Dept. of Self-Improvement, Part III

Seeing both of my older brothers writing about self-improvement reminds me of one of the most common stories I tell about being my older brothers' younger brother. This is back when I was 4-going-on-5 and they were 7 (somewhere in the early summer months after their birthday but before mine). My older brothers, being who they were (and are), had decided to ship off to Math Camp for a week, leaving me with a pretty major responsibility: cutting out the week's worth of Garfield comic strips and placing them in the Garfield scrapbook that the two had been maintaining for some time by then. They had initially asked our mother to cut out the comics for them, but she very quickly delegated the task to me. Nate and Jack, in addition to being precocious solar-powered calculator wranglers, were also preternatural experts in the ways of cutting things out in incredibly straight lines. I, sadly, was not, and Nate & Jack returned home after the week of nerds-in-the-woods-ing to a week's worth of badly mangled Garfield cartoon strips.

In the blog's current spirit of self-improvement, I would like to announce that, now that I am 25-going-on-26, I think were I to have to cut out a week's worth of Garfield strips for the twins now, I would do a damn good job. Although my lack of improvement re: handwriting has been well documented here, I would like to proclaim that my scissor skills are comfortably at an adult level. I bet I could even make the ends of the ribbon on a gift-wrapped package curlicue.

Additionally, it has also been noticed on this blog before, that the internet (which unanimously agrees that Garfield is not only terrible but evil), provides delightful ways to improve Garfield. The site Garfield minus Garfield, as well, does a bang-up job (simply by removing Garfield from the strips entirely) of self-improving Garfield on Jon Davis's behalf.

Strip from Garfield minus Garfield.