Escape Adulthood

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Archives for June 2017

Danny Donuts, June 2017 Adultitis Fighter of the Month

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An Adultitis Fighter is someone who rallies against rules that don't exist and engages in ruthless, senseless acts of silliness that undermine Adultitis and its unadventurous version of adulthood. Once a month, we shine a light upon the most remarkable among us, holding them up as a dazzling example of what we should strive for in this epic battle against a formidable enemy. Our first experience with Danny Donuts was at an Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (AATH) conference. He was leading a group of people sporting red clown noses who went to O'Hare International Airport in Chicago to greet arriving passengers and give them their own clown noses to wear. Normal people don't do that. But top-flight Adultitis Fighters do. You could say that Danny has turned Adultitis Fighting into a career. He's a comic performance artist who also considers himself a Kids Performer, Musician, Author, Emcee, Auctioneer, Soccer Fanatic, Writer, Producer, Video Editor, Public Speaker, and …

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Living a More Adventurous Life is as Easy as ABC

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My friend Dave (a recent Adultitis Fighter of the Month) has Mondays off. They started becoming a little stale, so he decided to shake things up. Although he's an avid traveler, Dave realized that he actually explored very little of his home state of Wisconsin. One day, he pulled out a map, landed on a city named Amherst and set out to make a day of exploring this unfamiliar town. Next week, he went to a city that started with the letter "B" (Babcock), followed by Columbus, and has continued his quest through the alphabet. (He's currently on "H".) Most of the towns are quite small, but they all have something interesting about them, whether it's an old covered bridge, an obscure museum, or a unique little park where he and his dog Lily can hang out. And not surprisingly, these adventures turn out to be pretty economical. As we settle into the summer here in the northern hemisphere, I thought this was a neat idea worth sharing. It's proof that you don't need to jet off to faraway …

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Do You Know the Real Reason They Made Stonehenge?

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I remember the painting critiques back in art school. After spending several weeks working on our masterpieces, we’d all sit in a circle and explain what our paintings were about. Someone would inevitably say their piece was a postmodern reaction to the phycological impact of the industrial revolution that caused existential dread. To me it looked like a canvas with some paint sloppily applied. It did seem like the students who were better at making “serious" art got better grades. (Or perhaps they were just better at explaining why their art was serious.) Perhaps this is why, after making this painting of Stonehenge, constructed with ice cream sandwiches, I feel obliged to explain why. There are many theories about what Stonehenge is, who built it, when it was built, and what purpose it served. Many theories, but nobody knows for sure. Of course, someone put them there. Someone had a reason for it. Most theories assume it served some sort of “serious” purpose concerning …

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What if You Knew The Numbers?

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Kim and I recently took the kids to their first Cubs game. It was a beautiful day, Wrigley Field was as friendly as usual, and we reveled in singing "Go Cubs, Go" after they sealed the win against the Giants. We often see first times coming. We prepare for them and anticipate them with the excitement of a little kid on Christmas Eve. The last times have a habit of sneaking up on us, though. We have a digital frame in our kitchen that rotates old family photographs. I find myself regularly spying an old snapshot of one of my kids and thinking to myself, "She was never that little, was she?" As of this writing, my oldest is only eight, but the pictures feel a century old. The other day, Kim commented on a photo of our son when we was an infant. "Some days," she said, "I'd give just about anything to hold that little baby one more time." I agreed. It occurred to me that although I held that little baby many times -- often in a sleep-deprived and grouchy state -- there was also a last …

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