I'm still rather happy. More so than I've been in years. And in all honesty, I don't miss television as much as I thought I would. My current financial predicament does occasionally lead to large bouts of boredom, though, especially when most everything these days costs a pretty penny.
So tonight, my amazing roommate/best friend and I decided to find a way to entertain ourselves. We hopped online and found creative writing exercises to not only feel creative (we're nerdy), but to also get to know one another better, and have a new experience to share (did I mention we're nerdy?). What follows is my response to one of the exercises that we did. I share this with you not because I think it is good (it's not), but because I had such a blast doing it, and I want you to do it, too. It was free entertainment that allowed us to be creative, and to also share our creations with one another. The exercise comes from here. We did the random stimulation exercise. In ten minutes, and two random words (mine were "tire" and "type-setting"), this is what I wrote (complete with spelling errors and all):
Ugh. Here I am again. Stuck
in this stupid, thankless copy-editing job. No matter what I do, the
type-setting is never correct. Too much margin space. Too many spaces between
paragraphs. Do not, under any circustances, use Comic Sans as a font. Make sure
the page is the correct color. Did you remember to check the grammar? Like I
have nothing better to do than deal with nit-picky formatting issues. Granted,
this is what I’m getting paid for, but I swear, nobody is reading these piece
of shit bulletins for the Society for Emotionally Distraught Animals anyway. At
least not enough to care what font I use. People like Comic Sans. I’m not sure
why my boss is so against it. He claims it’s “unprofessional.” Yet, somehow,
spending thousands of dollars on an organization devoted to a cause that
neither saves lives in any form (human or not), nor pays its employees hire
than minimum way, is completely okay. If I didn’t need this job so desperately,
I’d quit. It’s such a shame that this is the only job I can get. I have a
Master of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing, and this is the only employment
I can find. The only joy, the only solace I have during my days, are doing the
petty, passive-aggressive antics to annoy my boss. Is this immature? Yes. Does
it prevent me from suicide? Also yes. This, incidentally, means that what I do
during the day actually saves a human life. More than I can say for SEDA. My
favorite “prank”, if you can even call it that, was the bulletin I designed for
last-years Traffic and Safety Awareness campaign. The whole ordeal, apparently,
is to make people aware that driving too close to the edge of the road when an
animal, such as a squirrel, is nearby, causes the squirrel undue stress. So,
despite the fact that no laws are being broken, the task of the day was to ask
drivers to drive closer to the center line if they happened to see an animal on
the edge, to prevent animal stress. Due to a lapse in judgment by my boss, I
was put in charge of the first draft of the bulletin. I decided to create an
image of a giant tire. The kind of tire found on monster trucks. And place it
near the edge of the road near the cutest bunny I could find. And I had the
bunny’s eyes bugging out of its head, with a tagline that read “Driving to
close to the edge can cause strain, even if it doesn’t cause a stain” with
another pic, of the exact same bunny, only smashed with the tire stained red.
Priceless.
I can honestly say that trading stories with my friend is some of the most fun I've had in a while. So if you're bored and broke like me, but have some nerdy friends and some time, I'd recommend doing silly things like this. I'm gonna keep posting my own responses to various exercises that I do, and I would love for you to do them as well and post your responses in the comments.
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