“This is kind of like an adventure”
A phrase caught my ear and sent me down a rabbit hole

Ginger Floerchinger-Franks was interviewed for The New York Times last Monday about her Thanksgiving plans. She usually hosts 10 at her home in Boise, but this year, she swapped a few dishes between houses and everyone ate together over a Zoom potluck.

“This is kind of like an adventure,” she told The Times.

The article continues on, interviewing people in the way Thanskgiving articles do — slices of different lives assembled like a combination cheesecake. What stuck with me, though, was the phrase.

“This is kind of like an adventure.”

It sounded like the title of a book. Not an old one (“ The This is Kind of Like an Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “The Life and Strange Surprizing This Is Kind of Like An Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”), but a newer one. An essay collection you’d bring up at party so people know you know how to read.

I might have let it go, but, lately, I’ve had the time. So like every bodily symptom I’ve ever had, I Googled it.

The word “adventure” has over two billion search results, an appropriately epic amount. The phrase “it’s an adventure” has a little over four million, which isn’t as much as it used to be. But “This is kind of like an adventure,” how Ginger felt about Thanksgiving 2020, returned only 10 search results. These are those ten slices of life from people — real and fictional, scared and excited, about to embark on and right in the middle of — adeventures

10. “I reckon for kids this is kind of like an adventure!”

A dad in the UK had a problem. His central heating had failed. So to warm his family and his family jewels, he’d taken up chopping wood for a wood burning stove. He wrote about it in his blog called “Dad Blog UK” in 2015, and someone made the comment about adventure. UK Dad replied to it: “Yeah, the kids think it’s a bit of an adventure. My wife needs some persuasion this is the case.”

9. “The alternative would be for me to be at home and be really bored, but this is kind of like an adventure.”

A high school senior in California spent his Spring Break in 2016 registering voters a nearby Sacramento neighborhood. He told a reporter: “It’s just kind of interesting to see how reluctant people are to hear what we’re trying to offer them. I see myself in that situation. I probably wouldn’t have opened the door. So it’s kind of funny to see it from the other end.”

8. “Umm sure yeah, I just feel nervous at the idea of reading for a person like yourself 😂 I haven’t had much experience reading for other people that I don’t personally know, so I’m pretty nervous. ( this is kind of like an adventure) But I’d be happy to try :)”

A stranger asked a witch on Tumblr to give them a private Tarot reading. It made the witch nervous.

7.

9:40:51PM. I LIVED IN SOUTH TAMPA MY ENTIRE LIFE AND LIVED IN 9:40:55PM VIRGINIA PARK 28 YEARS.

9:40:56PM THIS MAKES ME AN EXPERT ON MY NEIGHBORHOOD. 9:40:58PM THEREFORE I AM GIVING EXPERT TESTIMONY AND CREDIBLE 9:41:01PM AND SUBSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.

9:41:01PM IT’S NOT EASY KNOCKING ON DOORS.

9:41:03PM IT’S NOT EASY GOING THROUGH A COMPLETE STRANGER’S 9:41:07PM HOUSE AND KNOCKING ON THE DOOR AND ASKING THEM 9:41:09PM WHAT THEY THINK OF AN ISSUE.

9:41:09PM I EXPECT THAT SINCE YOU ARE ALL ELECTED OFFICIALS 9:41:13PM THAT AT SOME POINT IN YOUR LIFE YOU PROBABLY HAD TO 9:41:16PM DO THAT, BUT YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I AM TALKING 9:41:19PM ABOUT WHEN YOU GO DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY 9:41:23PM KNOCKING ON DOORS. I HAD TO MAKE MYSELF DO IT. 9:41:25PM BUT AFTER A WHILE I NOTICED A TREND.

9:41:26PM I COME HOME TO MY HUSBAND AND I SAY, YOU ARE NOT 9:41:29PM GOING TO BELIEVE WHO I MET TODAY.

9:41:30PM YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THE CONVERSATION I HAD 9:41:33PM TODAY. AND IT WAS LIKE EVERY DAY, AFTER A WHILE, I 9:41:36PM STARTED TO REALIZE THIS IS KIND OF LIKE AN ADVENTURE 9:41:40PM AND I LOOKED AT IT VERY DIFFERENTLY.

9:41:40PM I COULD TELL YOU STORIES FOR AN HOUR BUT I AM GOING 9:41:44PM TO LIMIT IT TO THE PERSON THAT I FOUND THE MOST INTERESTING.

At a Tampa City Council hearing in September 2018, a concerned citizen took the microphone to speak out against a proposed new development. It took her a while to make her point, but like the boy in California, door-knocking was her adventure. The story she ended up sharing about the most interesting man, who was actually for the new development, was a story about the man’s father. He went to enlist in WWI, but didn’t weigh enough, so he ate a lot of bananas and went back. He served in the army, the woman says, but “he didn’t eat another banana for 10 years.”

6. “This is kind of like an adventure. It’s like we’re on an adventure to the countdown. No. No. No. This is a final countdown.”

Facebook can caption videos, and this is a line in a Facebook video titled, “OUR PLANET IS GOING TO END LIKE A PAINFUL CANCER AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO FEEL THE PAIN.” The artist in the video first gained some fame when he was intereviewd shirtless in Union Square in 2015. A student reporter asked him about the meaning of life, and put his answers over the soundtrack from Inception.

5. “Now that we are emerging from the woods, we have to leap the next series of hurdles. This is kind of like an adventure race. To help with one of those hurdles, I’m going to sell a collection of my short stories as a fundraiser. I’m in the process of laying it out, but hope to have both print and e-book editions available within a week or so. Don’t feel obligated to get one, but a few people have commented that they enjoy my writing, so I thought this would be a good way to feed my massive ego- I mean pay some medical bills.”

Another dad, this one in the US, kept a blog as well. US Dad’s is devotetd to his daughter’s medical journey. He started it in 2012. It ends in 2016. I don’t know how things turned out.

4. “If it is pretty much right, I have a few issues, just to clear a few things up before you clarify the commands to me. 1 is that the door will have to remain open all the time. This is kind of like an adventure map, so the player or players will have to be going in and out constantly. You don’t have to fix that. I can probably do it on my own without trouble.

A member of a Minecraft forum is clarifying the plan with their fellow players. At the end of the two-paragraph-long post, they write that this “probably the longest message I have ever typed.”

3. “Hey boys, this is kind of like an adventure, isn’t it?” Katherine asked. “We’re going to have such great stories to tell about this. All about the one afternoon you all got to hide in the pantry at the cafe.”

Our first fictional voice comes from a character in the novel The Magnolia Cafe, not to be confused with the bakery and cause of my love handles. Katherine in this scene is lying about how it will be fun to be trapped in the titular Magnolia Cafe.

2. “This is kind of like an adventure and I haven’t had one in a while”

Another female fictional character is squatting outside an SUV to pee. The novel The Dysfunctional Holiday is about a “battle to keep everyone safe and sane through a Thanksgiving meal that might be everyone’s last.

1. “This is kind of like an adventure. It’s like a little science experiment where you’re like, “okay , I’m gonna, see how it is.” And even that can help you frame things in a little bit of like, “I’m not a victim where everything is stressful and happening to me.” It’s more like, “I’m an observer, I’m a scientist, and I’m going to try this one thing and test this hypothesis.”

In another Facebook video, the last on our list, a nutritionist discusses managing anxiety and the benefit of reframing your experience as an adventure. The title of the video is “Know Your Closest Exit.”

2020 has been a nightmare, but a nigthmare is kind of like an adventure. Whether you’re keeping your family warm, loving your sick daughter, knocking on doors, making the most of being trapped inside, playing a online game, responding to a stranger, thinking about the earth’s future, or relieving yourself not in a toilet, know your closest exit and know this is an adventure. Kind of.

P.S. A Twitter search of the phrase returned four results: someone dying their hair red, a screenshot from an anime I don’t know, the phrase by itself in quotation marks, and a picture of two dildos and a vibrator with the caption, “This is kind of like an adventure for my pussy.”
['Zach Zimmerman']
['Adventure', 'Fun', 'Funny', 'Internet', 'Humor']