davidd's A DOLL A DAY 2023

[davidd]

Dude doesn't sound very weird to me.  Did you wade through the entire book?  I had a quick look on Amazon; I see suggestion #4 is "turn this book into a shovel" (??)...on the face of it, it sounds like something you might like to do.  I kinda like the idea of sipping tree-made water though.  I'm all for communing with the universe, and it sounds like there might be some useable meditative ideas here, but not particularly "weird".

I like your "jungle" setting but am amused that in the tropical wonderland I envision you are currently in, that you need artificial greenery 

The need for artificial greenery in Florida was not something I was anticipating, but it's been a while since I lived in a "neighborhood" where houses are close together. The trend among the surrounding neighbors is to have those bright white plastic fences, so it's difficult to frame a photo in the yard without having a glaring white fence in the background. There are a lot of power lines, too. And there's been a bit of a drought for a while, which is odd. There's not a water shortage, because of natural springs and lots of low-lying landscape, but the foliage looks a bit sparse and dry. Plus, this is northern Florida, and it's winter, so most of the deciduous trees have lost their leaves. Things are not nearly as lush here as I would have ex-pected.

Turn the book in to a shovel is another thought ex-periment: imagine what else you might use the book for rather than as a book. I used to play this game with my 8 year old special education students. I'd pick some object, usually something simple like a playground ball, and tell them, "this isn't a ball. What else could it be?" Kids today, and not just special ed kids, have a difficult time imagining. They are very literal. Their online games and phones do all the "imagination work" for them.

If this book is any indication, it's not just kids who have that problem. People have become accustomed to being spoon-fed "imaginative stories" in video format set in the Marvel Universe. Thinking outside the box isn't happening much, and the box keeps getting smaller.

The tree-made water ex-periment sounds interesting and I might try it this spring or summer. The claim is that trees respirate most of the water they consume, and that if a plastic bag is sealed around the end of a branch (during the growing season as opposed to mid-winter), the water "ex-haled" by the tree will accumulate in the bag. I suppose it's the same mechanism that leads to moisture building up on the glass of a terrarium, although some of the terrarium moisture likely evaporates from the soil as well before condensing on the glass.

Yes, I read the entire book. It was a quick read, and mostly at least moderately interesting. There just weren't many suggestions that I would consider "weird," and what weirdness there is is a "closeted weirdness," in which you conduct little ex-periments and record your weird thoughts and impressions in a private journal. There were no suggestions to do something that was overtly weird to the point where friends or co-workers might look at you askance, not even anything so benign as a suggestion to try a new hairstyle, or wear an outdated necktie, or put colorful laces in your shoes, or... spend the day talking like a pirate. The author doesn't even suggest sharing any of your weirdness anonymously through online forums or platforms. I suppose the secrecy aspect could be interpreted as being a little bit weird in itself.

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2 February - A Doll A Day 2023:

Little Big Fan

I found these little fans that look like big fans in 1/6 scale at the same place I found the plastic plants yesterday, for super cheap, so I purchased two of them. One was pink and one was purple, which was cute, but a dash of spray paint allows them to better fit my standard mise-en-scène, which is dark, greasy, rusty, and grungy.