An Ode to the Cynic

I love despair.com. Those guys crack me up every time I go on their website. Honestly, I would love to work for them.

One of the treats that they have provided is a chance to make your own demotivational poster.

Now those of you who know me know that I'm about two things:

Freedom and Mocking.

And not necessarily in that order either.

So tonight I made a few demotivators mocking myself and my roommates.

Enjoy.

This is my roommate James. He has a hard time making decisions. If you know him then this poster will go a long way.

This is me. The caption says it all.

This is Travis. He can only see in 2-D.

Some people say I over-work myself. This is my witty response.

A hard learned lesson.

God Bless America.

And no one else.

THUGGIN' IT

So if you've already seen the video you may be thinking, "Where did that come from?"

If you know us really well, then you are probably thinking, "Yeah, they would."

But let me tell you the story of how this all came to be.

Last year I decided to put together an album that I would mail out to family and friends for Christmas. It was terribly last minute and my good friends Chris Smith and JP were kind enough to play bass and drums for me despite having almost no warning. The three of us only practiced together twice outside of actual recording time.

One day we were wrapping up our recording session in Nate's studio room, and I started playing the guitar riff from "Thuggin' It." They just started playing along; we all stopped and laughed when I tried to start rapping. I asked rather jokingly, "You guys wanna do a rap song?" and everyone responded in the affirmative.

So we laid down a quick track, and Nate spliced it together for us. I went home, wrote the rap, came in the next day and rapped it in the studio room. We put some finishing touches on it and boom in about 24 hours "Thuggin' It" was born.

Fast-forward six months.

I was up in Utah to visit my recently returned mission president. I was sleeping on couches by night and hanging out with Alex, Max, Austin and several other old friends by day. I asked them if they wanted to make a rap video in a similar fashion to the recording. You can guess what the response was. So we got together, shot some footage for a few hours, had a ton of laughs and called it good.

Fast-forward six months.

I grabbed all the video clips on the Phil and Alex Winter 2010 Adventure, edited and now we've got the video. It was the longest last minute project of my life, but some how I managed to keep on "Thuggin' It."

The P & A Stamp of Approval: Winter 2010

For those of you who don't know about the P&A Stamp of Approval check out this before you watch the video.

There's history here and loosely quoting Cicero:

"Not to know where the P&A Stamp of Approval comes from is to be forever a child."

Just A Sample

Schools out.

We're back together.

This time we have a camera.

Hope you're excited.

So Mormon.

I love Awkwardfamilyphotos.com.

Sometimes, like during study breaks, I cruise the website.

Tonight was just such a night, and as I went through I couldn't help but think,

"WOW, Some of these are just so Mormon."

Exhibit A:

Probably the least likely of the 3 photos featured tonight. But seriously, a whole family of brass players. Let me see, Mom and Dad fell in love in high school during marching band. She waited for him while he was on his mission, butta bing butta boom...

Either that or they met at BYU. Same thing right?

Exhibit B:

OKAY, this is totally an LDS chapel. And this is totally eight kids ranging from the ages of infant to "I play football (grunt)." And they are totally chucking the youngest one into the air.

"It's OK mom, if we drop him we've still got a couple spares."

"Jimmy just take the darn picture!"

Exhibit C:

OK, do I even need to go into this one? Who has that many relatives? Who get's that many relatives together? in white? and takes a picture? I'll let you think on that one for a while.

Call me judgmental if you want.

It's OK, I can take it.

I'll even take it as a compliment most of the time.

I just call it like I see em'.

Blah blah blah!!!!!! Blah BlaaaaaaaHHHH!!!!

I am sitting here in the Noble Library, and I want to ram a pencil through my eye.

Well,

not really.

I just want some points for drama.

Really, I am just:

sitting on my butt,

checking facebook,

scoping out the snow and lift ticket prices at various resorts,

finding new songs on youtube,

occasionally looking at my notes,

imagining myself as a superhero saving the world,

or maybe just a really hot girl who wants my body like no other,

reviewing in my mind how great America is,

scratching my nose,

writing this arbitrary and utterly pointless blog post,

coming up with things to put on a list so that way I can feel like I am doing something of value,

and REALLY, REALLY, REALLY wanting Friday to be here so I can get the chuff out of AZ and hit the slopes.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Hope you like my poem that doesn't rhyme.

Poem by text centering. Wow, I feel so artistic right now.

K back to engines, youtube, and daydreaming.

So Jacked...

This is what you look like when you procrastinate your technical writing research paper till the night before it's due and the only thing you are running on is hot tamales and water. Gotta love the lazy habits.