Rain Angels

By: Hank Green, inspired by Katherine Evan Jon Pete and Jennie

Florida has this problem. Ok, Florida has a lot of problems, but the one that is most obvious and least man made is the climate. Its freakin hot, its really freakin hot, like spontaneous combustion hot. As you might be able to guess this pretty much rules out the possibility of making snow angels at Eckerd College. Well one day we decided it was possible and though we got a little wet it was well worth it. Below are directions which explain the process of making a rain angel.

FIRST: Rain angeling is something that you can do alone or with friends, its funner with friends but easier alone. If you want friends you have to coordinate the effort. Really the only thing you have to do for a very long time is wait for rain, in this time you might want to do school work or something.

SECOND: If and when it starts to rain, RUN don't walk to the nearest outdoor concrete surface. If you want friends with you knock on doors as you run and yell for them to come, if you've planned well they'll know whats going on and be pleased that there is something to do now other than school work.

THIRD: Remember that "nearest concrete surface" you were running towards, well as soon as you get there lie down on it. That is if it is still remotely dry. If the surface is already rained on its not gonna work. You might want to try interesting positions, but its best if your limbs are away from your body. In this picture it turned out looking pretty post-apocalyptic with everyone dead or dying (except bridget who is just enjoying the nice day). If you don't like rain or you have delicate clothes you shouldn't be in Florida.

FOURTH: This is the second part where we wait, hopefully you won't be waiting for too long. There are two ways to do this. You can wait until you know that the ground is totally wet (except for the space underneath you). Or you can wait until the rain stops completely. A good thing to do while you are waiting is humor the growing crowd of people by making funny noises, or to discuss amongst the group of rain angelers how extremely strange this all really is.

FIFTH: GET UP. This is the fun part, you stand up (whether the rain has stopped our not) and the concrete is wet everywhere except where you were lying. So there is a nice outline of you and your friends on the concrete. The people who were previously scoffing at you will complement you on you creativity and ingenuity. You will be closer with your friends, and you might make some new ones.

SIXTH (a side note): You might notice that your outlines don't really look all that much like snow angels. And in fact that they look like a chalk outlines of a modern day massacre. But its as close as we could get, the only way to really make them look like angels would be to flap you arms so rapidly that you blocked all the rain drops as they came to hit the ground. And that would be impossible.

SEVENTH: Its a real possibility that on the day when you are rain angeling there will be a really big test that you have to study for. In that case (due to the law of college students) you'll want to waste even more time. I'll leave your mind to figure out something cool to do with your rain angels, but in our case we decided to use sidewalk chalk (something 1 in 10 college students keeps in his desk) to outline our bodies so that our rain angels would last longer.

If you have any other ideas for us, we'd be happy to take your suggestions.