Make Limeade

Let’s face it, ‘09 was a washout. It was the first decade of the new millennium, and no doubt we saw our share of fantastic technology, design, and ideas. We saw the iPod, opened our hearts to a Microsoft gaming console, and ultimately found ourselves with a non-Caucasian president. But let’s face it, it had its share of sh*t-stains that America was more than proud to parade like a madman showing off his collection of  brightly coloured socks.

Because I LOVE being both counteractive and squeaky

2010 (pronounced Twenty-Ten, so I hear), on the other hand, is the start of something completely different. If you don’t think so, just look at the omens. I just spent my New Years watching my friend drink a bottle of vodka, piss in the middle of the street, puke as soon as the ball dropped, then pass out for an hour after panting, “never again, never again never ag-Huurgghhh!” THAT’S FREAKIN’ AWESOME! For a kid who’s life has oft been spent sitting on a couch with his friends sipping Sprite and watching Discovery Channel, 2010 really came into the scene balls-out. 2009 had its times, but we’re willing to bet it was all a warm-up for what the 21st century can really do.

So, as a final way of saying goodbye, let’s end 2009 with one last hurrah. Play ‘em off, Keyboard Cat!

That’s the sound of those little paper horns, by the way. As of writing, it’s roughly 8:51 PM on December 31, 2009. Ten minutes ago I was scrolling through facebook, Ten days ago I was sitting  back watching Pulp Fiction for the first time, and 10 years ago I was doing basic math for a color-by-numbers clown. All day I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember the highlights of this decade. well surprise, surprise, It’s been all one big blur. I was in first grade, my mom died, I entered highschool, and here I am, 5′9″, 137 pounds.

When you step back and look at it, a decade really isn’t that long. They say that if the history of the world was a clock, the human race would have arrived at the party a little before midnight. In a decade we can see the rise and fall of franchises, empires, humanity, culture, art, the only thing we can’t see is Sean Connery’s aging.

There are exactly zero differences between these two pictures. Can you spot them all?

the great 00’s have been some of the oddest years of my life. We’ve seen the birth of domestic terrorism, sparkling vampires, space marines, furry leaches known as “Snuggies”, and prepubescent rockstars more beloved than Lynyrd Skynyrd, Journey, and at times even the Beatles.

10. Ten minutes and I’ll be sitting with my friends. 10 hours and I’ll be off to better things, almost unchanged by the sudden 1 creeping up on the date. Here’s for the best in 2010.

Got any tidbits to share with us about the past 3650 days? let it loose in the comment box below.

The Best Feeling in the World

Sitting beside me  here at my desk is a hardcopy edition of my one-act play that I’ve been bitching and moaning about here on makelimeade.com for over two months. I must say, the physical hardcopy edition  really gives you this tremendous feeling of accomplishment. When it’s just sitting in your word processor, you have no physical connection with your work. Once it’s  actually printed, you start to feel the paper, smell the ink, and realize what all of that banging on the keyboard has done. But there is also this great feeling that the end product is crap. You panic and start to think that maybe all that hard work produced a boring piece of shit no one wants to read. I try to convince myself that all of these feelings are just part of the greater play writing process, but I just can’t picture O’Neill reading over A Long Day’s Journey Into Night and saying “ Oh man! This is so stupid. All those nasty critics are going to make fun of me.”  Maybe that was a bad example, O’Neill was dead long before A Long Day’s Journey Into Night was published, but still.

The thing I’m finding is that a play is a living an breathing thing. I may have finished writing it, but the characters, in my mind, still exist. All of the language, the motifs, the events, are still occurring. I look back at some dialogue I wrote and interpret it totally differently. Part of this, I think, is what makes stories so compelling. You don’t just read a book, but you live a book. Think about it, you are reading a James Bond novel, and pretty soon you start trying to act as cool as James did in Casino Royale. You’re at Olive Garden, the waitress asks what you would like to drink and you say “A Coke please”. But when you say this, you are really thinking “ I’ll take a dry martini…in a deep Champagne goblet…shake it well until it’s cold, then add a think slice of lemon peel” The act of ordering a beverage has evolved form a mundane task, to an opportunity to mimic your favorite Double O agent. We all get to escape our life, which is, let’s face it, boring as hell, and jump into another world where unicorns do exist.

~ optionshiftk

Oh Lawdy, Lawdy, how badly things end up sometimes. I’m hungry, tired, have barely been on the internet for more than two hours all week, and have lost all budding hope in actually maintaining any relationship longer than a one-night stand. (That is, a casual standing conversation with a lady during the night. We keep it classy here at ML). And its not like I can cease the flow of information moving through the world. Trust me, I’ve tried.

Not going to happen.

So you’re probably sitting there thinking, “Oh God, there he goes on another uneducated, dry-humored, pissy rant on some aimless topic. Someone get the Midol.” In that case, thanks for being a dedicated Make Limeade reader, T-shirts are on the way*. The truth of the matter is, I’ve been stuck between a rock and a hard place. Sports, academics, scouts, and my beloved Firefox have all been fighting for a place in my heart, and as last week’s empty spot can attest to, some things win out. Also, I didn’t have a topic, and I was running out of pictures of cats.

I’m sure we all can relate, It’s happened to everyone. Whether to keep searching imageboards instead of doing homework, choosing between a sports match or a choir performance, choosing between another trip on the sunshine express or satisfying the munchies you’ve had for the past four hours, or giving up a blog post so you can get another coupla minutes in the snooze.

If there was some way to get the upperhand in prioritizing things, I’d love to know. As it is, the best thing to do is just suck it up and keep going. If you have any secrets you’d like to include about keeping priorities to a minimum and schedules nice and free, I’m all ears.

*T-shirts are not on the way. Sorry Broski.

Ok guys, here’s a little bit of a story I wrote. I’m putting it up in like 4 parts, so enjoy.

Neptunium

The year was 1975. My name is Richard Freeman, and I am a scientist in the Los Alamos Energy Research Facility, which is a small laboratory maintained by the government. After the Manhattan Project, the entire research center was effectively abandoned to the janitors, without a scientist in sight. In 1967, though, a small energy crisis disturbed the nation as gasoline suddenly shot up in price due to a raging war in the Middle East. President Lyndon Johnson was put under pressure by his peers to begin developing new sources of energy, in the case that one day gasoline would not be available. In response to his critics, he quietly set up the energy research facility in Los Alamos. In reality, he simply sent three fresh graduates from the United States Air Force Academy to the old buildings in New Mexico. He had no idea what would happen, and neither did we. All that we knew was that we’d gotten a steady job, with very little supervision, and could basically do whatever we wanted. As I look back on the whole incident now I almost feel as if the accident was my fault, but I remind myself that what has been done was bound to happen to someone eventually.

That day, the sun was particularly bright as I stepped into the dusky lab. I greeted my bristling coworkers, Gordon and Albert, and slowly put my things into my locker. It seems as if a job as an atomic scientist would be exciting and revolutionary, and at one time, it actually was. But now it was 1975, and the science had been wrung dry. We were the only three in the plant, young and energetic, as all of the others had moved on to simply the design of or the production of atomic weapons. A recent breakthrough allowed for the creation of uranium fueled power plants, which although nifty, were nothing interesting from a scientist’s standpoint.

My coworkers and I quickly grew tired of shuffling papers all day in order to make it appear like the government was researching some ground-breaking method of generating energy. So, secretly, we decided to actually to create this incredible source of energy on our own. We had an entire atomic laboratory, so it only seemed logical. With no regulations to follow, no schedules to keep, we figured that we just might get some real research accomplished. Because we were technically part of a high-level project, we were allowed access to almost any material that the government possessed, so in other words, any material.

Our little group knew that the only way to create such a vast amount of energy and keep it under control would be through a process called cold fusion. Basically, there are two different types of reactions in an atomic bomb, the first of which splits uranium atoms, and the second of which fuses hydrogen atoms together. The process of binding hydrogen is multiple times more powerful than simply smashing atoms, which is how the government was suddenly creating bombs capable of incinerating anything within 20 miles. Keeping this power under control and using it for electricity is called Cold Fusion. By this year, many scientists had already given up on the idea, calling it a lost cause. But we knew that if we hit upon just the right method of creating this fusion, we would become the greatest scientists of modern times.

Nybrave08

*DISCLAIMER: This post in NO WAY intends to place the views of the
author as credible information. Hell, half of it is probably fudged
statistics he imagined during the commercials between Scrubs. In fact,
the author is probably one of the biggest hypocrites you’ll meet, but
the difference between him and others is that at least he knows what
he’s talking about.*

We’ve all seen them. They’re on buses, in churches, in cities, and in
our kitchens during the middle of the night when we wake up for a
glass of water. They’re hypocrites, and they’re not going away.

They look like us, they act like us, but are, without a doubt, annoying as possible. They come in all shapes and sizes, and share one similar trait- stubborn ignorance.

Do-Gooders & Big Picturists

Most people want to save the world (not including me, I just wished everyone had Pirate hats and a lifetime supply of chocolate milk, but that’s for another day). They want to save the rain forest, feed starving children in Africa, or some other feel-good service that they could contribute to from behind their air conditioned pleather seat and propaganda-stickered Macbook. I’d like to note, there are people out there who truly are trying to help the world, and I respect them highly. But there are also hypocrites. And I hate hypocrites. The people who think that simply because they put their change from buying environmentally friendly light bulbs and soy chips in a jar to save Ugandan orphans, then they have permission to bypass the homeless man sitting outside the store and curse off the next person they see who isn’t driving a Prius with a “club soda, not seals” sticker slapped on it. Being a good person extends past giving some here and there to people you’ll never meet. It means performing positive deeds to those around you. Help the man across the street. Give a dollar or two or ten to those who need it. You can’t save the world with pocket change and nothing else, so don’t ruin it for the rest of us.

Racists & Counter-Racists

This is a little sensitive of a topic, but annoying nonetheless. Racism remains in our world, and its probably not going anywhere. But please, if you think people of a different race are inferior (Which, in itself, most likely already makes you an annoying twit), Don’t look like you’re getting ready to go home to say hi to your children-slash-nieces and talk about the recent NASCAR race.

I've never kissed a girl and its all because of minorities!

We’d prefer not to have racism in our world, but if its going to be there, then like fast food and Disney Channel, there better be a legitimate reason behind it. People who hate other people shouldn’t act immaturely themselves, its plain and simple.

On the opposite side of the spectrum are the “counter-racists”, e.i. people who become offended at anything vaguely suggesting racism. They’re not exactly hypocrites as much as extremely annoying. Asking you for a black marker in science class has nothing to do with your skin color, I just want to make my carbon atoms look pretty.

Women

Lemme rephrase this. I love women, trust me I do, but some of them just don’t make sense. Its girls you have to look for. Actually, let me rephrase this, teenagers are the main problem here.We get it, you’re not familiar or aren’t old enough to understand certain things, but the fact that you actually shun certain ideas for being “too weird” then promote just-as-wacky theories really throws up a red light.

By today's standards, not strange at all

It surpasses my understanding why we exile people who act in a different manner, yet promote a society wherein we tolerate diversity. I’m not saying we have to love and hug people who we don’t like, but having a different disposition or fashion sense doesn’t constitute a legitimate lifestyle. Take these two pictures of Johnny Depp and Boo Radley. Both are taken in Black and White, and display masculine actors. But while one is a modern star and the other is a fictional shut-in, the response is much more varied. Listen, kids, lets make a compromise. You don’t call me “weird” when I make a valid point, and I won’t make fun of you for being in love with a sparkly centuries-old child molester.