I'm Like a Hot, Dinosaur Bath.

If you were to meet me in person, you'd realize a couple things pretty quickly. Well, maybe not quickly; I might have to explain things in a totally roundabout and confusing way first. But eventually, you'd come to at least one realization. Maybe.

When I was a kid, I loved baths. Especially bubble baths. Something about turning myself into a tiny, naked Santa Claus was too awesome to turn down. In a manner lacking any coordination, I would simultaneously throw my favorite bath toys into the tub, and then almost immediately after, throw myself in like I was an Olympic diver trying to beat out Soviet Russia for the gold, potentially furthering Cold War tensions but giving the folks back home something to cheer about. I never discovered the correlation between flooding the bottom two inches of the bathroom and my mother's inexplicable frustration that was directed at me the rest of the day after my baths.

Somewhere between my feet leaving the ground and my body breaking the surface of the water, I would realize that I was about to land on a bunch of pointy, plastic dinosaurs. And these dinosaurs were prepared to stab me like a bunch of knives, still pissed off at the universe for their meteoric demise. Looking back on it, this was really a dramatic reenactment of the dinosaurs' actual extinction. Or a really bad movie sequel, something called "Extinction 2: Revenge of the Velociraptors."

I did this more than once. I never learned. Every time I landed on the dinosaurs, I cried. My repeated insistence on impaling myself would truly be a wonderful case study in behavioral conditioning; more specifically, the fact that behavioral conditioning didn't seem to apply to me. But I was a resilient kid when it came to enjoying bath time; it didn't take me long to stop crying and start making hats and beards out of the bubbles.

Now, stick with me here. This analogy is going to make almost no sense, but it's the best way(questionable) I can describe myself and my sense of humor. I'm a lot like this bath scenario; at first glance, I seem really nice and calm beneath the surface. I am the bubbles that my six year old self coveted so highly, the bubbles that made me rip my Batman pajamas off at a rate that thankfully did not result in a career of stripping. As you get to know me, you realize...wow, his sense of humor is kind of mean. Ow. Wait, why does this hurt. Crap, did I seriously just land on an ankylosaur? You understand that, much like the toys, my sense of humor is all in fun, but it still sucks when your ass comes down full-force on a t-rex tail.

But the bite of my humor is quick, and you get used to it after a while. You get used to accidentally shifting onto a stegosaurus spike every now and then, and for the most part, the capacity to frolic amongst the bubbles and transform into some kind of weird, reptile-obsessed Benjamin Button is no longer hampered.

If that story did not help you understand my personality at all, then we're both having the same issue. I feel like I know myself worse now than I did before I started this post. 

On a side note, looking back on my time spent with inanimate animal-shaped objects, a lot of things make sense now; for example, I have a series of drawings of myself with my imaginary t-rex companion, Dante. 

Why I chose to name him after a lunar crater is some kind of unforeseen irony that I didn't anticipate at the time of Dante's inception, but it's too late now to change his name to something potentially less insulting to the history of his species.

On a slightly unrelated but completely astonishing note, check out a drawing I did of one of my best friends Johana riding a giant catfish:

She has an irrational fear of catfish, because apparently some of them get big enough to eat people or something, so I named it Spock after her favorite Star Trek character. I don't know if it made the catfish less frightening to her, but I thought the concept was worthy of some kind of Nobel Peace Prize for human-catfish relations. Though the reality of that idea is absurd, because from what Johana has told me, catfish are entirely opposed to rational discussion. But if they ever have a change of hear, I feel like my drawing has opened the door.