Cougars & Mustangs 

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I remember my early Interneting days, fiddling about on the class computer until I was picked up from first grade. Every now and then, I’d see some pop-up or sidebar ad that claimed I could win a prize if I beat a little game that it offered, usually something along the lines of punching a scowling, scampering monkey with one massive, gloved fist.

Boy, was the temptation there to actually try. Maybe the first time I didn’t realize it was a manipulative scam ad and attempted to punch it and its running about was too quick for young reflexes, but I soon learned not to trust such things. However, it was a game, and it was taunting me, and for all the restraint that I had the darn thing just kept showing up on the various websites I visited.

It continued to come back, even though I wasn’t doing anything about it. Have you ever had an idea like that? No, I don’t just mean the dumb ones, though the implication could be there given the shadiness of electronic monkey-punching. What I mean instead is, have you had a thought, something you’d like to do or try, that no matter how many times you pushed it away kept returning, as if that piece of your imagination was begging and pleading with you to consider letting it exist in physical form?

Well, here we are a month or so into summer, and assuming you aren’t already busy with the commitments you honestly probably have, why don’t you actually hear that idea out? Ideas can grow faces, by which I mean they form personalities and lives of their own, and we can grow quite attached to them. Whether it’s because of the good they’d cause or even just the pride for the clever connections your grey matter made, you want to give ’em a try but you just haven’t let yourself yet.

So how do you start? Well, for one thing, if you think you can make someone besides yourself excited about the idea, too, that can help. Ask a friend to keep you on task or even make it together. Also remember that sometimes the fact that you can’t find time for a thing doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t do it, but that you need to make the time yourself or it will never happen.

Phineas and Ferb, super geniuses that they are, would tell you that you don’t need to make a rollercoaster to be awesome and creative. If it’s something you’ve been yearning to do and you pour some of yourself into it, then the effort will show and, moreover, you’ll feel that much more satisfied.



Tune in next week, when Intern Chris White-Sanborn takes a deeper look into the world of underground monkey-punching, or send him collegiate news at [email protected] so that you don’t have to face that kind of horror.