Deaf Shower Scene

If you know me, or follow my sporadic blogging, you'll know I'm not the hugest fan of showering. And when I do shower, I tend to just hit the "hot zones" and not actually clean my whole body. Sometimes, I even do this in the bathroom when I wash my hands in public. I'll get a little soap on my finger tips and then rinse it off, cranking out three or four paper towels for effect in case anyone might have been in ear shot and was questioning the validity of my washing methods.
But I think I found something new. Something to kick off a new generation of bathing for me. It's nothing epic, incredible, expensive or sexy...
It's just earplugs.
Yep, sometimes it's the small things that make a difference. Like smiling back at random strangers, opening a door almost long enough for the person behind you to get through and feeling obligated to share half you last piece of gum; the small things are what make life worth living. So it is with earplugs. Once all the rage on construction sites, in saw mills and around firing ranges, earplugs tell the world you've got better things to do; like worry about you're hearing. But those (if you misplace the space in "but those", it says "butt hose") days are long past and earplugs have now found their way into bathrooms across America and are putting their talents to work for a different cause.
As a kid, I used to put my fingers in my ears in the shower. It was odd, but so are lots of things. I enjoyed the sound of water droplets hitting my head and the varying intensity with which they hit as I moved around. It only took me 15 years to figure out I could pull those fingers out of my ears and get to washing because the earplug was here.
So, tonight, with some awkward trepidation, I said to my wife, "I'll be in the shower, but I'll have earplugs in my ears. So if you need something, you'll need to come in and yell." Her confusion was evident, but she brushed it aside like all the strange things I do. I timed it right, she had 2/3 of American Idol left and a full drudging hour of FOX's Hell's Kitchen to giggle through. I figured I'd be safe and I was, getting through the whole 30 min shower without interruption. And just as I expected, the experience was epic. Being that you are not actually deafened by earplugs, your sense of hearing of that which is going on inside of you and near your body is heightened. I noticed that my current, morbid obesity has increased my resting breathing rate...a lot. I noticed that when I run my fingers through what is left of my hair to shampoo its sparsy goodness, it sounds gritty, like when you get sand between your toes and in your sandals. Terrible. I noticed that I could hear my wife walking around the house as the vibrations carried through the floor or something. I noticed many things and my shower was an all new experience.
So, if you've come to your wits end with bathing as well, preferring a quick wipe down with a moist washcloth or a scented baby wipe, maybe its time you tried earplugs. It doesn't make the tedious, time consuming task of bathing any easier, or less of all those terrible things that bathing is, it just makes it different. Like wearing your socks inside out one day, forgetting your wedding ring, or finding out halfway through the day that your watch actually stopped 13 hours ago. Nothing changes, it just feels the slightest bit different. I think you just might like it.

Just One Of Them Days

Today was blogalicious.

The day started with no less than one call to the police. My wife and I woke up to some lunatic screaming profanities at someone else down in the basement apartment below us. It wasn't the shouted profanities that woke us up, it was the realization that it wasn't evening time and it wasn't actually our downstairs neighbor screaming at her kids to go to sleep. Believe it or not, that's normal for us. We've come to expect it. If we don't hear the F-word and kids crying, we start to get worried. But this morning, it was different. The voice was more gruff; louder and very angry. I half sat up, half caring, when I suddenly heard a colorful tirade and some mention of the police, capped off by the sound of shattering glass.

That was unfamiliar.

I got out of bed.

As I listened intently, not letting my weight shift enough to make the wood floor below me creak, I heard quite a nasty, one sided argument going on between a rather angry gentleman and someone else in the house. A woman? A child? Both? As I wondered, the crazed gentleman stormed out of the house and started yelling profanities as he walked up the back steps, only to storm back down and successfully shatter the glass window of their back entry door.

Time to call the cops.

I love calling the cops on people.

First of all, anyone who wakes me up at 8am deserves to get TASED, bro. Second, there are kids down there and my single-mother, downstairs neighbor just had her third child (oops.) So if you're going to eff with my sleeping patterns and put at risk the lives of a couple of kids that already have some pretty sh**** lives, you better put your arms behind your back and prepare to not drop the soap. As I looked out the front window, still online with 911, I saw my downstairs neighbor's mother's car come flying out of the driveway with a crying lady in the front seat. It didn't look like my neighbor though. Too skinny. Be she looked sad/mad/scared.

I says to the police, I says, "Looks like someone just pulled out of the driveway to leave. A woman." When they asked me to describe the car and which way it was going, I responded as any cop-show-watching, car enthusiast would:

"It's a silver, late model Ford Escape heading south bound on 200 East with a lone female driver."

They stopped her down the road and the cop(s) at my house went downstairs. I never did find out what happened (you're let down, I know.) We had to leave to take our pups to the vet to have some teeth pulled. When we backed out of our driveway to leave, there were 3 police cars parked out front. I asked longingly if they needed me to stick around and they said it was fine for me to leave. I was a little disappointed. I wanted to give a statement, appear on channel 5 and have to fight off a retaliatory attack from the crazy gentlemen downstairs. But it wasn't meant to be. We took the dogs to the vet and when I came back home. It was long since over. No blood. No standoff. No bodies. Oh well.

After that, I had to get ready for my date with Pat. Pat is a man and Pat is my friend with a 9mm Taurus pistol. We had arranged to go shoot random stuff up Spanish Fork Canyon to make ourselves feel more like the men we know we are and after a morning like I'd had, I needed to kill some inanimate objects. I shot 40 rounds of 7.62x54R ammunition through my new-to-me, Soviet issue, 1943 Mosin Nagant 91/30 bolt action rifle. It was amazing. So loud. So powerful and SOOOO very manish. We decimated a phonebook, an old laptop and anything else that got in our way. Ninty rounds between the 2 of us and our 2 guns in an hour. It was exhilerating. Yes Pat, I'll go with you on that second date.

Finally, on the way back to the real world (otherwise known as English 319, Writing Fiction) I watched a UTA public bus clip and sideswipe a parked, armored bank truck as the bus tried to round the corner. The armored truck was parked right up in his business and I could see the driver eyeing his mirror carefully as he tried to sneak past. Then the driver was like, "Eh, whatever," and as he hit the rear, steel plated bumper, I could see/hear metal and plastic breaking off the bus. But the driver didn't slow. He didn't pause. He just kept scraping by. I love seeing that kind of stuff.

After all that excitement, driving around 4 different cities this evening to find a new apartment seemed pretty tame. What's that you ask? Why yes, we are moving again. And yes, it will be our 8th move in the 3 years and 5 months we've been married. Don't ask. It's a LONG story and I don't want to tell it. I'm trying to type this up while watching Toddlers and Tiaras on TLC. Yeah, that show with pageant kids and crazy moms living vicariously through their significantly more attractive younger children. I hate this show. It's like watching those PETA videos about animal abuse on Mink farms. It's so distracting. And it's strange I'm not watching something else. I got Comcast to lower my bill from $130/mo to $90/mo while at the same time giving me 60 more channels and increasing my internet from 6Mb to 8Mb. All that and I'm watching Toddlers and Tiaras? I've got issues.

p.s. Why does blogger do the dreaded, Microsoft Office 2007-esque, double-down when I try to make a new paragraph?

Rage Against Machines

It's a few ticks past 3am on a Friday night/Saturday morning. I'm seathing with rage and my lips burn with the shame a diatribe of profanity brings. Ah yes, it is the weekend and it appears I have been playing video games again. Walking on hot coals, hanging from meat hooks pierced through the skin of my back or peeling back my finger nails with a rusty spoon and ball peen hammer might be a more relaxing activity for my weekend evenings because video games put me in a blind rage. They cause me neck tension, headaches, jaw pain and an intense furrowing of the brow. I am not happy right now. No matter how much I enjoy killing WWII Japs, Nazi's, zombies or Commies, I can no longer handle my rage problem.The poor kids living down below me are surely now conviced the words their mother yells at them at bedtime are actually words of common use (i.e. GO THE @%^*$# TO BED!) And the neigbors next door realize how close we live when the windows are open and my rainbow-vocabulary floats through the night. My colorful shouts of anger and shock at the rediculousness of video game travesties send my neighborhood into alert. What I'm getting at is I have a major anger problem that manifests itself when provoked by an appropriate agent. During the week, that agent is yellow and red lights that blink without reason like the lights of a Christmas tree; changing at will as I approach to pass through them. During the weekend, it is my XBOX 360. I don't throw controllers, I don't hit my TV and don't get violent. No, I prefer empty threats and screaming in the flickering darkness of my office. Down the hall, my wife shuts the door to the bedroom to block out the noise. I hear the front door slam shut as the Spirt (that would be of a religions nature) scurries out the door to find more peaceful lodging. I am a monster. I am a crazed lunatic. With opened cans of diet soda piled around me and a handful of opened sting cheese wrappers mounting on my bookshelf, I fade into sadness, realizing that I am most likely, truely insane. Too poor to break something I'll have to pay for, I scream madly like a lone wolf. I am a closet video game psychopath.

Sign Of The Times

Woah, I just realized how things have changed over the years. I just now, sitting in front of this computer, had to google which side of the envelope a stamp goes on. I was about to adhere one of the Christmas themed return address stickers my kindly State Farm agent gifted us this holiday season when I realized, I had no clue which side it went on. I had no non-metered mail to reference, so I did the only thing a 20-something computer hack like myself could do: I googled how to format snail mail. How odd. How odd indeed.

Disastrous

What a disaster this blog is. What kind of a blogger doesn't blog for over a month? I am ashamed of myself. So let's get caught up and let you know what kinds of things are going on:
I've had to work on my personal portfolio for the last week or so. I wasn't originally planning on doing an internship this summer, but miraculously some opportunities arose for me to possibly go to the beloved city of Chicago and I decided to pull some rainbows and unicorns out of my butt and get a portfolio together to apply. If you're confused about the rainbows and unicorns thing, it basically means I didn't have anything and I made a miracle happen. Unfortunately, I wont find anything out til late April and that actually sucks. I'll try and toss up the portfolio in PDF form up here for you all to check out. It's by no means perfect or an excellent representation of my best work, but it does have some good gems in there and some things that I simply need to improve upon. The UNICEF TAP project is what I am most proud of and as soon as I can, I'll post up the links to all the videos we did. For now, just the one. I helped with concepting and did all the copywriting. I am very proud of this and am extrememly impressed with the work everyone did on the project to make this so amazing.

Utah Tap TV Spot from Mike Morris on Vimeo.

Update: Looks like Mike Morris (the design mastermind) added up one of the longer spots to his vimeo.com account. Here is one of the longer ones:


Utah Tap :: Here's to the World from Mike Morris on Vimeo.