a skill I didn’t know I had

I don’t consider myself a weird person, at least not overly so, I always enjoy it when someone really goes “there”.

That is why, when one of my friend asked I would help him cover the local graffiti hot spot in print paper, I immediately said yes. Not only was this an amazingly bizarre thing to do, but he promised that he would give beer and pizza to anyone who helped, so I was all in.

now, before I start, I just want to say a few words about this graffiti hot spot.

I live in a small town, where the only real cultural life that exists is crated by the students at the design-school. Because the town in so relatively quite and the school is the only escape, it becomes sort of cultural hob. Sadly once in a while that culture spill over and manifests itself in terms of graffiti, which the local government sees as an act vandalism.

Because they were seemingly powerless to stop it, and it was becoming kind of expensive to keep removing, they decided to designate a tunnel leading under the railway as a graffiti hot spot. Basically, you can paint as much as you want there without any repercussions, which was nice because the place was basically covered wall-to-wall anyway.

The place itself is however not particularly enticing. It is a somewhat broad but dank and “rapy” place that you kind of can’t avoid if you live in kolding.

Because of it’s central location and probably because it is one of the few places in kolding that you can do this kind of project, my friend Markus, decided that this would be the perfect place to be arty-farty.

He talked allot of his friends into joining him in this bizarre assignment, which really isn’t that hard for him because he is both hot and charismatic. I, of cause, was one of the friends who showed up at 4 pm on a cold windy November afternoon to paste up copy-paper to the wall.

It was a pretty straight forward job and it should have been boring as hell, but strangely I found an aptutute for that particular task. Yes I know it sounds weird, but I was the fastest person in my group to paste up pieces of copy paper to a concrete wall in a dank tunnel.

I guess I can add that to the list of incredibly dumb tasks at which I excel.

It was really quite exhilarating to get compliments all the time and show off this skill I didn’t know I had and I stayed much longer than I had planned, but in the end, the cold did get to me and I ended up leaving before the job was done.

I know that is not very gentlemanly of me, but if you have ever been outside on a windy, rainy November day in Denmark, you would understand.

Mission statement

I like the sound of the word mission statement, makes me feel like a secret agent… OK maybe not, but is is kind of cool anyway.

Presently at school we have a course called personal design competence which my fellow students hate. Basically it is a course devoted to getting us out of our chairs and make us take charge of our professional lives.

The reason that everybody hates it, is that it is tedious, long winded and kind of preachy. Nobody likes to hear people telling them to get their act together, even if they may need to hear it some times.

Part of this course is an endless array of team-building and group dynamic exorcises in which your are supposed to verbalize your competences. This is particularly difficult for a group of Danes, as we have grown up with the notion that bragging is a cardinal sin and talking about yourself should be kept to a minimum.

However, in one of these group sessions, as I was talking about this project and my blog, a friend of mine said something which stuck with me; “you should not focus on making a finished game within the time-frame that you have, you will tire yourself out. Instead focus on making the greatest pitch in the history of time. Something so great that it would make anyone want to play your game, just to know more”.

I thought that was a really great piece of insight and something that I thought I would run with. So that is my mission statement.