Do Keri Smith's 100 Ideas

This took over a month to do, but it could have been much quicker. The bulk of it was done in three or four sessions.

Oh yeah, since it’s not very obvious, the idea was to come up with 100 uses for a tin can. Some of these require a technical ability far beyond my own.

1. phones
2. holding food
3. saving time on road trips (wide-mouthed container)
4. pedastal
5. wheel
6. mirror (cut up and flatten out)
7. drum
8. use to play catch
9. something to stand on to see over a crowd
10. guiro
11. funnel
12. rainwater reservoir
13. target
14. projectile
15. hourglass
16. bank
17. crush and use as a paper weight
18. cut out pieces and use as a stencil
19. sharp metallic armlet thing?
20. booby trap (fill with something heavy, balance over a door)
21. mobile junk drawer
22. small container for paint from a big can
23. poke holes in it and use as a sprinkler
24. biscuit/cookie cutter
25. stencil for the perfect circle
26. another booby trap idea: hide on a dark step near the top of a staircase
27. pot for small plants/flowers
28. fill with small rocks or sand to use as a shaker
29. cover the big red button
30. mold to make a candle
31. cupcake tin
32. use to mix drinks
33. goat food
34. poke holes and hang from a line, fill with a candle to make a lamp
35. low-visibility ant farm
36. sieve
37. shaker (for flour, etc.)
38. fish tank
39. dangle from the back of a car on wedding day
40. windmill
41. wind vane
42. catch water from a leaky roof
43. hat
44. tip can (like a tip jar)
45. early warning system
46. skillet
47. cutting board
48. bowling ball
49. trash can
50. plumb (for a pendulum)
51. flimsy knife
52. pizza cutter
53. shuriken
54. hub cap
55. light condenser
56. rolling pin
57. patch for metal structures
58. use edge to scratch into rock (or softer things)
59. roll up to use as a pin
60. roll up and use as a nail
61. hook
62. throw into a pit to see how deep it is
63. roll up a segment to use as a ring
64. small floatation device, like a buoy
65. bobber for fishing line
66. anchor
67. scroll holder
68. exercise weight
69. busking
70. eclipse viewer
71. ballot box
72. pipe bomb
73. sand castle mold
74. shoes for walking on hot coals/scorpion pits
75. peeler
76. cup (I didn’t think of this earlier???)
77. doorstop
78. anchor (model ship)
79. pizza pan (very small)
80. strainer
81. pan for gold panning
82. muffler for car exhaust pipe
83. pontoon for model airplane (or boat)
84. spindle
85. pincushion (after perforation)
86. cheese grater (ditto)
87. drip catcher
88. woodchip smoker (for barbeque)
89. replacement receptacle for manual pencil sharpener
90. large hair curler
91. spittoon
92. world’s smallest steamroller
93. vase
94. lazy susan
95. bug trap (honey at bottom)
96. remote explosive (requires water, dry ice, duct tape, string)
97. small dumb waiter
98. yahtzee game necessity
99. tall muffin tin
100. base for pink flamingo, sign, etc.

“Write your own definition of one of the following concepts, sitting, waiting, sleeping (without using the actual word.)”

I’m going to go out on a limb and use the word, but only as a reference. I could call it “it,” all the time, but it’s in my nature to undermine rules that I think miss their creator’s point.

Waiting is a state of mind. In which a person expects the future to hold a change from the present. In which the future differs from the present. The change can be hoped for or feared. It can be a helping hand or a slap in the face. But still, when someone knows that something will happen soon enough, he (aka he or she) waits.

Waiting is powerless, without control over what comes next. A person might wait now and expect to have power later, but in the present it is the forfeit of any current power. Thus waiting is a passing off of responsibility from oneself. This can be done in the face of small matters, like waiting until the rain stops before going out to get the mail, or it can be more profound, like waiting for love.

When waiting is desirable, it is called patience. When it is undesirable, it is called procrastination, laziness, fearfulness, or daydreaming.

Waiting is a lack of action, with no lack of motion. Waiting assumes that there is an inevitable motion along time, an inescapable traveling from now to later, a pause in action so that the person is carried along a known path. If a person waits, he commits himself to a path that will not change. It is set from the begging of the waiting until the end. Other people, and the state of the world, do not change for a waiting person.

A waiting person is a rock floating in space. Its trajectory is set, so are those of the objects around it, and the future is predictable. If one of the objects happens to be a living thing, its reaction to the given rock will not change because the rock is not changing. For a waiting person, the world is stochastic; if only all the variables could be known, the one inevitable path could be seen.

This predictability can be comforting, and the inevitability of change as time passes can be frightening. Since a person cannot attend to every aspect of his life at once, he is always waiting for something. If he works for a career, he waits for love. If he pours interest into his hobby he puts off a much-needed vacation. So, we are all waiting, as we focus our limited power to control those aspects of our lives that we deem most important, or occasionally to those sides that we’ve neglected, giving them just enough attention to keep them from collapsing for another year. Meanwhile, others take this approach to many sides of our lives, waiting on all fronts for the inevitable change that we should probably know is coming. Waiting is a necessary incubation, time to let things set into motion play out as they will, until they require our attention again. Waiting is the part that gets left out of the stories, except when it is done with unusual intensity.

Or maybe waiting can only be done with intensity, but what would that make everything else?

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...At some point, that turned from a definition into an essay. I realize it probably sounds a little hopeless. It’s been a weird day. The past two weeks have been a weird day. I’ll take that as a sign of the change that I’ve been looking for, hopefully one I’ll be happy with later.

This should be fun. I could check off the few of these that I’ve done before… but I could stand to do them again. Besides, reading an Animorphs book in one day doesn’t count. I just need to remember to make an entry every time I do something.