All these things we've done

Midnight last night the GISHWHES timer struck zero, but that wasn't the end for us.  I mentioned before that I'd written a letter to the editor in an attempt to satisfy item 13, "An op-ed piece published in a local paper about how "petty, vindictive birds are stealing from the elderly!"", and that Adrian had submitted it for me.  Well, nothing really came of it, and I figured that the newspaper had saw through my pretty prose to the absurdity that it most obviously was.  This morning, I opened the paper to find this:

It may have been too late to submit it for points, but, well... it ended our GISHWHES chronicle with a bang, alright.  Moving on to some of these other things that myself and the rest of the ibsasscats have thrown together over these past few days of GISHWHES:

Item 6:  If your child were a prodigy artist and had a marker and you were deep asleep and they were inspired to "beautify" your face, what would the result be?

Item 69:  You and a friend must take at least 50 of your stuffed animals/dolls on a field trip to a grocery store. All of the stuffed animals/dolls must EITHER be attached to your clothing or in a grocery cart or both.

Item 53:  Carve a Jill O'Lantern! Carve a pumpkin to look like a feminized Misha Collins. Bonus points for realism.

Item 149:  Draw or paint a picture of Miss Jean Louis riding a school bus like a horse as it flies off a cliff into a volcano. There can be no passengers and she must have a dialogue bubble above her head that says something she would definitely say at this moment.

Item 54:  Elmo Gone Wrong. What would a Tickle-Me-Elmo look like if it had a serious crystal meth problem?

Item 37:  A screen cap of a chat thread on Misha Collins' IMDB page. The thread must be started by a user with your team's name and must pose an unusual question about Misha's personal life, such as, "Is it true that Misha Collins eats nothing but the hearts of human babies?" Or "Why doesn't Misha have any fingers?"

Item 146:  Make a children's doll from items found in your refrigerator or pantry. Go ahead and really creep us out with this one.

Item 5:  Let's see what Twister would look like with 13 people. Each person must be wearing only one color of clothing, i.e. all yellow, or all red and no two people can be wearing the same color clothing.

Item 22:  We've all heard of a "flea circus". What do "flea strip clubs" look like?

Item 83:  You holding a picture of you holding a picture of you holding a picture of you holding a picture of you holding a picture of an apple. You must have a gold frame suspended around your head.

Item 148:  A picture of you and a loved one kissing. Here's the catch though - you must have at least 11 food items between your lips and the lips of your loved one.

Item 14:  A person in a business suit with a leather briefcase jumping into leaf pile.

Item 78:  A one-page GISHWHES comic strip involving a rhinoceros, a tangerine, and an appendectomy.

Item 150:  It's Medieval Battle Time! Huzzah! You and a friend or loved one, dress up in your best battle gear/armory comprised entirely of kitchen ware. You can be wearing nothing else. Strike dueling poses.

Item 98:  A dog taking a human for a walk. Human must be on all fours and have a collar around their neck and the dog must have the leash in his mouth.

Item 51:  How long was Miss Jean Louis's "kale binge"? One might find the answer on one of our social media platforms.

Item 10:  Find an object that was manufactured the day and year you were born in city or town of your birth. Prove it. (Note: the "object" in question cannot be you or your twin.)

Item 35:  Draw or paint a portrait of Misha Collins and the Queen of England, both dressed in Steampunk, riding on a single stallion.

And we didn't just have to take pictures; we had to make videos, too!

 

Item 100: In mime, depict one of the following phrases: a) "The pen is mightier than the sword." b) "You're the bees knees!" c) "Holkyn kolkyn!"

Item 140:  A stop-motion film depicting the two by two loading of Noah's arc and the ensuing flood.

There were a few other videos done to which I don't have links:  Item 129, "One of you pulling up to a fast food restaurant drive-thru to order a meal, but instead of ordering a meal, you are only allowed to make sheep noises into the intercom. Must clearly hear the person on the other end of the intercom" and Item 119, "Recite "The Raven" to a crow", but this is the majority of the zaniness we engaged in over the past few days.  My principal contributions were writing item 13, organizing and participating in item 5, making item 37, and the two videos shown here, items 100 and 140, were both my doing.  I'm actually ridiculously proud of my videos.  I don't know... just having created something in this way makes me feel giddily happy.

So, what did I learn during the course of this event?

• Our local newspaper has exceptionally low quality standards.
• All it takes to be able to raid the school drama department is to ask for the key.
• Together we can accomplish so much more than we could ever imagine doing alone.
• All neighbours deserve to be rescued from their homework for a dramatic sword/pen duel.
• Perfect planning is impossible, especially in a group; what's important is how you improvise.
• Sometimes circumstances don't play by your schedule.
• There's always time for the things for which you have absolutely no time.
• A good instrumental track improves any video.
• Like Murphy's Law says, anything that can go wrong, will.
• When placing plastic animals on inclined planes, don't overestimate the force of friction.
• There's people all over the world who see things in the same insane way I do.
• Creativity is craziness. It's having fun, it's that feeling of insane pride you get when you make something that is completely and pointlessly yours.  It's dreaming up intricate, precise concepts and then it's making plans up on the fly and fixing things as you go.  It's your grandiose outlines and your wild, illogical ideas, your best laid schemes of mice and men.  I'm not very artistic:  I can't draw or paint or sketch, but that doesn't mean I'm not creative.  I can write and I can do, I can edit films and come up with zany ideas and set them to music, I can find things and fix things and organize things...  creativity is so much more than just being able to draw pretty pictures, and GISHWHES celebrates true creativity in all its insane, imperfect glory.

So, that was my experience with GISHWHES.  It was strange, it was embarrassing, it was off the wall, and I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.  It was a great opportunity to bond as a class and to do things I would never have considered doing otherwise.

As one of my favourite books ends, "May God forgive me for this and all these things I've done".

GISHWHES: Day One

One of the rules of GISHWHES is that you can't post any of your pictures on social media until after the event is over, so that means I can't share our items thus far in this blog post.  Never fret, though; in six days I'll be posting them to my heart's content.  Our team meeting was today at lunch, and we have a pretty good tentative plan of who is doing what.  Everybody was really enthusiastic, and I'm pretty optimistic that we'll be able to get a bunch of items over the next few days.  My contributions so far are completing task 37 (A screen cap of a chat thread on Misha Collins' IMDB page. The thread must be started by a user with your team's name and must pose an unusual question about Misha's personal life, such as, "Is it true that Misha Collins eats nothing but the hearts of human babies?" Or "Why doesn't Misha have any fingers?").  It was actually more difficult than expected; on IMDB you can't just pick a username; it's automatically your email address.  So I had to make a new email, and I had to confirm the account by getting a texted pin, although I don't own a cell phone so I had to find one to borrow.  This was all at seven this morning while I was supposed to be getting ready for school, so I'm pretty proud that I managed to get it done all through trial and error.  In the morning I also sent a message to a friend of mine who's involved with a lot of music related things to see if he could help us with item 126 (Get an orchestra in a symphony hall with at least 25 instruments to play "Carry On My Wayward Son").  It most likely won't work out, but I promised him cookies and Halloween candy, so we'll see.  After school I also wrote a letter to the local newspaper in an attempt to fulfill task 13 (An op-ed piece published in a local paper about how "petty, vindictive birds are stealing from the elderly!"), and Adrian submitted it for me.  It's actually fairly strongly written and I managed to make it seem hardly absurd at all, so I have my fingers crossed that it'll get published.  Patrick, Jessica, Sarah, and Aaron all completed tasks as well:  task 54 (Elmo Gone Wrong. What would a Tickle-Me-Elmo look like if it had a serious crystal meth problem?), task 51 (How long was Miss Jean Louis's "kale binge"? One might find the answer on one of our social media platforms), task 98 (A dog taking a human for a walk. Human must be on all fours and have a collar around their neck and the dog must have the leash in his mouth), and task 22 (We've all heard of a "flea circus". What do "flea strip clubs" look like?) respectively.  I was very busy tonight studying for my physics exam and chemistry test that are both tomorrow, so I hope that later this week I'll be able to get more things done for GISHWHES.  A personal goal of mine is task 140 (A stop-motion film depicting the two by two loading of Noah's arc and the ensuing flood), but there are so many other cool options that I'm dying to do!

It's not easy being in charge

There's only approximately five hours remaining until the start of GISHWHES, and might I say I can't wait.  Nonetheless, it's been a lot of work so far for something that hasn't even begun, especially since we aren't the event's organizers; as the de facto team leader, I've found that organizing a group can be just as daunting a task as organizing an event itself.  I'm not exactly sure how all the problems and speed bumps became my responsibility, but I guess if you want an idea to come to fruition, you've got the put the effort in yourself.  First of all, getting a team together wasn't as easy a task as it first appeared.  Fifteen kids in the class, fifteen spots on the team seemed like mathematics at its most basic, but of course things weren't that easy.  When I asked the class who wanted to join the team, everyone said yes except for Kathleen, and everyone was supposed to register over the long weekend a few weeks ago.  By the Monday, only three people had registered:  Jessica, Adrian, and myself.  In addition, Ferdie decided he didn't want to participate after all, although Kathleen decided she did want to be involved so we still had a net membership of fourteen.  Little by little I managed to goad more people into remembering to register (likely annoying everyone in the process), and Mr. Broderick agreed to both be our teacher supervisor, and also register for our team to fill the remaining position.  However, things still weren't kosher.  A few days later Sue and Sarah followed Ferdie's lead in deciding that GISHWHES wasn't the thing for them, and our team was once again short, this time by two members (and to make matters worse, only six of us were registered by this point).  So with the help of Jessica I turned to the grade 12 class for help, and Aaron and my brother Michael immediately volunteered.  I was hesitant to allow my brother to join the team, as it felt like he just wanted to ride along for some easy CAS instead of actually participating, but I was pressured into letting him join lest looking like a complete jerk.  Sarah (a different one this time) was also interested, so I told her to put her name down and we could probably find her a spot.  Afterwards I went to talk to Mr. Broderick, who hadn't yet registered, and told him that he didn't have to, since we found another student (Sarah) to take the final position.  By the next day we had in theory a full team of fifteen and eleven people registered, so all the chaos seemed to be over.  As you can probably guess, it wasn't.  Michael bailed, even after he had assured me he'd be committed, and our team was once again left one member short.  I went back to the grade twelve class since there seemed to have been quite a bit of interest the first time and I believed I'd be able to find someone who wanted to participate.  I was right on both counts:  the class was full of people who wanted to be a part of GISHWHES.  So much so that they had decided to make their own team.  If Michael hadn't hogged that spot I would have gotten one of them on our team the first time I was there, but I'm not bitter.  Not at all.  Anyway, we went back to Mr. Broderick and asked him sheepishly if he would in fact register (it was especially awkward since we had originally told him not to register, then we told him to, then we told him not to, and here we were telling him to again), but he agreed, and over the course of the next few days our final team members registered and our team was full, just a mere 48 hours shy of the registration deadline.  Since then things have gone a bit smoother, although I've had to organize a meeting for tomorrow and talk to teachers to make sure the date was clear of other IB activities (our IB coordinator was planning a working lunch), and I've had to field everyone's questions, comments, and concerns, although I don't mind doing that at all.  Anything that fosters excitement for GISHWHES is fine by me, and hopefully everyone will be motivated over the event and I won't have to poke and prod people to participate.  I'm so excited for the hunt, and I hope everyone else is too!

GISHWHES, you say?

Around this time last year I saw a girl online talking about a worldwide scavenger hunt in which she was participating, and while at the time it piqued my interest, I never really looked into it.  I saw some more people talking about it this year, and I didn't make the mistake of ignoring it twice.  It's called GISHWHES, which stands for the quirky, a propos name "the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen".  The more I read about it the more enamoured I grew with the idea; as a team of fifteen, one scavenges items off a giant list, a feat that involves such things as doing good deeds dressed as superheroes, making a portrait of Shakira out of coffee beans, lifting a fully decorated Christmas tree into the air with balloons, and recording all of these creative and wonderful feats via video or photography.  Last year GISHWHES even achieved Guinness World Record fame as the world's largest scavenger hunt!  Everything I read pointed to one conclusion:  GISHWHES would be the ultimate CAS project for Creativity.  And, coincidentally, a fifteen person per team requirement is perfect if one's IB class totals fifteen people.  It didn't take much to sell everyone on the idea; well, except Kathleen, but I think even she is coming around.  We even managed to convince our history teacher, Mr. Broderick, to be our supervisor and help us out.  Anyway, when I got home from school today I registered and payed the fee, which is partially to pay for the grand prize (an amazing trip to Scotland that we have no illusions of in any universe actually winning) and partially goes to charitable organizations, which is a nice touch.  Everyone else is supposedly registering before Monday, which I hope they will, although the registration deadline isn't until next Saturday so there is still a bit of leeway.  I am just so excited for this project; it'll be tough, especially for someone lacking artistic ability such as myself, but I have a feeling that it'll be a truly amazing experience.