KAPOW! DING! SHADINGADONG! Amoeba Man returns, SFZerians!

So, as you probably already guessed from my post, my idea for this task was to make a book out of soap. And I knew exactly what I was going to chisel into them: the rules of Fight Club. What better thing? Seriously.

For those of you who don't know them, they are reprinted here for your convenience.

The first rule of fight club is... you do not talk about fight club.
The second rule of fight club is... you do not talk about fight club.
Third rule of fight club, someone yells "Stop!", goes limp, taps out, the fight is over.
Fourth rule, only two guys to a fight.
Fifth rule, one fight at a time, fellas.
Sixth rule, no shirt, no shoes.
Seventh rule, fights will go on as long as they have to.
And the eighth and final rule, if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

So, the task. Now, bit of a tangent here. I think SF0 is, deep down, all about learning. That's the whole point, isn't it? To learn about things you didn't really think about before. Well, I learned something really important with this task.

Soap is really freaking hard to cut.

I'm not kidding. It doesn't give away like you would think, it's not soft like cheese, it's hard. Solid. Rockesque. And worse, if you apply too much pressure, it breaks in all kinds of nasty ways (sort of like a child's personality). I mean, cheese on bread, this stuff is ROCK SOLID. I popped it in the microwave for a few seconds to see if that might soften it up, but you can see the results of that below. DAMN. I mean, really, you wouldn't expect soap to be this hard! It's like trying to cut down a tree with a penknife. That is, if trees were small, square, broke easily, didn't have leaves or branches, and were bars of soap. If I put it in water, that would make it too slippery, and I'd risk cutting myself (which would have been alright if "Time and Medical Attention Heals All Wounds" was still active, but now that it isn't, I'm not as willing to take one for the SF0 team).

Anyways, the hardest part was just getting it cut, seriously. The result was a bunch of rough, mismatched, jagged chunks. But whatever, I'm an SFZerian, I can soldier on. I started using my knife to chisel the rules into the pieces, and this was probably the easiest part. I had most of the rules chiseled in within a half hour. I soon realized, though, that on some of the chunks, I could shave off some of the more rough bits and make two fairly smooth, even sides. That worked pretty well, except that the resulting stack was really, really high. Too high to bind with what I had originally intended (a ring from a binder). I thought of punching a hole through it and being really badass and tying it up with a strand of my own hair, but that didn't work so well (and it hurt. Not a lot, but it hurt. Don't judge me). It was at about this point that the good Doctor Schleitwerszt (see The Highest Place) suggested I try and color in the etchings with a colored pencil to make them more visible. This didn't work at all, which in all honesty I should have suspected after our expedition a week earlier. Kolorbahl was of little help, choosing instead to make derisive remarks about the whole affair.

It was at about this time that my mom got home and suggested I use a real bar of soap, one that was thick and could be more easily sliced. I looked down at my own jagged, shoddy pile, embarrassed. I decided to take her advice and clear the slate, as it were, and start fresh on another day.

That night, I bathed with my jagged Fight Club soap. It was amazing.

Tomorrow, while I was at school, she bought me a ten pack of Ivory soap. I looked at the package.
"Not too much and not too little. Just the right amount of lather. Just a little scent. And there you go. simply lavender".
Oh, marketing. Ho ho ho! I laugh.

But these bars were much more substantial than the crappy ones I had tried to cut last night. What's more, they didn't have as much of a design on the front, making them much better for chiseling. I could hardly wait to start in on my new bars of soap.

Soon, though, I realized each one of the wrappers had a little message on it. The first one I pulled out read "The road to a friend's house is never long, and the directions are simple". I have no idea what this has to do with soap, unless you and your friends do communal bathings (which is cool, seriously), but I felt reassured and my life was reaffirmed. Thank you, Ivory, for that total non-sequiter that somehow managed to reaffirm my faith in life! YAY FOR SOAP. Soon the room smelled of simple lavender. I'm not sure how it's different from complex lavender, but then, I'm not an Ivory marketing executive (though I sometimes wish I was so that I could make flipping great wodges of cash thinking up pithy slogans to put on soap wrappers).

"Thank you for bringing Ivory home", another read. Anytime, soap, anytime (though I understand it's illegal in some countries).

Glee and exultation! This soap was much easier to cut. It had a soft, pleasing texture and smelled faintly of lavender. I would have eaten it if it weren't soap. I was a little smarter with the cutting this time and managed to get four double sided "pages". I etched a rule on each one of them, and it worked pretty well since I was using a mechanical pencil and that had a nice thin tip. I actually did try wetting the soap, and to my glee, it made it even easier to cut and left all my fingers intact! GLEE.

Now that I had all my pages aligned in a nice, neat little stack, I needed to figure out a way to bind it. Obviously, traditional binding wouldn't work as well, so I needed to find something a little more out of the ordinary. Finally, after some thought, I jabbed a toothpick through the whole mess, which worked pretty well, actually- it went through cleanly. To read the book, you have to rotate the pages around the toothpick. When you get to the back, you just turn them over and do it the other way around. It's not important what order the rules are in, really, it's just important that you COMMIT THEM TO MEMORY AND BASE YOUR LIFE AROUND THEM.

So, with my book of solidified cleaning fat finally finished, I cleaned up my mess and settled down to upload the praxis. A book not only made of unusual material, but bound in an unusual way! AweXome.

Partial credit must go to Sponty, since he got me thinking about Fight Club again with our Taking Tree task. I don't think I would have thought of this had it not been for him.

Until next time, SFZerians,

HENSHIN!