The Odd 1s Out

by James Rallison

  The whole time I kept asking the interviewers, “Do you understand?”

  And they said, “Yeah.”

  I thought I was doing well. I left feeling a lot more confident.

  But then they never called me back.

  So I didn’t get the job, even though I bought a nice shirt from Target. And I kept working at Sooubway.

  This is what I think: The community college people were just embarrassed that they’d given me a calculus problem, and then I totally got it right in front of them. They probably thought it would have been awkward if we worked together. That’s definitely what happened. It wasn’t because I actually got the problem wrong or I was a freshman and all the other tutors were in their mid-twenties. The point is, I’m not going to be teaching math anytime soon.

  Still, I think interviews build character. People have told me stories about how they went to only one interview and got the job. Those people have missed out on a lot of character development. Sometimes you need to fail in life. Because you’re not that special. Besides, failure makes for good stories.

  Chapter 13

  Things I Do That Adults Probably Don’t Do

  Once you turn eighteen years old, you technically cross the threshold into adulthood. You are legally and socially more responsible the second you stop being seventeen.

  Now, when I turned eighteen, I didn’t feel any sort of change. The planets didn’t align and fulfill some prophecy. Nope, I still woke up the same way, felt the same, and had the same likes and dislikes.

  But people told me,

  I was still pretty immature and didn’t have the mind-set of an adult. Just look at my old YouTube videos. The very first video I posted was made by a legal adult, and he didn’t know anything about recording good audio or drawing pictures in the right ratio for YouTube (1,920 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels tall, if anyone was wondering). Heck, there are kids younger than me who are more artistically talented.

  Kasey Uhter @grgikau

  Luckily, when I was first starting out, I didn’t show my face in any videos, because I had a pretty awesome bowl cut.

  You can tell how cool I was by the holes in my jeans. See rule #2.

  Back when I legally became an adult, I did some things that I don’t think people who call themselves adults do.

  Actually, no—I still do these things. I started doing them when I was little and I never grew out of them. I don’t know if I ever will. These things are a little embarrassing to admit, so don’t make fun of me.

  I’m just kidding; you probably should make fun of me for doing this stuff so that I’ll stop doing it.

  The first thing I do that real adults probably don’t do is that I close my closet door before I sleep.

  You know, because that’s where monsters live. And everyone knows that monsters can’t open doors—duh—so closing the closet door is a 100 percent surefire way to prevent monster attacks. If for some reason I forget to close the door, then hiding under my blanket will do the trick.

  I can’t tell you why I like sleeping with my closet door closed. When I’m lying in bed and my eyes are completely shut, I can still sense whether my door is open. It’s my Monster Radar. Maybe it’s because it’s darker than the rest of my room or because the clothes make weird shapes, but I have to close that door before I sleep.

  This might happen to me when I have children.

  Weirdly, during the daytime, the closet seems fine. In fact, I used to record audio for my YouTube videos in there. I’ve sat in that closet for an hour at a time and a monster has never appeared and attacked me. My closet isn’t even that big. I sit down in it and my legs touch the walls. So if a monster was going to live in there, it would have to be really small or really skinny.

  It’s a weird and childish habit, I know. But I just want you to know, if you sleep with the closet door closed, you’re not alone.

  The monsters are there too.

  Another thing I’m still afraid of is crossing the street. I blame my mom for instilling this fear in me. When I was little, she told me that when people drive cars, they can’t see kids at all. (My mom disputes this claim.) So I always assumed that I was invisible to cars, and if I was in the street, the car wouldn’t stop or slow down for me because, as my mom said, they couldn’t see me.

  I think this is a good way to teach kids to be afraid of cars, as they should be. The thing is that even as an adult, when I have the right of way to cross the street, I’m still on the lookout for runaway cars.

  In high school, there was a road that kids had to cross to get to the school. It wasn’t a busy road, mind you, only two lanes of traffic, but every now and then a car would drive by, using the road for its intended purpose.

  Some kids would just walk across the road while a car was driving toward them. They were just rolling the dice, hoping that the driver was paying attention.

  I don’t understand what was going through these kids’ minds. First of all, they were jaywalking, so they shouldn’t even have been there. Second, if there’s a car coming toward you, is it really smart to walk in front of it? I think it’s obvious who would win in that fight.

  For me, whenever I walk up to a road, my initial reaction is to look both ways. Even in the middle of nowhere. And no matter how many cars are on the road, I will always speedwalk or jog across the street.

  Nowhere is safe from cars, okay? Why do we even drive them?

  Another thing I do as an adult—and this is pretty embarrassing—is that I watch Minecraft videos even though I don’t play Minecraft.

  I had a friend ask if it was weird that he still played Minecraft and I told him yes. But for some reason, I think it’s okay to watch someone play the game and not even play it myself. I own the game, by the way. I have an account. But I haven’t really played in years.

  When I first started drawing comics for the internet, I watched some TV shows (anime) or listened to music while I drew. But if I didn’t feel like doing those things, I watched people play Minecraft on YouTube. There was one specific channel that I liked watching and I still like it to this day: CaptainSparklez.

  I’ll be watching

  until the day one of us dies. (Hopefully, he’s first.) I just enjoy watching other people play video games. Or maybe it’s CaptainSparklez’s soothing voice. I don’t know. (Sorry if you’re reading this, Jordan.) But I feel like real adults get their enjoyment from watching serious stuff, like the news or something.

  Another thing I do is I talk for my pets. Not to them like normal adults—for them. Not the usual, “What you got there, bud?” I’ll ask them a question and then respond for them.

  Each pet has a different voice and personality, which I give them.

  I’ve been told by fans that it’s not that weird to talk for your pets, and I’ve been assured that other people do the same thing, but I don’t think they understand. I have conversations with these animals. I’ll start talking in my normal voice, and then I’ll respond to myself in either an extremely high-pitched or low-pitched voice—sometimes a Russian accent (depending on which animal is talking)—and that second voice is supposed to be what my animals would say if they could talk.

  The dogs have no idea what’s going on. They just hear me switching between voices every few seconds.

  And to make this worse, the dogs are pretty mean to me in these conversations.

  I’ve built these characters and personalities around my dogs that aren’t reflective of how they actually act. My dogs have “told” me to shut up. They’ve called me names and when I hug them they go “Ew!” But I still love them!

  There’s probably something psychological going on with all of this. Like deep down I secretly agree with what the dogs are saying. Either that or I’m a sociopath.

  And the last thing that I do that most adults don’t is: I dropped out of college to make YouTube vid
eos.

  For a while it sounded bad when people—usually really old adults, like my friends’ parents—asked, “So are you going to school?”

  And I had to tell them, “Nope, I dropped out and moved back in with my parents to work on my YouTube channel.”

  But I’m doing what I love doing, and that’s drawing. I always said that I would hate getting a desk job, but now look at me—I have a job where I’m . . . sitting behind my desk all day.

  Even though I’m stuck behind a desk, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still follow your dreams. Go ahead and do that. Maybe you’ll get lucky.

  When I was in high school making comics, it took me days to finish a comic strip. To set a goal for myself, I put this reminder above my desk:

  One day, I’m not sure when, but it was probably when I hadn’t done my chores, my mother made her own commentary:

  Then my older sister, I’m not sure when, but it was probably a time when she was mad at my mom, crossed that out and wrote:

  I’d just been trying to remind myself to finish my comics and not cause a family philosophical debate. The thing is, both my mother and my sister had a valid point. I give a lot of tongue-in-cheek advice, but my honest advice after all of this is to follow your dreams, but do it in a smart way. Aim big, but have a backup plan. Take risks, but don’t risk your life savings.

  Don’t listen to the haters. You can achieve great things if you work hard enough.

  And remember, whatever you do in life, wear your seatbelt.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Jordan Miller (RushLight Invader), PantslessPajamas, and Vopse for helping me color the illustrations. Without them, this book—and this world—would be a lot less colorful.

  Thanks to L. Harrell (Lorenmakesart) and my twin sister, Faith, for beta reading the manuscript. Without them, this book would be filled with incoherent ramblings and typos.

  And a big thanks to my older sister, who bought me my first drawing tablet for my sixteenth birthday.

  Thanks to my agent Tim Travaglini for using gentle persuasion and outright nagging to convince me to write this book.

  Thanks to Amanda Shih, Lauren Appleton, and all of the people at TarcherPerigee who’ve waited patiently for me to finish.

  Thanks to my family for being the source of fun times, inspiration, and an assortment of injuries.

  And, of course, a big thanks to all my fans who give me the opportunity to do what I love: draw cartoons, tell stories, and occasionally make fun of corporations who will now never sponsor me.

  About the Author

  JAMES RALLISON has been drawing comics since he was eight years old. At age sixteen, he created the webcomic The Odd 1s Out, which now comprises more than three hundred comics and has expanded into a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers. James lives in Arizona.

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