(last edited on February 15, 2023 at 12:26 pm)
A few days ago I was talking to some people in the video game community, and was complaining about making choices about what to do in the morning when there were sooo many things clamboring for my attention. Since each task is about equally important/exciting, much decision-making energy is frittered away. One of the people I was chatting with, H, writes down stuff on scraps of paper that she rolls-up and picks at random. She also has a collection of hats, which got me started on how I could never find a hat that fit my round melon of a head. Cowboy hats, baseball hats, fedora hats…nope!
The combination frustrations, picking a task and finding a hat, then fused into a mission to get a hat for wearing AND picking tasks from. I stumbled upon these 0.75 inch diameter wooden bingo balls and found a tall bowler hat; my sister warned me not to get a super-cheap hat because it would be guaranteed to make me sad.
While I haven’t figured out exactly how to use the bingo balls (they’re numbered from 1 to 75) in a task selection system, the hat I’ve already got big plans for in two ways.
First, the bowler hat is worn by the henchman Odd Job in the 007 film Goldfinger. Japanese-American actor Harold Sakata has a similar build (i.e. large and puffy-faced), so I figured this hat might work with me as well.
Second, I’ve been thinking of participating some day in cowboy action shooting, a kind of “Wild West Cosplay with Real Guns” sport that’s pretty neat. You get to pick a nickname/persona when you join up, complete with a backstory if you are so inclined. I’ve got an idea for what my persona would be, though I have yet to (1) buy hundreds of dollars worth of replica firearms and (2) find a local SASS chapter to join in New Hampshire assuming (3) I have the time to participate. These are all pretty big prerequisites. However, I can start buying the clothes; the bowler hat would be a good fit for the persona, as it was quite a popular hat in the Old West, and it would be a handy second costume to have available for…well, I’ll think of a reason later.
When the hat came in, I tried it on and liked it a lot. There’s something pretty neat about wearing a hat, and this one made me feel pretty good. Hats sort of feel like a “cat for your head”, I realized, sitting comfortably atop your dome to keep you company as you do your business. Still, I wasn’t sure if it looked stupid, even after getting affirmations from some friends. So I went down to my friend Sid’s portrait photography studio to get some pictures of the hat, ostensibly to make sure it didn’t look really dumb. Sid himself is quite a connoisseur of hats, himself a wearer of flat caps, so we had a good time looking at them as well as vintage eyeglass frames that might fit well. Here’s one of the photos:
Apparently I was very tired when this picture was taken :-) The next photo session I think I will need to do a smile calibration!
5 Comments
That hat was made for you. That’s an amazing look.
Your resemblance to Odd Job is uncanny :) – but don’t worry, it’s a good thing!
Hi, Dave! I love your new hat. And the pose! You can create multiple personae with this hat, changing your expression, the way you tilt it, ever so slightly. As a creative person, you’ll find lots of ways to make it “you”. Marvelous comment that the hat feels like a “cat for your head”.
Oh, the bingo balls — so many options! You can use them with the numbers as important, say with a list of tasks to chose from. Be sure to put fun stuff in, too, like call a friend, play a computer game for a set number of minutes. Even sing a song out loud, feeling foolish.
Paint some of them, either with colorful dots as an additional choice system (like, five with a red dot, five with a blue dot, etc., to signify a type of a task). Use them to make a board game path or obstacles.
If you are trying to gain or measure something, like weight loss, or miles walked, you could start with all (or how many you need) in one jar, and move them into another jar to track accomplishment. (I used this method with pretty rocks, each signifying a half-pound weight loss and started moving them this way. Sad to say, I gave up after a short time, but, as a visual-minded person, the concept was quite helpful, and I will start again. I ended up tossing the rocks into the garden, with other rocks, so I have to find something else that grabs me for the next round.)
Hope your holidays are good, and you are ready to dive into what you want to do next. cheers
Thanks for the reassuring hat support! I’m not sure how much personality I want to show with a hat, but I suppose it would be a great challenge for 2015 to try to make it happen! Thanks!!!
That hat is da bomb. You totally rock it.