Halloween Bunkosity!
So, I’m rushing this entry just a tad. If any of you guys remember my video from my presentation for project 2, it was fairly obvious that my project turned out pretty shitty. My initial idea for the project was to see if I could get everyone that went to Critical Mass, which turned out to be like 200 people, to hopefully come dressed up as zombies. From there, I wanted people to take a quick detour (I’m talking like 5 second detour since we rode right past it) and stop at Whole Foods where I was hoping we could just do a quick little zombie stroll through the store to shake things up a little bit.
So the first thing I did was make a post on craigslist because that’s where everyone always puts upcoming bike events, and the bike section gets a lot of traffic as whole. http://austin.craigslist.org/bik/892503150.html I then messaged the admin of the blog atxbs.com whose name is Jason and is really a sort of figurehead in the biking community. I believe his blog actually won best blog for the Austin Chronicle this year.
He was nice enough to make a post on his website about my call-to-arms http://www.atxbs.com/?q=node/545 If you read it though, it kind of seems sort of dissuading. For instance, the whole part about only participating if you are “COMPLETELY at a loss for a costume” really doesn’t seem to encouraging. No hard feelings though. He’s done a lot for the bike community, and I guess I am just being a bit selfish in the sense that this was merely for my own project.
Anyways, so I sent out a couple of messages on myspace to the Critical Mass usergroup and to Jason as well about my idea for the Whole Foods romp. I didn’t get really any feedback regarding it, but I still I wasn’t completely discouraged at this point.
So come Friday the day of the ride, I went out and bought white face paint, and tried to make some fake blood. I had a lot of fun making the blood to be honest, it felt like something I missed out in doing when I was 9. The blood didn’t turn out so hot unfortunately. I got a recipe off of a the how-to wiki page and while I followed it pretty closely. For whatever reason, the blood came off looking pink. So when I put it on my clothes, it actually just looked like I spilt some wine on my shirt. Failure on that part, so I ended up going to the campus Art store and spending MORE money on makeup. How fun right?
So it’s 30 minutes before the ride, and my gallon of fake blood sucks, and I still don’t have my own costume on yet. I put it on in like 10 minutes, and it turned out surprisingly decent. Except the whole friggen night when I went downtown people thought I was the fucking Joker…
When I get to the Mass down at the West Mall, I am just crushed. Everyone has bad ass costumes don’t get me wrong, but there are only a handful of zombies. Immediately, I knew my project was donezo. I have all this face paint and fake blood. There were quite a few people without costumes, and while I was able to hand out a couple of the bottles (one being to a friend I already knew), no one really wanted to put it on and become a zombie. It was really disheartening. I mean one guy even said, “Nah, I will break out.” How lame is that?
Already being discouraged, I walked around the gathering to see if I could maybe rile up some people to enact my initial plan. Any costume is a good costume when you’re walking through Whole Foods I figured. Just thinking about this makes me kind of sad, but it just seemed like everyone would shrug me off. I felt like a pretty big loser to be honest, and the fact that it’s Halloween when you think anyone with a costume could maybe get some respect made it that much more worse.
All in all, I learned a lot from this failure though. I need to plan stuff better and not just cross my fingers that people will be willing to do what I want– that’s just dumb. Furthermore, I need to quit being so soft spoken and speak with more conviction if I want people to do what I want (not in a domineering way). If I do another flash mob/social hack type thing for my last project, I need to start working on it now as in like tonight. Set up a website, start plugging it everywhere etc. Otherwise it’ll just hurt my morale like this one did.
