Sunday, June 16, 2013

harder than it sounds

the other day i was watching a live telethon raising money for the craig the genie pilot. (click here to read more about this pilot on kickstarter. and, you know, donate to it or whatever. they only have five days left to raise money and still about halfway to go.) anyway, whenever they hit a certain benchmark, one of the guys involved would do something. these somethings included internet challenges, one of which was the saltine challenge. now, i had never heard of the saltine challenge, and when they were explaining it i thought it sounded laughably easy. basically, you have to eat six saltines (including the crumbs) in a minute without drinking any water. joey richter, the one who attempted the challenge, couldn't do it, and i found that completely ridiculous. i mean, you just have to eat six crackers in a minute. that's so easy!

so yesterday i decided to try it. and oh my god let me tell you it is so much harder than it sounds. so. much. you eat the first cracker and feel great about yourself because you got it down in the ten seconds and it was easy and you feel like you have it in the bag. but every cracker after that one gets progressively harder to chew and swallow. it's like a giant mass of jaw-freezing glue just forms in your mouth and fighting it is like trying to fight off an annoying dragon that jumps in with a new story every time you open your mouth to talk and you just feel frustrated and hopeless and your mouth, that has been so faithful to you your whole life, is suddenly rendered completely useless. when time started running out, i ended up stuffing the remaining crackers in my mouth, but couldn't swallow them in the minute and so i failed. then my brother tried, and only got three and a half crackers done. my other brother tried and ate two before he started laughing so hard that he had to stop. my husband got all of them in his mouth but not swallowed, too. i had pretty much decided that the challenge was impossible by that point. and then my dad came along.

as i explained the challenge to my dad, he mocked it (like we all did) and said he could eat the whole packet without water. of course i made him do it after that, preparing my "i told you so!" speech in my head. he started the first cracker, taking a bite instead of shoving the whole thing in his mouth like the rest of us and i thought, "there's no way he can eat that slowly and finish six in a minute. he's going to lose for sure." but he continued eating them at his own pace and swallowed the last one with a few seconds to spare. needless to say, i was impressed.

i think i need to try it again with his strategy. you guys give it a shot, too, and see for yourself how much harder it is to do than to say.

*Forward Motion - Relient K

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous hippopotamusJune 17, 2013 at 6:03 AM

    Omg daddy is so awesome! You skills have recorded him and posted it to youtube. He'd be famous lol or internet famous which is pretty much the same thing

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    Replies
    1. lol yeah we pretty much said the same thing afterwards. but i honestly did not believe he would be able to do it so there was no point in taping it.

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