Thursday, January 24, 2008

Adventures Gone Awry

I’m someone who seeks after new experiences. My laziness typically prevents me from doing things that are too terribly exotic, but I make do with my small adventures.

Earlier this week I learned that Drew was giving a lecture here at OSU. None of you know who Drew is, but he is the creator of Toothpaste for Dinner (found easily enough at www.toothpastefordinner.com) which read moderately often and enjoy. I decided to go based on 3 things:
1. I bought some t-shirts from Drew a while back, and in our emails he seemed like a stand-up guy.
2. Drew has made a career out of being amusing, not hilarious or even funny, which seems like an admirable goal.
3. I’ve never gone to a lecture completely outside of my field, let alone one by a cartoonist, let alone one by a moderately deranged cartoonist.

Turns out, the lecture wasn’t amazing. Drew was amusing in person, but rarely broke into funny. Every other audience member knew far more about him than I did, thus many of the questions they asked made little sense to me. His business model doesn’t seem likely to work for me. And while I found his lack of public speaking skills amusing in and of themselves, this significantly slowed the process of his presentation. My little adventure, while not a disaster, didn’t go nearly as well as I’d hoped.

Tonight after going to the temple I decided to once again have another subdued adventure. We were trying to decide where to go for dinner (you get relatively little flirting done in the temple itself, thus the dinner trip afterwards is requisite) and I suggested Clovers, home of the butterburger. My reasoning being that something that sounded so gross must actually be good, or the restaurant would have been closed down by now. Since no one had any better ideas, and I am in fact a convincing and charismatic fellow, we agreed to try out Clovers.

Since this qualifies as another misadventure, things obviously didn’t go terribly well. Evidently a butterburger has a toasted, buttered bun. Not very exciting. The end result is a burger slightly greasier than a greasy burger. While I’ve had countless burgers of lower quality, I’ve had a slightly higher countless number of better ones. I wouldn’t qualify this as an adventure gone awry except I did drag 9 people with me to have the butterburger experience, and the disappointment mounts with each additional visitor.

But I remain undeterred; every adventure can't be successful. Tomorrow I’ll investigate the restaurant known both as the best and worst Mexican food in Columbus. I’ll attempt to navigate a bookstore which has more than 30 rooms. And perhaps most daring of all, I’m going to attempt to make it from my house to the gym using nothing but underground tunnels. What can I say, I’m an adventurer.

1 comment:

Erin said...

You're going to try all those new adventures in one day? You ARE ambitious. But what a day it will be if they all go according to plan, or even if they result in another misadventure.