Masses, I give you: Joy Hadden.

1. Have people give you money to go on a trip, then create a blog to keep them updated on your journey. This ensures that you give yourself a solid readership base – something you’ll most certainly need once you move beyond, well, creating the blog.
2. Set the bar high with stories about riveting, real-life events. To adequately check this point off the list, it demands that you live in such a way that puts you in riveting situations… like getting a haircut in China. A plus to telling such inspiring stories is that if you aren’t the world’s best writer, the tales’ content will pick up your slack.
3. Return home from said trip, and use your content to demand people keep reading. There are no shortage of ways to do this. Topless self-portraits can prove productive, as can posting topless photos of your neighbors. Making fun of yourself works pretty well, too.
4. Shamelessly plug your blog until everybody knows about it. This is particularly effective for the first several months of self-promotion (until people realize that your content isn’t good). Social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook allow you to drive traffic to your blog, promising your friends something spectacular if only they’ll click the link.
5. Call your blog “award-winning.” You can only do this if people continue to visit it 6 months or so into your promoting it. It doesn’t have to have actually won any awards, but the fact that people spend their valuable time on your site is an award in itself.
6. Write about things you’re an authority on. Maybe you’ve had Lasik surgery, maybe you’re really savvy in the way of things like facebook or the Internet in general. Write about it, and do so in a way that people leave thinking, “Man, I didn’t know [name] was such an authority on [whatever]!”
7. Blog about how good your blog is. This must be done with great care. It is important that you not come across as full of yourself, but communicate to your readers that they are smarter and better looking than their friends because they read your blog. This is not a step for a beginner.
8. On your 500th post, tell people your secrets. Some of the best blogs I follow (incidentally they are the same blogs that most coolest and sexiest friends follow) have done this. It shows your selflessness, and people will leave lots of congratulatory and thank-filled comments, which will in turn validate you, the blogger.

There you have it friends. I admit, there might be other approaches to attaining award-winning-dom with your blog… but probably not. Thanks again for all your time. Five hundred posts take a long time to read, and I don’t take that lightly. I’m proud of you all, and I appreciate your being proud of me.

The following are some photos I captured from the evening for the masses to enjoy.

A few weeks ago I was scheduled for an unfathomably low 15 hours. While this was mildly surprising, I wasn’t entirely thrown off… after all, it is February. The following week I was scheduled for a record-breakingly low 9 hours over two shifts. This motivated my attempt to spend no money for an entire week and a conversation with the powers that be to ensure that all was well, which I was assured was the case. On the second of those two shifts, I went to check my schedule for the following week, and I was surprised to find that my name wasn’t even on the schedule.

This was new to me.

Apparently, when you don’t get a single hour in a given week, they don’t even bother putting your name on the line up. It could lead one to believe that they are no longer a member of the staff. A brief (and less-than-tactful) conversation with the Boss Man assured me that that wasn’t the case. I still had a job, just zero hours for the next 10 days.

I couldn’t believe it. I secretly wished they’d fire me so I could get unemployment. I’d make more that way than I do working 40 hours a month. I left work that night justifiably upset with the employer I’d so faithfully served for thousands and thousands of hours to that point. As I pulled out of the back entrance of the parking lot onto a side street, I saw in my rear view mirror an array of red and blue lights.

Great.

Farmers Branch’s own Officer Best (number 1833) asked me if I was in a hurry. I informed him that I wasn’t particularly in a hurry, I was just trying to get home after a pretty terrible day at work (remember, zero hours the following week). He then asked (brilliantly) where I worked, took my license and insurance and did whatever it is cops do at that point. I wasn’t sure, but I was fairly confident that Officer Best would go back there, look to see that I hadn’t had a ticket in over three years (and even then for going a mere 7 miles/hour over the limit), and let me off with a warning.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. He came back to my window, had me sign some new fangled UPS-like machine to receive my citation, and wished me safe driving. I wished him the same, and drove off defeated.

Well, I thought I was defeated. Turns out the feeling of defeat I experienced that evening couldn’t hold a candle to the beat-down I received upon looking up how much it costs to not stop before leaving a parking lot in Farmers Branch: $273.

Un. Freakin. Believable.

But the Father was pretty gracious to remind me that it’s just money, and He’s good, and in control, and that there are people with waayyyy bigger problems than anything I’m dealing with.

To celebrate having lived through such an historic event, one that I’ll no doubt tell my grand kids about, I took a stroll around my neighborhood armed with a knit hat and a camera.

Dallas, I don’t say this often (because I usually don’t mean it), but I’m proud of you.

I had twenty minutes between the time I clocked out at work and the time Avatar’s movie reel started to roll at Northpark Mall’s AMC, a drive that could take anywhere from 9 to 39 minutes, depending on traffic. The odds were stacked against me this particular Thursday night as it had been raining cats and dogs for the entirety of my six-hour work shift, and didn’t relent upon my punching out.

Minutes 10 to 13 after clocking out were spent standing on the side of LBJ talking to the man whose car I’d just rear-ended when Skylar (pictured above in front of Save-Way) temporarily found herself at the bottom of a never-before-seen lake that the Lord (in)conveniently placed in the middle of the highway.

As both minute 13 and my conversation with the maroon sedan’s driver came to a close, I got back in Skylar simultaneously thankful for the grace I’d just been shown by my new friend, and perplexed at how long he seemed to be willing to stand out in the rain to talk about how he didn’t care to exchange information.

By the time I’d merged onto southbound 75 my mind was reeling with thoughts of how great Skylar’s been to me over the years. From the day we picked her up from the local used car dealer as a replacement for Roweena, she’s been as true as any girl I’ve ever known (something Roweena couldn’t boast if she tried). A few highlights of my trip down (no pun intended) memory lane:

• The first accident: SamB and I were driving to our high school one night for some something, and while I swore against it at the time, I must have run a red light for that lady to have slammed into my driver’s side door with the authority she did. Not an overly happy memory, but significant nonetheless.
• Blue lights: I’ve done an excellent job keeping this under wraps since they broke, but there was a season in which Skylar had blue neon lights on her belly. Remnants of them may or may not still be down there…
• Florida: Sky went to Florida once without me. The Roommates who took her managed to return without a single photo of Sky on the beach.
• Dents: You’d be hard-pressed to look at Skylar from any angle and not see a scratch or dent of some kind. Oddly enough, I have no idea where most of them come from (namely the one-giant-dent-turned-many-smaller-dents on her roof…), but they’re endearing.
• Speeding & Tickets: Sky and I have gotten a ticket for going 7 over and have remained unscathed going 35+ over. So in that regard we’re both awesome and remarkably unlucky.

So thanks Skylar, for being worthy of the title “my truest girl.” You’ve deserved a blogpost of your for many years now. Now you have it. Hope you like it.

I love you.

It seemed as though the whole of Dallas decided to spend this particular part of their holiday at the home of the award-winning Pearl Latte. The line was out the door, and seating had been scarce an hour prior when I’d arrived, forcing me to sit at the bar amidst all of the action of order-placings and drink-picking-ups. So I found myself quite literally in the middle of the mid-morning madness when I received an email entitled, simply, “funny.”

The email’s content was as simple as its title. Nothing more than a link to a YouTube video. I put in my headphones, clicked the link and the five-and-a-half minute video began loading. The clip’s title and description caught my attention and caused me to deem the video worthy of a view. And with that, the video began streaming.

Within the first twenty seconds, my failed attempts at stifled laughter ensued. Within the first minute, it was clear that my so-called tickle box had been tumped over, and wouldn’t soon be restored. I tried as hard as I could to keep from bursting out in such a way that would cause the 70+ coffee lovers to stop and stare at me. (Remember, I was in the eye of the tornado that hit TPC just 10 minutes prior to clicking the link.) The result was that kind of stupid sounding (and looking) laughter that you do when you’re in the children’s choir at church and Brad Smith does something wildly inappropriate during a Christmas musical.

I could hardly breath. My smile was so big that I couldn’t open my eyes. I was sweating and crying, and doubtless my head was red as a beet. At about the three-and-a-half minute mark, I turned the video off, overwhelmed with embarrassment for how absurd I had to have looked. I kept laughing at least another minute after I’d stopped the video, at this point motivated both by funny things from the clip that still lingered in my mind and by the fact that I was caught off guard by how hard I was laughing, which apparently makes me laugh more.

It wasn’t until half an hour later when I was back home at Sandia that I finished watching the video. It was just about as funny the second time as it was the first. And with that, I give you the video. I sincerely hope that you watch this at work and laugh to the point of crying while all your coworkers stare on, bewildered.

*Disclaimer: This video is rated PG (maybe PG-13), and revolves around a drunk guy. In posting it and thinking it’s hysterical, I am in no way condoning or glorifying getting drunk. At least I’m not trying to…

The images displayed above were made and processed on my iPhone, using the Lo-Mob application.