Alice Minium

We were all in such a hurry to grow up — so much so that now we have completely forgotten how to be children.  The world is not an adventure anymore.  The death of your imagination is the death of your lifeblood.  It is a living fact that you cannot learn without an active imagination.  However, while growing up is a necessary evil, monotony is not.  Don’t let adulthood wear you down.  Don’t sentence yourself to a lifelong stretch of ordinary.  Don’t ever be boring.  And don’t ever, ever completely grow up.

1. Agree upon a genre/category (Disney classics, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, people you know & like to laugh at, teachers, etc.) and each of you choose a character.  Don’t tell anyone who your character is.  Go to school the next day and ACT LIKE THIS PERSON in every situation; you must maintain character at all times.  After a few hours, you all try to guess each other’s characters.  This can be done outside of school as well.

2. Play dubstep music without words and invent a rap to it as it comes to you.  Must be improv.  Insert beatboxing as needed.  Do not interrupt the beat — you and the beat are one.  Nobody is watching you.  Just kidding: you’re taking a video, ’cause this is going to be really funny in the morning.

3. Create a cardboard sign that says FREE HUGS and go stand on the sidewalk in the city.  Give free hugs.  Make somebody’s day.  (Leave your wallet in the car while you are distributing hugs.)

4. Videotape your fish tank and create different personas for each of the fish.  Each one of you creates a fish’s character and does the voice for it.  Create a sitcom about their lives with spontaneous dialogue and narration.  On YouTube™, there is a man who created a seventeen-episode soap opera about his sea monkeys.  It’s literally him just sitting there doing voices and videotaping his sea monkey tank.

5. Buy a bouquet of flowers and go to the cemetery.  Choose a gravestone and guess the entire person’s life story, ending in the cause of their death.  Then say a short prayer for them and leave a flower at their grave.

6. Crack five glow necklaces.  Leave them as sticks and do not apply connectors.  Toss them onto the ground.  Have each person say what the pile of glowsticks resembles (example: three different people looking at the same pile could all see a bowl of noodles, a campfire, and a pond of fish).  Pick them up again and repeat.  Forty-five times.  You have to do this one forty-five times.  It’s like the game that never ends.

7. Next time you and your friends hang out, invite someone completely random that you would never really talk to.  Hang out with them like everything’s normal and you’re perfectly good friends.  It’s like that movie Dinner for Schmucks, except not really.

8. Create a complex mega-city out of Legos® or a house/neighborhood out of Play-Doh.

9. Make a list of twenty things and send your friend on an Internet scavenger hunt.  Google or other search engines not allowed.  (Example: something “cursed” that is for sale on eBay®; a picture of somebody that looks like someone famous; an article about a REAL conspiracy involving the government that you’d never heard of; an unintentionally funny blog or website preaching on the evils of something totally ridiculous; etc. etc.).

10. Play Beatles™: Rock Band™ until your neighbors file a noise complaint.

11. Have a Candy Land/Uno/Apples to Apples/Hungry Hungry Hippos championship.

12. Play Guess Who? and answer all the questions in the voice you think your character would have.  Play Charades or Pictionary but come up with your own ideas — don’t use cards.

13. Host a dance competition and rate each other as a panel of judges.

14. Consume caffeine and hold a contest to see who can jump on the trampoline the longest.

15. Buy a cactus.

16. Go out and about your regular plans wearing a cape and/or top hat.  Bonus points if you carry around a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde at all times.

17. Create an improv duet on the piano/keyboard.

18. Go on an expedition in the woods and pretend to be explorers or characters in an adventure/horror movie, keeping in character the entire night.

19. Invite someone you don’t know very well to hang out with you and your friends.  All of you go out to dinner and pretend you’re in a horror movie, keeping a dismal tone and pointing out omens you see everywhere, always acting with a sense of frantic urgency or impending doom.  Seriously freak that person out.

20. Put lollipops in all your neighbors’ mailboxes.

21. Reread your favorite books from your childhood, or watch the tv shows you loved as a kid.  (This will be a much weirder experience than you think.)

22. Watch each other’s home movies from when you were kids.

23. Create a secret society and make t-shirts for each other (Tie-dye/fabric paint/fabric paint pens/stencils/glitter/iron-ons/whatever).

24. Plan your own funeral in the event that you might die — make it awesome, write it down, and entrust the plans unto the care of your friends.

25. Make cookies and deliver them to all your friends’ houses for no apparent reason; extra credit if you include a teacher, enemy, or anyone that would make the delivery extremely awkward.

Most of you wouldn’t actually try most of these ideas.  They do sound really silly.  You may be sitting there thinking to yourself that you are honestly too cool for such silly things.

I would like you to know that you are not.