I Suck at Projects

There's a lot of stuff I don't like all that much about being a grownup. Responsibility, achy breaky body parts, and extra backfat are just a few of them. But one thing I really enjoy about being a grownup is that I don't have to do projects ever again. I sucked at projects for two reasons.

1.) I never did them until the last minute-The teacher would say, "Your grade will hinge completely on this 15 page paper due in 4 months." Then I'd do absolutely nothing, until one day I would awaken to panic because the stupid paper was due in 7 hours. So I'd cobble something together using huge font, and making a bunch of stuff up because this was before the internet wrote your papers for you (i.e. It's a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln invented the steam powered locomotive.) Then I'd barely get it done, print it out, run to class, and forget my disk in the hard drive. I forgot my disk in the hard drive like 46 times in college. I hated that.

2.) Projects were dumb- It's hard to get enthusiastic about dumb things. It's a simple matter of choice. Let's say you were 11, and your choices were either write a paper about the Pilgrims, or..... play tackle football at the park all day with your friends, and then go egg Old Man Fran's house, what would you choose?

With that in mind, here's a small sampling of dumb projects I had to do throughout my life:

-Kindergarten- Make Smokey the Bear out of a brown paper sack. I couldn't cut with scissors yet, so this complicated things, plus I glued the Smokey head on the wrong part of the sack. So instead of being proud, I crumpled up my Smokey the Bear, shoved him in my backpack, and cried on the bus. (Side note: The only two times I cried in school were both on the same day in Kindergarten. The first time was because I rammed my shins really hard into some cubbies.)

-2nd Grade- Draw a picture of the USSR- The USSR, in case you didn't know, is the hardest fricking thing to draw in the world and I could barely draw a concentric circle at the time. So my USSR wound up looking like a giant booger. I hated the USSR after that. I was glad when Communism fell for different reasons than most.

-5th Grade-Write a story about a leaf- This was supposed to help us think abstractly or something. Instead, I wrote an extremely pointless story about this leaf floating around. To make matters worse, I got in trouble because I named the leaf "Senor Dildo" because I thought this would make the story better. I didn't even know what a dildo was, I just thought it was a synonym for "jerk".

7th Grade- Make a Solar Collector that would cook a weiner- This was in Shop Class, and everything I did in that class was a giant failure. I spent forever trying to get this thing to look like everybody else's, and then the weiner didn't cook. I was so mad! The only consolation was that there's a picture in the 7th grade yearbook of me pointing at my weiner.

8th Grade- Long report on Dogs- I don't remember how this became the subject I had to report on, but I know I cut out a bunch of pictures of various dog breeds from one of those old Encyclopedia Brittanica sets from the 50's. This set was old enough so that it mentioned that the Korean War was an "ongoing conflict", and there was a large section in it on "The American Negroe". Anyhow, after I cut a bunch of dog pictures out of this old encyclopedia, I realized that all we had in my house was double sided tape. But being that the report was due that morning, I had to use it. So of course all the pages stuck together. It was like a Hustler magazine, except the gratuitous beaver shots were replaced with German Shephards. It was so bad that I even had a teacher who didn't even teach the same subject come up to me later that week and say, "I saw that dog report you did. Jesus, that was terrible."

9th Grade-SLUDGE- Everybody from St Louis Park remembers this because it was mandatory, and gayer than Kevin Spacey. I believe the object of this project was to take a big beaker of crud, and determine what it was made of. This took many weeks to complete, and at no time did I have any idea what I was doing. I was fortunate to have had a partner who had a little bit of aptitude in this area, so he dragged me along like a fat girl stuck in a bus door. At the end, I turned in this long drawn out report that I did not understand. The teacher came by and shook my hand. "Congratulations Brian, you've completed SLUDGE." I wanted to punch him in the balls and make him drink the SLUDGE for this comment.

College-Create a fictional shoe company-This was in the last business school class of my college career. It was a class called Business Policy and Strategy, and basically the success of the shoe company determined your class grade. The problem was that there was no discernable "strategy" in the whole exercise. You made your shoes either crappy and inexpensive, or nice and pricey, or somewhere in the middle. Then you put your specs into a computer and it spit out your results. The first two times we went cheap and did terrible. So then we switched to expensive shoes..... and did terrible. Finally, for fun, we made shitty shoes at a really expensive price. Jackpot. Made tons of fictional money. This was supposed to be a Business School student's most important college class, the one that tied the rest together, like The Dude's rug. This is why I don't go around bragging about my degree.

So yes, being a grownup is sometimes not so fun, but at least there's no more projects. Whenever you feel like killing yourself, just recite that mantra.