Some Highly Craved Attention

Friends,

I have exciting news! I am now a little less unfamous.

I was recently interviewed about Life in MS Paint on a blog that gets a lot more hits than mine does: jenbokoff.com.

Ever since the interview was posted (all of about 2 hours ago), I have been acting like a celebrity.

 

 I have also developed a taste for the finer things.

(Clearly, I've been pretty thirsty today.)

I  called a real estate agent about purchasing a unit in a downtown high rise but I have yet to hear back. Perhaps I shouldn't have told him I wouldn't budge over $800 total (and even that was a bluff).

I almost blew the interview too. I kept thinking it was funny to answer "No" to everything.

This wouldn't have made for a very interesting interview, so I really had to show some restraint.

Special thanks to Jen Bokoff for having great taste in blogs!

Check hers out if you get the chance. Many  of her posts are informative and thoughtful, which is more than I can say for Life in MS Paint.


Make it rain!

(I threw at least 9 or 10 bucks in the air! And then scrambled after them as a gust of wind hit.)

PB (or Paintball to the Lay Man)

I went paintballing recently. Yes, that's right, paintballing.

One might wonder - What is a guy with no depth perception, speed, agility, or blood thirst doing signing up for paintball?

Getting shot, that's what.

One of my best friends was getting married and he wanted his groomsmen to play paintball before he tied the knot.

He decreed that I had to wear a bright orange vest and skull cap because he thought it would be fun to watch me get pelted with rock solid paint pellets. Because I'm a complete sap and figured that it was his weekend, I reluctantly complied.

One of the most interesting things about paintball is that you end up playing with other strangers who, in many cases, devote horrifically significant portions of their lives to the game. When we scoped out the competition, I realized how far out of my league I was.

 

Perhaps the best part of paintball was the angry teenager who gave us the instructions.

After this warm welcome, it was time to rumble. I must say getting shot by those paintballs is no picnic. Those suckers hurt! The pain involved in getting shot really raised the stakes as we ran through the woods, dove behind trees, and holed up in bunkers.

One major problem I had was that I couldn't fit my glasses under the face mask. Also, the mask fogged up instantly whenever I put it on. This is a bit of an issue because vision, surprisingly, is an important component of paintball. Everything looked like this:

The weird part was, I actually kinda liked paintball. There was a sort of tactical/team element that really appealed to me.

Actually, if I'm being honest, it was more like this:

I really did get kinda into it.

(I had to tell myself to go easy on the Frost, Conrad, and Heller (and Bruce Willis) references.)

In the end, the teen with the attitude complimented me by saying I was good at crouching.

I suppose there are worse compliments you can get in paintball.

But not many.

Emergency Medical Technician

The summer after my freshman year of college, I decided to attend Emergency Medical Technician school. I figured staring into the open gaping wounds of strangers seemed like a nice way to spend the summer. I conned my friend into signing up too. It was tough to convince him.

We were the youngest in the class, which was filled with colorful characters.

One man drank at least one 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew every morning.

This one lady was a Hasidic Jew who wasn't allowed to show her hair to anyone so she wore a bright red shiny wig.

We actually became really good friends with her.

The instructors were characters too. Our head teacher was an EMT named Sergio. He demanded that we refer to him as Serge. The whole summer, I thought he was saying we should call him "Sarge," so that's precisely what I did.

There was another instructor who liked to tell us all about her colon removal. Everyday she would go into vivid detail.

She also had a strict policy for dealing with male suitors.

At some point in the term we got to go on ambulance ride-alongs and hospital shadowings. It was fascinating. One girl in the class had a unique way of dealing with the stress of an emergency situation.

During one of the hospital visits, my friend and I were assigned to clean out a lady's wound.

 

We got the surgical tape stuck in our gloves and were rendered almost entirely useless. 

One of our friends wasn't used to the automatic sphygnomamometers mounted on the wall because he had only used the hand-held kind. When he went to take a patient's blood pressure, this high tech version really tripped him up. He pushed the button on the wall, but forgot the vital step of attaching the cuff to the patient's arm. 

He stood there waiting patiently for the machine to do its thing while it blew up like a big noodle on the wall behind him. The patient requested a real doctor immediately..

After my friend and I passed the class, we were pretty anxious to save lives. And by anxious I mean overzealous. For example, we once saw a woman trip on the sidewalk.

When we returned to college, we decided to major in the liberal arts.