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Cold Feet

Our man takes the Ice Bucket Challenge

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By Dan Forward

“A

llow me to break the ice” – Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hi. If you can see this video on Facebook, you obviously already know my name, so it makes no sense to introduce myself, and with a few more clicks you could also probably get a pretty solid grasp on the last nine years of my life. My video-gaming peaked in ’07, I stopped using hair gel in ’11, and I scoped out hotties in my classes from the day I got a college email address. My aliases include “Fast Forward,” according to my coworkers that I beat in a 5K this summer (all of them), “Miss Daisy,” according to my coworkers who have to drive me to Red Heat Tavern after work (quite a lot of them-thanks, guys), and “Pig Herder,” according to Old English scholars who know that “for” means “swine” and that “ward” means “watchman” (isn’t “Forward” already a word?).

Anyway, I’d like to say that it was very nice of my girlfriend Sara to nominate me for the Ice Bucket Challenge in honor of Pete “Mr. Freeze” Frates, a fellow BC alum, and to raise money for research into ALS. Yes, winter is here early, fellow Westerosians. Very soon, I will douse myself with a bucket of water, an Internet tradition that, according to my research, dates back to the nigh-prehistoric digital era of June 16, 2014. This will be uploaded on FaceBook, for my friends and family to see and laugh at, thanks to my beautiful girlfriend. Although if my video sees some success on this platform, I might consider uploading it to Newsflare (https://www.newsflare.com/upload) or other similar sites to try and earn a little money off of it. It could be worth a shot.

I’ll be the first to admit I was initially cold to the idea of the Challenge, though not to the idea of shoving a pun into this sentence like a glacier through bedrock. Getting tagged on Facebook to plank or Harlem Shake is something other people deal with. You never think it’s going to happen to you. But it’s a snow problem. I’m going to use it as a perfect opportunity to guilt-trip my friends into doing something very inconvenient while still getting to do something good for a very worthwhile charity.

How should any of us choose which of the people we know to inflict this upon? It depends quite a lot on at what temperature you feel revenge is a dish best served. For example, if I were one to hold a grudge, which I most certainly am, I might nominate some people who tagged me five years ago in a questionnaire-style note that asks in me 74 different ways who I have a crush on, or maybe someone who linked me with a photo in which every friend is represented as a character from Harry Potter. But if I prefer to strike while the ice pick is hot, I’d definitely single out someone who Liked an Upworthy article in the past week with a title like, “This Mild-Mannered Ice Scientist Froze His Dying Wife and Created a Gun that Turns People into Snowmen. You Won’t Believe What Batman Did Next.” Two choices that seem like polar opposites, right? Wrong! Because all that really matters in the end is that the winter of your discontent will be made glorious summer by chilling out to clips of people you know hitting themselves in the head with frozen water while you rack up cold hard cash to research a cure for a serious neurodegenerative condition that is seriously not cool. So tag away, BC friends and lesser humans, and choose w . . ice-ly? Penguin iceberg snowball.

Learn more about the Ice Bucket Challenge here.