Author: Shawn

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Are hand-washing instructions that hard to write?

Last time, it was a tiny bathroom at a hospital. Today, it was in Target: I saw a step-by-step process posted on the mirror above the sink that will get your hands nice and clean so you can go out into the store and grab merchandise off the shelves that’s been in people’s dirty, sweaty paws earlier in the day… Target is very concerned about your personal hygiene.

They’re probably environmentally friendly, too. That would help explain why the bathroom had those electric hand dryers that blow hot air onto your hands. They’re cleaner than paper towels, create less waste, etc. They also prevent you from following the step-by-step process posted on the mirror above the sink.

Steps 5 and 6: Dry your hands thoroughly with a paper towel, then use it to turn off the sink.

Is it really that hard to figure out what’s in the bathroom and adjust the instructions accordingly? Why not make a parachute that tells you to “Pull cord to release chute” and don’t include a cord, resulting in someone plummeting to an extremely painful, yet extremely speedy demise? Okay, fine, maybe that example is a little over the top—most people who shop at Target don’t have the kind of cooties that can kill you. At least not on their hands.

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Do they make flame-retardant chip dip?

I was at a friend’s New Year’s Eve party last night and he talked me into putting a few drops of Death Sauce on a chip and eating it (or Hell Sauce or Fire Sauce or whatever that spicy stuff is that’s supposed to singe the hair on your chest when you eat it). That led me to two discoveries:

1) I chewed it with the right side of my mouth and the burning sensation was only on the right side… at first.
2) It took about eight hours for the sauce to pass through my digestive system and it burned just as much going out as it did coming in.

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Once again, I got nothin’

I’m too busy being lazy to think of anything really amusing and I can’t afford to be lazy: there’s a party to attend! And the weather is supposed to turn really crappy in a couple hours, so I should probably get up, run some errands and get wild and crazy for the rest of 2010! And by “get wild and crazy”, I mean “watch some movies, eat too many snacks, feel bloated when we ring in the new year and pass out into a food coma.” Same old, same old.

So to everyone out there on the Interwebz, I hope you have a very safe, very happy, very merry, very splendid, very very very spiffy New Year. Enjoy 2011, y’all. I’m sure it’ll enjoy you just as much.

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Is it because I lack resolve?

I’m sure some people have been working on it for weeks already: their New Year’s list of resolutions. “2010 was (insert description here), but 2011 is going to be awesome! I’m going to do these specific things and I’ll be rockin’ the shiz-nit!” Well, I’m not among those masses—I don’t bother with resolutions.

I talked about this once at a Toastmasters meeting a couple years ago. I was just checking out the group, seeing if I was interested, but I opted to stick with the public speaking skillz I already had. Besides, they confirmed that I wasn’t doing too bad at the time.

During the last half of the meeting, they would pick people out of the group, ask each one a question and the person would have to talk for a minute or so. After four or five people, everyone would vote on who they thought did the best job. The person choosing speakers picked me by accident—normally, they don’t have guests speak, but she thought I looked familiar… (I opted not to mention anything about being on TV.) Still, I decided to give it a shot, so she asked me what my new year’s resolution was going to be.

I got up in front of the group and felt fine, no real nervousness, but I started rolling my sleeves up and kept doing it while I was talking, which might have cost me some votes. But aside from that, the essence of my little speech was what I said in the first paragraph: I don’t bother with resolutions.

My reasoning? I tend to be a bit pessimistic when it comes to stuff like that. “I’m going to work out more.” “I’m going to lose weight.” “I’m going to start doing [blank].” But what happens if you mess up? If you miss a workout or eat a really heavy meal, you start to feel guilty. If trying to keep that resolution and failing makes you feel guilty, why bother making it in the first place? Deciding “I’m going to lose 20 pounds!” and not losing weight after a month… time for large quantities of comfort food that instantly counteract whatever progress you might have made through the remainder of the year.

There was more since I spoke for over a minute, but I filled the required amount of time and sounded like I knew what I was talking about. If I remember right, I received some sympathy from people who weren’t as pessimistic about resolutions and those might have been the people who gave me their votes. The winner probably got a trinket of some sort—remember, this was a couple years ago and some details are a little fuzzy—but just hearing that some people in the group thought I did the best… that was pretty cool, too.

Some of you reading this may be thinking, “Wow, what a great story… hey, wait a sec. You resolved to write a blog entry every day in December and you’re almost done! Hypocrite!” Oh yeah?! Well… yeah. I got nothin’. Maybe it’s because I set the bar pretty low for myself:
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“Write something—anything—from the 1st through the 31st and create a warm, fuzzy feeling inside of myself that doesn’t entail buying one cup of something that costs nine bucks at Starbucks.

“Whether the entries will be of good quality… I’ve written good and bad before, so I’ll let you be the judge.”
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Piece o’ cake. Some were a couple paragraphs I finished 15 minutes before midnight, some were epic short stories. Okay, maybe just regular short stories. But the point is that while I had my daily deadline, I didn’t sweat the other details. If the blog entry was good, yay for me. If it sucked… well, I finished it anyway.

That said, tomorrow is the last day of December and the last day of PerBloWriMo. The entry may be short again—I’m going to a friend’s house for New Year’s Eve and the pre-party starts at noon—but I’ll finish the job I started. Okay, fine, that might be the completion of a resolution, but it was only a month-long deal. Still, small victories are victories nonetheless.

Starting in 2011, writing every day will probably be out the window, but I don’t want to subject people to a lot of suckage if I can help it. I’ll put more time into writing blog entries and hopefully even write them as opposed to just thinking about what to write. Wait… that’s not a resolution, is it? It is? Shit. Well, I might as well go shopping for large quantities of comfort food now.

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Could Sonny Bono be alive?

Blog writer Shawn Bakken is reported to have died shortly after a snowboard accident earlier today – December 29, 2010.

I, a writer & novice snowboarder, was vacationing at the Zermatt ski resort in Zermatt, Switzerland with family and friends. Witnesses indicate that I lost control of my snowboard and struck a tree at a high rate of speed.

I was air lifted by ski patrol teams to a local hospital, however, it is believed that I died instantly from the impact of the crash. I was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident and drugs and alcohol do not appear to have played any part in my death.

Additional details and information will be updated as it becomes available. This story is still developing.

About Zermatt Ski Resort – While neighboring Gstaad is one of the world’s top resorts with its three five-star hotels and St. Moritz is more popular, most rank Zermatt as Switzerland’s top resort. A remarkably peaceful getaway, the village is peaceful thanks to its car-free environment. Amazingly picturesque, Zermatt holds the world’s second biggest lift-served vertical drop and receives huge snowfalls thanks to its altitude.
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Hmmm… makes for an interesting read when it’s about yourself (versus Owen Wilson, Adam Sandler, Charlie Sheen and whoever else supposedly died in a similar fashion within the last week or two). I’m not really sure why the bogus report is pimping the ski resort—maybe one of the employees there has been making up the rumors to increase its visibility among the “unwashed masses” (i.e., people who don’t and will never care about skiing in Switzerland).

For those of you who might be concerned, multiple pop culture media sources have debunked the story, so now we can go back to thinking about other pressing matters. Like how the NFL might punish Brett Favre in 2011 for texting pictures of his junk to Jen Sterger during the 2008 season.

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You know, it’s times like this when snowboarding into a tree starts to sound pretty appealing.