instant tradition

The best part about being an adult is making your childhood dreams come true on a grand scale.  I’ve been hula-hooping since I could walk (truth: I started ballet when I was 3.. and.. well.. it’s kind of the same thing, right? I mean, balance and movement and what not. Nevermind, just go with it), and I always wished.wished.wished I could hula hoop somewhere besides my garage.  I mean, who likes huling around all the junk that didn’t fit in the house? Not me.  I shook it left and right and promised myself I would hula in coola places when I was older.

Since I figure that most people have dreams just like mine, I decided to host a hula hoop competition on the streets of Minneapolis.  The pictures tell the story:

adults only

You know that feeling when everything suddenly comes together?  The moment I’m talking about proceeds weeks and possibly months or years of endless worrying.  The type of worrying that springs up while you’re running on the treadmill, writing a term paper, or trying to boil water, and all of a sudden, you can’t stop wondering: Am I doing the right thing?  What if this is a disastrous idea?  Then you silence your mind because you have chosen instead of logic, you will follow your intuition.  Yes, always intuition.  If you haven’t figured me out yet, that’s the way I work – I follow the signs, I go where they lead.  No pros and cons chart for this girl.

It’s tricky to determine all the things that could go right about a project, and so I usually just go straight ahead with any experiment that crosses my mind.  This method has produced my best and my worst ideas.  A classic example of how our greatest strength can be also be our greatest weakness, right?
Today, everything with my experiment went totally wrong and made me wish I had a boss that vetoed all my bad ideas.  The flipside is that being left to my own devices usually makes for a pretty good story.  
The oddball quirky story for today is that I had a not-so-brilliant-but-well-intentioned idea to make an ‘adults-only’ play zone at the park.  I wasn’t intending to play in it or anything, but I thought the concept was pretty important, and might encourage people to be a little silly.

Anyway, I roped off an area between some trees with streamers, and then I blew up tons and tons of balloons to fill up the play zone.  Bad idea, right?  I guess I don’t have any experience with balloons, but it simply didn’t occur to me that they would blow like wild and be all over the streets within 2 minutes.

Oops!  Drivers started honking and I was chasing down the balloons and I definitely made more people angry than happy.
My little brother called in the middle of the mayhem, and I explained the situation.  He calmly told me that I should just fill the balloons with candy and hang them around for people that might need cheering.

Anyway, I went home and did exactly as my little brother instructed:

attack of the bees

It’s common knowledge that I consider Thoreau a personal friend. I mean, heck, I threw the guy a birthday party this year. A bigger secret, perhaps, is that I consider his pal Emerson to my other bestie. Like, if the three of us all went to Harvard in 1835 we would have shared a lunch table. Or, even bigger news, I might have convinced Thoreau to let us all share his little cabin in the woods.

If you’re not into my favorite authors, this post might be throwing you for a loop. If you are, however, then you might be familiar with one of Emerson’s most popular sayings: “be kind, be honest, be silly.” A pretty good maxim for an optimal life, right? I have a penchant for kindness and giggles, and I’m a fan of honesty (qualification for BFFdom).

That said, I decided to pay homeage to my homeboy Emerson with an attack of the bees in Minneapolis. Come again? I designed the graphic below, made lots of copies, and then placed the bees all over the uptown neighborhood.