless, completely irrational... people always say that he has a sense of humor.

I bet He does it. I bet God makes people sneeze for kicks.

I hope that's not sacrilegious, actually. I honestly don't know if God is a 100% serious being all the time. I would expect He does things for amusement, but then that's only based on how I would do things if I were God.

Which, clearly I'm not.

I guess I'll leave it at that God MIGHT be the one who makes people sneeze in the sun. Just in case.

I had something really important that I wanted to update you guys on, but it's slipped my mind for the time being. Something cool about swimming. It might come back by the time I finish the painful picture for the post I was going to post a while ago.

Which reminds me, I have to finish that post now too. Wow... this is a lot more work than I thought it would be.

Still waiting on Ari's guest post, and still waiting on the Andy's guest post. Andy has an excuse though, he's busy doing the college thing.

Uhm. I think that's about it.

LESS THAN THREE WEEKS UNTIL I GET TO GO BACK HOME. I'm so excited to see my family again. College is fun, sure, but family is like a royal flush to colleges straight.

I probably shouldn't use poker terms, since I don't really know what they mean. A straight is good, right?

Hopefully?

Whatever. You know what I meant.

this is taryn

Brian's blog has been commandeered for today.

Hi, I'm Taryn. I'm 17, a swimmer and a freshman at Asbury University, which means I have to put up with Brian way too often. He stole my laptop right now, so I stole his back.

(Not his back-back, because that would be weird. But I stole his laptop. Anyway.)

Umm, Kelsey wants to be mentioned, so here I am mentioning her.

Anyway, Brian is reading something I wrote, but I accidentally deleted something he wrote which I really do feel bad about, by the way. I'm way too mean to Brian. But he's way too nice. Toughen up, bud! Hearts!

Umm, I don't really know what I want to talk about, but Brian is going to have my computer for awhile longer (he's reading 30 pages) so I have to keep on babbling.

Just keep babbling, that's my motto.

I just ate a piece of apple flavored Dubble Bubble gum, and it didn't taste very good. Kinda left a nasty taste in my mouth, actually. Yuck. Makes me want some water, but alas, none exists in my immediate vicinity. If I were to get up, Brian might re-steal his computer and delete this brilliant blog post.

(Haha, re-steal makes it sound like Brian stole this computer in the first place. Which he probably did. Everyone knows Brian is a notorious criminal.)

Oh, if you didn't know, Brian has a Mac. Also if you didn't know, my madre works at Microsoft. This means that Brian and I are mortal enemies. And Brian is the one at fault, fyi. Though seriously, if he had to steal a computer, why on earth would he go for a Mac? Dumb.

Okay, talking about Macs is making me angry. Grr, grr.

Should I be doing anything else right now? Probably not. I mean, sure, I do have some reading for a couple classes and one assignment for another, but who actually does homework in college? What a funny thought.

All I want to do right now is write. (in case you couldn't tell by the prolific nature of this post, I am a writer. Kinda impressive it's been five minutes since I started this, huh?) Anyway, I can't do that because Brian is busy reading, that silly face.

By the way, we all need to give Brian a round of applause for a couple things:

A) he wears jeans now!

B) he got rid of his ugly old jammer and now wears a drag suit like a real swimmer!

Yay, Brian!

Aww, they grow up so fast.

Umm, what else can I babble about for a few more minutes?

Brian just called me infuriating. I suppose I am. It's fun. Makes life interesting, especially when I am drowning in a big vat of liquid boredom. How's that for imagery? Boredom is usually a pale green-gray color with a viscous tactility (is that a word?) not dissimilar to warm honey.

Wow, I really am not thinking about anything I'm saying. It's kind of falling out of my fingers like word vomit. (Yay, Mean Girls!) I just really want my laptop back. Brian is a slow reader, I have now decided, and should definitely hurry his little four-eyes up.

Ummmm, running out of things about which to babble . . .

Kelsey has a water bottle right now which she stole from our 1:00 English class. It had been on the table for almost a week, so she figured she'd just take it. Thief, I know. And kinda gross, especially if you could see this particular water bottle. It's metal and real legit--you know, the kind you could run over with a tank and it would only get a couple dings. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what has happened, since it does have a few dings.

Kelsey herself is working on a Spanish worksheet. It looks tedious, but that might be because I'm in Latin and can only fondly remember my high school days of Spanish.

Okay, well I am going to post this now. If Brian objects, he can edit/delete it later, but that would make me really, really sad.