Incommunicable

The goddess who views warfare as a fascinating exercise in abstract problem-solving, a chance for strategists to display their genius or cunning, whose followers are always seeking the opportunity to offer up another Cannae as sacrifice to her? To whom war is figures being moved across maps in generals tents, and the fact that actual people suffer and die in it is just irrelevant?

As seniors, my friends and I greeted freshmen students (no one asked us to). One of us held a clip board and pen. One held a tailor’s measuring tape. And one had a sharpie and a small stack of “Hello my name is _______” name tags. Here’s how the prank goes.

1) Cheerfully greet each student as if you’re an official greeting team of some sort. Clip board holder says “Friend, let’s get you a name tag”

2) Measuring tape holder proceeds forward, holding out tape-measures something random about the person (something where you don’t actually need to be up close and personal, like the length of their shin from 2 feet away, or I suppose you could try asking “please may I measure your wrist” or some such). Measuring person calls out a number. Possibly two.

3) Clip board person studiously records the number on a chart. Nods gravely/excitedly/smoothly/suspiciously/enthusiastically/whatever at Name tag person.

4) Name tag person writes down something utterly totally random in the tag blank. Like “peanut butter” or “ aerodynamic jellyfish”. With great ceremony, tag person hands tag to new student. All prankers bow, or offer waves, while saying “Pleased to meet you (name tag name), welcome to college! We hope you have a great year!” And walk away in whatever style suits you best.

If their actual name is literally anything other than Steve, it’ll still be funny and everyone will wonder why this one person got a regular name on their nametag while everyone else is labeled as Jubilation or Injket-1098 or whatever.

We used to take kiddo trick or treating in my wifes old neighborhood, it was smaller than where we live now but wife has friends we didn’t get to see often that we’d visit.

Every year there was a guy dressed as a wizard with Eldar Futhark runes on a big walking stick.

Thing about runes is you can pick up 5 different books on them and walk away with 6 different ways to translate them. But they’re all close, if I stare at modern writing in Eldar Futhark runes I can read just about any of them, it just takes a while to get the accent sometimes.

Anyway this guy dressed as a wizard had the name Mark written down the front of the staff in bigger runes than anything else on it. So the first year I see him I stop and go “Hey, Mark, right?” and he confusedly goes “Yeah? Uh, do I know you?” and I just tell him “Nice wizard staff” before walking off.

Executive dysfunction comes from a lack of available dopamine. Common advice is wrong. You need to provide your own dopamine before you can start. Otherwise you're trying to run your car on empty.

"But what if I still don't do it" well you already weren't getting it done anyway. Now you have a little treat. Try again later.

You deserve kindness and care even when you aren't being productive.

Midway through talking about my symptoms my voice audibly started shaking as I was describing them, clearly upset.

In the middle of my monologue he turns the tablet to face me, closes whatever program he has open and the wallpaper is this fucking collage of pictures of lord farquaad from shrek, lovingly decorated. Dude just sat there placidly smiling at me until I noticed and stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. We sat there in silence like this for like a solid minute before I started wheezing laughing. Before I could even say anything else or process it he picked up the tablet and wordlessly left the room, and I just sat there dumbfounded until the doctor showed up. 10/10 doctor experience tbh

I didn’t own a cell phone at the time to get a photo so this rendition from memory is all I can provide you