Interns Acting Like Eight Year Olds… NOTHING Better.

Yesterday, the 826LA West staff learned how to make tabletop movies. Birte, our lovely programs/administrative assistant, sent an email out last week giving us only a few clues of what this moviemaking business would be (I use the word “us” loosely, because it could have been just me who was totally clueless as to what tabletop moviemaking was). She said 1)if we could, we should be in the office at 10:30 for an early start 2) we are going to use the moviemaking for a workshop camp sometime this summer, and 3)it’s going to be fun, fun, fun!!! (She just used one fun, but I added those last two to imply my brain’s excitement to any type of fun). Gee, I sure do use a lot of parenthesis. (That’s ok).

So, naturally, as soon as I hear about this tabletop moviemaking, I am curious as to what it may be. For some reason or another, the first image that popped into my head is some kind of new technological device in which a touch screen movie player that sits literally within the table – really, like an iPad Table. Which, on a side note, I am sure will be invented soon. Kids would gather around the table, touch the screen, drag things, and type things, and then BOOM, a movie shall be made! Just like that! Now, I don’t know why I would imagine this as the process we would soon be trained on – since I have seen no such thing before, and since that would require heavy carpentry on our parts to create. But you know, that’s just what I pictured.

I arrive early on Monday, too smart to know that iPads would not have been magically installed into our tables, but too dumb to think of any alternative. A man named Brick was puttering around the office – he clearly was the one in charge of all this. I calmly sat on the couch, tentative and waiting, and then an important fact dawned on me as I looked around the room – clearly, it was Hat Day in the office and nobody told me. There was Julius, our director of education, in a dark and light green knit skull cap; Danny, who wears hats normally, donning a black and grey SKI cap; and Brick himself, the newcomer, wearing a great train-conductors-ish type hat: khaki in color. Even Karin was wearing a bandana!!! Luckily for me, it felt as though I, too, was wearing a hat, since over the weekend I got my hairs chopped off and now have this mop-top which feels so heavy yet so light that I get confused. So I wasn’t completely out of the hat-loop.

Oh, goodness, I digress. Soon enough, we were all guided by train-conductor-hat-Brick into the tutoring room and on the table were a mash-up of paper dolls attached to halved popsicle sticks, half pages of funny scenery (i.e. a piñata, a cafeteria, a food court…), props attached to halved popsicle sticks (cop cars, more cop cars, bookshelves, etc), a tiny little flip camera, and an iPhone. Welcome, all, to the process of REAL tabletop moviemaking!

The stage was set. Around the table sat interns Taylor, Karin, Nina, Sarah, Chloe, and Kat (… me), as well as Birte and Danny.  Brick began explaining the process: first, the kids (i.e. us, in this particular training session) would pick a background, two or three popsicle stick characters, and maybe a couple props. Next, using the background as the scene, a short story would be written, using narration and dialogue between the characters. Then, after this is done, on scratch paper, any necessary props could be drawn and cut out for the characters to use. When the scene is set, the fun begins. Each person verbalizes their story via IPhone microphone, and then acts the story out with their characters via flip camera mechanism. Voila! A movie is made as soon as the pieces are converged together on the computer!

The best part of the training was Brick’s insisting that each of us try it out. We had to think of our own short script – then we would narrate it, film it, and edit it, so we could better instruct the kids during the workshop later this summer. Some of us teamed up (Karin and I acted as a pair, as well as Taylor and Birte). After 20 or 30 minutes, beautiful, beautiful scenes were completed. Allow me to show you how creative, strange, and, in my humble opinion hilarious we are here at 826LA by explaining some of our movie scenes. Be prepared.

First up: Taylor and Birte. These two set the stage using a party background – you know, balloons and such. They featured two main characters. Some skinny paper dude, and one fat guy, wearing one of those shirts that made his belly button protrude out the bottom. Skinny dude was throwing a party for himself and fat guy was the only one to show up (albeit with a fruit plate)! Skinny dude was so upset that he ordered fatty to go find Justin Beiber and bring him back ASAP if he wanted to come to this party. What would fat man do!? (FYI, all stories were to end on a cliffhanger).

Then… Nina. Two paper dolls were “walking” in front of a cliffy-deserty background. The guy doll says to the girl doll, you need to go to the hospital! What you are doing is not normal! The girl refuses – what could a hospital do for her, especially a hospital in the “third world country” in which they were? Guy comes back with – if you were sneezing for six hours straight you would go… right? There is obviously something wrong! The girl still refuses. What would happen? (p.s: the girl’s problem was that she couldn’t stop jumping.)

Chloe featured two sisters, one black and one white, both fat and wearing the same sweatshirt which we ALL coveted, as it featured four puppies all sitting in a cut out pumpkin.  Why a paper doll would feature such a terribly amazing sweatshirt, nobody knew. So these women were making pie for the state fair, and for some reason they needed tree-sap from a hippie eco-gardener named Todd. Voiced by Karin, one sister insisted, “Skootch over, TODD, give us dat SAP!” end-scene.

For the finale: Karin and I. I will just be blunt about it: ours was the bomb.  It featured a man named Herman and a woman named Pearl (the same paper doll as the sisters in the above story… what can we say, we liked her sweater). Pearl happened to have a penguin son named Charlie, who was having a birthday party (Pinata scene!) little did Charlie know, his piñata was not filled with candy, but with a real-life dead horse!!! Clearly Karin and I are the most mature of the bunch. Anyway, Herman knew exactly what was going on, and as Charlie took a swing and hit the piñata, he DOVE at Charlie, moved him out of the way and got COVERED with horse intestines!!!! (intestines were not a featured prop, as you may have guessed, so Karin and I had our own home-made guts drawing featured in the movie). But then, the COPS CAME……..

Reading over our movie makes me both giggly and disgusted. But what an original idea for a horror story – a horse piñata with a real horse inside? Gross!!!

So really, to conclude, all I can really say is that the day was filled with tears of joy… from laughing.

Fun facts I found out yesterday:

1) Chloe Searcy was born on top of Searcy Mountain in North Carolina. Her family owns the mountain.

2) Karin had a dream one time that a turtle guarded her apartment day and night. Now she has a turtle statue outside her apartment door.

3) Nina’s girlfriend’s apartment was “really ugly colors of green and brown” – close to the colors of the very outfit I was wearing yesterday (this was funny, not offensive).

4) Chloe recently drove by a run-down shack that had a spray painted sign on it that read:” P-Nuts and Haircuts Inside”.  She drove by another one that read “Watch out for Angry Bull”.

5) There are people who live in the Appalachians who have no teeth.

An informative day, indeed.

On a closing note, I can only say that I hope this blog wasn’t one of those “you had to be there” blogs. Did this make any sense at all? Or did you read this and think to yourself, what the heck did I just read about… these people are freaky… Well, in any case, we ARE freaky, but in a fun kind of way. So take that, world.

And then I found an 8 dollar bill……..

Kat.

You NEVER forget how to ride a bike…

Yesterday night was the book release of “You Never Forget How To Ride a Bike”, by the students at John Marshall High School. Everything about the night was exciting to me, although my excitement could have been due to the MONSTER ENERGY DRINK I chugged before arriving (it was just one of those evenings when I felt the need to be supercharged for no great reason, I guess…). Everything leading up to the event was new to me, the event itself was spectacular, and even the after-part was phenomenal.

SO. The new things. 1) it was my first time going to the Echo Park Time Travel mart – our “sister” (?) location in… well, Echo Park. 2) it was my first time driving in real, hardcore LA rush hour traffic – into the heart of downtown itself. Spectacular! And also, so STRESSFUL! But it was a stress I liked, and kind of laughed at while it was happening so it was ok in the end. 3) it was my first time going to skylight bookstore, which is where our event took place. SO great, I cannot even explain the greatness. It is in Los Feliz by Silverlake (look at me, the Iowan, namedropping all these little LA ‘burbs…) and it happens to be my new favorite spot in town.

So now that I have for some reason outlined the beginning part of this here blog, let me just go ahead and explain the night. I started off at my apartment in Inglewood, surrounded by my roommates 5 cats… YES! 5 CATS!, and I ate a bowl of oatmeal for good luck. Not that I needed any luck, but it was more for the getting-ready part of the night. Yes, some girls choose to actually pretty themselves up for “events”… I just choose to eat a nice bowl of oatmeal. This is my life. SO. I then exited the premises and started on the road to the Time Travel Mart. So excited to see it. Sleepy. It took me an astounding 50 minutes to get there! When my GPS told me it would have taken 10! What is this, LA?? Explain yourself! I don’t understand traffic, why cant people just drive at a nice pace of 50 miles an hour continually… well, ill save that rant for my own inside thoughts. So I drive into this new, great part of downtown area, which I have never seen before, and then, as I exit on Sunset Boulevard, to my left JUST like in the pictures, I SEE it! The Time Travel Mart! It was like seeing a celebrity. I don’t know  why. Its just that… I have seen so many PICTURES of the thing from websites, from Dave Egger’s TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school.html) to images I had imagined of it in my head… so let me digress and just say, I was excited to see it. After the parking hassle, I walked in and it was CRAZY! The front of the store sells silly products like cavemen supplies and robot supplies, etc, and then, to get to the back, you walk through this black tunnel with glowing Christmas lights and then bam – you enter into this great room filled with old tables and chairs, with high ceilings and a calendar on one wall, pictures of butterflies above an Apple computer lab… and in the corner was Julius and the interns who already arrived, ready for action. We discussed the set up plan that would happen at Skylight, and then took off. It was at this moment where I secretly went to the store and chugged a Monster, in case that topic was of any interest to you still. So we get there, I explore the store; it was filled to the brink of books like “How to Get Out of America” (tips on being an Expatriate) “Sh*t My Dad Says”, “The Bedwetter” by Sarah Silverman… and a “green” Dinosaur sticker book for kids. They had me at hello, this bookstore.

And then, I saw it. In the center of the bookstore, where we had chairs set up and a podium up for our student speakers of the night, I saw the book! “You Never Forget How to Ride a Bike” – the book we helped the kids publish. It had an elephant on the cover, riding a bicycle. It was green. And inside, were 15 or so stories from public high school kids. I picked it up, started flipping through it, and was totally shocked. Should I have been shocked… this I do not know. All I know is that the stories these kids had were so great. They told tales about identity crises, gang experiences, teacher debacles, high school struggles, and the voice of every single piece was honest, funny, and humble, all at the same time.  As we set up, some of the student speakers (students asked to read their piece in front of the audience) started arriving, and soon enough, the whole place was filled with high school  kids, parents, LA onlookers, bookstore staff. That was something else new to see: so many supporters for a high school project. Go LA, although that is the way it should be for all  high school creative events, I would think.

The night took off as Julius announced the publication to the world (or the audience), thanked all the volunteers, the student editorial board, and the teachers. Speaking of teachers, I will use this as an in to say – that high school must have some fabulous teachers for embarking on this project. If I were in high school and the project assigned to me was “ok, write a story. It is going to be published in an actual book that we will actually sell on amazon.com” I would have been totally floored- what a great way to inspire kids to get creative! Ok. Moving on… after introductions and thanks, the kids started reading their pieces, one by one, and as I stood in the audience, I was taken aback– the quality of these student’s work was so impressive to me, and it made me so glad to be part of the organization that helped those voices get heard. Something about student writing is, like I said before, so honestly funny – they don’t try to make it stylistically humorous—its just inherent within the piece. These kids have a bright future ahead of them if they can write that good in high school.

After the speakers concluded, all authors present gathered at the front to sign books. I felt super hyped up and excited for them, and I wanted all of their autographs. They looked so happy! So accomplished! And everyone bought a book and got it signed! For one moment, I lived vicariously through them and felt totally ecstatic at the enjoyment and pride they must be feeling. I wanted to give them all hi-fives. It was most certainly a Kodak moment (what a cliché thing to say… yet still SO true)!

After people took off, after the packing was finished, I drove home, contented and still quite energetic. I gave intern Karin a ride to her  bike in Venice, and it turns out another new thing was learned: every 826LA intern I’ve spoken to at length is just so darn cool! She didn’t even mind the fact that I got majorly lost and had to take a 15 minute detour. Excellent.

So this was my exciting 826LA night. Full of newness, wonderful kids, wonderful books, and exciting, hyped up moments. SO glad I was able to make it. Good job, John Marshall kids!

Until next time,

Kat.

Slam Books, Scattergories, and Sad Interns

Yesterday was a double whammy kind of day: it was the last day for after school tutoring, AND the release party for our very own 826LA West Slam Book, entitled “This Is What it Was in the 80’s” (believe me, the rest of the book is just as intriguing as the title). Because of the “whamminess”, it was an overall jovial afternoon here at our office, with many interns traipsing around and helping out (traipsing- what an excellent word that is). Let me walk you through some of the more fascinating moments we had by making a list, for your own enjoyment.

1)      I will start with the least important fact of the day, although the importance of all these facts may or may not be debatable. I discovered Lemonade. No, not regular lemonade, which I drink daily at my humble abode here in LA, but lemonade from the store lemonade! Yes, I DID just use the word lemonade 4 times in the last two sentences… impressive! Intern Lauren made the lemonade run for us during the lunchtime hour and she brought back all different kinds, which as an Iowa girl I am not used to, and was frankly quite shocked and awed by. Her own flavor of choice: Watermelon rosemary. Weird, yet so delicious. Like I said, this particular fact is not necessarily that important.

2)      Intern Karin made Easymac in our microwave, and then proceeded to eat it three feet away from me! What a mean trick! That macaroni and cheese smell, I swear to god, it is just unbeatable. I would like to bottle it up and wear it as a perfume. No, I would never do that; I would hate to smell like Easymac 24/7, so let’s just call it a very appetizing smell. So here we sat, her eating and me looking menacingly at her from my seat, and she proceeds to tell us a terrible story involving ticks. One time, in her native Virginia, she awoke in her own bed to find 13 ticks stuck on her body! First, 13 is an unlucky number of ticks to have on you, and second, really, ANY number of ticks is an unlucky kind of thing.  I found this a mysterious tale that made this little fact just a little more important than the Lemonade aforementioned.

3)      My last point will concern the supermarket sector of Venice. A) Costco here is HUGE!! It is like a cavern, or maybe an oasis, of incredibly cheap, buy-in-bulk EVERYTHING! It was also a madhouse- intern Nina and I went to get celebration food for our book release- and it was packed as can be. Not only that, but the fruit plates were nowhere to be found. A Costco that doesn’t carry fruit plates? How can it be that huge and not have fruit plates!! B) Albertsons is AMAZING!! We abandoned our Costco trip since we were reluctant to stand in the long lines when we didn’t even have a fruit plate, so we went to Albertsons and oh my god, it was beautiful! We got fruit plates, veggie plates, cookies, juice boxes (Capri sun, of course), diet cola, and diet ORANGE (do not get the Albertsons brand – it turns your teeth the same color as the soda). We left feeling triumphant and I left feeling particularly delighted at my newfound passion for Albertsons stores. This is the most important fact because it deals with: fruit plates, cookies, AND our book release party, all at the same time.

So that was the beginning of the day, in the office. As 2:30 rolled around, it was time for the tutoring session/party to start! Kids worked on homework, interns helped kids, and after a couple hours passed and all their reading and writing was done, we found ourselves in a HUGE game of Scattergories. Somehow, we revolved many of our answers around Oprah, for example, for the “Cold” category; an answer starting with O was… “Oprah to Stedman”. Enough said.

Now today, we interns find ourselves in a lonely, Kid-less 826LA, and intern Larissa made quite a good point – she said that it was weird how much you start rooting for a kid after only knowing him or her for less than a month. Most of us summer interns came here in late May, and have only tutored these kids for 3 weeks or so, but now that they’re all gone, for now, we all kind of miss the humor! Most of our kids are characters- from the little girl who inserts the word “beautiful” in every single one of her sentences because she is so proud she can spell it, to the kids in the 5^th grade who have their very own “Yo Mamma” blog on WordPress…. They gave us all some great memories while we had them here! Now that the school year is over, I think we are all looking forward to our summer workshops and ELL classes when we will see some of our familiar faces again, as well as meet new characters to learn with and from.

Now I cannot end this blog commemorating our wonderful 826LA kids without posting just a few Slam Book excerpts to all of you who read this – these quotes, all written by our very own students during their downtime in the tutoring lab, are pretty priceless…

“I have come to 826LA for two years. I like it here. My friends Lizette and Edwin always come here. When I have homework I work with LiLi. I’ve gotten better at doing my homework. I play games and I draw picture. I read a book and write a story. When I am done with all those things I go home. The end.” (By Monserat Trinidad, signed with a <3)

“Someone went somewhere to do something. Someone sometime asked someone else, “who’s someone?” (By Mia Eisendorf)

“Well why is this world so weird? Like the girls – some are pretty and some are ugly. But there is gonna be the one. SO I think I found her. She has curly hair. She has a very nice smile. How I met her: PE. When I first saw her I fell for her smile. I told my friend, “who’s that?” My first conversation with her was very nice. I told her, “why is your smile so pretty?” she told me, “Why is your hair so pretty?” I told her I don’t know. Every time I see her she puts a smile on my face and butterflies. Her name- you’ll have to find out, nosy!!” (By Josh Camucho)

“Danny is weird. I am going to jack his hat. And he is going to be like, “Where’s my hat?” I am going to be like, “I jacked it homie.” That is nice.” (By Robert Rodriguez)

“On Monday I wrote a story about a number. A true story.” (By Margarito Garcia)

Pretty good kids, huh?

Until next time…

Kat.

Volunteers, Elephants, and Ultimate Life Questions…



Today was a day of letter answering, questions that everyone should ponder but probably haven’t as of yet, and most importantly: lameness.

The day started phenomenally. I arrived early, after guiltily scarfing down a Rockstar Energy Drink (to me it was justified because it was lemonade flavored and only a buck. So there), and was faced with the task of answering emails sent to us by our lovely soon-to-be volunteers. While typing away, I made note of something interesting- almost all of our emails from people are more like letters – letters explaining how excited they are to hear about a program like us, how passionate they are to keep up some sort of creative spark in the minds of children, how they have all these great experiences that make them apt contributors. Sure, there were a couple emails that just asked for information, and those are great too, but the amount of people who have this excitement about helping these kids kind of thrilled me. It was time well spent, reading through those letters, and it goes to show: our volunteers rock in so many diverse and awesome ways.  So woo-hoo, volunteers!! And woo-hoo to all of you out there who, even if you aren’t an active participant in our program, believe that it only takes a little bit of one-on-one interaction to change things for a kid.

After the emails were finished and the warm fuzzies cooled down a bit, I took a brief 15 minutes to configure this here blog. I got it to look sort of organized, but it is now brown. This is not something I am a fan of. I tried to change the text, and it only proved to me, or rather reiterated this point, that I am horrifically unsavvy with computers. But I digress. Soon enough, it was time for our kids to start arriving. Slow at first, I sat at a table with a few of our volunteers and chatted. Little did I know where our chatting would lead….

First, one particular volunteer happened to have a pet salamander named Thor. A fierce name for a fierce creature.  This is pretty irrelevant to the rest of this ‘graph but I just wanted to throw it out there because I really do think a salamander named Thor is just great. As we heard about Thor’s adventures, I skimmed through a book we  happened to have on one of our bookshelves: Cambridge Fact Finder. Everything from Transportation to Gestation periods- which of course is what I flipped through first (accidentally… don’t worry. I don’t have a out-of-control interest in the birthing of other animals). Anyway, it turns out that a camel has that little bun in the oven for a over a year!- 402 days, if I may be so precise! Imagine- that hump of water up on top and then a hump down below, carrying a baby? We sympathized. Then. In the next column, there it was. Elephants are pregnant for two YEARS! What?? Poor little elephants! As we discussed the agony of the elephant birthing procedure, Ruby interrupted with a very important question: do chickens lay eggs every day? Is egg laying painful? And also, where do snakes give birth? (don’t ask me how we got chickens and snakes in the same phrase). And what about dolphins? How do they give birth? As I type this I am aware that the answer is a click away on google… but I just want to play stupid for a second- how do these things WORK?? Those poor elephants…

Then the kids came! A small crowd, with many of the regular faces. Ah the melancholy of remembering the last 2 weeks of school- the dreading of doing any sort of work whatsoever, the pain of going to class, etc, etc. But our kids are good and after they did their work, read, and wrote in our slam books (one of which is soon to be published- yay!) they started playing games. Well, our interns like games too, and as the crowd dwindled, we figured it was time to combine game-playing efforts. So we got together, middle schoolers and 20somethings, and started playing a drawing version of telephone (I attempted to explain it through typing but it just doesn’t work. Nina, another great intern, is the queen of the game and if you really want to know, if it is just killing you, then I am sure she could explain better). And then it started. The Lame word. Everything was all of a sudden lame, says the kids playing at our table. Ah, teenage rebellion, ho-ho-ho…. (as if I wasn’t that age less than a decade ago)…. They milked the word all they could- and it turned out pretty funny.  Has it dawned on anyone else that middle schoolers, and kids in general, laugh approximately 10,000,000 times more than adults?  Whats up with that? It makes me sigh, as I sit here drinking yet another lemonade. People attribute it to immaturity- but I am not sure that’s really what it is. I just think they have a ton of fun- and the great thing is, is that as their playing, their work gets done too. Whether its regular old homework or writing silly but incredibly expressive passages in our journals, their attitude is one I wish more adults would simulate. Think how fun it would be if adults just burst out laughing doing whatever they do. If they hear a joke. If they see a funny picture. If they DRAW a funny picture. Or what if THEY all called eachother lame?

That, my friends, would be a jovial world.

So, here you are, fine readers, from good volunteers, to mysterious snakes, from pregnant elephants to the mystery of adulthood, a day in the life of an intern’s crazy brain. It was a good one!

Back to the lemonade.

Kat.

A Case of the Mon-Days?!

It turns out that there is no such thing as a “case of the mon-days” as an intern at 826LA. Today happens to be my first Monday as an intern, although I started here a couple weeks ago, so perhaps as I get used to things here Mondays wont be as exciting, but today, for me, was pretty entertaining.

The above paragraph sounds kind of boring. Informative, but boring. So let me explain.

Today’s loveliness could be attributed to the fact that my Sunday was terrible. I have this thing with not wasting days. Its almost like I am this 110 year old lady who keeps feeling like I need to make the absolute most out of every day- milk it like a cow for all its worth- or else I might find sometime soon that I have lived a whole life and have nothing to show for it but video games and television shows. This one cliché little saying, this “life is short, make the most of it, etc” saying, happens to be the pivotal existential crisis of my 20’s thus far. I don’t want to waste time! I have too many things to do! I want to write thousands of books and learn how to play piano and learn how to paint and… and… do all those things old people say they wished they would have done- I don’t want youth to be wasted on the young! Isn’t that the saying?  As you can see, it is indeed a crisis. So I think about time a lot, what I am doing with mine, what I should be doing with it, what I could be doing with it. And I have found that sometimes I have no choice but to waste it.

That was one long, tangential paragraph that did not even give you the info of what I DID on Sunday that was such a waste of time- yet all info was yet again informative… hopefully. So heres what I did on Sunday.

I watched reruns of Lost. All .Day. I just sat in my makeshift bed (I am currently sleeping on the floor of my friend Sebastians spare room, but something will need to change soon because the floor happens to also be an invisible litterbox, apparently, for his cat Richard to pee on)… and watched reruns. I also ate nothing but cereal all day. Cheerios with cinnamon on them. I like to eat my cheerios in an extra large bowl so I can eat a lot of them yet still say “oh… I only had one bowl…” I like to lie to myself like this, and I do it often. ANYWAY, I had a slight headache, from not having any coffee all day (a sad but true statement) and so I figured I would take this one day and make a hermit of myself. Do nothing but sleep, watch lost, and eat cheerios. People do this sometimes, right? Why am I not entitled to a day like this? I felt guilty all day- I really did. Guilty of my unproductiveness- how did I get this way! Why cant I just be lazy, guilt free! The point is, I had a guilty, terribly lazy, terribly wasted Sunday. I went to bed early, and slept in today.

So today. I woke up after a long night of dreams echoing much of what I saw on the many episodes of Lost I watched (jungles, obstacle courses, gunshots, the like), and I felt pretty ready for the day. But not without my morning oatmeal- also including cinnamon. I ate my oatmeal, had a cup of lemonade to go with (to celebrate the fact that it is almost summer), got out of my pajamas, always a hard thing for me to do, and was out the door. 10 minutes later, I am at the SPARC building, ready for a mon-day’s work.  I was pleasantly surprised as I walked up the cement staircase to our floor to hear what sounded like a pack of children- and then I found it was a pack of children! Fourth graders! Which could only mean one thing- it was a field trip day.

Choose your Own  Adventure- why don’t they make these types of books for adults? They’re those books that let you choose what happens to characters, who dies, who kills the monster, etc. I think I would like an adult version. Stephen King I am sure could do it- take one of his horror novels- have it branch off into- the good guy dies, the bad guy dies, and maybe a twist, like instead of anyone dying the good guy and the bad guy actually get together with their wives and go on a double date- that sort of thing. Well, now that I have typed it out, it seems a little silly, yes, but aren’t all Stephen King books a little wacky? Well… enough about this. The kids choose your own adventure was adventurous indeed.

It was entitled: The Purple Cow. Here is what happens: 3 friends, “you”, Max and Menalie, are all jumping on the moon. Yes, jumping on the moon. Then! Out of nowhere! A purple cow with green spots arrives and makes a popping sound and tries to hypnotize you with his antennae!! (sneaky little beast…). So what can you do? The kids thought of two options. First: they can run to the spaceship and try to go home. Second: they could put on their special space boots and try to jump on the cow. Eventually, they get to choose their own third ending, etc, as the adventure goes. At some point, a child asks Danny to shave his leg. Five minutes later he receives a similar suggestion: he should shave his eyelashes. Do you get the jist of where this is going?

Call it what you want, but there is something hilarious about the… innocence? Immaturity? Joke-y-ness? Of a kid. I could get into some weird run of the mill story/antecdote about this sort of  youthfulness, but I think we all know the story- the story is, kids are funny. They make each other laugh. Sometimes it ‘s distracting, but most of what they say is somehow so organic, and creative, and erratic. I am smiling to myself through the computer screen to you all, not only because of the memory of the funny purple cow story, but also because I secretly just  told you a run of the mill story/antecdote, JUST like I said I WOULDN’T!

So here you are, world, the first entry of what im sure you can already tell will be a random, slightly crazy, maybe weird, kind of spooky blog! More funny stories to come (I will try my hardest not to rant on next time about my existential living status)

Farewell…

Kat.