And some advice

I admit that I like the cartoon "Regular Show." The humor can be kind of dumb and it's frequently sort of crude...and yet, there's something endearing about it. (It may be all those years that I spent leading a youth group of teen boys, and the fact that I teach barely-out-of-adolescence men that I find the show "endearing" at times).

One of the episodes centers around Rigby "getting mentored" - he is essentially strapped to Muscle Man via a baby harness, and made to "shadow" Muscle Man on his day's work. (Muscle Man SEEMS like the biggest jerk ever, and yet, along with Skips, he seems to be the one park employee who gets his work dones mostly uncomplainingly.)

Well, anyway, he gives Rigby three pieces of advice on how to tolerate the tougher park jobs (transporting manure fertilizer, working in the hot sun, crawling under the wash-house to fix plumbing). And for some reason, that struck me.

There's an online poster-generator where you can make your own variants on "Keep Calm and Carry On" (yes, I know I said that knowing the history of the actual poster gives me the chills a bit, but it does seem to have become a cultural artifact in our times).

Well, I thought Muscle Man's advice (which also, I think, applies to grad school and to a lot else in life) might make a good poster:

I wound up using the recycling symbol there (I assume they recycle in the park) because none of the others I tried looked good. (I found and uploaded a tiny figure of Muscle Man, but it looked awful on the poster, so....)

Of course, this lends itself to all kinds of silliness. (I give the link above, if you want to make your own). There's this, which I admit with some embarrassment I relate more to the My Little Pony comic (where it features on the entrance to the Diamond Dogs' mine - yes, I see what they did there, now, after googling)

This also seems to be good advice (though not being sure of the context of the song, maybe it was intended ironically, I don't know. I confess, the earlier David Bowie albums were a bit before my time and I never got into him)