Things to Do When You Have no Money and no Friends

I am going to confess something to you all, I am a very restless person. I cannot feel mentally satisfied unless I have some project to entertain myself with. And the best time to explode out of the creative volcano, would be when all your friends are out having fun and you are splurged out on the sofa watching something so banal that you aren't actually absorbing any of it, instead letting it drift into your subconsciousness and letting it poo all over your 'creative spirit'. Now we can't have that can we? Here are a few things you can do to prevent this.

• Read a book, how obvious I know but don't just read any book. I find I am too ambitious and try to tackle some William Wordsworth or Mary Shelly and find I can't read it for too long because I keep having to look up archaic words. If you haven't read anything in a while, go for something easier to read like Chocolat by Joanne Harris. But if you are feeling particularly intellectual today, go for a good old classic, or even some Greek Plays by Euripides or Sophocles.
• So if you haven't got any interesting books, make yourself useful and actually bother to do the washing up! Take a picture and put it up on Facebook, amaze people at how boring your life is at the moment.
• Obviously these are boring ideas, so you still haven't washed anything up or read anything intellectual. Now go and gather up all your lego men, or old barbies or teddies or some fruit with googly eyes on and grab the camera while your at it. Now you are going to make a stop motion animation movie! There doesn't necessarily need to be a plot, just play around with lighting and scenery, Get some lamps around your 'stage area' I will go into more detail on another hub. Basically you take lots of photos of your lego man, moving him about a millimeter at a time, he could be walking or he could be sat down and sliding across the floor. I find it is best to just play around with lighting and movement, rather than making a plot an speech when you are just starting out. Make it spontenious and as weird as possible! Then when you are finished, upload the pictures to windows movie maker, then using the time line give each picture about 0.09 milliseconds each. It depends how fast you want things to move, but have a play around and see what looks the best. You can literally do anything with stop motion, I have put a link at the bottom for a video I made with mannequins to advertise for volunteers for a project I work with. If you go on to my channel you will see lots of examples of stop motion and maybe you will get a few ideas.
• If you can't be bothered with stop motion animation (it does take a lot of patience) but still want to do something whimsical and funny, grab your cat/dog/hamster/rat/duck and create an amusing photo frame of them. Basically you get a piece of card, cut a hole in it big enough for your pets head, then draw something around the card. I chose to put some flower petals around my cats face, she was reluctant to actually stick her head through but I was highly amused non the less. I am sure you can think of something ten times funnier than flower petals, please let me know your ideas!
• Make something tasty! This always cheers everyone up, you could make some fudge or cinder toffee and bring them round to your friends house as a surprise. There are lots and lots and lots of recipes online (hoorah for the internet!). I really like Nigella's Tiffin/Rocky Road, all you need is some chocolate, crunchie bars and some salted peanuts. Basically melt the chocolate (I recommend microwave, 1 and a half minutes, keep stopping to stir or it will go funny!) smash all the crunchy stuff, put it in a tray or something, mix it all up and pop it in the fridge. It is super tasty, and a lot easier to make than fudge.
• If you have a musical instrument in the house that is collecting dust, then pick it up and learn to play! Things can be slow at first but once you have learned your first song then you will feel so proud of yourself. I keep trying to learn the ukulele, I can play creep by radio head (all four chords indeed) but at least its something, just another ongoing project I suppose.
• Write a letter to someone that lives far far away, could it be an old school friend that has moved to australia? Your favourate person who has moved to the south to become a mad marine biologist? A long lost uncle in Peru? You could write them a short story or draw a picture. Send nail clippings or bogeys and leave it annonymous, then await a facebook status saying 'who the smeg sent me a snot rag through the post' and you can have a wee giggle. Of course you shouldn't really send people your bogeys because it is a little unhygenic and offensive and they probably wont speak to you anymore because you rang them up to apologise when you had to many glasses of merlot and merlot makes you feel guilty.
• If you are any good at sewing, why not drag that boring cardigan out and make it pretty with a few floral embellishments? There are tons of fabric flower tutorials online. Or you could get that old t-shirt out and give it a good snipping with the scissors, cut off the sleves and the coller line, make it all funky and cut strips along the back. If it is of the cotton variety then it will pull nicely into long straggly bits, also lots of tutorials online, although I may be making hubs about such things in the future!

So I hope you have had a more productive evening doing these fun things! If you have any suggestions please pop them in the comments!