Challenge #21a: Raffle Rights to Snipping Rat-Tail for Charity

SO! Last Saturday morning, I looked like THIS:

Stay tuned for how I looked by Saturday Afternoon

Oh it was Good Times!

Look at me celebrating the good will of the occasion with a dude I’d never met before this day.
Seriously. LOOK HOW HAPPY WE WERE:

Until you have had hair long enough to do this ... you have not lived.

Now there were a couple things that fell through … for one thing, we got held up in the morning and showed up a little late. For another, both of my original co-conspirators – Ek the Dreamer and Max Anonymous – were unable to make it, sad because of how much they helped me get the ball rolling on this thing.

Oh and in my rush to get there I left all the posters and t-shirts and so on at home.

Could have done with a TABLE OR TWO TO PUT THE DAMNED FOOD ON PERHAPS ALSO???

Oh.

WHOOPS.

So this is the part where my sister lectures me about being bad at organising stuff. But seriously, there wasn’t that much to organise by this point, I thought:

• Show up
• Hang out
• Eat food
• Cut hair

That’s basically how I expected it to go.

A number of people who’d heard about the event (mostly through the Leukaemia Foundation’s website) showed up, wondering where the “official tent” was. This was a little confusing as I hadn’t thought you needed a tent for a haircut. But basically anybody who asked about this tent I’d never promised gave me a “wtf even IS this” face and awkwardly shuffled off. It was possibly the most slappable facial expression I have ever seen.

Very confusing. I think they were baffled to see that an event called “Cavemen Against Cancer” which described itself in all-caps, sporadically switching in and out of the third-person … was not taking itself very seriously.

For some reason, rather than just uhhh showing up, a number of friends opted to text me in the middle of the event wondering when the shaving was going to happen so they could show up exclusively for that part of the afternoon. This was probably the most basic planning fail on my part –  60 odd people had RSVP’d “yes”, so I’d naively thought it made sense to hang out and have a lovely picnic in a lovely park on a lovely day with friends until the mood felt about right … yeah maybe if I’d said that out loud just once before the day I’d have realised how naïve it sounds 😛 (Of course I hadn’t actually expected to see 60 people on the day, I’m not that naïve!)

So why am I turning this post into such a downer re-cap? ACTUALLY THERE IS A POINT TO THIS

Pretty much any Past Mykal would have folded at these obstacles. In the past, I might have raged internally at people for not giving a fun idea a chance, broken down in despair at how much I sucked at getting it perfect, run around apologising to everyone who had shown up … basically, anything but had a good time.

Seriously, two months of building confidence with all these little challenges and you know what this Mykal did about all those problems?

Absolutely nothing. I didn’t even notice any of that stuff until later.

If you were wondering how I managed to just miss all that – check this out:

http://my.leukaemiafoundation.org.au/TeamPage.aspx?Referrer=direct%2Fnone&teamID=64835
Dunno how long that link’s gonna be active for, but we blew our $2000 target out of the water! Even since the day, there have been donations. For a random dumbarse idea that popped into my head cos I was falling over trying to do flips in the backyard, $2500 raised for charity is not a thing to sniff at.

And then an awesome friend showed up with THIS:

Did I mention there was a friggin’ choir happening every time somebody got shaved?!

So we’re having our hair clipped off to the sounds of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, “Be A Man”, “Just Can’t Wait to be King, amongst others …

Because it was awesome, that’s why. One person out of the hundred or so I’d fb-spammed for help with this thought it might be a cool thing to add to the day … and she was right.

Later said music group would turn from a flock of sweet sirens into a gaggle of scary sexy vultures when it was time to rip the hair from my legs chest and back. Turns out, a lot of women think men have this sort of pain coming to them?

Frankly, Singing Housemate Jay got more than a bit into it, when he wasn’t taking awesome photos with Mr Anderson. Oh, that’s right: I had two photographers – one semi-pro, one amateur – running around snapping up all these awesome shots. And as you can see in the first couple photos up there, I wasn’t the only caveman there on the day.

As Lady AK, sister of Shadow Bucket, had declared first thing in the morning, this day turned out to be all about FRIENDS.

Well, friends and horrible people who just came because they wanted to hurt Benny the Rat-Tail.

And not only awesome friends who get behind ideas and bring their own wickid smooth talent into the fray, but alsototally awesome randoms, in spite of what I said earlier about the tent sooks. There were easily more people that gave us the stupid wtf face and walked off than who stuck around, but it turns out that sharing a laugh with a stranger is way more memorable than getting a funny look from a moron.

There was a family who’d come all the way from Seymour just because they’d heard about my little event and they thought it would be a novel way to spend an afternoon. This lovely lady, Jodie, wound up jumping in and doing most of the shaving just because she was better at it than the rest of us. And the dude in the .gif animation with me up there, well frankly, he was a pretty cool dude.

And at the end of the day, Aunty Chan and Nekkid Sempai (a dude I’ve been literally hoping to catch up with foryears) made a completely unexpected appearance!

THEN Lady AK and HSP Shadow Bucket threw a wonderful dinner party which went on until the early hours of the morning! JUST BECAUSE.

AND IT WAS GOOD.

I showed up to the party like this. I think I'd like to show up to more places like this from now on.

This was followed up by a trip to the beach, where I ex-foliated the crap out of myself by rolling around in the sand for ages – oddly enough, providing the final piece of inspiration I needed for the next challenge I’m going to attempt. More on this next entry – although for now, I will say that my sister laughed hysterically and said I won’t be able to do it. (Oh Mykal how you do love your teasers)

(I should note that in all this madness my eyebrows never DID get done … it’s looking increasingly likely that I’m going to have to upload a video of what happens to them …)

Basically … I never had the CHANCE to do anything but have an awesome time and revel in the kick-arse fact of what can happen when you have the right kind of persistent optimism and you direct it at the right people.

"The right people" are not always "the nice people"

Trusting people to be awesome doesn’t mean everyone you meet will suddenly know how to be awesome – but it does mean you’re going to find it easier and easier to spot the interesting ones who are worth your time. These wankers who won’t cut their hair without some sort of special “official” tent, or who brand me with bizarre labels like “rogue” for being a little bit different … well, the sooner they get confused and bugger off, the sooner I can chill with random Kick-Arse Mums from Seymour while eating dinosaur egg cake half-naked with some of my best friends in the middle of my home city on a beautiful day, with my own personal Monty Python background music. Why in the hell would I ever miss the tent-seekers? Why should I keep doing things their way when my way results in this???

Seriously, why be a tent-seeker when you can be, um, a rat-tail-giver?

(Okay okay okay so I’m sure there are perfectly fine human beings who just find me annoying or whatever for perfectly legitimate reasons … but I’ll consider their advice/feedback if they’re nice enough to give it.)

This is another one of those really obvious truths that you can understand rationally years before you actually feel it emotionally – and this Cavemen Against Cancer thing was the day where I just felt it so strongly there’s no way I can see myself doubting it for a very long while. Basically, the Big Decision I’ve made this month between quitting my job and committing to the Really Big One is that I no longer care about what other people think I’m supposed to do. I have every confidence that going ahead with doing what I want to do, the way I want to do it, is gonna work out. I don’t even see it as risk-taking anymore. Not living the life I want when I know I can, allowing little people to trap me in their own tiny bubbles … well, that is the biggest risk I can possibly imagine right now.

THIS IS A MUCH SIMPLER LIFE IT'S BETTER THIS WAY

Once again, I thank everyone who was a part of this day. You might have gotten the impression that it was kind of a big deal for me.

I can’t wait to see what you all think of next in your own missions 🙂