Billy’s Weird Life, (Also dubbed “the most uninspired piece of writing to come out of Brian’s fingers.”)

Sometimes I feel like half of me is Timid & Shy Little Brian, and the other part is his boisterous uncle who is always trying to embarrass him. Timid & Shy Little Brian just wants to stay under the radar and live in anonymous peace, but the boisterous uncle is always yanking him out of it and reminding everyone of the time he got stuck in a his girlfriend’s parents’ bathroom. It is because of this conflict that I write this post.

The problem is that I promised I’d do this in my previous post. About a year ago I posted The Fraidy-Cat Lion, which is an endearing and Young Authors Award-winning story written by me in third grade. Yes, third grade, my rebellious year. Between episodes of playing drums with my pencil and playing High-Five Spin The Bottle with a glove, I was writing the damn cutest thing you could ever imagine.  That’s right, Mrs. White and that Meatloaf-doppelganger recess aide, I used the pain from your oppressive fists to foster my creativity! Who’s laughing now?

Then fifth grade came along, and with the entrance of scant traces of puberty, more and more of my adorable creativity took its leave. That year it was announced that we would all be writing books to be entered again into the Young Authors contest. Being a veteran of this kind of contest, I was sure that my story would be a shoe-in for the award. But I wouldn’t let the fame make me sloppy; I wanted my new story to have the same artistic integrity and grounded panache as The Fraidy-Cat Lion. So I started brainstorming.

This was the year that I had started reading the Harry Potter books and I wanted nothing more than to be him. Each chapter of the books filled me with such giddy excitement accompanied by the mournful sigh, Oh my sweet goodness, I wish someone would tell ME that I’m a wizard! It permeated my every thought, and clearly affected my dreams as well. So when it came time for me to choose a story to write, I undoubtedly had one choice and one choice only: to use this passion to write a story about a boy who finds out he’s a wizard and is invited to Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Creative.

Even more creative, though, is the title. Ladies and gentlemen, Billy’s Weird Life.

 

  ["I dedicate this book to my family"...because they don't know that I played High-Five Spin The Bottle yet and I have to rack up all the points I can before conferences.]

 

[Billy's dad and grandparents are dead ringers for my dad and grandparents. Really, I did a horrible job concealing the fact that Billy is me.]

 [My Calvin & Hobbes influence started early. See?]

 [My sister drew Billy for me on this page. That is clearly 8th grade artistry.]

 [This is one of my favorite pages, because (1) Again, Billy's dad looks just like my dad, (2) I used colored pencil, crayons, AND gel pens to illustrate this, and (3) I thought that people wouldn't recognize the golden starlike shapes as "sparks."]

[I owned a shirt just like that at the time. Billy = me.]

 

 [I amazed even myself with my mountain-drawing abilities. WATCH YOUR BACK, BOB ROSS.]

 

[I'm not fully sure what is going on here between Billy's mom and dad, but it seems as though I was hinting at some sort of deeper problems in that relationship.]

[The Chair-Moving Spell: A favorite among weary-legged wizards.]

 

[Billy ends up being HOMESCHOOLED? What the HELL?]

 [Probably not the best idea to end the book with a fragment sentence.]

I did not win the Young Authors Award that year. During the assembly during which the award winner would be announced, I sat confidently cross-legged, ready to stand up and accept the prize. But it never happened. I was crushed. 

How could I not have won? Comments written by my classmates on the back cover of the book included such praise, as:

Cool! - Hans

Cool book! It was really GOOD! I liked the idea about "Harry Potter" ~Alyssa~

Very good book! I loved the not very many mistakes. Cool(written with eyes in the O's and a silly, tongue-wagging smile underneath)! - James

I guess that's that. You've now read my embarrassing fifth grade novel. And it's all because of that embarrassment-fixated second half of myself. There aren't any more on this subject, thank God. (Well, except for my seventh grade autobiography.)

DAMN YOU, SECOND HALF OF MYSELF!

How to escape from Al Queda in three easy steps … If you don’t eff it up (UPDATED)

I dreamed the other day that I was outside Paris in an abandoned bunker that was presently being used by Al Queda to hold their hostages.

And I was one of them.

Not one of the Al Queda members. The hostages. I was one of the hostages.

It was pretty frustrating to be abducted in the middle of my vacation in Paris. I mean COME ON I LOVE PARIS. I was probably following the Arago line and giving the Maison de Balzac another try. (Look at me acting like I know lesser-known things in Paris. Those are the only two things, I promise, that make me a Paris hipster. Everything else I did there was touristy.) But now I was sitting on a chair with a bunch of skinny, bearded guys with guns standing around me. Why the heck did Al Queda choose Paris?

They are masters of secrecy. …And they love crème brûlée.

In this dream, I was a little more adventurous than I probably am in real life. I was going through escape ideas in my head while I was sitting there. The walls of this abandoned bunker were open, so I figured that my first plan of escape would be to just make a break for it. I waited for the guards to turn around, and when they did, I bolted.

Or at least began to bolt.

This is actually how far I got before the guard turned back around.

[Foiled.]

I fell back into my chair and smiled to the guard as if nothing had happened. I’m thinking I looked something like when Calvin got caught acting like a dinosaur during class…

[This is the third Calvin & Hobbes reference in a row. LET’S KEEP THE BALL ROLLING, BABY!]

Then I remembered the phone in my pocket. I’ll text my parents, I decided. Slowly I slid my phone out of my pocket and tried to find my parents’ number on my touch screen. Lately, my phone’s touch screen has been acting up, so it took awhile, but I kept my eyes on the prize. However, I probably should have kept my eyes on the guard because all of a sudden this went down:

GUARD: HEY!! What are you doing?

ME: Nothing! Nothing. I promise. I was just looking at my phone, which doesn’t. Have. International. Texting. Anyway. *Dangit!*

GUARD: Okay, then. Back to sitting, hostage.

ME: Thanks.

[When I told my mom about this dream, she said, “WHAT THE HECK COULD WE HAVE DONE TO HELP YOU?” Hopefully ALL YOU CAN, Mother. Jeez.]

We (and by “we,” I mean the Al Queda guards, the other hostages, and yours truly) then went on a fieldtrip across the street.  As we approached the street, a non-Al Queda car drove by. Now’s my chance, I thought, and I took the summer sausage in my pocket and threw it into its open window. 

I then realized, Dangit, I should have scratched something into the summer sausage, like “HELP AL-QUEDA” or something. No, I couldn’t have done that. Maybe something like “HELP! AL-QUEDA HAS KIDNAPPED ME.” Aw, I probably couldn’t have written that in time. Now those people are just wondering why some kid threw a summer sausage into their car. DANGIT.

And then I woke up.

And don’t ask me why I had a summer sausage in my pocket in the first place.



UPDATE: One of my faithful follower(s) spurred an interesting conversation about the meaning of the sausage in my pocket. (Wow, I thought that last phrase wouldn't sound dirty. SO WRONG.) My hypothesis was this, for which she immediately requested a t-shirt design...

You're welcome.

UPDATE: My Little Experiment

Okay, so the “Celebrity Names in the Title“ thing didn’t work. I was actually a little surprised. I was even more surprised the Google didn’t blacklist me for keyword spamming. That would have SUCKED.

I mean, why would someone whose entire existence is dedicated to gaining more followers and ultimately reaching Blogvana by receiving Blog of Note or something RISK ALL OF THAT BY SPAMMING HIS TITLE?

I walk a thin line.

(That last sentence is the tough way of saying “I had no idea that blacklisting was even a word until a friend of mine told me about it.”)

I don’t even know what I would do if I was blacklisted. It would probably begin with me updating the Faceplace and the Tweetybox multiple times with panicky messages like,

“DON’T WORRY, MY BLOG STILL EXISTS. YOU JUST CAN’T SEARCH IT RIGHT NOW. FURTHER BULLETINS AS EVENTS WARRANT.”*

Or something like,

“AAAUGHH MY BLOG HAS BEEN BLACKLISTED, BUT I PROMISE I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING BAD. IT WAS A MISTAKE. DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO UNDO SOMETHING LIKE THIS?? YOU CAN STILL VISIT IT AT brian-schroeder.blogspot.com!!”**

And everyone on Facebook would probably read it and say, “He has a blog?”

After much Googling, deliberating, and drinking worrying, I would probably decide that it would be best to fashion a sincere, handwritten letter to the people at Google. 

(click to enlargigate.)

Something like that. The good news is, Popcorn Day is in the clear, even though my experiment failed. People must just really like that Scrabble post. Bizarre. 

*Wow. That's the second time I've referenced Calvin and Hobbes in my recent posts.
**Yep. I just linked to my own blog within my blog. It has the same infinite effect that looking into two facing mirrors does.  

Lady Gaga Justin Bieber Kobe Bryant iPad Snookie Precious

So I have a theory. On my sidebar, you will see a box that says “Popular Posts.” For those of you who are too lazy to scroll down (I’m mostly talking to you non-Macbook users who have to bring your cursor all the way over to the scroll bar and draaaaaaaaag that stupid bar down to the correct place, instead of simply placing two fingers on your trackpad and effortlessly navigating the page. I totally understand, by the way…when I want to scroll on a PC laptop I feel like I’m scraping superglue off tree bark with a pipe cleaner. [I find more uses for those every day!] Anyway…), here’s a picture of that box: 

You’ll notice that a lot of these posts are some of my better ones. Perhaps you're chuckling to yourself about something funny that  I wrote in one of these previous posts. Such fond memories, right readers? But did you notice that Pictionary one? Do you remember reading that? Was that a good post?

[It’s okay if you want to say no. I understand.]

The truth is, this is not a very good post of mine. It was early off in this blog’s life, and I guess I thought it was cute.

And yet...

It’s one of the most popular posts. Why? This is my theory: The title has five board games listed in it. There are clearly some game enthusiasts out there who look tirelessly to find a good board game-themed blog who stumbled upon Popcorn Day in a Google search. They took a look around, saw that this was just a silly blog of some guy who draws pictures of his dreams, and stepped out. Thus, this post receives more visits. 

To test this theory, I have titled this post with the names of current celebrities and pop-culture items. If it ends up in my “Popular Posts” box, we will know definitively that I am right. 

 [For some reason I have the Inspector Gadget theme song stuck in my head.]

This is the most pointless post…

Over the Handlebars

I’ve ridden my bike to class every fair-weather day for the past two years. I gingerly lean through sharp turns, pedal up and down hills with ease, maybe pop a wheelie three inches off the ground. I’m really good.

This week, however, the earth must have rotated a bit faster, the wind must have been a little bit stronger, or those darn landscapers must have moved the rock wall on that corner two inches to the right, because I fell off my bike.

Twice.

TWICE.

I felt like Calvin learning to ride his bike in the old comic strips. And when I fell, it wasn’t like a stumbled to the side and got back on, I was actually thrown over the handlebars.

The first time I was trying to run into Christie’s wheel with mine, got tangled up, and went flying. The second time, I ran into a rock wall on campus and, again, was thrown over my handlebars and crashed into the ground, slamming my shoulder on Christie’s wheel, and bending it. 

The wheel, not my shoulder.

I’m a little discouraged to get back on.  I’ve been told it’s just like riding a bike. That doesn’t really help.